An archipelago of multimedia publishing
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This keynote presentation at the Digital Dissemination seminar at Skövde University in Sweden traces the development of the Vega Academic Publishing System from its roots in Cheryl Ball's work as the editor of the online journal, Kairos.
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An archipelago of multimedia publishing
- 1. An Archipelago of Multimedia Publishing Dr. Cheryl E. Ball | West Virginia University
- 2. (Digital) Publishing Studies • theorized practice • focus on production • interdisciplinary • research about publishing practices courtesy of Maia C, Flickr CC license
- 4. Hypertexts/ Hypermedia New media scholarship Digital scholarship Online scholarship Webtexts Scholarly multimedia Designed research On naming, see Ball, 2004; Lauer 2009, 2012 Naming Our Scholarship
- 6. Kairos’s first issue, circa 1996
- 11. The New River, October 1996 - present Born Magazine, 1997-2011 (Web)BeeHive, 1998-2002
- 15. Web archive version of webtext from CCC Online
- 16. Jeremy Tirrell’s “A Geographic History of Online Rhet/Comp Journals” http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.3/topoi/tirrell/
- 17. Sustainability
- 18. infrastructures for digital publishing social scholarly technical Photos by miuenski on Flickr See DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill, CCC 57(1); Eyman & Ball 2014a, 2014b
- 19. Kairos’s social infrastructure Tier 1: internal, section editors Tier 2: external, board members (if R&R at Tier 2) Tier 3: one-on-one mentoring between author & staff member
- 20. Tiers 2 & 3 Peer Review A. Macro-reviewing Comprehensive/substantive editing of form, content, and form:content B. Micro-reviewing Specific rhetorical and technical edits See Ball, 2013, “Multimodal Revision Techniques in Webtexts” Photo from Knight Foundation, Flickr
- 24. current copy-editing rotation for Kairos 20.1
- 26. See Eyman & Ball 2014a, 2014b infrastructures for digital publishing social scholarly technical Photos by miuenski on Flickr
- 29. Key Concerns for Digital Scholarship • accessible • usable • archivable technical
- 32. Text Andrew Morrison Director, Centre for Design Research at (AHO) Oslo School of Architecture and Design
- 33. Text Bengler design-development studio in Oslo, Norway
- 36. Vega Features Author tools multimedia authoring LaTeX conversion collaborative writing submission review tracking Editor tools open/closed peer-review a/synchronous review version control & DAM Venue tools modular workflows OA or embargoed rich metadata cross-refs & retraction features
- 38. c. Inge Ove Tysnes
- 40. c. Inge Ove Tysnes
- 41. http://ceball.com | s2ceball | s2ceball@gmail.com thank you
Editor's Notes
- Publishing studies —> rhetoric,technical & professional writing, print culture/book history, design studies, scholarly communication, intellectual property, & editorial practices across many publication genres. Digital = media-rich, open-access, design in relation to born-digital work, information architecture, etc. My history —> e-lit, RTC/C&W (digital writing studies: predates), editorial work with print & online venues (linear and non-linear editing interfaces…). So I made up the field name. Publishing studies in the US: ISU, U of Balto, Portland State, U Houston-Vict (based on ilstu), FSU (based on ilstu), Emerson, Hofstra Less academic; more professional: certificate programs… — my focus: media-rich academic publishing
- - distinguishing DP from DH - within and outside of DH - DH: collaborative, professionalizing, open —> all things C&W has done for a lot longer. (I don’t call myself a DH person unless I need funding) (for me, longer history of C&W…and all its names, e.g., digital writing studies). naming the kinds of “knowledge” production in digital writing…
- Naming…
- I prefer the term webtexts because that is the term that the journal I edit, Kairos, has historically used. Webtexts are screen-based, peer-reviewed scholarship that use the affordances of the Web to deliver their research arguments. Kairos publishes research about rhetoric, technology, and writing pedagogy, and is entering its 20th year of OA publication.
- Since Kairos’s first issue, its mission has been to publish scholarship that examines digital, networked, and multimodal composing practices—that’s 20 years of scholarship about digital writing practices.
- - how webtexts work (design enacting argument) (- plenty of Flash; but also mostly HTML)
- - technologies and media usage changes as Web supports different formats
- Kairos isn’t the only journal in digital writing studies, or more broadly in media studies, that publishes webtexts. Other journals have been in or more recently joined this publishing field, such as Computers and Composition Online (published from 1996–1999 and 2001–present), which is the strongest contender to Kairos. But there is also Enculturation, Vectors Journal, Harlot of the Arts, the Journal of Artistic Research, Public, and a few others.
