Reasoning Without Words: Envisioning the Multimodal Thesis and its Challenges

Posted on September 21, 2016 by academicbookfuture in research and tagged archaeology, Digital Conversations, Dr Sara Perry, Katrina Foxton, multimodal, PhD, research outputs, thesis, University of York.

This guest post is by Katrina Foxton, a third year PhD student at the University of York, Department of Archaeology. She’s writing her thesis about a historic building in York, which is being adapted into a mixed-use community venue. Her analysis will involve a dynamic Prezi map which illustrates the ongoing work undertaken by herself and volunteers. Her work (a mixture of text, image and hyperlinking) is multimodal. Below, she gives her thoughts on the position of multimodal research after a meeting organised by the British Library.

Figure 1. Art, text, sculpture all hold sway in the library of humankind –National Library in Vienna, image by author.

In April 2016, my MA supervisor, Dr Sara Perry, invited me to a meeting with the British Library to explore how PhD theses could manifest as knowledge that is not necessarily written. We were to discuss how multimodal (mixed media) methods can develop an argument within PhD research and the subsequent difficulties in submitting non-textual work. This Multimodal Thesis meeting was organised and hosted by the British Library’s EThOS team (who hold over 400,000 theses in their digital repository). It was also attended by a group of archaeological students, Dr Debbie Maxwell, TFTV lecturer, from the University of York and researchers from The Academic book of the Future project. Amongst us were representatives from Internet Archaeology, Judith Winters, and Director of Publications at the American Numismatic Society, Andrew Reinhard. There was an international presence from the States, Canada and New Zealand (and some of us had to be skyped in!)

As we discussed the potential of multimodal work, some exciting examples came to the fore (including a thesis which had been submitted to the British Library with a cassette tape, years after the emergence of later technologies such as CDROM and USB). The variety of multimodal work is the result of different technologies and material forms—and a good definition can be found here at the MODE website, Institute of Education. Multimodal work also often has connections to participatory work. Here are some examples:

Learning by ‘touch’ in the operation theatre: IOE (2013): https://mode.ioe.ac.uk/research/researchproject1/.
Cities, Bicycles and Data streams: Maxwell et al (2015): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279204832_Re-writing_the_City_Negotiating_and_Reflecting_on_Data_Streams.
Visualising Facebook relationships: S. Posavec (2013): http://www.stefanieposavec.co.uk/data/#/facebook-art-residency-relationship-dance-steps/
“Buried”—the archaeogame: T. Copplestone (2014): http://www.taracopplestone.co.uk/buriedindex.html.
3D digital reconstruction as research and knowledge-making: S. Perry (2014): https://www.academia.edu/10031174/PRE-PRINT_DRAFT_Crafting_knowledge_with_digital_visual_media_in_archaeology

It should be noted that in this discussion our group was not representative for the whole of academia – there was a high percentage of archaeologists in the room. But as archaeologists, we felt confident talking about different modes of knowing because within practice we are caught between ways of ‘looking’ at material remains and translating (interpreting) an understanding of them into writing or drawing. Archaeologists also make use of such technologies as 3D models, digital photographs, and virtual realities. We are also extremely reflective on how these impact knowledge gain (for further reading into this area, see below).

Beyond archaeology however, the point about the multimodal work is that researchers across the academy gain valuable insight if they experiment and know through different modes. This gain is often achieved through praxis or ‘practice-based’ research, a methodology which advocates knowledge-gain through multimodal techniques, often adopted within in arts research. An extensive report on practice-based research by Candy (2006) gives the rudiments of this approach. At the meeting, we were keen to hear about this kind of research and how submission issues were handled across different social disciplines, because there are definite challenges at university, departmental and library levels in accepting any non-textual work. In particular, the following challenges or questions came to the fore.

Handling, storing, and accessing non-text-based research outputs

Firstly, we discussed how, at the library level, there are the practicalities of handling, storing and providing access to thesis research outputs which are not text based. Traditional book formats sit nicely on shelves, are catalogued, and findable through search indexes. The digital equivalent – PDFs – are also pretty easy to describe, index, store, and access; after all, they are really just books dressed up as digital files – same structure, pagination, chapters, start and finish. When it comes to massive data files, or computer games or apps, then not only are these hard to organise along traditional library lines but options for accessing them are equally tricky. PhD researchers often seek to enable non-researchers and research participants to access research for a guaranteed amount of time (often ten years): is this at risk with multimodal PhD research? Whose role is it to ensure long-term preservation, readability, access to the underlying read software, and version updates? Another interesting question is whether university libraries – the natural home for their PhDs – are technically capable of taking on this role in any case? And, as Dr Perry has raised, in the interests of longer term future-proofing, a limitation may be placed on the objectives and the scope of the argument that an aspiring researcher wishes to lay out.

