Reconfiguring Publishing

An Electronic Roundtable Exhibiting the Future(s) of Publishing

Computers and Composition Digital Press / Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe

Since 2007, we have been hard at work in an effort to create Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an open-access venture committed to publishing innovative multimodal ebooks and digital scholarly projects under the imprint of Utah State University Press. Although CCDP publishes print texts in electronic form, we are particularly interested in academic digital projects that cannot be printed on paper yet have the same intellectual heft as a book. Our primary goal is to contribute to a "more capacious conception of scholarship" (MLA, p. 5) by publishing born digital projects that have the same specific gravity as books but not necessarily the same form as books. In this effort, CCDP strives to honor the traditional academic values of rigorous peer review and intellectual excellence but also to combine such work with a commitment to ground-breaking digital expression. For us, the digital press represents an important kind of scholarly activism—to provide academic legitimacy for digital books and to circulate this important work in a timely fashion and on a globalscale made possible by digital distribution.

At the Electronic Roundtable, we will share the work and promise of CCDP, which consists of three digital books:

Technology, Ecology, and Sustainability http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/tes

Generaciones’ Narratives http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/generaciones

Technologies of Wonder http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/wonder

With these books, the press begins to exemplify the kinds of scholarly possibilities that CCDP can provide while at the same time demonstrating digital work that combines words, images, video, and audio in a flexible textual environment. We will also discuss the sustainability question: how colleagues support CCDP—as co-editors, authors, editorial-board members, partnering institutions—in a collaborative network that is intergenerational and multi-locational. Please check out the following links:

Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) is an imprint of Utah State University Press

CCDP http://ccdigitalpress.org/
Editorial Board http://ccdigitalpress.org/about/editorial-board
Gail E. Hawisher http://www.cws.illinois.edu/people/hawisher/
Cynthia L. Selfe https://english.osu.edu/people/selfe

Electronic Literature Collection / Rita Raley

http://collection.eliterature.org/2/

This presentation/display will feature the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, newly released online and in DVD format in 2011. The ELC2, as it is termed, is published by the Electronic Literature Organization, a nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating and promoting the use of networked and programmable media for creative expression. Electronic literature is an emergent academic field in its own right and this anthology will play a crucial role in the development of both field and canon. Individual academic studies are not enough to create a solid institutional niche for any humanistic field; their reception must necessarily be limited as long as the critical objects themselves are difficult to find or even literally inaccessible because of such issues as browser compatibility. If electronic literary works are to be granted the academic recognition they surely deserve, such works must be published, circulated, and put to use in the schools, for which we require both the mode of editorial review particular to an anthology and Creative Commons licensing. (The editors and authors have worked to allow this volume of the Collection to be freely shared, non-commercially, between individuals, libraries, and schools, provided that appropriate attribution is maintained and the works are unmodified.) The ELC2 collection, then, aims not only to produce knowledge of these new genres but also to facilitate its transmission.

MediaCommons / Avi Santo

In 2006, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and I launched MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/) as a new type of born-digital scholarly press designed not only to publish new forms of scholarship, but to re-conceptualize the very functions and processes of scholarly production in a digital age. While MediaCommons has undertaken some successful and innovative projects as, for example:

we have also been deeply engaged with questions of how peer-review might be re-imagined as peer-to-peer review. These latter conversations have produced some productive experimentation (most notably, our collaboration with Shakespeare Quarterly (http://goo.gl/IdQFY) as well as to funding from The Mellon Foundation to develop protocols for how peer-to-peer review might be conducted across the humanities without either sacrificing the rigor attached to traditional review processes or the innovative possibilities that online tools and practices offer.

Ugly Duckling Presse / James Copeland

This presentation will focus on Ugly Duckling Presse's efforts to keep limited edition handmade books available to the public through its website. The principal site that I will be discussing during the panel will be our online chapbook archive, which is here: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/online-reading/