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Publishing and Publicly Engaged Scholarship: Model Practices for Publication in the Humanities
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Publishing and Publicly Engaged Scholarship: Model Practices for Publication in the Humanities
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Segment:0 .
KATH BURTON: OK, so I think people are probably making their way into their various Zoom comfort zones. And we're just about getting ready to start. Thank you to everybody who is joining us online today. I'm Kath Burton from Routledge Taylor & Francis.
DANIEL FISHER: And I'm Daniel Fisher from Hebrew Union College Cincinnati and the National Humanities Alliance. Kath and I are co-conveners of the publishing and public humanities working group. And we'd like to introduce our panel today.
DAVE TELL: I think that's me. My name is Dave, Dave Tell. I'm a professor at the University of Kansas. I'm a co-director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and a co-founder of the Emmett Till Memory Project.
MICHELLE URBERG: I'm Michelle Urberg. I am currently doing some consulting. And I also just started a new role at EBSCO doing some implementation work for libraries. And I am here to talk about the role of Humanities in digital projects. And I am a musicologist by training. So thanks.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Hi, I'm Judy Ruttenberg, senior director of scholarship and policy at the Association of Research Libraries. Glad to be here.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I'm Elizabeth Waraksa. I'm an associate dean at George Washington University Libraries and Academic Innovation. Also happy to be here.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful, we're delighted to be here with you today to discuss publication and public humanities scholarship, which we understand broadly as research, teaching, and programming across humanities disciplines that's distinguished in three key ways. First, it's often conducted in coequal, mutually beneficial partnership with community members and institutions. It offers opportunities for engaging in the humanities, not just as audiences, but, really, as creators of knowledge.
DANIEL FISHER: Second, public humanities work is integral to academic disciplines. If it's philosophy work, it advances the discipline of philosophy. If its history work, it advances the discipline of history. And it creates, really, broader and more inclusive disciplinary knowledge and participation. And third, public humanities work is designed to serve the public good.
DANIEL FISHER: That is it makes things better through partnership and through scholarship, contributing to public life. And in these ways, it really can bridge the divide between research and practice. Positioning experts of all kinds, from the academy, from the community, at the center of public narratives around the value of the humanities and society. Two quick examples might give a sense of the breadth of public humanities work, at least where I sit in the United States.
DANIEL FISHER: First, the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Initiative, for example, brings faculty and students together with the University of Kentucky libraries to create digital stories, exhibitions, and audio content, drawing on oral history interviews with members of the state's Jewish community. A second example is DC Adaptors. It's a rhetoric project in Washington DC that documents really questions and archives how the city's residents have adapted the DC flag, including an interactive map and data visualization.
DANIEL FISHER: Both of these examples benefit academic and community partners in different ways. They're integral to their disciplines. And they create new academic knowledge that serves the public good. And it serves academic goods, as well, for these and other reasons. However, their publication must be approached somewhat differently than a conventional humanities initiative.
DANIEL FISHER: And Kath can share more about that.
KATH BURTON: Thank you, Daniel. So over the course of the past 18 months, a small group of us, comprising publishers and scholars, have been working together to outline some of the challenges, and also the model practices associated with creating content, publications derived from the public humanities research projects, programming, and teaching that Daniel was just describing. We started with a close interrogation of the challenges associated with publishing engaged work in the humanities.
KATH BURTON: For instance, publication objectives of scholars may not always be completely aligned with those of public and community partners. So how does a publication ensure that diverse voices of those involved in projects are included effectively in the scholarly publication? How does publication in traditional books and journals, for instance, reflect the process as well as the outcome? And what is the relationship between public and digital scholarship?
KATH BURTON: The working paper that we've deposited in H Commons, and I think can see a link in the Pathable chat, outlines some of the practices that support the publication of engaged research. Our thinking has now turned to how existing publication pathways, systems, and models might adapt more dynamically to the needs of public humanities scholars. So we find ourselves in a really exciting juncture in this journey and have started to dig deeper into interrogating existing publishing life cycle, and to do so in a way that would draw in more participants to broaden out the conversation.
KATH BURTON: We've begun to consider questions such as, what counts as publication. Do we need metadata standards for all parts of the engaged research and publication cycle? How might public humanities scholars engage more with their library? What role can scholarly societies and libraries play in establishing good, evaluative standards for engaged research?
KATH BURTON: And even more excitingly, thinking about the future, what are the prospects for the next generation of perhaps wholly digital public humanities scholars to participate in the creation of new forms of knowledge? Daniel.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful. We'll cover these questions and more in today's session. First, though, each of our panelists will share their professional perspectives on the challenges of publishing and publicly engaged scholarship. How do you perceive these challenges from the perspective of your work? We'll then move on to a cross-panel conversation. So that each member of the team can pick up on each other's perspectives.
DANIEL FISHER: We'll welcome your feedback, really, at all points, via the Pathable chat. And we'll have ample time at the end for questions and answers. Please use the Pathable chat for that. And we'll do our best to respond today. And if not, we'll find a way to do so after the event. And with that, I will pass the mic to our first panelist, Dave Tell. How do you perceive the challenges of publication and public humanities from the perspective of your work?
DANIEL FISHER:
DAVE TELL: Thanks, Daniel. Honor to be with all of you. Honor, also, to be part of this working group over the last 18 months. Like I said, my name is Dave Tell. I'm a professor at the University of Kansas. And I've, for the last seven years, been investing a lot of energy in publicly engaged humanistic research. I'd like to put one particular challenge on the table that relates to publishing engaged humanities work.
DAVE TELL: But before I do so, I want to put the disclaimer out there that this challenge is really not unique to the public humanities. But it's particularly intense or particularly magnified within the public humanities. And I think this is actually one of the real takeaways from our working group. Is that thinking about publishing in the public humanities, it's almost like it puts a magnifying glass on scholarly publishing writ large.
DAVE TELL: And it helps us to think about issues that are applicable everywhere, but perhaps appear with, I don't know, greater clarity when we're thinking about publicly engaged scholarship. So with that disclaimer, here's the challenge I want to talk about. How do we publish and preserve the process of publicly engaged scholarship as well as the product? Unlike elementary algebra equations, or even elementary social studies, in which all variables are given an advance, scholarship in the humanities involves the gradual accumulation of unknown contexts and unknown variables.
DAVE TELL: And scholarship in the public humanities accelerates the increase of unknown variables. So in comparison, I know this is a little bit unfair, but in comparison to traditional humanities scholarship, the public humanities involves methods and practices that, at least in my experience, are particularly prone to generating extra variables. Such scholarship, for example, has pushed me into local communities.
DAVE TELL: And any time a scholar-- and I think this is fair to say writ large, that any time a scholar gets pushed into a local community, things happen. No matter how much you read in advance, and no matter how homogeneous a community may seem from a distance, once you're in that community, things happen. We discover local knowledges, local fault lines, local politics, and local customs.
DAVE TELL: All of which generate intellectual surprises. Which of course, is why we do this work in the first place. And so over the last 18 months, my working group partner, Barry Goldenberg, and I have been thinking about the challenge of including processes into the published product. And here's our conclusion at the moment. If we are going to provide a true account of the engaged humanistic project-- humanistic research experience, there can be no strict dichotomy between private process and published product.
DAVE TELL: Which all sounds well and good, except for how difficult it make things. Because once you break down that dichotomy, all sorts of other questions come to the fore. Let me give you two quick examples. Here's a question that we suddenly have to face. And that's the question of what gets included. Right so, a couple of years ago, I published a traditional humanities book.
DAVE TELL: And like a lot of humanities books, it drew on an archive. But the only thing my book learns from that archive is the content of the archive. But by working with this group over the last 18 months, I've come to see that the process of talking my way into that archive, which honestly took two years and some high drama with no shortage of relationships. That's just as interesting as the actual content that was in the archive.
DAVE TELL: And why is it that when I wrote the book, all I did was talk about the content? So what I'm trying to say is once we break down the process product distinction, now we have a lot of new questions about what gets-- what parts of the process do we have to publish. And finally, I'll end with this. Another question, once you break down the process product binary, you also have to think about what version of a project you're going to preserve and publish.
DAVE TELL: I've been working for seven years with the family of the 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till to create an online, publicly engaged website and smartphone app to tell that story for the next generation. And just last week, this question came home to me, when a private preservation company called me up and said, Dave, we'd like to preserve the Emmett Till Memory Project. And I said great, which one?
DAVE TELL: Do you want the one that went live in 2016 but wasn't really all that good, but it was there. Or do you want the one that's live now? Or do you want the one that's going live a year and a half from now? All the sudden, once we agree to include process, all of a sudden, there's not just one finished Emmett Till Memory Project. There are at least three, and probably countless different Emmett Till Memory Projects that we have to think about which one gets published and which one gets preserved and how.
DAVE TELL: So with that, I will turn it over to Michelle.
MICHELLE URBERG: Hi, all. The challenge of-- let me make sure I remember the question that we were talking about, talking about the challenges of publication in the public humanities, and how-- from the perspective might work. So I, as a scholar in the music history field, certainly I feel that the challenges of preserving music are definitely different than if you're preserving something that is coming from an archive.