- and, of course, much of this work mirrors that of electronic literature journals, which have come and go as often as digital writing journals have.
- For the 15 years I’ve worked with Kairos, we’ve actively worked towards better preserving the webtexts we publish.
- missing plug-ins
- Multi-journal special issue…
- lost work….
- lone editors… lack of infrastructure… lack of sustainability
- What are the missing texts, the missing journals, the missing institutional repositories you’ve relied on?
- scholarly social technical
- I’m going to return to part of Kairos’ social infrastructure — the peer-review process — to show a little more detail how design is treated at these stages. For born-digital webtexts that engage multiple modes and media as a function of their genre, additional rhetorical concerns arise with regard to decisions about delivery, access(ability), and sustainability. Authors of webtexts need to ask themselves: is this work best presented in a more linguistically rich (written) or visually rich (images, layout, video, etc.) format? To what degree does interaction help to express the argument? Is an audio component necessary for this particular form? Etc.
- 1996 peer-review via YahooGroups But the problem with reviewing webtexts in this manner – via email – is the problem of translating nondiscursive elements such as page layout or the photos of the author’s daughter into a linear set of words. In addition, the reviews are asynchronous, which creates gaps of time – sometimes weeks – between responses. While that aids in thoughtful participation by the board, it doesn’t facilitate the kind of immediacy in peer-response that digital media texts sometimes require. —> Research study: 3000 pages of webtext evaluations from Tier 2 since 2001. (scholarly infrastructure of Kairos)
- Prior to acceptance. Once accepted, a submission runs through our production process. (Dinner convo re project-management software)
- Discussing design as a rhetorical move still feels fairly new in our field, despite scholars’ previous discussions of design-as-rhetoric (Buchanan; Sheppard; Wysocki) and webtextual journals such as Kairos and Computers & Composi- tion Online publishing designed scholarship for almost 20 years. How can our field—in our scholarship, our classes, our conferences—move toward design as integral to our arguments and as part of our invention processes?
- have been copy- and design-editing, [8-stages] keeping track across our 8-stage production process through a staff wiki and email. This social infrastructure runs the machine that is Kairos.
- [training wiki] The staffing is important to point out here because one of the reasons Kairos has been able to sustain itself all these years is due to the large, well-qualified, trained, and dedicated staff who volunteer their time to be part of this social and scholarly endeavor. Many of them are graduate students or early-career tenure-track scholars teaching 4-4 loads who spend as many as 10-15 hours a week during production cycles, which can last upwards of three months, 2-3x a year. For the first 10 years of Kairos’s life, that wasn’t the case—we didn’t really have assistant editors, and section editors all worked independently. But it just wasn’t sustainable, and a change meant more time hiring and training people. But we’ve done that work now, and everything is in place to bring in new staff members whenever we need them, which is about every two years. This hiring and training cycle, and this staffing situation, is radically different from pretty much every other online journal in our field. So I know I’m asking a lot when I’m asking the field, and its editors and potential editors, to learn from our prior mistakes in digital publishing. But, we DO have lessons learned and best practices to share. And since one of writing studies’ core scholarly values is collaboration and sharing and working socially, I think it’s reasonable to expect some collaboration and sharing and working socially on these matters across publications in our field.
- The technical infrastructure of digital publishing is all about sustainability and preservation, regardless of form, in the rapidly evolving technological ecosystems of the Internet. There’s a reason why Kairos was the only journal left standing when link after link, journal after journal, in the multi-journal special issue of 2002 disappeared: The editors had built the technical infrastructure of the journal to withstand the whims of the Internet. The others? They each had their own stories about why things changed and moved.
- [Kairos index] Kairos has been doing it successfully for 20 years. We’ve had our stumbles—a month offline last summer that forced us to move servers unexpectedly; the four days offline in 2009 when Germans stole our domain name; the one or two complicated pieces that we had to host on other servers along the way and then forgot to move…. These are not happy moments in my Kairos history. I am embarrassed by them.
- [PLAY VIDEO] But we’ve learned quickly from all of these errors, and made strides towards best practices that have and will continue to make the journal a viable place to publish over the next 10-20 years (if the Web lasts that long...) We are constantly reflecting on our practices and interrogating our workflows regarding technical infrastructure, scholarly expectations, and the social capital that serves as the economic engine for our particular journal.