Embracing multimodal research outputs in academia

Figure 2. “a book is not an image of the world” (Deleuze and Guttari 2003, 11). Imagine a library where some of the books were filled with puzzles, photographic essays holographric performances, music and film pieces…? Books in National Library, Vienna, image by author

Secondly, we discussed whether there may be some wariness on the part of academic committees, heads of research, and even PhD supervisors, to embrace the world of multimodal research outputs. As a result, the libraries are left grappling with the problems without the direction and support that those at a higher-level in the university could be providing. It’s widely agreed that there is still a need for at least part of the ‘thesis’ to be a written, critical analysis of the research. But does it make sense, for example, for a student to describe the way a ‘mobile app’ works by using written words rather than allow the student to submit the app itself as part of the PhD thesis, simply because the rules say the thesis must be a bound volume? Arguably, a vital moment of reckoning lies in the moment an examiner ‘opens’ a thesis, with their expectations of what they are to examine and corresponding skills to do so. Therefore, in the aspiration towards creating new knowledge, the PhD examination process must also drive the communication of excellent research (and certainly towards the innovative and the original!). At this time then, how can examiners – and others involved in the flow of new knowledge – be involved and embrace new technologies to ensure the research is communicated and built on by others?

There are a lot of questions here. This is the beginning of an ongoing investigation and, to build momentum, the value of the multi-modal thesis must be demonstrated across a wider sphere.

Digital Conversation event: British Library, 29 September 2016

To this end, I’m drawing attention to a British Library “Digital Conversation” event on 29 September. A panel of PhD students (past and present) will describe their own text and non-text thesis outputs, and discuss ways to open up access to and acceptance of multi-modal, non-text research outputs. You are all invited to join us and support what is essentially a call of action towards reconfiguring the PhD thesis at a quintessential level.

Please book here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-conversations-british-library-ethos-multimedia-phd-theses-tickets-27326014846. to claim your free ticket.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Followin Katrina on Twitter: @kfoxton9

#AcBookWeek 2015: Publisher Workshop at Stationers Hall

Posted on September 20, 2016 by academicbookfuture in Academic Book Week, libraries, Open Access, Publishers, publishing.

To celebrate the recent announcement of the next Academic Book Week (23-28 January 2017), we’re revisiting some highlights from last year’s #AcBookWeek! The first post considers the gathering of academic publishers at the historic Stationers Hall to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities facing the industry. There were 25 individuals representing seven academic publishers, all of which publish books in print and/or digital format. The participants were asked to work in groups and address some of the core questions first posed at the launch of The Academic Book of the Future project. Project co-investigator Nick Canty (UCL) reflects back on this event.

The questions and issues we put to the assembled publishers spanned three main areas, as follows:

1. Changes in the nature of research, the research environment and the research process

What do academic books do?

We started off by asking publishers for their views of what purposes they think academic books fulfil. Answers were varied, with some participants asking how we define which books relate to research and which are for reference. This point was picked up by another participant who argued that publishers’ categories (reference or textbook) don’t matter – what matters is the prestige of where you find your content and being providing with trusted credible content. There is a glut of information today with undergraduate students and researchers drawing on a broader pool of resources than in the past (including Wikipedia), which has partly been enabled by digital technologies, although it was questioned whether the structures were in place for interdisciplinary research.

Additional purposes for the academic book were offered, for instance: for academics to achieve tenure, or to publish their PhD thesis; while another participant observed that academic books are now required as a tool for metrics to help define impact, as well as working for libraries to gauge interest through bibliographic data. A more apt starting point might be to ask what the book is doing: proving a hypothesis, making an argument, or communicating an idea – but this doesn’t answer whether textbooks, reference, and professional books should be considered academic books, too. Our seemingly simple question clearly has several possible complex and multi-faceted answers.

What changes have taken place in the research environment?

Moving on, we looked at how research is changing in academia. This shook out some fascinating points. As well as comments about the REF (Research Excellence Framework), several participants mentioned the pressure to produce research outputs and the ‘need for speed’, which was pushing researchers to journals and away from books (presumably because of their longer production times). The pressure to publish quickly has had big changes on the production process and there has been advances on this side of publishing. However the sales cycle with library wholesalers hasn’t moved as quickly, and advance notice to market is still at least six months. As someone else said, the rate of change is quite slow.

Alternative ways of research were picked up, including real-time feedback and peer review, crowdfunding and the Knowledge Unlatched publishing model and a question about whether Amazon’s classifications are becoming more important – presumably for discoverability.

New forms of books

We wanted to find how books might change because of new technologies and Open Access (OA). There was agreement that OA is having the greatest influence on journals, with books following more slowly behind. Several participants remarked that OA and new media offer more opportunity for collaboration with peer-adopted books with extra resources such as data and video. Shorter book formats, such as Palgrave’s Pivot series, are also a response to a changing environment. New media might herald new virtual collections, such as chapters and articles which are led by XML and metrics, although other participants sounded a note of caution: books are still books and they are not changing – they are still driven by market demand and the activity of publishers is still the traditional model of print with some digital offerings.

There were observations that with booksellers increasingly resistant to stock niche books and the academic book more challenged in terms of sales it was hard to find books in bookstores now and they are mostly just in libraries, although book authors still want print copies. This reflects broader concerns about the visibility of books in brick and mortar stores as the online space expands.

2. How are the processes through which books are commissioned, approved or accepted, edited, produced, published, marketed, distributed, made accessible, and preserved changing, and what are the implications for the following?

Publishers

Needless to say this elicited lots of responses, with publishers seen as moving from B2B operations to B2C, and more functions outsourced to attempt to lower costs. While some participants didn’t think marketing had changed much over the last decade, others saw changes to staff recruitment as new skillsets are needed as consumer marketing becomes more important. Clearly there are differences between publishers here. There was a comment that nowadays publishers have to do more direct marketing and rely less on channel marketing.

