Tag: publishing

A History of Place 3: Dead Trees and Digital Content

The stated aim of this series of posts is to reflect on what it means to write a book in the Digital Humanities. This is not a subject one can address without discussing how digital content and paper publication can work together. I need to say at the outset that A History of Place does not have any digital content per se. Therefore, what follows is a more general reflection of what seems to be going on at the moment, perhaps framing what I’d like to do for my next book.

It is hardly a secret that the world of academic publication is not particularly well set up for the publication of digital research data. Of course the “prevailing wind” in these waters is the need for high-quality publications to secure scholarly reputation, and with it the keys to the kingdom of job security, tenure and promotion. As long as DH happens in universities, the need to publish in order to be tenured and promoted is not going to go away  There is also the symbiotically related need to satisfy the metrics imposed by governments and funding agencies. In the UK for example, the upcoming Research Excellence Framework exercise explicitly sets out to encourage (ethically grounded) Open Access publication, but this does nothing to problematize the distinction, which is particularly acute in DH, between peer-reviewed research outputs (which can be digital or analogue) and research data, which is perforce digital only. Yet research data publication is a fundamental intellectual requirement for many DH projects and practitioners. There is therefore a paradox of sorts, a set of shifting and, at times, conflicting motivations and considerations, which those contemplating such are faced with.

It seems to be that journals and publishers are responding to this paradox in two ways. The first facilitates the publication of traditional articles online, albeit short ones, which draw on research datasets which are deposited elsewhere, and to require certain minimum standards of preservation, access and longevity. Ubiquity Press’s Journal of Open Archaeological Data, as the name suggests, follows this model. It describes its practice thus:

JOAD publishes data papers, which do not contain research results but rather a concise description of a dataset, and where to find it. Papers will only be accepted for datasets that authors agree to make freely available in a public repository. This means that they have been deposited in a data repository under an open licence (such as a Creative Commons Zero licence), and are therefore freely available to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world.

In order to be accepted, the “data paper” must reference a dataset which has been accepted for accession in one of 11 “recommended repositories”, including, for example, the Archaeology Data Service and Open Context. It recommends that more conventional research papers then reference the data paper.

The second response is more monolithic, where a publisher takes on both the data produced by or for the publication, and hosts/mounts it online. One early adopter of this model is Stanford University Press’s digital scholarship project, which seeks to

[A]dvance a publishing process that helps authors develop their concept (in both content and form) and reach their market effectively to confer the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books receive.

In 2014, when I spent a period at Stanford’s Center for Electronic and Spatial Text Analysis, I was privileged to meet Nicolas Bauch, who was working on SUP’s first project of this type, Enchanting the Desert. This wonderful publication presents and discusses the photographic archive of Henry Peabody, who visited the Grand Canyon in 1879, and produced a series of landscape photographs. Bauch’s work enriches the presentation and context of these photographs by showing them alongside viewsheds of the Grand Canyon from the points where they were taken, this providing a landscape-level picture of what Peabody himself would have perceived.

However, to meet the mission SUP sets out in the passage quoted above requires significant resources, effort and institutional commitment over the longer term. It also depends on the preservation not only of the data (which JOAD does by linking to trusted repositories), but also the software which keeps the data accessible and usable. This in turn presents the problem encapsulated rather nicely in the observation that data ages like a fine wine, whereas software applications age like fish (much as I wish I could claim to be the source of this comparison, I’m afraid I can’t). This is also the case where a book (or thesis) produces data which in turn depends on a specialized third-party application. A good example of this would be 3D visualization files that need Unity or Blender, or GIS shapefiles which need ESRI plugins. These data will only be useful as long as those applications are supported.

My advice therefore to anyone contemplating such a publication, which potentially includes advice to my future self, is to go for pragmatism. Bearing in mind the truism about wine and fish, and software dependency, it probably makes sense to pare down the functional aspect on any digital output, and focus on the representational, i.e. the data itself. Ideally, I think one would go down the JOAD route, and have one’s data and deposit one’s data in a trusted repository, which has the professional skills and resources to keep the data available. Or, if you are lucky enough to work for an enlightened and forward-thinking Higher Education Institution, a better option still would be to have its IT infrastructure services accession, publish and maintain your data, so that it can be cross-referred with your paper book which, in a wonderfully “circle of life” sort of way, will contribute to the HEI’s own academic standing and reputation.

One absolutely key piece of advice – probably one of the few aspects of this, in fact, that anyone involved in such a process would agree on – is that any Universal Resource Indicators you use must be reliably persistent. This was the approach we adopted in the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus project, one of whose main aims was to provide a structure for URI references to toponyms that was both consistent and persistent, and thus citable – as my colleague Tassos Pappacostas demonstrated in his online Inventory of Byzantine Churches on Cyprus, published alongside the HGC precisely to demonstrate the utility of persistent URIs for referencing. As I argue in Chapter 7 of A History of Place in fact, developing resources which promote the “citability” of place, and link the flexibility of spatial web annotations with the academic authority of formal gazetteer and library structures is one of the key challenges for the spatial humanities itself.

