ITHAKA The Next Wave 2017: Alan Harvey - Introducing .supDigital

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Alan Harvey
Friederike Sundaram
Jasmine Mulliken
Nicole Coleman

So our project is about things that aren't books.
The focus of our program is to provide a publication outlet for peer-reviewed interactive digital scholarship.
The emphasis here on peer-review is significant. What does it mean to peer review a digital publication? We have deemed this to mean the interactive projects must encompass scholarly arguments amenable to peer review in the same manner as “traditional” book publishing. By definition, this requires a project to include the argument and analysis within the publication. This means we cannot publish tools, databases, reference works, etc.
We will also guide authors toward open-source code wherever possible, as well as developing standards for different forms of scholarship. Throughout this process, our goal is to establish best practices for peer review, development, and publication.
This acquisition process is very similar to our book acquisition program, and we have discovered that building the program from scratch also bears similarities to a book program. It takes several years to build a new book program. Our digital program has likewise taken 2-3 years to build. We now have an active pipeline, as Friederike will explain, and commitments to publication spanning the next four to five years.

Enchanting the Desert is our first interactive scholarly work. It was published in May 2016 after about two years of development. During those two years, we worked closely with the author to polish his first iteration of the project, make it intellectually and technically more robust and user-friendly. Because the format and structure weren’t pre-defined like they would be for a print manuscript, there was a lot of back and forth and a gradual shaping of the project both from the publisher’s and the author’s side. For the record, this isn’t something we usually do for manuscripts. But, we’ve learned that it is clearly necessary when developing such a new, interactive product.

A publication like this genuinely breaks new ground. That breaking of new ground takes time, it requires a revised peer review process, more development and guidance on all fronts, and a different distribution method. While we’ve learned a lot over the two years of developing this publication, many of the questions are not yet answered and some answers have evolved over the last two years.

Despite those unanswered questions, we have made good progress and are now preparing to publish three more interactive publications in the next six months:Samuel Liebhaber’s When Melodies Gather,Alisa Lebow’s Filming Revolution, And Tom Mullaney’s The Chinese Deathscape.From these brief impressions running on the screen, you can already see how different each project is from the other. Not only do they cover different disciplines and research methodologies, they also employ different technologies and modes of visualization.

What they have in common is that they advance complex arguments in their field using both the content and the format of the publication. [Based on the material on which their argument rests and/or the way that argument is presented, interactively, not linearly, possible not text-heavy,] these projects simply have to be rendered computationally. Otherwise they would lose significant aspects of their argument if they were flattened to a page. These are the kinds of projects that benefit from our work.

Even though our scope may sound narrow in the face of the diversity of digital projects out there, the interest in our program is robust, and you can see that, even though publishing results takes time, we are working with dozens of authors and author teams on projects that are in development, and, this is a reality of the editorial process, we are also rejecting dozens of projects that are not suitable.
To illuminate that first column for you, the number of projects we have rejected so far: We’re not covering all of the types of DH projects with our program. That doesn’t make those other types less worthy; it simply makes them the wrong fit for us. There are also projects that could potentially be built out, but that won’t sit well in our wider program of disciplines and themes and thus won’t find an audience here. And, as always, there are projects that are just not up to the intellectual level of what Stanford Press publishes.

Jasmine will take over now to go into more details regarding the technical challenges we and our authors are facing.

many of whom have already begun development on their projects before their work enters the production phase. Nevertheless we have put together a package of recommendations which are available [click] online and address each of these topics.

[slide] For the sake of time, I’ll just say we’re looking forward to Scalar’s CE layer, but until then, and for our non_scalar projects, CE remains a challenge.

[Our copy-editing approach depends on the structure of the project. Our first publication was copyedited offline using the Word-and-transcribe method. For our next project the editor will work directly in Scalar’s author-edit mode and track changes in a separate spreadsheet. Neither of these methods is ideal. Scalar is developing a copy-editing layer for their platform, but of course, this will only be useful for Scalar projects, not the majority of our projects which are custom-coded].

[slide] Without traditional means of distribution and marketing associated with books, the open access digital content we’re publishing needs to make it to readers through alternative methods. Interactive digital projects aren’t automatically [click] routed to distributors or libraries. So far we’ve worked with our own library to transmit catalog info to Worldcat, but it is up to individual libraries to add these records to their own catalogs. We are also in conversation with Google Scholar to establish a way of indexing our interactive multimodal projects for discovery that doesn’t involve creating all-text versions of them, which would defeat the entire purpose of our program.

[slide] Registering projects with DOIs and for copyright is a significant challenge. DOIs can be registered for journals, articles, datasets, chapters, and books, but not for web-based interactive projects or the individual states of those projects. We are in conversation with Crossref to expand their terminology and schemas to include the types of interactive digital projects we’re publishing, but change will be slow and require more demand from the publishing community to warrant completely new schemas.

[slide] The U.S. copyright office lags incredibly behind the capacity for published formats, both in content and code. They require two documents for registration--the entire website in pdf format; and 50 “pages” of code in one of these archaic formats.

[slide] Another challenge has been determining an appropriate hosting and delivery method for projects. We have established supDigital.org as a base domain on a dedicated server with Reclaim, and are navigating the typical challenges involved in migrating content from authors’ development servers to supDigital.

Alan Harvey
Friederike Sundaram
Jasmine Mulliken
Nicole Coleman

[slide] Once an interactive work is published, we face the next set of challenges: How can we preserve access? How can we ensure these projects remain intact and interactive for future readers? Web archiving, something in the vein of the Wayback machine or the Mellon-funded Web Recorder, offers a partial solution. But even our first publication, while still working in a modern browser, breaks in the context of Wayback. Who is responsible for updating or maintaining the code? The author? The publisher? Does a publisher have the infrastructure to ensure longterm access? Or is this a task better entrusted to an associated library?

Traditionally, the question of motivation for publishing has always been durability and access. The library’s role is integral to that assumption.

This cuneiform inscription from Bisotun was intentionally placed on a major trade route in multiple languages so that it would be widely read and it has lasted.

There are a number of strategies for minimizing dependencies and consolidating content. Ideally, this begins happening at the inception of the project. Though in these early days, that is rare. Authoring software is not designed for an editorial and publishing process. So we are considering mediating solutions like web archiving and emulation that will help reduce the vulnerabilities.
We are also pursuing strategies that are only ultimately vulnerable to bit rot. We have made significant progress with projects like LOCKSS to preserve digital content at the bit level.

As I hope we’ve shown, we’re already quite a way into the future.
Most of our partners, from authors to archivists, are nowhere near handling the types of interactive scholarly works we are producing.
We are actively pulling them along with us.

As I outlined at the start, this is an ongoing acquisitions program with an active pipeline. We thus need to continue this effort. At the same time, experience now allows us to reassess some of the foundational decisions (tools, for example).
As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, we are actively blogging about challenges, successes, and issues of interest. But the “education” goes far beyond this, as you’ve already heard. We need to educate all our current and potential partners.
And to reiterate Nicole’s comments, archiving is still an active area of development for us, due to the interactive nature of the works.
Finally, the critical mass necessary for experimentation with business models will be reached in the coming year, allowing us to play with pay-per-view, subscription, and author-funded models.