MICHELLE URBERG: Dealing with recorded sound, concert experiences definitely have their own challenges to preserve. And capturing that ephemeral moment is always a challenge. If I'm talking to you as a metadata professional, the other side of my life, the library side of my life, I'm much more concerned with how the participation is going to be recorded and made available for discovery and findability.
MICHELLE URBERG: And in that arena, it is especially important to have ways of documenting who has participated in what way. And certainly, we have items like-- or new projects like the credit taxonomy that are working to accommodate all sorts of people who are participating in various projects. At present, that taxonomy, while it's a really great step, it is not really designed for this kind of work.
MICHELLE URBERG: It falls short with the rich complexity of people who are involved with digital humanities projects. And from a music perspective, I can say that it is definitely not intended to accommodate anything, really, in the arts space. It's really honed for journal participation. So there's an opportunity there and a challenge to this community to keep working on that to accommodate these other types of projects.
MICHELLE URBERG: And I would add one final category, a third hat that I wear. Certainly in the consulting space that I inhabit, I've learned that publishers are not always excited, or I would say, at least, at the very least, trepidatious about pursuing work that is beyond documenting a final product. So current publishing workflows don't really accommodate things that continue to have multiple iterations.
MICHELLE URBERG: And part of that's because of the way publishing systems have established themselves. But part of it also is how we have-- how the industry, publishing, from the time that somebody submits something to the time that somebody reads something or engages with it in some way, is all about the final product. And so these systems have been honed around that final product.
MICHELLE URBERG: They've not been honed around engaging throughout. Certainly things like preprint servers are helping with that. But again, that is always based around a written document, usually, and a data set which is collapsible into some sort of spreadsheet or another data driven format. The projects that we're talking about here don't really-- they can't be confined in that way. So processes for publishers to accommodate that in their operational workflows need to change.
MICHELLE URBERG: And so do the technologies that support it. And who-- that's all I had to comment on that. Who comes after me?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Hey, Michelle. I think that's me.
MICHELLE URBERG: OK, great, thank you. I'm so glad that you know.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Thank you for that. So thank you so much to Kath and Daniel for including me on this panel. I want to talk about how research libraries, as a sector, sort of fit into these conversations and challenges. And then also just underscore how helpful it is to have these cross-sector conversations, ones that involve scholars, publishers, libraries, and of course, ideally, the communities that we all partner with.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So libraries, of course, have historically played a bridging role between academia and the public in exhibits, book talks, other kinds of programming. So I'm happy to be here participating in this dialogue. Because so many threads are coming together right now, I think, from libraries, archives, and publishing that speak to this, these challenges. So 10 years ago, when I first came to ARL, I heard two prevailing themes from libraries around supporting digital scholarship of the kind that we're talking about.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: One was that wanted to support it. One was that they had the sense the environment was totally bespoke. They weren't sure that investing in building websites, or databases, or technology around particular project could be reused or standardized. And so that was kind of a research question. And two, I would hear about scholars coming to the library with digital assets that either-- from former projects that either weren't well described, weren't built for preservation, and had to-- there had to be some sort of forensic analysis to figure out what to do with, how to sort of describe and deal with them.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: But in the past decade, I think almost all of the academic members of the Association of Research Libraries have digital scholarship staff. Many have centers. Many of those centers are collaborative on campus with other units. And they are spaces of interdisciplinarity, shared technology, expertise, and a strong service ethos. So on the ARL website, and I'll put this in the chat after I'm done, we have a series of profiles of member libraries' digital scholarship activities that have exemplars, many of which overlap with the Humanities for All project, which are worth looking at, I think.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Humanities for All includes many projects housed in libraries, including things like exemplars like Documenting the Now and [INAUDIBLE],, both exemplars of kind of community partnership and engagement that involve, really, sometimes divergent ethical frameworks that had to be-- around accessing or archiving that had to be negotiated. We've also, of course, seen university presses, over the past some years, with the help of funders like Mellon, embrace innovative digital platforms that kind of-- that can handle multimodal research as a publication.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And just where we are now, we have almost 40 University presses in the US and Canada that are organizationally integrated into the university library. So ARL and Association of University Presses have been supporting this particular community of press directors and university libraries that really touch on many of these exact kinds of issues, supporting digital scholarship, metadata, and the like, publishing.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: There's been great leadership from community based archives from people like Bergis Jules and Michelle Caswell. They've done work through IMLS on these issues. So technically, I would share the challenges that have been raised in the working paper, and that have been already mentioned today. Sort of what and for how long do we keep digital project that may or may not be associated with a formal publication?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: This is not unique to the humanities. I think scientific publishers are struggling with how long do we keep data. What version of data? Where is-- all that. So how we integrate these projects, which are often websites, into library or other network discovery environments? So other than doing kind of personal promotion, how do we come upon them as the kinds-- as assets like books and articles that we know how to find.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So as wonderful as the diversity in this space is, we need some kind of standards to build infrastructure. And from an economic perspective, we need some kind of shared infrastructure, particularly between presses, institutional repositories, and libraries. So and then just in a-- so lots of technical things. And in a general sense, I think what the working paper raises is this question of trust.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And who gets trusted with these important stories? So the working paper gives a shout out to the SNCC legacy project at Duke University. Which I absolutely commend to you to look at, SNCC legacy project dog, which has kind of beautiful-- beautifully lays out discussions about a group of former activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and their activist lack of trust in institutions, and particularly universities, with these stories.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And how they came to kind of negotiate this partnership. How the material will be made available, who owns it. And then another fabulous example, and I'll stop after that, is the Colored Conventions Project, which is mentioned in Humanities for All. Started at University of Delaware, now at Penn State. Kind of extraordinary documentation in that project of the collaboration between scholars, technologists, librarians, and the community, including a wealth of K-12 teaching materials.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And a brand new University Press from UNC Press, which is en route. I haven't touched it yet. I've ordered the book. So I guess I will just end by saying that one thing that we learn from these cross-sector conversations is that scholars themselves can be a very effective bridge between librarians and publishers.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And so next up on the panel is a scholar librarian, my good friend, former colleague Elizabeth Waraksa.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: Thanks, Judy. And thanks, Daniel and Kath, also, for the invitation to be here. Really excited to be a part of this conversation. I'd like to use my time in this section of our panel to bring in another element we haven't specifically touched on yet, and that is undergraduate students as content creators in the publicly engaged humanities. Here at George Washington University, many of our undergraduate students are preparing for careers in public service.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And this preparation takes a variety of forms, from service learning, to internships, to research partnerships with faculty and other researchers here in the Washington DC area. And our undergraduates are also mindful of building their scholarly and professional portfolios during their years at GW. Along with that comes significant interest in publishing their work, from op eds in the student newspaper, The Hatchet, to peer reviewed scholarship.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: At GW Libraries and Academic Innovation, we support undergraduates looking to publish their work in a number of ways. The George Washington University Undergraduate Review, a journal that is edited and published by undergraduate students is preserved and made accessible through our institutional repository, known as GW Scholar Space. And our scholarly communications team provides workshops for the student editors on best practices in peer review, mince DOIs, and advises on accessibility.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So really productive partnership there with our undergraduate editors and authors. The same repository, GW Scholar Space, is the preservation and access point for GW's electronic theses and dissertations, which many student authors consider publications, and often make open access immediately upon receipt of their degree. We also use our institutional repository for student projects, especially posters, featured in our annual GW Research Showcase, our annual competition and opportunity for students to highlight their research.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: These are challenging to preserve, because they have multiple formats. So speaking of multimedia, that is something we think about a lot here at Libraries and Academic Innovation. So I'm thinking about this combination of undergraduate public engagement, the variety of student work that they wish to make accessible, that they wish to publish.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And this got me thinking. And here's a question and a provocation for everyone who is here. Could one make the argument that the publicly engaged humanities is more likely to be found in local library supported publication and preservation venues than in traditional academic publications? So I think I'll stop there. And looking forward to continuing the conversation.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA:
KATH BURTON: Great, thank you, Elizabeth. And thank you to all panelists. I'm just going to jump in and give Daniel a second to catch his breath. But I think we were going to move into the second segment of our session today. And give all of our panelists the chance to reflect on what each of the other speakers has already mentioned. And we're going to do that in a reverse order.
KATH BURTON: So Elizabeth, you find yourself in the hot seat again. Are you ready to go?