I do feel that one further piece of advice needs a mention, especially when citing web pages rather than data. Ensure the page is archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, then cite the Wayback link, as advocated earlier this year here:

This is very sound advice, as this will ensure persistence even the website itself depreciates.

Returning to the publication of data alongside a print publication however: the minimum one can do is simply purchase a domain name and publish the data oneself, alongside the book. This greatly reduces the risk of obsolescence, keeps you in control, and recognizes the fact that books start to date the moment they are published by their very nature.

All these approaches require a certain amount of critical reduction of the idea that publishing a book is a railway buffer which marks the conclusion of a major part of one’s career. Remember – especially if you are early career –  that this will not be the last thing you ever publish, digitally or otherwise. Until those bells and whistles hybrid digital/paper publishing model arrive, it’s necessary to remember that there are all sorts of ways data can be preserved, sustained and form a valuable part of a “traditional” monograph. The main thing for your own monograph is to find the one that fits, and it may be that you have to face down the norms and expectations of the traditional academic monograph, and settle for something that works, as opposed to something that is perfect.

A History of Place 1: Authorship and Teaching

This is the first of a series of posts to follow the recent publication of my book, A History of Place in the Digital Age. My aim with these is to look at various topics on the theme of what it means to write a book in the Digital Humanities (DH) as a means of reflecting on what I got out of the process as (I guess) a “Digital Humanist”, partly to capture such reflections for posterity (whether or not posterity has any interest in them), and also in the hope that they might be of some sort of value to others considering such a course. Here, I look at the links between writing a book at teaching, in both the undergraduate and postgraduate taught classrooms.

A prosaic problem is, of course, accessibility. Even the most committed student would balk at the cover price of a History of Place, and inevitably it takes time for an institutional library to place orders. It is therefore worth exploring in detail what one can and cannot do to make your work available under the terms of one’s contract; and, where possible, expediting library acquisitions by (for example) encouraging purchase of the e-edition. I don’t think I have any searing insights to offer on this subject, rather I see it as part of a much broader and more complex set of issues on Open Access in Higher Education which, I am sure, others are far more qualified to comment on than me.

It’s a tenet of major research universities such as my own, that our teaching should strive to be “research led” (see e.g. Schapper, J. and Mayson, S.E., 2010. Research‐led teaching: Moving from a fractured engagement to a marriage of convenience. Higher Education Research & Development, 29(6), pp.641-651). Most, I guess, would interpret this as meaning that the content delivered in the classroom is sourced from one’s own original research, in the context of one’s Department’s research profile an strands, conveyed via various pedagogical tools and techniques. Most of the latter are based on conventional scholarly publications, notably journals and, of course books. In the future, I would like to consider particularly the implications of writing a book – and thus complicity, for better or for worse, in that environment – for student assessment, and the kind of culture the act of authorship encourages. In this, one needs to bear in mind that the traditional essay is perhaps not best suited to the delivery of all kinds of DH content. To transcend this truth (which I think most DHers would accept) I plan to use some of the cases discussed in my book – for example mapping references to Cypriot places in texts, (the subject of much of Chapter 7) – to encourage students to test and challenge observations I discuss on the construction of imperial identities, for example by using practically the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus. Ideally, I would like to accompany this with screencast videos to accompany the institutional lecture capture (the desirability and ethics of this are a story for another day); something I have already started to do to assist students with the Quantum GIS exercise they learn.

The text of my book is structured around a postgraduate module I have taught for three years now, Maps Apps and the GeoWeb: An Introduction to the Spatial Humanities. I think it is fair to say that there has been a great deal of cross-fertilization between the two activities, certainly at the design stage. The chapter structure of the book partly, but not entirely, reflects the weekly lecture programme for Maps and Apps, a conscious decision I made when drawing up the book proposal, figuring that there could be economies of scale in terms of the effort involved in both tasks.

Writing chapters which correspond to classes was a great opportunity – and impetus – to update my own knowledge and scope of understanding of those topics, and numerous new insights have found their way in to the lectures this year as a result. This has also given me a richer context to include, where appropriate, examples from contemporary life, something I feel greatly helps students engage with complex concepts, relating them to their own experience. For example, my class on neogeography, delivered towards the end of the Semester, was updated this year to include a discussion of commercial appropriation of passive neogeographic material by transport service companies, something which I explore at a theoretical level in Chapter 5 in A History of Place; but which (I think) also points students towards much broader contemporary issues which they see in the news, such as the appropriation of user data by platforms such as Facebook. Teaching this class, I have found that students react creatively and imaginatively to a task where they are asked to find actual instances, based on their own local knowledge and spatial experience, of omissions of features in OpenStreetMap, of the kind described by Monica Stephens in her 2013 paper Gender and the GeoWeb: divisions in the production of user-generated cartographic data; an important text both in this class’s reading list and in Chapter 5.

