Enhanced Publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities: tensions, opportunities and problems
Andrea Scharnhorst, Nick Jankowski, Clifford Tatum, Sally Wyatt, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Netherlands
Tuesday 27 March, 6.15pm, Anatomy Museum. Followed by drinks
Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly exploring ways to make their research available on the Web, not only by providing lists of publications but increasingly providing supplementary or original research materials. The term ‘enhanced publications’ (EP) reflects this development and constitutes the focus of a range of initiatives in the Netherlands that explores possibilities and solutions for publishing scholarship in a Web environment.
In this seminar we will present the e-Humanities Group Enhanced Publication Project, which developed Web venues to complement four books (see http://ep-books.ehumanities.nl/). Fundamental to this approach is a focus on Web-based texts as dynamic and evolving discourses rather than completed works. This focus is on engagement with emerging scholarly practices, particularly with regard to the blending of formal and informal scholarly communication. The aim of the project is to introduce book-related texts, and associated materials, as digital proxies to scholarship. It is common to find a wide variety of reviews and associated discussions about books on the Web. However, it is still uncommon to find the full text of books on the Web. From this perspective, scholarly work published in book format can be viewed as a less influential contribution to Web-based discourses.
We will also discuss the technical features of the project, including preparation of the WordPress platform and two plugins developed for the platform. In particular, we report on our experiences with MIT Press as related to development of an enhanced publication for the book Virtual Knowledge, to be published by MIT Press in 2012.
Register to attend at: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2658502653
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About the speaker
Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst is Head of e-Research at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) institution in the Netherlands - a large digital archive for research data primarily from the social sciences and humanities. She is also member of the e-humanities group at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam, where she coordinates the computational humanities programme.
She has a background in physics (Diploma in Statistical Physics) and in philosophy of science (PhD on the application of mathematical models to the science system as self-organizing system). Her current work can best be characterized as part of the information sciences. For more information see: http://knaw.academia.edu/AndreaScharnhorst/About