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I'm absolutely ready to go. Thanks, Kath, for a moment of pause. I'd like to pick up on something Dave said earlier, and others have mentioned as well, publishing and preserving the process, in addition to the product of publicly engaged humanities. And I'm going to continue to highlight this as an opportunity for partnerships with libraries. Community members, co-authors, librarians, archivists, digital technologists, can help here with versioning, can help here with metadata standards that reflect the different steps in the scholarly process, the research process, the conversational process, the ethical questions that come up with all these kinds of projects.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So the libraries are not just providing durable URLs. That's a really important part of versioning, and preservation, and discovery. But libraries are also really well poised to talk about credit. To recognize labor, and contributions, and individuals. Through things like ORCID IDs to make sure the co-authors are recognized. And the life cycle, the object life of that product is captured through our processes for creation, preservation, discovery, and long-term access.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So just a shout out to Dave and to everyone who is working to preserve that process, as well as the product.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, I think, in-- with respect to that, I do think there are fruitful conversations to be had between public and engaged humanities and the open science movement, which has been very focused on process, very focused on opening up, and sort of showing the-- showing your work, I guess. And then the ways that we build systems or norms around capturing those kinds of processes, so that they-- either whether it's for replicability, or accountability, or really to increase participation, the public good that Daniel opened with.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So we did a study a couple of years ago at ARL that was funded by NEH around discovery and digital humanities. And it was-- it's really an interesting-- we had a lot of interesting conversations with-- and we did a survey of some of these kinds of projects, what is considered the sort of data that was alongside the project. And what is then ends up in the library, could end up in a library or a repository as collections.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And that kind of blurred boundary between data and collections, which sort of is-- it's not an inherently interesting distinction. But it's a workflow distinction. And it's sort of how you come together and handle this. Is this something that's published and dealt that way, or archived as data. So I think there's lots to be-- not just bringing sectors together, but bringing disciplines together could shine some light on this.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And I'm sure our audience has expertise to contribute to that question.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, so just piggybacking off of that, I-- the first thing that comes to mind in managing anything that we would call data or the process of collecting data and recording it, the place that I go to immediately is in the hard sciences, where there are already some for-profit and some nonprofit repositories that are available for people to make available and open the work that they're doing in some sort-- it is a final form.
MICHELLE URBERG: It is not a work in progress form, usually. But it seems like there's a few systematize places for people who are working in DH projects to put their data, whatever that data may be, be it oral histories, or mark-up of archival documents, or other types of recordings, there's no place to really put that stuff and to keep it, to mark it up to make it available for public comment.
MICHELLE URBERG: Unless you build your own website, and then it's not a repository. Then you are dependent on discovery, basically, from whatever Google can offer you, and the SEO that you build into your website. So it would be great to hear from this community about what types of repositories could possibly be built that could be shared across disciplines in a way that-- I mean, the things that are coming to mind for me are repositories like Dryad and something like that, but for designed specifically for digital humanities projects.
MICHELLE URBERG:
DAVE TELL: All right, so a question showed up in the chat a second ago from Bill Kasdorf. I'm just going to read the question and then respond to it. Bill says I'm interested in your thoughts about the intersection of digital humanities and social media. To put Dave on the spot, thank you, an example would be the controversy about a painting of Emmett Till exhibited at the Whitney a couple of years ago.
DAVE TELL: How, if at all, did your project respond, or react, or contribute to that. So to set the stage here, you might remember the year is 2017. The painter is a Brooklyn artist named Dana Schutz, who exhibits a photograph called the Open Casket. And if you've ever seen the famous picture of Emmett Till-- the famous photograph of Emmett Till in the casket, this is a painting that is an interpretation of that photograph.
DAVE TELL: When she exhibited it at the High Ed Whitney in New York City, this, of course, caused some international controversy. How did I respond? First, this is a good story in how to respond. And I'm happy to share it. I don't imagine this story is applicable to all of these situations. But if that old John Dewey quote, where he says something along the lines of the solution for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
DAVE TELL: I think we might be able to adapt that and to say something like this. The solution for the ills of public humanities work is more public humanities work. So in the case at hand, we invited-- well, I worked with a nonprofit in the Mississippi Delta. And we invited Dana Schutz to spend a couple of days with us in Mississippi, and to spend a couple of days with the family of Emmett Till.
DAVE TELL: And the family, and myself, and some people from the nonprofit, and Dana, and her family, spent a couple of days just driving around looking at the sites and talking about the legacy of the murder and the impacts of that legacy on local communities and on the United States writ large. And there was some hard conversations about the role of a white artist engaged in a Black community with an African-American family.
DAVE TELL: These are not questions that you can sort of have a once a one size fits all answer for. But I will say that the process of spending two days together, thinking about this, created friendships between Dana, and myself, and the nonprofit, and the family that are far more lasting than the controversy in 2017. And although Dana has become a close friend, I'm not making this up when I said I had to Google the controversy to remind myself what year it was.
DAVE TELL: Because from the perspective of community engaged work, once you have those relationships down, they can weather the trials of social media and the news media. Which, as you know, is very up and down. And so you really need those relationships to do this sort of publicly engaged work. So I'll leave it at that.
MICHELLE URBERG: I saw a comment in the Zoom chat about-- by Sean Concannon. My apologies if I-- I'm really bad with names. I have a mispronounced name, too, myself. GitHub, yes, we can use GitHub for-- as a repository. I think one cool thing about GitHub that it is built for versioning.
MICHELLE URBERG: One major challenge for GitHub is that it is hard to create a really robust federated search inside of that space. It's primarily designed to encapsulate one project in all of its various forms. So a broader view, possibly something, maybe GitHub paired with something, like GitHub, and then there's another sort of UI that sits on top of that that facilitates some sort of search mechanism to gather a bunch of different types of data sets and different types of projects together.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that they would be discoverable in one place. But then you can also then delve into each one in depth at a specific repository page. That could be a potential solution, something like that. Yeah, right. The comment in Zoom is that you need an explanatory material hosted elsewhere. That's right.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, exactly.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: There's a question about a role for humanities journals in expanding what is considered formal or legitimate scholarship. And I know we've talked about evaluation some in this group. But just a plug for that those kinds of conversations are also these kind of multi-sector-- there's a lot of stakeholders in that. So when you think about scholarly societies that have come up with evaluative criteria, and many have, for what is-- for digital scholarship, some, whether-- one of the things that we hope about formal scholarship is that it is preserved in some sense.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So is it preserved in its native technical environment? Is it preserved in some other way? And certainly then, a role for journals in how that gets linked up. And the sense that's made of that.
DAVE TELL: So I also want to throw out there that Elizabeth's little provocation earlier reminded me that the question of what gets published from public humanities research is not a question that we can consider in isolation from the broader research environment, and in particular from the environment in which scholars are rewarded for certain types of research and not others. I know at my University, at KU, we're trying really hard to come up with metrics for evaluating questions of promotion and tenure vis-a-vis publicly engaged work.
DAVE TELL: But I also know that because at a lot of places, KU included, because those metrics are not as trustworthy as the established metrics, I have no incentive to really try and make my public work legible. Because they don't know how to count it anyway. So I'm much more likely to just throw it up on a blog than I would be otherwise. Because until universities sort of catch up with the different forms of publication, it's going to be a real impact on scholars, particularly junior scholars, on how they can go about this.
DAVE TELL: So this question of what gets published is really-- I mean all of us know this. It's not just an academic question. It's not just a publishing question. But it's a question about the viability of engaged research as a whole. Because if we can't figure out a way to publish it in ways that get counted, then no one's going to want to do it.
DAVE TELL: Because we have incentive, like job security, to do traditional humanities work. And we don't want to disincentivize the relationship, community driven public work. So I just appreciate that reminder from Elizabeth.
DANIEL FISHER: Thank you, Dave. If I might take the moderator's prerogative and raise the question myself to the panel. What counts, in your view, as the unit of publication? And what systems need to be in place to support validation, accreditation, and dissemination, and preservation of diverse public humanities assets? I'll pop that in the chat as well.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, that is the eternal question. Is it-- for composers, a composition is a unit of appropriate publication for tenure, I think. But that wouldn't cut it for me. I would need a book, as a musicologist. So if we're going to push out into alternate formats, I think the thing that makes a book acceptable has always been some level of peer review, right?
MICHELLE URBERG: Be it open or closed peer review. Traditionally, it's been closed. So if there is a way to build in some sort of benchmarking, whereby people who are also knowledgeable are able to weigh in on the validity of the thing that you're saying, that often becomes the gateway to acceptability of an idea, or the trust that it's good quote, unquote "good scholarship." So some sort of validation process like that, I think, in addition to all the other things that we talked about, is key.
MICHELLE URBERG:
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I think another interesting angle to bring in here would be impact. So not just impact factor, but impact if something is picked up in the local media, the national media, the global media. If you're making impact in your community, I think that should be something that counts. Not just what realm it was published in, or that it was peer reviewed, but how it impacts those who were hoping to impact.
MICHELLE URBERG: Would a collection of newspaper articles or tweets be enough, then? Do you need to set up a way to collect that stuff? Because there's going to be a lot of stuff that you, as a person, are going to miss, unless you have some sort of alert set up, just sort of gather all that and then bundle it all together, and present it to your committee, when the time is needed-- sorry, when it's needed at the review time.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: Here at GW, we have a tool called Social Feed Manager that does allow that kind of mass collection of hashtags. So that one could, indeed, use that in their promotion and tenure portfolio if needed, or in a job application. I was talking earlier about undergraduates. So they don't all necessarily want to become scholars in the traditional sense. But they're content creators at the time of their undergraduate career.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And so we have to think about many, many uses of their publicly engaged humanities products, the many paths they take.
MICHELLE URBERG: Bill Kasdorf also mentioned in the Pathable chat about alt metrics. I think I am less knowledgeable about that than I should be. But I think that that's measuring citations and clicks of published work. So there would have to be a way for center of documentation to connect a tweet or a newspaper article which aren't connected with DOIs or other sorts of traditional publication mechanisms.
