Coffeehouse Conversation on Scholarly Electronic Publishing
On Wednesday, March 29, 3:30-4:45, MITH will inaugurate its occasional Coffeehouse Conversations series with a roundtable on Scholarly Electronic Publishing. The discussion will be facilitated by Katie King (Associate Professor of Women’s Studies), Matthew Kirschenbaum (Assistant Professor of English and Articles Editor for the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly), and Claire Moses (Professor of Women’s Studies and Editorial Director of the journal Feminist Studies). The format will be open and freewheeling, with plenty of opportunity for asking questions and exchanging ideas. Topics that might be expected to come up include: what it means to “publish” online; peer review, credit, and perceptions of prestige for online publishing; editorial standards in electronic journals; copyright and the economics of scholarly publishing in the present climate; whether the journal format itself is viable online, or whether blogs, bulletin boards, and other forums are more appropriate; libraries and electronic journals; how new media will alter the materiality and substance of scholarship; and the longevity of the scholarly record as it sheds its traditional embodiment in paper.
Speakers
Katie King is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies, cyberculture and media studies, and LGBT Studies. Her first book was “Theory in its Feminist Travels: conversations in U.S. women’s movements.” She has two others in progress now, “Speaking with Things,” an introduction to writing technologies, and the other, “Networked Reenactments,” flexible knowledges under globalization.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. Kirschenbaum served as the first director of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity living/learning program in the Honors College at Maryland. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, he specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008.Mechanisms has won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Much of his work now focuses on the critical and scholarly implications of the shift to born-digital textual and cultural production. He was principal investigator for the NEH funded start-up “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use” and is also a co-investigator on the NDIIPP-and IMLS-funded project devoted to Preserving Virtual Worlds (2007 to present). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and recognized with a commendation from the Society of American Archivists. He also oversees work on the Deena Larsen Collection at MITH, a vast personal archive of hardware and software furnishing a cross-section of the electronic writing community during its key formative years, roughly 1985-1995. Kirschenbaum serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of projects and publications, including Postmodern Culture, Text Technology, Textual Cultures, MediaCommons, and futureArch. An avid tabletop gamer, he contributes to the group blog Play the Past devoted to meaningful play and cultural heritage. His work has received coverage in the Atlantic, New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. See www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.