Samantha Gorman
Interdivisional Media arts and Practice (iMAP) University of Southern California
A. J. Patrick Lisziewicz
Interdivisional Media arts and Practice (iMAP) University of Southern California
Brianna Marshall
Library Science and Information Science Indiana University
Kevin A. Wisniewski, Moderator/Panel Organizer Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC) University of Maryland Baltimore County
Biographies
Samantha Gorman is a writer, scholar and media artist who composes for the
intersection of text, performance and digital culture. Her website is http://samanthagorman.net.
A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz is a media artist and writer from Buffalo, NY. A. J. received an M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from SUNY Buffalo, and is currently a Provost’s Fellow in the iMAP PhD program at the University of Southern California.
Brianna Marshall is a dual degree Master of Library Science and Master of Information Science candidate at the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science in Bloomington, IN.
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 have worked as a librarian, researcher, archivist, and editor and has taught English, history, political science at Stevenson University and Widener University, among other universities.
Panel Description
Emerging technologies in the digital age have transformed the ways in which we collect, process, and transmit information. For academia, this transformation is apparent in both research and teaching activities, in the collections and duties of the library, in the needs of student bodies, and in the demands of authors and administrators. Digital publishing is increasingly becoming one of the most pressing issues in academia, as scholars in all disciplines seek to investigate best practices for creating, reviewing, distributing and preserving digitally born work. In the past year, we have seen the formation of several key groups seeking to address issues in digital publication and archiving, including a panel who recently addressed a U.S. House Subcommittee on the problem of open access to academic scholarship. The MLA Preconference on Evaluating Work for Promotion and Tenure has pointed to the dearth of credentialed publication options for digital scholars, leading convener Kathleen Fitzpatrick to call for a response that might “network the field, by connecting scholars through digital platforms.”
In short, publishing is changing. As digital tools have become more accessible for humanities scholars, our definition of what constitutes research activity in the humanities is also changing. This panel’s focus is on how these changes will impact both academic and artistic communities and on how they create and maintain scholarship, literature, and art. Each talk specifically examines some of the critical issues facing artists and academics, libraries, and presses—and how current trends and opportunities might impact the university and the market.
1. “‘Float Don’t Sink’: Publication in an Ocean of Apps” (Samantha Gorman):
This talk will use the author’s iPad Novella as a lens to address the experiences of, and lessons learned through, independent digital publishing. Practical aspects will address design, distribution and how to balance innovation in the humanities with technical platform constraints. Both scholarly research and production will be presented as a method of academic inquiry into what digital publishing really signifies.
2. “The Professional Costs of Free Distribution” (A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz):
While academics are becoming increasingly aware of the professional costs associated with open-access, digital scholarly publication, little attention has been paid to the difficulties facing artist-academics who distribute their artistic work online for free. This talk will use the artist’s experiences with AFEELD (http://afeeld.com/), his full-length collection of digital literature, to foreground some of the professional challenges facing authors of free, internet-based collections of media art.
3. “Scholarly Communication & the Library” (Brianna Marshall):
Libraries have historically been proxy consumers in the facilitation of information, both digital and analog: purchasing from companies then providing to patrons, always acting as the middleman. However, this is swiftly changing as libraries move toward a more direct role in facilitating digital scholarship. This talk will focus on how academic libraries are repositioning themselves to in relation to e-books, digital presses, and the open source movement.
4. “Rescued from Obsolescence: The University Press in the ‘Post-Monograph’ Era” (Kevin A. Wisniewski):
There is a growing agreement in the emerging field of digital humanities that the possibilities for arts and humanities-based research go beyond the traditional monograph. In the recent months, there has been a flurry of activities in the media about the “post-monograph.” This talk will address the role of the monograph and the university press and explain what the post-monograph age means for the university press and for both scholarship and literature.