MICHELLE URBERG:
JUDY RUTTENBERG: I just want to mention two kind of national level projects that are sort of-- that are interesting in this area, that might-- they're in progress. So we'll see what they contribute here. But one is the Humetrics, humanities and social science project, which is funded by Mellon. And it's kind of developing values, a set of values, by which humanistic scholarship can be-- and not exclusively publicly engaged, but I think can have some bearing on this.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And certainly will get into values like things that have been mentioned here on credit and engagement, partnership, and things like that. And then the other is in the science. And so the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine is somewhere in its three year roundtable of aligning incentives for open science. And it's exactly to the points that Dave raised, like why do you contribute time and effort into things that don't count in a-- that aren't viable for one's career.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So out of that project is coming up some toolkits and ways to engage at the department level, which is kind of where the rubber hits the road in terms of evaluation, sort of tools to have those kinds of conversations. So ideally, we have them and in higher education. So that there's some sort of shared understanding. But they happen institutionally.
MICHELLE URBERG: The Pathable chat is clocking away, it's great.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Great question about the difference between attention and public uptake, and this kind of impact. How, exactly, I mean, once you have metrics, you're all about the metrics. Count stuff versus the kind of deep understanding of impact. Yeah, great question.
DAVE TELL: I mean, I think a lot of this conversation in the chat right now is really another way of putting a finer point on the question that Daniel started us off with a second ago, which was what's the unit of analysis? It's another-- what do you put a DOI on? It seems like we're in this moment of sort of-- if we used to just put a DOI on the final product, now we put it on-- well, let's also put it on this process. Well, then you break the process down. And well, do you count Dave's relationship with x community member?
DAVE TELL: Is it ever smaller increments? And that's what's at stake, too, in this idea of alt metrics. And this is a thing, to be completely honest, the Kath introduced me to a year or so ago. And we looked at an old article I had written about the launch of the Emmett Till Memory Project. And alt metrics captured-- I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head here. But alt metrics captured under 10 ways that this particular article had been picked up.
DAVE TELL: But on my own CV, I have this little tracking document that tracks the ideas, in sort of public news media, even if they don't mention the article by name, or the journal title by name. If they pick up the ideas of the Emmett Till Memory Project, I've been tracking it. And then it's hundreds long. And so I went to Kath, I said, wait a second, alt metrics found 7.
DAVE TELL: I can show you 100. And what basically was the issue was the question that Daniel said, what are we going to put a DOI on? And it seems there, essentially-- there has to be a line somewhere, right? Because you would think there would be a point of diminishing returns, at which ever so-- and I don't know where that line is. But I do think that line has to be decided.
DAVE TELL: I'm really sort of provoked by this sort of idea of Humetrics. I was unfamiliar with that. But sort of these conversations that these lines have to be drawn, thinking about what's at stake for young scholars. It has to be drawn thinking about relevance to social media, as well as big publishers. So it's lots of people with lots of investments in drawing this line.
DAVE TELL:
DANIEL FISHER: I'd add also the publication of publicly engaged work is critical, not just for individual career development, but for the development of the field as a whole. So as it grows, and matures, and develops, it's just important that methodologies and ideas be shared, and tested, and I think peer reviewed. And there have been a number of questions about peer review. I'm interested in what kind of peer review might reflect the values that inspire publicly engaged humanities work.
DANIEL FISHER: Michelle, would you trust your review more if it were open or double blind?
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, that's really interesting. I, for the first time, a few months ago, I was asked if I wanted to have credit for reviewing an article. And it would be publicly accredited. And that was interesting. At first, I was like, yes, I really want this. But then in the second hand, I thought, well, how is that going to change my relationship with the author of this article?
MICHELLE URBERG: And in the end I did decide to open it up, because I feel like if I'm going to walk the walk, then I have to. I feel like open peer review is probably the ideal, because it allows for-- open peer review alongside of open, iterative, in-process publication.
MICHELLE URBERG: So this is even more in-process than what you get with like a preprint, for example. So you're working on something, you're shopping an idea. Does it make sense? Are you missing data points that need to work with it? Are you talking to a community that you're trying to get inside of and understand, but maybe you need to present it, the information that you're talking about, in a certain way.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that you're, on the one hand, respecting their wishes for representation, on the other hand, you are speaking to your scholarly community. And sometimes, there's a bit of a divide between those two. So openness in peer review is part of that process. And acknowledging who is participating in your conversation for your final product I think is really important. From another standpoint, I think it will all make us more humane in our scholarship.
MICHELLE URBERG: We are going to be forced to consider how we appear in our discussions. And we all know about infamous reviewer 2. So we don't want to be a reviewer 2 publicly, I think. And so I think it could it would make our scholarship better in that way as well. So, yeah, I'm all for-- the more open, the better. But I do understand why things have been blinded up to this point.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, Michelle, we were at-- we hosted a meeting a couple of years ago with the Social Science Research Council. And we were sort of talking about this in the social sciences. But the same ideas of open peer review and how people would be comfortable. And one person said, so yes, maybe it would make us more humane. But also might sort of dial down the price-- dial down the cost of being a little bit wrong.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So the notion of-- Dave's notion of putting something out in a blog also has the notional kind of vibe to it. You can sort of, here's what I'm thinking about. And can sort of engage in the discipline in a way that isn't this is my thing. And then the person comes along and says she was wrong, because, without that style of engagement.
JUDY RUTTENBERG:
MICHELLE URBERG: Rebecca Barrett asked about open peer review of books. Yeah, totally. And actually, in some ways, books are actually better set up for that now than the journals, I think, in that iterative process, because of platforms like Manifold. Because you can build in an open peer review process into the construction of your book.
DANIEL FISHER: We're coming up on time. To wrap things up, I wonder if our panelists might be willing to share a plea for the future. Based on your professional experience, what, looking forward, would you like to see changed, or brought into existence, or emphasized in the publishing world, and the library world, and in the world of public humanities scholarship.
DAVE TELL: I'll start. And I'll start by being overly dramatic, because we're at a conference. So let me say that I think the future of the humanities, writ large, depends on answering these questions about the public humanities, because the vast majority of humanities work happens in publicly funded institutions. And if we can't make a case for the public relevance of humanities work, especially in this austerity driven, neoliberal age, I work in Kansas.
DAVE TELL: The humanities, I really think that these questions are urgent. And that if we can't figure out how to publish, and circulate, and promote public work, that the humanities is going to have an increasingly difficult narrative problem as it tries to sell itself to administrators, legislators, and a justifiably skeptical public.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: That's a tough one to follow, Dave. But I'll jump in with something more micro, which is I'm looking forward to humanities publications that look much more like science publications, with multi-author papers and books, long strings of everyone who ever contributed the intellectual work and labor of that research project. So that's my wish. And I think it's just about-- I think it's here.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I think we're pretty much on the cusp of this. So I'm hopeful.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: I would say that I'd sort of broaden the stakes of Dave's drama and say that the sort of-- our public institutions themselves kind of rely on regaining trust in the public-- from the public by making the process of scholarship more participatory, the relevance more clear, and the public good more evident.
MICHELLE URBERG: I'll wear my metadata hat for this. I am hopeful that something like credit will really blossom and be taken up by the standards groups that have developed it in collaboration with people who are working in other formats than it currently supports to really flesh it out. Or maybe it needs to be credit 0.1, or something, or 2.0, or whatever.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that it's like whatever it currently is, and then there's another type of credit that sits alongside of the current one that accommodates formats, scholarship that's being produced in this space. Judy just put in-- I'm going to put-- is it all right if I put that in the Pathable?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Oh, yeah, sure.
MICHELLE URBERG: She just suggested a great-- you'll have to explain your acronym, though.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, I'm looking it up. So we could combine credit with, I guess, TODRA, Taxonomy Of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities. So there is-- so we could combine the concept of the granular approach to giving credit with a taxonomy more appropriate for the field.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, great, that's a nugget right. Everybody who's a NISO our in this community, I think that's future work.
DANIEL FISHER: I have a somewhat more modest plea than all of these. And that's that we'd be able to continue this conversation. That thinking through the challenges of publishing public humanities work is a first step. Modeling good practices, such as those that have been collected in the working paper, is a good first step. But there's more that needs to be said. And there are more perspectives to be included in the conversation, including community members.
DANIEL FISHER: And one place that we're hoping to do that is in our H Commons group. A link to the group, I shared in the chat. And I would encourage you to follow the link and to continue the conversation with us there. Kath, do you have any parting words?
KATH BURTON: No, just to say thank you very much to all of our panelists for your rich and really creative responses to the specific challenge of publication in the public humanities. This has been a really illuminating departure from the earlier conversations that we've been having, and really enriching and encouraging, as Daniel said. We'd love to continue that conversation. Thank you all to everybody who's been contributing to the Pathable chat and to SSP for giving us the opportunity to engage with you all today.
KATH BURTON: Yeah, happy to hear from you by whatever means possible.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful, thank you all.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Thanks.