Authors were seen as becoming more ‘savvy’, more demanding, and more knowledgeable on all aspects of publishing – but particularly in marketing, where for example, they understand the importance of Amazon profiles. However there was very little change to the commissioning process, which was still based on a conversation, a campus visit, or a meeting at a conference. Academics are therefore still ‘student intermediaries’. There is a need to make books available everywhere but it is difficult to push every channel and there is therefore more pressure on authors to help with marketing via their profile in academia. The publishing industry increasingly values media skills and as a consequence there is a convergence of academic and trade publishing at this point.

The publisher brand and the website are important but editors still need to actively reach out in the commissioning process. Editors need usage data to inform commissioning decisions but they aren’t getting this at the moment.

In terms of the publishing process as well as new distribution formats (XML, video) reference works can published in stages with no single publication date, raising the question: what is ‘enough’ content to launch with? Finally, there was general agreement that while there are experiments with peer review it is ‘here to stay’ and ‘still central’ to academic publishing.

Aggregators

Pressures and tensions were noted here. These revolve around asking how sustainable the aggregator business model is, with publishers improving discoverability and free searches from Google. There is also tension in that libraries still want aggregators and value their services and small publishers need aggregators (‘in thrall to them’), but publishers are selling complete books – not bits of content. The situation is made more complicated by centralisation and mergers in the sector.

Booksellers

In addition to the points about booksellers above, participants noted the disappearance of campus bookstores and the emphasis on stocking high sales books rather than niche ones, therefore questioning the value of bookstores to publishers today.

Libraries

The issue of preservation came through here, in addition to comments about squeezed library budgets (although new models such as just-in-time purchasing and PDA were mentioned as solutions). There was concern about what happens when publishers merge, and features of online access are no longer available with the new company (the example cited was in relation of viewing PDFs after a merger). Further concerns were that although libraries keep digital archives, what happens when formats change? This has implications for future access and preservation.

How might the relationships between the different kinds of agents in the publishing supply chain develop in the future?

The last question looked at the supply chain and how publishers and other intermediaries might work together in the future. Once again, some tensions were noted. Libraries are concerned about the power of aggregators, but they choose to work with them rather than with individual publishers. This makes it hard to resolve problems, as it is unclear who is ultimately responsible for problems: the aggregator or the publisher? One group suggested we need to ask what an intermediary is in the supply chain; can we consider the library as an aggregator today? Another group defined intermediaries as ‘anyone/thing that intervenes between point of production and point of use/reading.’

Publishers increasingly want direct access to end-user data from aggregators to drive usage to their online collections to improve renewals, but this desire to drive users to their sites puts them in conflict with aggregators, who provide little information to publishers. Open Access is a possible way to sidestep aggregators, but it then needs something like Amazon or Google for users to discover the books.

Conclusion

The workshop was an opportunity for the publishing industry to address some key issues the project has sought to address. While there were bound to be contradictions among participants, what came through were questions about the future role of aggregators in the supply chain, changes in the research environment and perhaps as a consequence, changes in how authors work with publishers, and changes in the way publishers operate. There was agreement however that the book, whether print or digital, was here to stay.

Creative writing theses: guidelines on discoverability and open access

Posted on August 1, 2016 by academicbookfuture in authors, libraries, Open Access, research and tagged British Library, creative writing, NAWE, Susan Greenberg.

On 5^th May 2016, the Project attended a meeting at the British Library to discuss the issue of discoverability of creative writing theses. The meeting was organised by Dr Susan L. Greenberg (Senior Lecturer in the University of Roehampton’s Department of English and Creative Writing). She acted on behalf of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) whose remit includes supporting the work of creative writing academics in the UK. The meeting brought together leading academics in the field of creative writing, as well as library staff from the British Library and university libraries. Discussions expanded well beyond the initial topic of discoverability, touching upon a wide range of issues. This blog post is a summary of the discussions that took place, and includes some important advice for those submitting creative writing PhD theses.

Discoverability

The initial topic of conversation was discoverability. A core concern is that it is difficult for researchers to find creative writing theses, particularly without an author name, and it is also difficult to advise students on how to find them. Dr Greenberg outlined this in an earlier blog post, but the conversation at the British Library meeting extended the scope of debate. The following issues may hamper the discoverability of creative writing theses:

The title of the thesis is often metaphorical, and may not be explicit.
Often there are no abstracts.
Accompanying metadata is often unclear, or even missing altogether.
The thesis can be in two parts – creative work and critical analysis – but this is not always the case. How are the different parts catalogued and searched for?
At an institutional level, the forms that must be filled in by PhD students are designed for other disciplines, and may not contain the fields required to make creative writing theses discoverable.
Creative theses that incorporate a media element cannot currently be deposited in EThOS.
International barriers exist: for example, a UK researcher faces difficulties finding and accessing theses from Australia.
There is a lack of consensus across institutions about terminology: creative writing PhDs are catalogued and described on EThOS in different ways, for instance:
- PhD in Creative Writing
- PhD in English Literature
- PhD in English with Creative Writing
- PhD in Critical and Creative Writing

EThOS does not have an option to catalogue a thesis under ‘creative writing’, so it must be included in the abstract/keywords if it is to appear.

