PubPub newsletter subscribers received this newsletter on May 11, 2021. You can view it here on Mailchimp. Subscribe for updates about the platform, news from our communities, and topics we’re thinking about.
Hi all,
You've been busy! We've been busy! And we're really starting to feel like things are gaining momentum, not just with respect to the development and growth of PubPub, but also regarding how so many Communities are using their spaces (and other tools!) to share and collaborate better. We believe a healthier, more equitable, and more open future for knowledge exchange and creation is possible and that this momentum is key to making it happen. May's Community Newsletter highlights just some of the progress all of you have made toward this goal in the past month.
Contours Collaborations: Border Crossings in Art and Humanities, a new journal based at Vanderbilt University and founded by Professor Robert F. Barsky, exists to center art and artistic expression in conversations about border crossings and the movement of people. “I want to explore the power of artworks to expand our understanding of what vulnerable migrants experience, and to help people relate through powerful aesthetic experiences to the process of border crossing," Barsky notes. To that end, Contours worked with artist Susan Clinard to launch its first exhibit on PubPub. The Community and exhibit were also designed by artist Lukas Eigler-Harding and produced by the PubPub Content Team. You can read more about the launch in this press release.
As part of the Collective Wisdom Project, the British Library published The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage for early access and community review. The book was written in two week-long book sprints by 16 collaborators from the US and the UK, brought together with funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It serves as a wonderful example of Community Publishing in practice!
Thanks to the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, a portion of the MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies series — a library of canonical, out-of-print architecture books — is now openly available on PubPub through the Humanities Open Book Program!
The PubPub Content Team has partnered with the Harvard Data Science Review to produce interactive features in a handful of its articles. The first of these pieces, “Enhancing and Accelerating Social Science Via Automation: Challenges and Opportunities” in issue 3.2 is now live and includes a video summary, podcast, and a series of explanatory videos embedded throughout.
It is 2021, the major social media have been around for more than a decade, increasingly being used for reading-related activities, like organizing one’s own bookshelf, discussing novels, and reading book reviews. Still, there is no publication that tries to organize the knowledge generated by research about digital social reading (DSR). This new [draft] title, Digital Social Reading, by Federico Pianzola is now posted for community review and aims to do just that. Please read, share, and offer Federico feedback!
“5 Things to Think About: Finding Excitement in Open Knowledge” by Ashley Farley in the Commonplace
Endnote(s)
[1] We're Hiring! We're looking for a software to developer to help make PubPub an end-to-end solution for community publishing. Join a great team that cares deeply about making knowledge accessible and an organization that prioritizes employee well-being. Learn more here.
[2] Tell us what you want! In the next few months, we’ll be turning to building some new systems to power better Community Publishing, starting with activity and notifications. We'll begin with simple views of activity and the ability to receive regular email digests of activity, then expand from there. To learn more about our plans and contribute your thoughts, you can visit our Activity and Notifications discussion thread. This will lay the groundwork for us to begin work on editorial management to support as many types of Community Publishing processes as possible — from traditional journal review processes, to preprint server submissions, to overlay review of preprints, and beyond. To do this, we’re asking for your help defining what you’d like to see in these features. If you have thoughts or ideas, we invite you to add to the discussion thread on the topic to which many have already helpfully contributed.