Segment:0 .
KATH BURTON: OK, so I think people are probably making their way into their various Zoom comfort zones. And we're just about getting ready to start. Thank you to everybody who is joining us online today. I'm Kath Burton from Routledge Taylor & Francis.
DANIEL FISHER: And I'm Daniel Fisher from Hebrew Union College Cincinnati and the National Humanities Alliance. Kath and I are co-conveners of the publishing and public humanities working group. And we'd like to introduce our panel today.
DAVE TELL: I think that's me. My name is Dave, Dave Tell. I'm a professor at the University of Kansas. I'm a co-director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and a co-founder of the Emmett Till Memory Project.
MICHELLE URBERG: I'm Michelle Urberg. I am currently doing some consulting. And I also just started a new role at EBSCO doing some implementation work for libraries. And I am here to talk about the role of Humanities in digital projects. And I am a musicologist by training. So thanks.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Hi, I'm Judy Ruttenberg, senior director of scholarship and policy at the Association of Research Libraries. Glad to be here.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I'm Elizabeth Waraksa. I'm an associate dean at George Washington University Libraries and Academic Innovation. Also happy to be here.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful, we're delighted to be here with you today to discuss publication and public humanities scholarship, which we understand broadly as research, teaching, and programming across humanities disciplines that's distinguished in three key ways. First, it's often conducted in coequal, mutually beneficial partnership with community members and institutions. It offers opportunities for engaging in the humanities, not just as audiences, but, really, as creators of knowledge.
DANIEL FISHER: Second, public humanities work is integral to academic disciplines. If it's philosophy work, it advances the discipline of philosophy. If its history work, it advances the discipline of history. And it creates, really, broader and more inclusive disciplinary knowledge and participation. And third, public humanities work is designed to serve the public good.
DANIEL FISHER: That is it makes things better through partnership and through scholarship, contributing to public life. And in these ways, it really can bridge the divide between research and practice. Positioning experts of all kinds, from the academy, from the community, at the center of public narratives around the value of the humanities and society. Two quick examples might give a sense of the breadth of public humanities work, at least where I sit in the United States.
DANIEL FISHER: First, the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Initiative, for example, brings faculty and students together with the University of Kentucky libraries to create digital stories, exhibitions, and audio content, drawing on oral history interviews with members of the state's Jewish community. A second example is DC Adaptors. It's a rhetoric project in Washington DC that documents really questions and archives how the city's residents have adapted the DC flag, including an interactive map and data visualization.
DANIEL FISHER: Both of these examples benefit academic and community partners in different ways. They're integral to their disciplines. And they create new academic knowledge that serves the public good. And it serves academic goods, as well, for these and other reasons. However, their publication must be approached somewhat differently than a conventional humanities initiative.
DANIEL FISHER: And Kath can share more about that.
KATH BURTON: Thank you, Daniel. So over the course of the past 18 months, a small group of us, comprising publishers and scholars, have been working together to outline some of the challenges, and also the model practices associated with creating content, publications derived from the public humanities research projects, programming, and teaching that Daniel was just describing. We started with a close interrogation of the challenges associated with publishing engaged work in the humanities.
KATH BURTON: For instance, publication objectives of scholars may not always be completely aligned with those of public and community partners. So how does a publication ensure that diverse voices of those involved in projects are included effectively in the scholarly publication? How does publication in traditional books and journals, for instance, reflect the process as well as the outcome? And what is the relationship between public and digital scholarship?
KATH BURTON: The working paper that we've deposited in H Commons, and I think can see a link in the Pathable chat, outlines some of the practices that support the publication of engaged research. Our thinking has now turned to how existing publication pathways, systems, and models might adapt more dynamically to the needs of public humanities scholars. So we find ourselves in a really exciting juncture in this journey and have started to dig deeper into interrogating existing publishing life cycle, and to do so in a way that would draw in more participants to broaden out the conversation.
KATH BURTON: We've begun to consider questions such as, what counts as publication. Do we need metadata standards for all parts of the engaged research and publication cycle? How might public humanities scholars engage more with their library? What role can scholarly societies and libraries play in establishing good, evaluative standards for engaged research?
KATH BURTON: And even more excitingly, thinking about the future, what are the prospects for the next generation of perhaps wholly digital public humanities scholars to participate in the creation of new forms of knowledge? Daniel.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful. We'll cover these questions and more in today's session. First, though, each of our panelists will share their professional perspectives on the challenges of publishing and publicly engaged scholarship. How do you perceive these challenges from the perspective of your work? We'll then move on to a cross-panel conversation. So that each member of the team can pick up on each other's perspectives.
DANIEL FISHER: We'll welcome your feedback, really, at all points, via the Pathable chat. And we'll have ample time at the end for questions and answers. Please use the Pathable chat for that. And we'll do our best to respond today. And if not, we'll find a way to do so after the event. And with that, I will pass the mic to our first panelist, Dave Tell. How do you perceive the challenges of publication and public humanities from the perspective of your work?
DANIEL FISHER:
DAVE TELL: Thanks, Daniel. Honor to be with all of you. Honor, also, to be part of this working group over the last 18 months. Like I said, my name is Dave Tell. I'm a professor at the University of Kansas. And I've, for the last seven years, been investing a lot of energy in publicly engaged humanistic research. I'd like to put one particular challenge on the table that relates to publishing engaged humanities work.
DAVE TELL: But before I do so, I want to put the disclaimer out there that this challenge is really not unique to the public humanities. But it's particularly intense or particularly magnified within the public humanities. And I think this is actually one of the real takeaways from our working group. Is that thinking about publishing in the public humanities, it's almost like it puts a magnifying glass on scholarly publishing writ large.
DAVE TELL: And it helps us to think about issues that are applicable everywhere, but perhaps appear with, I don't know, greater clarity when we're thinking about publicly engaged scholarship. So with that disclaimer, here's the challenge I want to talk about. How do we publish and preserve the process of publicly engaged scholarship as well as the product? Unlike elementary algebra equations, or even elementary social studies, in which all variables are given an advance, scholarship in the humanities involves the gradual accumulation of unknown contexts and unknown variables.
DAVE TELL: And scholarship in the public humanities accelerates the increase of unknown variables. So in comparison, I know this is a little bit unfair, but in comparison to traditional humanities scholarship, the public humanities involves methods and practices that, at least in my experience, are particularly prone to generating extra variables. Such scholarship, for example, has pushed me into local communities.
DAVE TELL: And any time a scholar-- and I think this is fair to say writ large, that any time a scholar gets pushed into a local community, things happen. No matter how much you read in advance, and no matter how homogeneous a community may seem from a distance, once you're in that community, things happen. We discover local knowledges, local fault lines, local politics, and local customs.
DAVE TELL: All of which generate intellectual surprises. Which of course, is why we do this work in the first place. And so over the last 18 months, my working group partner, Barry Goldenberg, and I have been thinking about the challenge of including processes into the published product. And here's our conclusion at the moment. If we are going to provide a true account of the engaged humanistic project-- humanistic research experience, there can be no strict dichotomy between private process and published product.
DAVE TELL: Which all sounds well and good, except for how difficult it make things. Because once you break down that dichotomy, all sorts of other questions come to the fore. Let me give you two quick examples. Here's a question that we suddenly have to face. And that's the question of what gets included. Right so, a couple of years ago, I published a traditional humanities book.
DAVE TELL: And like a lot of humanities books, it drew on an archive. But the only thing my book learns from that archive is the content of the archive. But by working with this group over the last 18 months, I've come to see that the process of talking my way into that archive, which honestly took two years and some high drama with no shortage of relationships. That's just as interesting as the actual content that was in the archive.
DAVE TELL: And why is it that when I wrote the book, all I did was talk about the content? So what I'm trying to say is once we break down the process product distinction, now we have a lot of new questions about what gets-- what parts of the process do we have to publish. And finally, I'll end with this. Another question, once you break down the process product binary, you also have to think about what version of a project you're going to preserve and publish.
DAVE TELL: I've been working for seven years with the family of the 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till to create an online, publicly engaged website and smartphone app to tell that story for the next generation. And just last week, this question came home to me, when a private preservation company called me up and said, Dave, we'd like to preserve the Emmett Till Memory Project. And I said great, which one?
DAVE TELL: Do you want the one that went live in 2016 but wasn't really all that good, but it was there. Or do you want the one that's live now? Or do you want the one that's going live a year and a half from now? All the sudden, once we agree to include process, all of a sudden, there's not just one finished Emmett Till Memory Project. There are at least three, and probably countless different Emmett Till Memory Projects that we have to think about which one gets published and which one gets preserved and how.
DAVE TELL: So with that, I will turn it over to Michelle.
MICHELLE URBERG: Hi, all. The challenge of-- let me make sure I remember the question that we were talking about, talking about the challenges of publication in the public humanities, and how-- from the perspective might work. So I, as a scholar in the music history field, certainly I feel that the challenges of preserving music are definitely different than if you're preserving something that is coming from an archive.
MICHELLE URBERG: Dealing with recorded sound, concert experiences definitely have their own challenges to preserve. And capturing that ephemeral moment is always a challenge. If I'm talking to you as a metadata professional, the other side of my life, the library side of my life, I'm much more concerned with how the participation is going to be recorded and made available for discovery and findability.