In the meeting it became clear that there are numerous reasons for the difficulties outlined above, including a lack of clarity about who is responsible for training students in the use of electronic repositories. Should this be the role of specialist subject supervisors, graduate schools, or research training departments? As increasing technical demands are made on researchers, it is an issue that must be resolved.

Although the day was ostensibly about discoverability, it soon emerged that there were several other interconnected issues around creative writing theses in current and emerging academic and publishing contexts, which are described in the rest of this post.

Open Access mandates and institutional repositories

The major issues seemed to hinge on Open Access. UK university institutions now mandate their researchers to deposit their work in Open Access repositories, which has specific implications for creative writing researchers, as outlined below.

Intellectual Property

When EThOS was established, research by Charles Oppenheim on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) concluded that publishing theses in repositories posed a very low risk to the rights of authors. But this is not the case for creative writing theses. While academic publishers are by and large prepared to publish a thesis available on a repository as long as it has been substantially revised, trade publishers may refuse publication of a creative writing theses in a similar position. Greenberg summarised the issue: ‘Having a pre-existing version anywhere, on any conditions, seems to be anathema.’

Version control

Creative writing theses that are later developed by publishers may be amended, ranging from the correction of minor typos to the incorporation of major plot changes. As one writer-academic stated at the meeting: ‘I’d much rather people accessed the revised, published version than the legally available version in a repository.’

Piracy

There is a major issue with piracy; one academic reported the example of a novel that became available as a free Torrent download within weeks of publication.

Embargoes

Researchers have the option to place their thesis under embargo for a fixed period – usually three to five years. This action can help with some of the issues discussed above, but prompts questions of its own. The first concerns knowledge: do all PhD students know that this option is open to them? If not, whose responsibility is it to make them aware? The second is the fixed-term nature of the embargo: can “never” be an option? And whose responsibility is it to renew embargoes once they expire, the library or the author? Libraries will probably not have current contact details for authors after 5 years, and the authors may forget.

From the non-author point of view, embargoes can have an adverse effect on the dissemination of research, impacting for example on individual scholars who would like to access the thesis to inform their own work. How is this overcome?

Policies on embargoes currently operate on a university-by-university level: perhaps national guidance on policy for creative writing theses is required.

Ethics

Creative writing theses that involve nonfiction accounts of living subjects raise specific issues. One participant described the case of a PhD supervisee writing a memoir which included anecdotes gathered from family funerals and other events. In the social sciences, the default assumption is that all identities are anonymised before thesis submission, but in the case of creative nonfiction (as with journalism) full anonymity is not always possible or desirable. This can create difficulties with ethics committees, because the projects do not fit into standard models built with other disciplines in mind. A different form and different process is required, but how will this be brought about?

Clearly, there are many complex issues and questions to be addressed:

Who should be the gatekeepers for creative writing theses: libraries and institutional repositories, or the authors?
How should this gatekeeping be managed so that creative writing theses are available for research, but not so publicly available that they hinder trade publication?
How are creative writing PhD students being trained in writing abstracts and metadata; using repositories; copyright? Who should deliver and teach this training?

All of the issues boil down to the fact that creative writing is a very distinct discipline with unique requirements. As Greenberg stated: ‘Creative writing as a relatively new discipline has had to constantly negotiate its way through the academic system in order to be recognised.’ These issues are highlighted anew by the mandate to move towards Open Access. Creative writing academics present at the meeting agree that now is the time to address them.

Practical Guidance for Creative Writing PhD Theses

One immediate practical outcome of the meeting is the launch of a new one-page document, backed by NAWE and the British Library, which gives staff and students advice on how to submit the electronic copy of their PhD thesis. The document has a Creative Commons license, allowing universities and other organisations to share it freely. You can download the document using the link below and share it freely.

NAWE-BL-General-Guidelines (pdf)

The Project would like to extend its thanks to all attendees of the meeting, in particular Dr Susan Greenberg for organising it, and Dr Ros Barber for creating the initial draft of the guidelines document.

Quadrivium XI – Day Two

Posted on June 22, 2016 by academicbookfuture in Uncategorized.

Day Two of Quadrivium XI at De Montfort University highlighted the past, present and future of academic books for medievalists.

We started with hands-on workshops: ‘The making of a book in pre-digital age. How was a book “created” before digital technologies were introduced in the world of publishing? The participants made and wrote with quill pens in the Trinity House Scriptorium and experienced type-setting and hand-pressing in the printing workshop at the Centre for Textual Studies.

One thing for sure: we — as medievalists — appreciate handwriting and printing technologies, but we cannot ignore the impact of the digital technologies either.

Earlier in the 20th century, an academic book for medievalists was relatively easy to identify. It often embodied at least 20 years of rigorous scholarship. It was often a thick volume, hardcover, and published by a reputable publisher. It was often expensive, but that was acceptable, as the book was meant to be bought by university libraries and guaranteed to be kept on their shelves for hundreds of years. It was a big, significant and eye-opening book, which would be read, referred to and used over and over by all scholars in the field. Digital technologies have brought about a modification in the methodologies for researching, producing and delivering scholarship, however, and the impact of digital environments on scholarly publishing seems to be more than self-evident.

