On Monday, March 21, 2016 at 5:30 p.m. in Pembroke Hall, three academic publishing professionals will participate in a panel discussion entitled, “New Directions in Scholarly Publishing and the Challenges of Evaluation.” This lecture series is intended to engage Brown faculty and students in a conversation about changes in the field of scholarly communication in the twenty-first century and will complement the University’s initiative for digital scholarship, which was recently awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
The panelists:
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communications and managing editor of PMLA
- Alison Mudditt, Director of the University of California Press
- Tara McPherson, Founding Editor of Vectors, and creator of the new authoring platform, Scalar
The discussion will focus on the history and evolution of scholarly publishing, innovative publishing platforms, and how university presses can adapt to meet the needs of multimodal scholarship while continuing to provide the rigorous review processes that meet the needs of the scholarly community.
This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Brown University Library and the Cogut Center for the Humanities.
Abstracts
Kathleen Fitzpatrick:
Focus will be on the MLA’s platforms for supporting new forms of scholarly communication, including the Commons and CORE, as well as MLA’s guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship for tenure and promotion.
Alison Mudditt:
Scholarly communication is increasingly in flux as the academic community, scholarly organizations and research funders question whether traditional publishing models and norms are still appropriate in an increasingly open and digital age. As a vitally important and distinctive vehicle for communication in the humanities, how can monographs not only be preserved but also reinvigorated as we move towards open, digital models? Open access has enormous potential to increase the reach and impact of scholarship, but it will have disruptive effects on established norms, and raises some key questions – especially in disciplines deeply invested in the slow forms of knowledge-making represented by the monograph. Speaker will address the barriers, sensitivities and practical challenges surrounding open access monographs, and about the ways in which UC Press is addressing them via its innovative Luminos program (www.luminosoa.org).
Tara McPherson:
What are the particular affordances of the digital for scholarly knowledge production today? How might we imagine scholarship differently if we move beyond a focus on text toward multimodal expression and design? What audiences might such work reach? This talk will explore how we might envision scholarship along multiple scales and in varied formats, paying particular attention to the ways in which scholarly evidence might be engaged anew through the possibilities of the digital archive. By taking up the specific case of the online platform Scalar, the speaker will approach these questions through concrete examples of digital scholarship today.
Bios
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, where she serves as Managing Editor of PMLA and other MLA publications. She also holds an appointment as Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, where she led a number of experiments in open peer review and other innovations in scholarly publishing.
Alison Mudditt
Alison Mudditt has been Director of University of California Press since 2011, where she has focused on reshaping the Press’s strategy and structure to meet the needs of its diverse audiences in the digital age. Alison has twenty-five years experience in scholarly publishing which began at Blackwell in Oxford, UK, where she rose to become Publisher for the Humanities Division. In 1997, Alison moved to Taylor & Francis Inc. in Philadelphia as Publishing Director of the Behavioral Sciences Division. Alison joined SAGE in 2001 as Vice President and Editorial Director, and was appointed Executive Vice President in 2004 where she led the SAGE’s publishing programs across books, journals and digital during a period of tremendous growth. Alison is a regular speaker at industry meetings and is currently Vice Chair of the Scientific Publications Committee and member of the Open Science Committee of the American Heart Association, and member of the Board of Directors of K|N Consultants. She has also served on the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers, and was Co-Chair of the Dean’s Leadership Council at California State University, Channel Islands.
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.
She is author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) She is currently completing a monograph about her lab’s work and process, Designing for Difference, for Harvard University Press. She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is a founding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) She is the lead PI on the new authoring platform, Scalar, and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, http://scalar.usc.edu/. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH.
Date: March 21, 2016
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: The Cogut Center for the Humanities, Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting Street, Providence