Another thing I found interesting to reflect on is that other chapters, somewhat counter-intuitively, emerge from reading, research and conversations I conducted during the process of setting up other modules I teach, in which I had relatively little previous grounding, and which were seemingly of limited relevance to the topic in hand. Chapter 2, for example, seeks to place the spatial humanities in the context of its long history. This includes the emergence of the Internet and WWW in the twentieth century, and a discussion on how these impacted human perceptions and experience of space and place. As one might expect, I draw heavily on Doreen Massey’s A Global Sense of Place in this section (a core reading for Week 1 of Maps and Apps, as it happens); but much of the literature I use to do so is drawn from my undergraduate History of Network Technology module. This was a course I began teaching in 2015/6, on quite a steep learning curve (if that sounds like a euphemism, that’s because it is). But a couple of years’ reflection on, for example, the work of J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran and Vanevar Bush – readings I expanded and consolidated for the book – bought me to realize that one can’t really understand the methodologies which underlie the spatial humanities without reference to the implications of the mid-twentieth century’s struggles with post war information deluge; for example Licklider’s vision, expressed in Man Computer Symbiosis (1960), of

[A] network of “thinking centres”, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

In my view, this expresses a “de-spatialization” of human knowledge that directly foresees the kind of interactions and data transactions now familiar to users of OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, and indeed any other kind of geo platform.   This seems to me to be fundamental to the epistemology of the spatial humanities, helping to explain the emergence of the GeoWeb in the broader context of the information age. I therefore have to admit – with a little trepidation – that as well as my teaching being research-led, my research is, to an extent, teaching-led. This is of course before I factor in discussions with the students themselves, in tutorials, seminars and questions after lectures (which do happen occasionally); and more than once my mind has been changed on a particular issue by an excellent student paper.

Of course, it depends on what kind of book you’re writing. A History of Place is quite a broad-brush consideration of the history and impact of GIS, and related technologies on the humanities, which is analogous to the module design and learning outcomes of Maps and Apps. It is therefore logical to expect a rough, although not necessarily comprehensive (see above) correlation between the class topics and chapters. It would of course be different in the case of a highly specialized book dealing with a particular topic in depth. But even then, I feel sure there would be similar crossovers even in such cases.

So, to summarize: Obviously we must aim to pass on our original insights as scholars to students. However, it is also very well worth considering, in as detached a manner as possible, what new insights your teaching might contribute to your book. This, in turn, will help you to strengthen and improve our teaching, and the curricula of your courses – especially when (as many Digital Humanists do) you teach courses across disparate subject areas. A careful mapping of course reading lists to your own bibliography can be very helpful for the same reason.

 

A History of Place in the Digital Age

There’s an interesting tension between writing a book with a title like A History of Place in the Digital Age, while in the process engaging in a massacre of trees to produce a paper book. Anyway, it’s now out, and available from my wonderful publishers at Routledge.

I’m going to try to blog here a little more in (the rest of) 2019, especially offering some ideas on the spatiality of scholarly communication. A central premise of the book is that communication through different media has always both fractured and shaped our ideas of place, and that we can trace this back in to the distant prehistories of the Internet, to the origins of print media, and perhaps even further. This surely applies to the communication and consumption of scholarly ideas, where digital media are rethinking what it even means to have scholarly ideas. One thinks of the work of scholars such as the Classicist Sarah E. Bond, whose ground-breaking work on scholarly outreach and public communication puts Classical ideas into contemporary social, cultural and political contexts, thus (surely) inviting audiences, both inside and outside the academy, to revisit the substance as well as the communication of those ideas. Linking to my own more recent work in digital art history, one can begin to see parallels with recent arguments which suggest that it is not so much the distinction between “digitized” versus “digital” art history (i.e. the use of digital imagery and resources versus the use of computational analysis to understand individual works of art) which is important, as much as what the role of art becomes in a society in which the Internet is ubiquitously and fundamentally integrated.

Here, anyway, is the table of contents:

1 Spatial humanities in the digital age: the key debates

2 The longue durée of the spatial humanities: Part I: Communicating place

3 The longue durée of the spatial humanities: Part II: The case of archaeology

4 Text and place

5 Spatial humanities and neogeography

6 Spatial narrative

7 The structure of geodata

8 Motion in place

9 Conclusion

And there is still some room at the launch on 9th May.