Prof. Wendy Scase remembers the days when she was a student. A computer back then was a huge machine, which filled up an entire room in a university. Since then, things have changed rapidly. In 2012, she and her team published a facsimile of the Vernon manuscript — one of the largest surviving medieval manuscripts, 22 kg, 350 leaves, 544mm x 393mm — on a single DVD-Rom.

For Dr Ryan Perry, the key academic book was, and still is, A manual of the Writings in Middle English. He was, however, also involved in many manuscript based online projects (Imagining History, Geographies of Orthodoxy), and is now thinking about a new project with ambitious digital aspects.

Dr Orietta Da Rold‘s career as a medievalist also started with a multi-volume hardcover academic book: Manly and Rickert’s The Text of the Canterbury Tales. Scrutinising a catalogue description in this book made her think further about the use of paper in Medieval England, and she is now working on a digital project The Mapping Paper in Medieval England.

Dr Hollie Morgan is probably one of the first medieval scholars to used “word clouds” in her PhD, ‘Between the Sheets: Reading Beds and Chambers in Late-Medieval England’. She is now working on Imprint Project, where the medieval texts meet the material and cutting-edge digital technologies.

Dr Takako Kato asked the participants to come up with their own ideas of how they would tackle the challenges and difficulties they might encounter, should they start digital projects now. Using The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 as a springboard, the participants discussed topics such as:

Longevity of the research data and how to keep the data updated.
Ideally the online framework should be updated regularly to incorporate the new technologies, such as apps for reading on hand-held devices.
An option to print the websites as books on demand.
The significance of sophisticated search engines.
Possibility of incorporating subscription fees to maintain the website.
Create a collaborative working environments using social media.
Interactive resources, for example, pronunciation guide.
Use of manuscript images online.
Use of word crowd.
Collaboration with other digital projects.

After two days of intensive discussions, QuadXI concluded with food for thought:

Do we read differently in print and on screen? Some of us do, some don’t; it depends on the nature of the texts too.
What are the perceptions of digital books? Are we happy to publish digital-only monographs? Or, do we still consider print books to be “better”?
Are current PhD students more equipped and trained to work in digital environment than PhD students 10-20 years ago? Not necessarily! We identified that current PhD students strongly feel the necessity of training in how to ask right questions using digital technologies.
Using digital technologies would make medievalists talk to specialists from different disciplines, like Dr Morgan, who now regularly discusses the taxonomy with a Forensic team.
If you work as a team member in a digital project, how is your work recognised?

We hope to see you at Quadrium XII in Glasgow to continue these discussions!

Life and times of an independent researcher: Publish or be damned?

Posted on June 8, 2016 by academicbookfuture in authors, publishing, research and tagged Catherine White, crossover book, independent research, interdisciplinary, May Morris.

This guest post is written by Catherine White, an independent researcher currently writing a biography on May Morris – the daughter of William Morris, Pre-Raphaelite, Socialist, and leader of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Catherine met the Project’s Research Associate, Rebecca Lyons, at the recent two-day conference on May Morris, co-organised by the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre, The William Morris Society, and the William Morris Gallery. Catherine’s experience of writing a distinctly interdisciplinary crossover book (i.e. one with appeal to both academia and the general public, and which crosses several areas of interest) and searching for a publisher whilst both an independent researcher and a new mother touches upon several key areas of the Project. Here she openly shares that experience.

Image of May Morris from the George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress.

In 2011, I saw a reference to May Morris. I had studied the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle for my Art History degree but had never come across her before. I subsequently found out she was a designer, embroiderer, jewellery-maker, writer, Socialist, part of the Arts & Crafts movement, and the daughter of William Morris. I was hooked. There has never been a sole biography of May, and so I decided that I would write one. Just after this, by sheer coincidence, I was introduced to a lady whose great aunt had worked for May Morris. She has generously allowed me to research her family archive, which contains an unpublished memoir and letters – and the rest is (art) history.

At the time I had a young daughter at home, and I took the chance to read as much as I could, whenever I could, to prepare for writing the book. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, any second-hand book I wanted to order could be delivered to my door. For those that were outrageously priced, I discovered that I could order in books from the British Library to my local library. Once my daughter started preschool, I used the two mornings a week to write. It was occasionally frustrating to have to leave a section mid-sentence, but it was mainly beneficial to have thinking time between each instalment. I recently came across a book called The Ladybird book of The Mid-life Crisis (Michael Joseph 2015), which had an illustration with the text caption of ‘Gwen has a 2:1 in Ancient History. She always planned to write a series of novels about Boadicea. Gwen is covered in apple sauce and has spent the afternoon clapping.’ Luckily it proved possible to combine the two (apple sauce and the book). It doesn’t seem to have done my daughter any harm, except that she has grown up sure that May Morris must be part of our family somehow.

In 2013, I approached my first publisher. Whilst knowing this would not be easy, I was fairly hopeful that the book was an attractive proposition because it was intended for a general rather than a specific audience. Although it is footnoted, and has unpublished information of interest to the academic community, May’s life has an appeal for a much wider audience, including those interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts & Crafts Movement, or social and political history, including the changing role of women – plus did I mention that May had a significant liaison with George Bernard Shaw? Yet this concept has actually brought its own challenges because it does not fit in a traditional publishing box. Publishers have expressed an interest in the proposal, but so far say that it doesn’t quite fit with their catalogue. It appears that academic publishers are more interested in a sole subject book, but this is not a purely academic book. I want this book to be accessible because it has such a great story to tell. An academic price tag of perhaps £50 or more would take it out of the reach of my core audience; those having heard of May Morris, or visiting an historic house associated with her, are unlikely to make such a purchase on a whim. General interest publishers could make this book affordable, but seem more wary of investing in a book on the single subject of May.

