Have you ever encountered an amazing digital publication that inspired you to think differently about your own scholarship?

Perhaps it was a new work in your own field or a presentation from a colleague in another department that started the wheels turning. Perhaps you began exploring your options . . . and realized that creating a digital publication could be a bit daunting. Established roadmaps and workflows for new and experimental forms of scholarship—which need to begin early with the research process—are not yet fully developed. Access to publishing platforms, costs for design and development, and availability of reliable guidance vary widely among campuses and scholarly presses. Conflicting advice and unfamiliar obstacles cause confusion and frustration for many authors, especially those navigating the tenure and promotion process. And yet . . . the promise of digital scholarship, of using the internet’s full potential to enliven and amplify important humanistic research, continues to beckon.

Adventures in Digital Publishing is an occasional web series founded in 2020 by Brown University Digital Publications, Emory University’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities, and the Open Access and Library Relations Committees of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses). ACLS joined the collaboration in 2022. The series’ mission is both to celebrate successful digital publications and to hear the stories of their development from members of the project teams.

Demonstrations of completed projects all too often gloss over the many decisions and challenges that arise during the development process. The founders of Adventures wanted to pull back this curtain so that publishers and authors could learn from one another and adapt hard-won lessons to new projects and circumstances. The most important lesson is embedded in the very structure of each episode, which brings together and acknowledges the labor and expertise of the featured project’s team. No digital project—large or small, simple or complex—can be completed by the author alone. Understanding this reality is essential, especially for humanists who tend to work independently on research and publication projects.

The podcast itself counts as the scholarship. We need to really hold on to that argument. . . . Collaborating with university presses is [an] effective way to push for the legitimacy . . . because the presses have the infrastructure, the expertise, and the knowledge to render scholarship more legible to the larger scholarly community.

Hannah McGregor
Director & Associate Professor of Publishing, Simon Fraser University

All episodes in the series feature peer-reviewed publications from members of AUPresses, as well as a guest moderator from within the AUPresses community. The first episode features Furnace and Fugue, developed by Brown University Digital Publishing and published in 2019 by the University of Virginia Press. The second highlights i used to love to dream, the first-ever peer-reviewed rap album, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2022 and later named a finalist in the multimodal category for the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes.

Secret Feminist Agenda, a peer-reviewed podcast published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press from 2017 to 2019, and the larger Amplify Podcast Network are featured in the fourth episode. The fifth episode showcases 2020 Dreams, published in 2023 by the digital publication initiative at Stanford University Press. Deviating a bit from the regular series format, the third episode features a conversation with the editors of the Stanford program before its closure in 2024.

In October 2024 several members of the Adventures planning committee joined the panel Collaborative Publishing at the George Washington Ethics in Publishing Conference to share takeaways from the series.

New episodes of Adventures in Digital Publishing are forthcoming in 2025 and will be announced to all subscribers of this newsletter. Stay tuned and keep exploring!

Back to Author Query.

Stay Informed!
Subscribe to Author Query