MICHELLE URBERG: And in that arena, it is especially important to have ways of documenting who has participated in what way. And certainly, we have items like-- or new projects like the credit taxonomy that are working to accommodate all sorts of people who are participating in various projects. At present, that taxonomy, while it's a really great step, it is not really designed for this kind of work.
MICHELLE URBERG: It falls short with the rich complexity of people who are involved with digital humanities projects. And from a music perspective, I can say that it is definitely not intended to accommodate anything, really, in the arts space. It's really honed for journal participation. So there's an opportunity there and a challenge to this community to keep working on that to accommodate these other types of projects.
MICHELLE URBERG: And I would add one final category, a third hat that I wear. Certainly in the consulting space that I inhabit, I've learned that publishers are not always excited, or I would say, at least, at the very least, trepidatious about pursuing work that is beyond documenting a final product. So current publishing workflows don't really accommodate things that continue to have multiple iterations.
MICHELLE URBERG: And part of that's because of the way publishing systems have established themselves. But part of it also is how we have-- how the industry, publishing, from the time that somebody submits something to the time that somebody reads something or engages with it in some way, is all about the final product. And so these systems have been honed around that final product.
MICHELLE URBERG: They've not been honed around engaging throughout. Certainly things like preprint servers are helping with that. But again, that is always based around a written document, usually, and a data set which is collapsible into some sort of spreadsheet or another data driven format. The projects that we're talking about here don't really-- they can't be confined in that way. So processes for publishers to accommodate that in their operational workflows need to change.
MICHELLE URBERG: And so do the technologies that support it. And who-- that's all I had to comment on that. Who comes after me?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Hey, Michelle. I think that's me.
MICHELLE URBERG: OK, great, thank you. I'm so glad that you know.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Thank you for that. So thank you so much to Kath and Daniel for including me on this panel. I want to talk about how research libraries, as a sector, sort of fit into these conversations and challenges. And then also just underscore how helpful it is to have these cross-sector conversations, ones that involve scholars, publishers, libraries, and of course, ideally, the communities that we all partner with.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So libraries, of course, have historically played a bridging role between academia and the public in exhibits, book talks, other kinds of programming. So I'm happy to be here participating in this dialogue. Because so many threads are coming together right now, I think, from libraries, archives, and publishing that speak to this, these challenges. So 10 years ago, when I first came to ARL, I heard two prevailing themes from libraries around supporting digital scholarship of the kind that we're talking about.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: One was that wanted to support it. One was that they had the sense the environment was totally bespoke. They weren't sure that investing in building websites, or databases, or technology around particular project could be reused or standardized. And so that was kind of a research question. And two, I would hear about scholars coming to the library with digital assets that either-- from former projects that either weren't well described, weren't built for preservation, and had to-- there had to be some sort of forensic analysis to figure out what to do with, how to sort of describe and deal with them.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: But in the past decade, I think almost all of the academic members of the Association of Research Libraries have digital scholarship staff. Many have centers. Many of those centers are collaborative on campus with other units. And they are spaces of interdisciplinarity, shared technology, expertise, and a strong service ethos. So on the ARL website, and I'll put this in the chat after I'm done, we have a series of profiles of member libraries' digital scholarship activities that have exemplars, many of which overlap with the Humanities for All project, which are worth looking at, I think.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Humanities for All includes many projects housed in libraries, including things like exemplars like Documenting the Now and [INAUDIBLE],, both exemplars of kind of community partnership and engagement that involve, really, sometimes divergent ethical frameworks that had to be-- around accessing or archiving that had to be negotiated. We've also, of course, seen university presses, over the past some years, with the help of funders like Mellon, embrace innovative digital platforms that kind of-- that can handle multimodal research as a publication.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And just where we are now, we have almost 40 University presses in the US and Canada that are organizationally integrated into the university library. So ARL and Association of University Presses have been supporting this particular community of press directors and university libraries that really touch on many of these exact kinds of issues, supporting digital scholarship, metadata, and the like, publishing.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: There's been great leadership from community based archives from people like Bergis Jules and Michelle Caswell. They've done work through IMLS on these issues. So technically, I would share the challenges that have been raised in the working paper, and that have been already mentioned today. Sort of what and for how long do we keep digital project that may or may not be associated with a formal publication?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: This is not unique to the humanities. I think scientific publishers are struggling with how long do we keep data. What version of data? Where is-- all that. So how we integrate these projects, which are often websites, into library or other network discovery environments? So other than doing kind of personal promotion, how do we come upon them as the kinds-- as assets like books and articles that we know how to find.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So as wonderful as the diversity in this space is, we need some kind of standards to build infrastructure. And from an economic perspective, we need some kind of shared infrastructure, particularly between presses, institutional repositories, and libraries. So and then just in a-- so lots of technical things. And in a general sense, I think what the working paper raises is this question of trust.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And who gets trusted with these important stories? So the working paper gives a shout out to the SNCC legacy project at Duke University. Which I absolutely commend to you to look at, SNCC legacy project dog, which has kind of beautiful-- beautifully lays out discussions about a group of former activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and their activist lack of trust in institutions, and particularly universities, with these stories.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And how they came to kind of negotiate this partnership. How the material will be made available, who owns it. And then another fabulous example, and I'll stop after that, is the Colored Conventions Project, which is mentioned in Humanities for All. Started at University of Delaware, now at Penn State. Kind of extraordinary documentation in that project of the collaboration between scholars, technologists, librarians, and the community, including a wealth of K-12 teaching materials.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And a brand new University Press from UNC Press, which is en route. I haven't touched it yet. I've ordered the book. So I guess I will just end by saying that one thing that we learn from these cross-sector conversations is that scholars themselves can be a very effective bridge between librarians and publishers.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And so next up on the panel is a scholar librarian, my good friend, former colleague Elizabeth Waraksa.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: Thanks, Judy. And thanks, Daniel and Kath, also, for the invitation to be here. Really excited to be a part of this conversation. I'd like to use my time in this section of our panel to bring in another element we haven't specifically touched on yet, and that is undergraduate students as content creators in the publicly engaged humanities. Here at George Washington University, many of our undergraduate students are preparing for careers in public service.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And this preparation takes a variety of forms, from service learning, to internships, to research partnerships with faculty and other researchers here in the Washington DC area. And our undergraduates are also mindful of building their scholarly and professional portfolios during their years at GW. Along with that comes significant interest in publishing their work, from op eds in the student newspaper, The Hatchet, to peer reviewed scholarship.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: At GW Libraries and Academic Innovation, we support undergraduates looking to publish their work in a number of ways. The George Washington University Undergraduate Review, a journal that is edited and published by undergraduate students is preserved and made accessible through our institutional repository, known as GW Scholar Space. And our scholarly communications team provides workshops for the student editors on best practices in peer review, mince DOIs, and advises on accessibility.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So really productive partnership there with our undergraduate editors and authors. The same repository, GW Scholar Space, is the preservation and access point for GW's electronic theses and dissertations, which many student authors consider publications, and often make open access immediately upon receipt of their degree. We also use our institutional repository for student projects, especially posters, featured in our annual GW Research Showcase, our annual competition and opportunity for students to highlight their research.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: These are challenging to preserve, because they have multiple formats. So speaking of multimedia, that is something we think about a lot here at Libraries and Academic Innovation. So I'm thinking about this combination of undergraduate public engagement, the variety of student work that they wish to make accessible, that they wish to publish.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And this got me thinking. And here's a question and a provocation for everyone who is here. Could one make the argument that the publicly engaged humanities is more likely to be found in local library supported publication and preservation venues than in traditional academic publications? So I think I'll stop there. And looking forward to continuing the conversation.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA:
KATH BURTON: Great, thank you, Elizabeth. And thank you to all panelists. I'm just going to jump in and give Daniel a second to catch his breath. But I think we were going to move into the second segment of our session today. And give all of our panelists the chance to reflect on what each of the other speakers has already mentioned. And we're going to do that in a reverse order.
KATH BURTON: So Elizabeth, you find yourself in the hot seat again. Are you ready to go?
