This Guide is part of a series that reflects on three years of research on sourcing and circulating scholarly communication on the open web. In the coming weeks we will share our discoveries, processes, and code developed through rapid prototyping and iterative design: the PressForward plugin for WordPress; the collaboratively-edited weekly publication Digital Humanities Now; and the experimental overlay Journal of Digital Humanities. We hope these resources will encourage and assist others who wish to collect, select, and share content from the web with an engaged community of readers.
An ever increasing amount of scholarly communication happens on the open web. Staying current in a field requires finding journal articles on personal websites, informally published reports in funding agency repositories, and personally published conference presentations shared in blog posts and slide decks. Although it may be overwhelming for individual scholars, communities with shared topical or methodological interests can work together to identify and circulate work they value.
For the past three years my PressForward colleagues and I have been developing methods and technologies to aggregate, curate, and distribute informally published scholarship. Our prototype publication Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) collects, selects, and shares work from an emerging and extremely diverse field that involves the disciplines of history, literature, art and media, and the professional worlds of libraries, archives, cultural heritage organizations, academic institutions, and entrepreneurial startups. I offer this guide to introduce the intellectual and practical considerations for initiating and sustaining a collaboratively-edited publication that sources and distributes scholarship on the open web, including:
- Identifying Intellectual Goals;
- Preparing Sources and Publication Venues;
- Establishing Editorial Criteria; and
- Workflow and Logistics.
Read Full Series Here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5