My other problem is that this book has to be illustrated. May Morris was responsible for making exquisite textiles and jewellery, and these have to be included, and in colour – which doubles the cost of production. This cost also means that self-publishing isn’t viable, nor was the offer from a publisher (my favourite rejection to date) who said they would publish it if I found £10,000 or a gallery willing to purchase 1000 copies of my book!

So where does this leave me? I am continuing to write the book, of course, and continuing to submit it to publishers. Finding a publisher has never been easy, and even May Morris despaired of finding one for her final book, which was eventually produced in 1936, just two years before her death. Overall, so far, I do not feel my book has suffered from not having a confirmed publisher; it has meant it could evolve at its own pace without the pressure of a deadline. There is a tipping point on the horizon though, which is a major May Morris exhibition planned by the William Morris Gallery in the autumn of 2017. Confirming a publisher now would enable me to prioritise my writing and aim for completion in time for the exhibition, but without one, I need to continue to combine writing with other work. But watch this (hopefully book-shaped) space!

#AcBookWeek: Book sprints and collaborative ways of working

Posted on May 31, 2016 by academicbookfuture in Academic Book Week, research and tagged book sprint, collaboration, Dr Spencer Jordan, University of Nottingham.

This guest post has been written by Dr Spencer Jordan (Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, University of Nottingham). Dr Jordan led a book sprint with ten students at the University of Nottingham during Academic Book Week (9-16 November 2015), which involved writing a book in just three days. The challenge was a huge success, and this post outlines the event itself, as well as some of the lessons learned, which have broader implications for thinking about the way we work as academics.

Could you write, edit and publish a book in three days? That was the challenge I set ten first-year School of English students at the University of Nottingham who applied to my open invitation. The challenge used the methodology of ‘book sprinting’, where a book is produced collaboratively over a very short period of time, normally between three or five days. In part the challenge was a practical examination of academic publishing, as part of Academic Book Week. But it was also a fantastic way for English students to immerse themselves in the real-life practicalities of book publishing.The event took place between the 9th and 11th November 2015. I acted as the facilitator but essentially everything was done by the students. It was decided early on that the book would be a student’s guide to starting university, a sort of rough guide to student life that would complement the existing, more official, documentation supplied by the University and UCAS. Interestingly, it was decided to include factual as well as creative responses, including poems and short stories as well as photographs taken by the students.

As you can imagine the three days involved lots of writing. Everything was done using Google Documents, so that all copy could be instantly shared and collaboratively edited from any networked computer. This saved an enormous amount of time and meant that the students could continue working well into the night, if they wanted to (which some did). By the end of day two we had over 25,000 words, as well as a variety of photographs, poems, and stories. Day three was where the students brought all this together into the final format of the document, placing case studies, student profiles and photographs alongside each section. A front cover was completed, with a name – ‘An Insider’s Guide to Starting University’ – aimed at students going through the very experiences that they had gone through themselves just months before. Harriet Williams was one of the students involved. Her interest in publishing and a desire to understand more about the process led her to volunteer. She said: “Taking part in the Book Sprint was the one of the best opportunities I could have had in my first year here at Nottingham. It was a brilliant way to meet like-minded people in order to write something meaningful and useful.”

The legacy of the book sprint isn’t just the book. It’s also the video that Eve Wood and Simon Barnett took over the three days and then edited. I think the video shows that the book sprint really did make an important contribution to The Academic Book of the Future. The students worked collaboratively, mainly online, using cloud computing. This allowed them to work 24/7, very often in different places. The students were able to make collaborative decisions, either face to face, or virtually. This meant that they were able to maximise their time, making as much use of the three days as possible. Sometimes as academics, particularly in the Arts and Humanities, we forget about collaboration. In my own work, collaboration has been laborious and difficult. And yet the benefits of collaborative working, particularly interdisciplinary work, can add a new dimension to our research. This synthesis comes not only through a shared academic interest but also through a willingness to engage with what might be called a collaborative methodology. I think the students have shown us the way here through the three-day Book Sprint, and I personally want to thank them.

The full video of the book sprint can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUABtFOnx74&feature=youtu.be

The Academic Book of the Future project would like to thank Dr Jordan, all of the students who took part in the book sprint, and Neil Smyth, for organising this wonderful activity for Academic Book Week.

Musical Scholarship and the Future of Academic Publishing

Posted on May 16, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, Open Access and tagged AHRC, Goldsmiths, John Baily, Laurent Pugin, Mark Everist, Richard Lewis, Simon McVeigh, Tim Crawford, Transforming Musicology, Yun Fan, Zoltán Kőmíves.

This guest post was written by Richard Lewis (Goldsmiths) of the AHRC Transforming Musicology project. It outlines a workshop on ‘Musical Scholarship and the Future of Academic Publishing’, sponsored by The Academic Book of the Future project, and held at Goldsmiths, University of London on Monday 11^th April 2016. This post first appeared on the Transforming Musicology project website, and is reproduced here with kind permission from Richard.