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I'm absolutely ready to go. Thanks, Kath, for a moment of pause. I'd like to pick up on something Dave said earlier, and others have mentioned as well, publishing and preserving the process, in addition to the product of publicly engaged humanities. And I'm going to continue to highlight this as an opportunity for partnerships with libraries. Community members, co-authors, librarians, archivists, digital technologists, can help here with versioning, can help here with metadata standards that reflect the different steps in the scholarly process, the research process, the conversational process, the ethical questions that come up with all these kinds of projects.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So the libraries are not just providing durable URLs. That's a really important part of versioning, and preservation, and discovery. But libraries are also really well poised to talk about credit. To recognize labor, and contributions, and individuals. Through things like ORCID IDs to make sure the co-authors are recognized. And the life cycle, the object life of that product is captured through our processes for creation, preservation, discovery, and long-term access.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: So just a shout out to Dave and to everyone who is working to preserve that process, as well as the product.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, I think, in-- with respect to that, I do think there are fruitful conversations to be had between public and engaged humanities and the open science movement, which has been very focused on process, very focused on opening up, and sort of showing the-- showing your work, I guess. And then the ways that we build systems or norms around capturing those kinds of processes, so that they-- either whether it's for replicability, or accountability, or really to increase participation, the public good that Daniel opened with.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So we did a study a couple of years ago at ARL that was funded by NEH around discovery and digital humanities. And it was-- it's really an interesting-- we had a lot of interesting conversations with-- and we did a survey of some of these kinds of projects, what is considered the sort of data that was alongside the project. And what is then ends up in the library, could end up in a library or a repository as collections.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And that kind of blurred boundary between data and collections, which sort of is-- it's not an inherently interesting distinction. But it's a workflow distinction. And it's sort of how you come together and handle this. Is this something that's published and dealt that way, or archived as data. So I think there's lots to be-- not just bringing sectors together, but bringing disciplines together could shine some light on this.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And I'm sure our audience has expertise to contribute to that question.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, so just piggybacking off of that, I-- the first thing that comes to mind in managing anything that we would call data or the process of collecting data and recording it, the place that I go to immediately is in the hard sciences, where there are already some for-profit and some nonprofit repositories that are available for people to make available and open the work that they're doing in some sort-- it is a final form.
MICHELLE URBERG: It is not a work in progress form, usually. But it seems like there's a few systematize places for people who are working in DH projects to put their data, whatever that data may be, be it oral histories, or mark-up of archival documents, or other types of recordings, there's no place to really put that stuff and to keep it, to mark it up to make it available for public comment.
MICHELLE URBERG: Unless you build your own website, and then it's not a repository. Then you are dependent on discovery, basically, from whatever Google can offer you, and the SEO that you build into your website. So it would be great to hear from this community about what types of repositories could possibly be built that could be shared across disciplines in a way that-- I mean, the things that are coming to mind for me are repositories like Dryad and something like that, but for designed specifically for digital humanities projects.
MICHELLE URBERG:
DAVE TELL: All right, so a question showed up in the chat a second ago from Bill Kasdorf. I'm just going to read the question and then respond to it. Bill says I'm interested in your thoughts about the intersection of digital humanities and social media. To put Dave on the spot, thank you, an example would be the controversy about a painting of Emmett Till exhibited at the Whitney a couple of years ago.
DAVE TELL: How, if at all, did your project respond, or react, or contribute to that. So to set the stage here, you might remember the year is 2017. The painter is a Brooklyn artist named Dana Schutz, who exhibits a photograph called the Open Casket. And if you've ever seen the famous picture of Emmett Till-- the famous photograph of Emmett Till in the casket, this is a painting that is an interpretation of that photograph.
DAVE TELL: When she exhibited it at the High Ed Whitney in New York City, this, of course, caused some international controversy. How did I respond? First, this is a good story in how to respond. And I'm happy to share it. I don't imagine this story is applicable to all of these situations. But if that old John Dewey quote, where he says something along the lines of the solution for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
DAVE TELL: I think we might be able to adapt that and to say something like this. The solution for the ills of public humanities work is more public humanities work. So in the case at hand, we invited-- well, I worked with a nonprofit in the Mississippi Delta. And we invited Dana Schutz to spend a couple of days with us in Mississippi, and to spend a couple of days with the family of Emmett Till.
DAVE TELL: And the family, and myself, and some people from the nonprofit, and Dana, and her family, spent a couple of days just driving around looking at the sites and talking about the legacy of the murder and the impacts of that legacy on local communities and on the United States writ large. And there was some hard conversations about the role of a white artist engaged in a Black community with an African-American family.
DAVE TELL: These are not questions that you can sort of have a once a one size fits all answer for. But I will say that the process of spending two days together, thinking about this, created friendships between Dana, and myself, and the nonprofit, and the family that are far more lasting than the controversy in 2017. And although Dana has become a close friend, I'm not making this up when I said I had to Google the controversy to remind myself what year it was.
DAVE TELL: Because from the perspective of community engaged work, once you have those relationships down, they can weather the trials of social media and the news media. Which, as you know, is very up and down. And so you really need those relationships to do this sort of publicly engaged work. So I'll leave it at that.
MICHELLE URBERG: I saw a comment in the Zoom chat about-- by Sean Concannon. My apologies if I-- I'm really bad with names. I have a mispronounced name, too, myself. GitHub, yes, we can use GitHub for-- as a repository. I think one cool thing about GitHub that it is built for versioning.
MICHELLE URBERG: One major challenge for GitHub is that it is hard to create a really robust federated search inside of that space. It's primarily designed to encapsulate one project in all of its various forms. So a broader view, possibly something, maybe GitHub paired with something, like GitHub, and then there's another sort of UI that sits on top of that that facilitates some sort of search mechanism to gather a bunch of different types of data sets and different types of projects together.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that they would be discoverable in one place. But then you can also then delve into each one in depth at a specific repository page. That could be a potential solution, something like that. Yeah, right. The comment in Zoom is that you need an explanatory material hosted elsewhere. That's right.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, exactly.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: There's a question about a role for humanities journals in expanding what is considered formal or legitimate scholarship. And I know we've talked about evaluation some in this group. But just a plug for that those kinds of conversations are also these kind of multi-sector-- there's a lot of stakeholders in that. So when you think about scholarly societies that have come up with evaluative criteria, and many have, for what is-- for digital scholarship, some, whether-- one of the things that we hope about formal scholarship is that it is preserved in some sense.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So is it preserved in its native technical environment? Is it preserved in some other way? And certainly then, a role for journals in how that gets linked up. And the sense that's made of that.
DAVE TELL: So I also want to throw out there that Elizabeth's little provocation earlier reminded me that the question of what gets published from public humanities research is not a question that we can consider in isolation from the broader research environment, and in particular from the environment in which scholars are rewarded for certain types of research and not others. I know at my University, at KU, we're trying really hard to come up with metrics for evaluating questions of promotion and tenure vis-a-vis publicly engaged work.
DAVE TELL: But I also know that because at a lot of places, KU included, because those metrics are not as trustworthy as the established metrics, I have no incentive to really try and make my public work legible. Because they don't know how to count it anyway. So I'm much more likely to just throw it up on a blog than I would be otherwise. Because until universities sort of catch up with the different forms of publication, it's going to be a real impact on scholars, particularly junior scholars, on how they can go about this.
DAVE TELL: So this question of what gets published is really-- I mean all of us know this. It's not just an academic question. It's not just a publishing question. But it's a question about the viability of engaged research as a whole. Because if we can't figure out a way to publish it in ways that get counted, then no one's going to want to do it.
DAVE TELL: Because we have incentive, like job security, to do traditional humanities work. And we don't want to disincentivize the relationship, community driven public work. So I just appreciate that reminder from Elizabeth.
DANIEL FISHER: Thank you, Dave. If I might take the moderator's prerogative and raise the question myself to the panel. What counts, in your view, as the unit of publication? And what systems need to be in place to support validation, accreditation, and dissemination, and preservation of diverse public humanities assets? I'll pop that in the chat as well.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, that is the eternal question. Is it-- for composers, a composition is a unit of appropriate publication for tenure, I think. But that wouldn't cut it for me. I would need a book, as a musicologist. So if we're going to push out into alternate formats, I think the thing that makes a book acceptable has always been some level of peer review, right?
MICHELLE URBERG: Be it open or closed peer review. Traditionally, it's been closed. So if there is a way to build in some sort of benchmarking, whereby people who are also knowledgeable are able to weigh in on the validity of the thing that you're saying, that often becomes the gateway to acceptability of an idea, or the trust that it's good quote, unquote "good scholarship." So some sort of validation process like that, I think, in addition to all the other things that we talked about, is key.
MICHELLE URBERG:
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I think another interesting angle to bring in here would be impact. So not just impact factor, but impact if something is picked up in the local media, the national media, the global media. If you're making impact in your community, I think that should be something that counts. Not just what realm it was published in, or that it was peer reviewed, but how it impacts those who were hoping to impact.
MICHELLE URBERG: Would a collection of newspaper articles or tweets be enough, then? Do you need to set up a way to collect that stuff? Because there's going to be a lot of stuff that you, as a person, are going to miss, unless you have some sort of alert set up, just sort of gather all that and then bundle it all together, and present it to your committee, when the time is needed-- sorry, when it's needed at the review time.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: Here at GW, we have a tool called Social Feed Manager that does allow that kind of mass collection of hashtags. So that one could, indeed, use that in their promotion and tenure portfolio if needed, or in a job application. I was talking earlier about undergraduates. So they don't all necessarily want to become scholars in the traditional sense. But they're content creators at the time of their undergraduate career.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: And so we have to think about many, many uses of their publicly engaged humanities products, the many paths they take.
MICHELLE URBERG: Bill Kasdorf also mentioned in the Pathable chat about alt metrics. I think I am less knowledgeable about that than I should be. But I think that that's measuring citations and clicks of published work. So there would have to be a way for center of documentation to connect a tweet or a newspaper article which aren't connected with DOIs or other sorts of traditional publication mechanisms.
