15-20 Minute Paper
Craig Saper
Professor, Language, Literacy, and Culture
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Kevin A. Wisniewski
Ph.D. Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture
University of Maryland Baltimore
Biographies
Craig Saper is Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Kevin A. Wisniewski is a Ph.D. candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. A 2009 NEH grant recipient and 2009-‐2010 Lord Baltimore Fellow at the Maryland Historical Society, he has worked as a librarian, researcher, archivist, and editor and has taught English, history, political science at Stevenson University and Widener University, among other universities.
Abstract
This presentation will begin as a dialogue between the two presenters reflecting on the debates and crises they see both within the academy and within the publishing world surrounding digitally-born scholarship—how they’re read, evaluated, distributed. As a response to the need for digital publishing within academic communities, the presenters offer their proof-of-concept for a new type of university press: The E-University Press @ UMBC (EUP@UMBC).
The (EUP@UMBC) is a new university press dedicated to the publication and distribution of digital scholarship and research. This press’s model embraces innovative work in the digital humanities, and its goal is to realize new possibilities for scholarship beyond the traditional monograph by offering more active participation from users and more flexibility and inclusiveness for scholars and reviewers. It also offers a much needed legitimacy to new forms of scholarship that use databases, digital interfaces, and multimedia design as crucial elements of the scholarly content. The strength of this new publishing house is its creation and mediation of dialogue between authors and scholars, artists, designers, technicians, and teachers throughout the submission, peer-review, editorial, and distribution/promotion phases of a work. The presentation explains the mission and infrastructure and will field questions on the matters ranging from the peer-review process to distribution of materials to the practical issues of funding and long-term sustainability.