- As the landscape of knowledge production becomes increasingly a digital, networked endeavor, it is incumbent upon us to make sure that all of our scholarship is consistently findable, usable, and sustainable. [slide:] accessibility, usability, and archivability. These best practices for sustainability in digital publishing focus on three key aspects of technical infrastructure: accessibility, usability, and archivability. [We have been calling this “sustainability” but I am attentive to that word’s mission creep.]
- 1. [slide: Accessibility needs to be supported in order to reach the widest possible audience]. While originally shaped by a focus on users who rely on adaptive technologies the techniques that provide greater access, publishing with an eye towards accessibility benefits all users. For Kairos, accessibility means open-access (of the libre model); requiring rich author-created metadata such as alt attributes on images, alternate media formats, and transcripts for all audio and video-based media. Accessibility also means consideration of the user’s access to bandwidth and the constraints that come with limited access (our server logs show visitors from over 180 countries, many of whom have slow modems or are connecting through cellphones).
- 2. [slide: usability]. In some ways, usability intersects with scholarly infrastructure as we strive to make webtexts more easily used for research purposes by adding metadata, making sure the text is open to copying and re-mix, and providing ways to easily cite the works we publish. Usability also applies to the editorial and revision functions—creating texts that can be easily revised is an important part of digital publishing and the teaching of digital writing.
- For instance, Kairos asks authors to use non-proprietary softwares and languages to compose. This allows all of our editorial staff to access the ‘neath text with minimal effort as we copy- and design-edit the piece during production.
- 3. [slide: Archivability]. The discussion around archiving and preservation of digital artifacts changes daily. This is not an issue to be solved once and for all, but to monitor and adjust as new technologies, new media, and new genres emerge. As a participant in the “Access/ibility for Digital Publishing” seminar I held last week said, “Don’t tell me that your WordStar 4.0 document won’t open. You just don’t have the right hardware and software to open it with.” It’s unreasonable, however, for us as scholars to maintain technical systems that would allow us to open every digital file on the planet far into the future. [PLAY VIDEO] But if we prepare our texts with the idea that—in 20 years, or, even in 5 years—some human, or alien, or tenure reader [slide: WPA-404] might need to open the CWPA 2008 conference program, then we need make that possible.
- Here are three of Kairos’s sustainability guidelines for all authors (slide above). Technical infrastructure is in some ways simpler (because there are known best practices like the W3C guidelines) and more challenging for digital publishing (because fewer journal editors have the technical expertise to run servers and networks). In writing studies, where academics are more professionally mobile than in other fields, the social and technical infrastructures intersect as editors and publishers move from one institution to another, sometimes bringing their journals with them and sometimes leaving them behind. As the economics of publishing further erodes the capacity to produce and mail out new print texts, there is a gradual shift to more online venues, including those for long-form and data-driven scholarship: from the WAC Clearinghouse to Computers and Composition Digital Press, the University of Michigan’s Sweetland series, and the Research Exchange. It has been our experience at Kairos that writing studies tends to overlook the technical as not a core element of writing practices, and we aim to correct that, at least in terms of digital scholarship and electronic publication. So this is how we fix broken things: Most authors and editors have a strong sense of the scholarly infrastructure (peer-review, placement in appropriate directories and bibliographies, the apparatus that authors need for tenure and promotion), as well as the social infrastructure specific to each journal’s institutional and disciplinary context and mission.
- We—as authors, editors, publishers, teachers, and organization members—remind ourselves to carefully consider all three forms of infrastructure when working with digital texts [slide: scholarly, social, technical], and to reach out to those of us who have histories and experiences that we are happy to share, particularly with the lesser-known technical infrastructures of composing and publishing. This attention to the infrastructures of digital publishing should begin to infuse general writing curricula as we prepare students for writing contexts that already begin with “born-digital” as a standard approach rather than an innovation that only technorhetoricians may engage.
- All this leads me back to a lack of technical infrastructure that can handle these types of processes for innovative and multimedia journals —> Vega… [Fulbright, Mellon grant, name of platform, Norway, archipelago, islands/tide]
- developers - publishing CMS expertise - science publishing expertise
- based in large part on research 602 students helped conduct in Spring 2015 —> publishing practices of editors and authors. several articles in the works
- modularity for venues, FREE, multimedia, data sets,
- collecting beta testers & minimal publicity. timeline = Fall 2017/Spring 2018
- While Vega is a collab project with Norwegians, it will eventually live at WVU, in WVU Libraries, specifically under banner of Digital Publishing Institute.
- whiteboard drawing after a DTF meeting
- What nodes can you add to the system?