MICHELLE URBERG:
JUDY RUTTENBERG: I just want to mention two kind of national level projects that are sort of-- that are interesting in this area, that might-- they're in progress. So we'll see what they contribute here. But one is the Humetrics, humanities and social science project, which is funded by Mellon. And it's kind of developing values, a set of values, by which humanistic scholarship can be-- and not exclusively publicly engaged, but I think can have some bearing on this.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: And certainly will get into values like things that have been mentioned here on credit and engagement, partnership, and things like that. And then the other is in the science. And so the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine is somewhere in its three year roundtable of aligning incentives for open science. And it's exactly to the points that Dave raised, like why do you contribute time and effort into things that don't count in a-- that aren't viable for one's career.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So out of that project is coming up some toolkits and ways to engage at the department level, which is kind of where the rubber hits the road in terms of evaluation, sort of tools to have those kinds of conversations. So ideally, we have them and in higher education. So that there's some sort of shared understanding. But they happen institutionally.
MICHELLE URBERG: The Pathable chat is clocking away, it's great.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Great question about the difference between attention and public uptake, and this kind of impact. How, exactly, I mean, once you have metrics, you're all about the metrics. Count stuff versus the kind of deep understanding of impact. Yeah, great question.
DAVE TELL: I mean, I think a lot of this conversation in the chat right now is really another way of putting a finer point on the question that Daniel started us off with a second ago, which was what's the unit of analysis? It's another-- what do you put a DOI on? It seems like we're in this moment of sort of-- if we used to just put a DOI on the final product, now we put it on-- well, let's also put it on this process. Well, then you break the process down. And well, do you count Dave's relationship with x community member?
DAVE TELL: Is it ever smaller increments? And that's what's at stake, too, in this idea of alt metrics. And this is a thing, to be completely honest, the Kath introduced me to a year or so ago. And we looked at an old article I had written about the launch of the Emmett Till Memory Project. And alt metrics captured-- I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head here. But alt metrics captured under 10 ways that this particular article had been picked up.
DAVE TELL: But on my own CV, I have this little tracking document that tracks the ideas, in sort of public news media, even if they don't mention the article by name, or the journal title by name. If they pick up the ideas of the Emmett Till Memory Project, I've been tracking it. And then it's hundreds long. And so I went to Kath, I said, wait a second, alt metrics found 7.
DAVE TELL: I can show you 100. And what basically was the issue was the question that Daniel said, what are we going to put a DOI on? And it seems there, essentially-- there has to be a line somewhere, right? Because you would think there would be a point of diminishing returns, at which ever so-- and I don't know where that line is. But I do think that line has to be decided.
DAVE TELL: I'm really sort of provoked by this sort of idea of Humetrics. I was unfamiliar with that. But sort of these conversations that these lines have to be drawn, thinking about what's at stake for young scholars. It has to be drawn thinking about relevance to social media, as well as big publishers. So it's lots of people with lots of investments in drawing this line.
DAVE TELL:
DANIEL FISHER: I'd add also the publication of publicly engaged work is critical, not just for individual career development, but for the development of the field as a whole. So as it grows, and matures, and develops, it's just important that methodologies and ideas be shared, and tested, and I think peer reviewed. And there have been a number of questions about peer review. I'm interested in what kind of peer review might reflect the values that inspire publicly engaged humanities work.
DANIEL FISHER: Michelle, would you trust your review more if it were open or double blind?
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, that's really interesting. I, for the first time, a few months ago, I was asked if I wanted to have credit for reviewing an article. And it would be publicly accredited. And that was interesting. At first, I was like, yes, I really want this. But then in the second hand, I thought, well, how is that going to change my relationship with the author of this article?
MICHELLE URBERG: And in the end I did decide to open it up, because I feel like if I'm going to walk the walk, then I have to. I feel like open peer review is probably the ideal, because it allows for-- open peer review alongside of open, iterative, in-process publication.
MICHELLE URBERG: So this is even more in-process than what you get with like a preprint, for example. So you're working on something, you're shopping an idea. Does it make sense? Are you missing data points that need to work with it? Are you talking to a community that you're trying to get inside of and understand, but maybe you need to present it, the information that you're talking about, in a certain way.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that you're, on the one hand, respecting their wishes for representation, on the other hand, you are speaking to your scholarly community. And sometimes, there's a bit of a divide between those two. So openness in peer review is part of that process. And acknowledging who is participating in your conversation for your final product I think is really important. From another standpoint, I think it will all make us more humane in our scholarship.
MICHELLE URBERG: We are going to be forced to consider how we appear in our discussions. And we all know about infamous reviewer 2. So we don't want to be a reviewer 2 publicly, I think. And so I think it could it would make our scholarship better in that way as well. So, yeah, I'm all for-- the more open, the better. But I do understand why things have been blinded up to this point.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, Michelle, we were at-- we hosted a meeting a couple of years ago with the Social Science Research Council. And we were sort of talking about this in the social sciences. But the same ideas of open peer review and how people would be comfortable. And one person said, so yes, maybe it would make us more humane. But also might sort of dial down the price-- dial down the cost of being a little bit wrong.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: So the notion of-- Dave's notion of putting something out in a blog also has the notional kind of vibe to it. You can sort of, here's what I'm thinking about. And can sort of engage in the discipline in a way that isn't this is my thing. And then the person comes along and says she was wrong, because, without that style of engagement.
JUDY RUTTENBERG:
MICHELLE URBERG: Rebecca Barrett asked about open peer review of books. Yeah, totally. And actually, in some ways, books are actually better set up for that now than the journals, I think, in that iterative process, because of platforms like Manifold. Because you can build in an open peer review process into the construction of your book.
DANIEL FISHER: We're coming up on time. To wrap things up, I wonder if our panelists might be willing to share a plea for the future. Based on your professional experience, what, looking forward, would you like to see changed, or brought into existence, or emphasized in the publishing world, and the library world, and in the world of public humanities scholarship.
DAVE TELL: I'll start. And I'll start by being overly dramatic, because we're at a conference. So let me say that I think the future of the humanities, writ large, depends on answering these questions about the public humanities, because the vast majority of humanities work happens in publicly funded institutions. And if we can't make a case for the public relevance of humanities work, especially in this austerity driven, neoliberal age, I work in Kansas.
DAVE TELL: The humanities, I really think that these questions are urgent. And that if we can't figure out how to publish, and circulate, and promote public work, that the humanities is going to have an increasingly difficult narrative problem as it tries to sell itself to administrators, legislators, and a justifiably skeptical public.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: That's a tough one to follow, Dave. But I'll jump in with something more micro, which is I'm looking forward to humanities publications that look much more like science publications, with multi-author papers and books, long strings of everyone who ever contributed the intellectual work and labor of that research project. So that's my wish. And I think it's just about-- I think it's here.
ELIZABETH WARAKSA: I think we're pretty much on the cusp of this. So I'm hopeful.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: I would say that I'd sort of broaden the stakes of Dave's drama and say that the sort of-- our public institutions themselves kind of rely on regaining trust in the public-- from the public by making the process of scholarship more participatory, the relevance more clear, and the public good more evident.
MICHELLE URBERG: I'll wear my metadata hat for this. I am hopeful that something like credit will really blossom and be taken up by the standards groups that have developed it in collaboration with people who are working in other formats than it currently supports to really flesh it out. Or maybe it needs to be credit 0.1, or something, or 2.0, or whatever.
MICHELLE URBERG: So that it's like whatever it currently is, and then there's another type of credit that sits alongside of the current one that accommodates formats, scholarship that's being produced in this space. Judy just put in-- I'm going to put-- is it all right if I put that in the Pathable?
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Oh, yeah, sure.
MICHELLE URBERG: She just suggested a great-- you'll have to explain your acronym, though.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Yeah, I'm looking it up. So we could combine credit with, I guess, TODRA, Taxonomy Of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities. So there is-- so we could combine the concept of the granular approach to giving credit with a taxonomy more appropriate for the field.
MICHELLE URBERG: Yeah, great, that's a nugget right. Everybody who's a NISO our in this community, I think that's future work.
DANIEL FISHER: I have a somewhat more modest plea than all of these. And that's that we'd be able to continue this conversation. That thinking through the challenges of publishing public humanities work is a first step. Modeling good practices, such as those that have been collected in the working paper, is a good first step. But there's more that needs to be said. And there are more perspectives to be included in the conversation, including community members.
DANIEL FISHER: And one place that we're hoping to do that is in our H Commons group. A link to the group, I shared in the chat. And I would encourage you to follow the link and to continue the conversation with us there. Kath, do you have any parting words?
KATH BURTON: No, just to say thank you very much to all of our panelists for your rich and really creative responses to the specific challenge of publication in the public humanities. This has been a really illuminating departure from the earlier conversations that we've been having, and really enriching and encouraging, as Daniel said. We'd love to continue that conversation. Thank you all to everybody who's been contributing to the Pathable chat and to SSP for giving us the opportunity to engage with you all today.
KATH BURTON: Yeah, happy to hear from you by whatever means possible.
DANIEL FISHER: Wonderful, thank you all.
JUDY RUTTENBERG: Thanks.
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