A couple of months ago Marilyn Deegan, who is emeritus professor at King’s College London, approached Tim Crawford asking him to put together a workshop as part of their Academic Book of the Future project (2014-2016, PI: Samantha Rayner). The project is a partnership between King’s and the UCL Centre for Publishing, and is funded by the British Library and the AHRC. The project has included a lot of work with practising scholars but Marilyn was keen to engage the musical community so we accepted her invitation.

The workshop was held at Goldsmiths on Monday 11 April and attracted just under 40 delegates. The programme comprised six invited presentations and a roundtable discussion with a mixture of scholars, musicians, and library professionals. This post is a report on the proceedings of the day.

The day began with an introduction to The Academic Book of the Future project from Rebecca Lyons (UCL) who is the research associate on the project. Bex described the background of the project and some of its activities so far, including the inaugural Academic Book Week in November 2015. She described how much of their early work has been involved with forming a community coalition by consulting with publishers, academics, and other stakeholders in the academic book, and attempting to address fundamental questions around the nature of academic publishing. Bex outlined some of their future plans, which include an online modular publication, called a BOOC, which will gather together content from a variety of sources including audio, essays, blog posts, and Storifies.

Mark Everist‘s (Southampton) presentation was pitched as a warning against the apparent benefits of Open Access publishing. Mark spoke from three different perspectives: as president of the RMA, as head of a research-intensive music department, and as a publishing academic. He argued through some of the hypothetical implications to the RMA of going fully Open Access. The RMA runs three publications: the Journal of the RMA, the RMA Research Chronicle, and a monograph series and publishes with Routledge. Mark described some of the benefits of digital documents over paper, including convenience of access and searchability. But he argued that online publication of scholarship does not involve any less work than paper publication: authoring and review is carried out by academics as part of their contractual responsibilities, but copy editing (including fact checking and typesetting), maintenance and sustainability, and promotion and marketing are carried out by professional publishers and these cost money. Mark argued that if scholarship were to go online and be Open Access, none of these processes could be avoided and so the costs would still need to be covered. Mark summarised by arguing that the biggest question around going Open Access is: who takes the risk? Currently it’s a commercial publisher, but if the RMA were to move completely to Open Access it would have to absorb that risk itself.

Following his presentation, Mark answered questions on alternative business models for publishing including that of the Open Library of Humanities which is funded by the Mellon Foundation and by library subscriptions. Another question concerned the practice in science publishing of requiring authors to produce so-called camera-ready copy using a template. Mark responded that science articles are normally short and so proof-reading and fact-checking is much more tractable for authors or reviewers, whereas humanities articles tend to be much longer so these copy editing tasks are better handled by specialist professionals. Mark also noted that he believes, because of the relative ease of science publication, the drive for Open Access is coming from the sciences.

Tim Crawford and I gave a presentation of our work on the plans for the final publication of the Transforming Musicology project. We described our original plan to publish a book which collects together the work of the project and which has a significant online component, but said that now we are intending instead to produce a fully-online publication with a possible future print version. We described how our work so far on the project has successfully led to the creation of a number of Linked Data resources which will feed directly into the publication. We reported that we now have a good idea of the expected content of the publication. Now we are in the position where we need to make plans about the required information architecture for the publication. It needs an authoring and editing strategy which will result in high quality hypertext. We are looking for a publication platform that is based on sound Web architecture principles. We hope to be able to include features such as embedded – but also interactive – music notation examples; Tim gave a demonstration of some of the work we have done on providing such features for lute tablature. We described our intention to curate dynamic reading paths through the publication’s content. While we are expecting authors to produce essentially prose chapters, we intend to edit them into re-combinable chunks, each bearing semantics describing how it may be related to other content chunks from the publication. As editors, we will then define a number of reading paths that address the needs and interests of different audiences, such as:

A research findings report on Transforming Musicology
A handbook on digital musicology methods
Readings paths on particular digital methods (MIR, Linked Data)
A reviews and comments reading path
Authorial/editorial reading path (i.e. conventional book)

We described our intention to make use of the affordances of the Web to help widen access to our research, in particular by allowing commenting, custom citation, and reader contributions (especially contributing to our data sets such as leitmotive identification or optical music recognition correction). Similarly, we outlined our intentions to use the publication as an access point for researchers who may want to make use of our data sets in their own research.

John Baily (Goldsmiths) began his presentation by mentioning his recently published book, War, Exile, and the Music of Afghanistan (Ashgate), which includes a DVD of films which John described as integral to the text, going on to argue for the complementary properties of text, sound, and video. He gave an account of his extensive use of film-making technology over the course of his career as an ethnographer and observational film-maker, arguing that technological developments have had a significant impact on the practice of ethnography. Following John’s presentation there was some discussion on the relation of the DVD to the text of his book and whether a digital publication may have provided richer opportunities for integrating the two. John partly answered this by demonstrating his online Afghan rubab tutor which mixes text, music notation, and three-camera videos.

Laurent Pugin (RISM) spoke about the initial meeting of a new NEH-funded project, Music Scholarship Online (MuSO). The project may become part of ARC (which backs other online projects including NINES and 18thconnect) and make use of the Collex (COLLections and EXhibits) Semantic Web archive management system. Laurent described several other tools published by ARC including TypeWright for correcting optical recognition output and BigDIVA for making visualisations from large data sets. Laurent argued that it’s not yet clear how MuSO may fit into the Collex system as that system’s affordances for text and metadata may not serve musical content so well. He gave the example of Collex’s full-text search system arguing that it wouldn’t be applicable for searching in music notation collections. Similarly, he argued that the FRBR concepts used in Collex are not necessarily suitable for music sources. Laurent went on to describe RISM’s intention to work with the other so-called “R projects”: RILM, RIdIM, and RIPM to build bibliographic research tools for music scholars. He demonstrated how the traditional RISM and RILM referencing schemes may be updated for online usage. For RISM, this is now largely completed in the shape of their Linked Data interface. Laurent reported that RISM and RILM are in active negotiation over improving their inter-resource hyperlinking.

Yun Fan/樊昀 (RILM) reported on some early-stage work at RILM in producing a Semantic Web ontology for musical concepts to help them develop their database of music literature. As motivation for their work Yun gave the example of being able to answer a natural language query about music: who composed the music for Star Wars? And showed how the search engine Google is already able to deal with this. She argued that Google is effectively using something like an ontology to help make this query possible. She began by describing some of the key properties of Semantic Web ontologies and the benefits they can bring. She mentioned Yves Raimond’s Music Ontology arguing that it was too focused on recorded music production to be suitable for RILM’s needs. She described how their increasing internationalisation is requiring that they update their indexing and cross-search to allow them to relate concepts in different languages. They are hoping that developing an ontology will assist in this aim. Yun gave some examples of RILM’s existing hierarchical subject headings, demonstrating how they are very biased towards European art music. She spoke about some of the difficulties in formalising musical concepts, giving the example of an encyclopedia definition of gospel music which is richly detailed and argued that it is difficult to pick out the precise concepts embedded in such prose knowledge. Following her presentation, there was discussion about the importance of re-use in ontology design: where suitable concepts already exist in other ontologies it’s best practice to point to them rather than replace them. There was also discussion about how RILM, which is a closed access resource, will actually make its ontology public.

Zoltán Kőmíves‘s (Tido Music) presentation was centred around Tido Music’s vision for the future of music publishing. He argued that print music publishing is not going to provide value in the long term and outlined their goals to create enriched and connected musical objects, musical objects as “living creatures”. He showed some examples of the iOS software they are developing for displaying musical scores in a dynamic and responsive way and for integrating extra-musical content into scores. Zoltán argued that academic and what he called “trade” publication needs are quite different (although individuals can be and often are members of both audiences). He gave the example of “preserving uncertainty”, describing how academic audiences often want to know about the uncertainties in musical sources, whereas trade audiences (especially performers) instead want to be presented with a single editorial selection in such cases. As illustrations of this he showed the Online Chopin Variorum Edition and the Lost Voices project. Following his presentation, Zoltán answered questions on the future publication strategy of Tido explaining that their next publications will be piano works for beginners. Discussion also covered the current restriction of Tido’s software to iOS and how this is not good for long-term sustainability.

Following the presentations there was a round table discussion chaired by Simon McVeigh (Goldsmiths). The speakers were joined by: Paul Cassidy, Sarah Westwood, and James Bulley (all PhD students in Music), Jonathan Clinch (Research Associate at Cambridge), and Richard Chesser (head of music at the British Library).

Following introductions, Richard Chesser began the discussion, arguing that everything that had been presented during the day was vital to the work of the British Library. He mentioned that digital publications already come under the rules of legal deposit and questioned how the restrictions of legal deposit will interact with the rights afforded to users of resources that are also open access. He also argued that legal deposit may help to address some of the sustainability issues of digital resources.

Mark Everist next raised a topic that had been introduced earlier – prestige and open access publication, suggesting it’s going to be somewhat of an obstacle or milestone. He argued that most academics know the value of a particular journal or publisher and will want to profit from that as much as possible and that therefore open access publications need to retain the brand of the publisher. Tim Crawford mentioned that prestige and quality are not necessarily correlated with impact, pointing out that it’s possible to perform well under various publication metrics – especially on the Web – without necessarily producing high quality work. Mark argued that impact factors are currently more significant in the sciences than they are in the humanities but that a move to online publication may alter this.

Laurent Pugin described the patchy uptake of digital techniques in publishing and libraries. He noted how libraries are now often digitising books that were actually digitally printed and argued that it would be better for libraries to be allowed to archive the original digital versions. Richard Chesser mentioned that under legal deposit legislation libraries are entitled to the best version available.

A question from the audience was asked about how people make use of Tido’s scores, particularly whether they know of performers playing from tablet computers, and whether their software is useful for ensemble performance. Zoltán Kőmíves argued that print music publications may still have their place in performance situations but also mentioned possible future display technologies that may be more suitable for performance. Tim Crawford and Jonathan Clinch discussed potential problems such as computers crashing or malfunctioning during a performance, or systems where the conductor gets to dictate the page turns. Zoltán argues that a potentially useful feature would be to allow annotations to be shared between performers.

Another question from the audience addressed the topic of reading habits and what reading of the future may be like. One member of the audience responded that Amazon have done some research based on the data they can retrieve from Kindle devices about how people read their eBooks, including where they start and stop. Amazon’s findings include that non-academics read books more closely.

From the day’s discussions it seems that there is a strong drive for increasing open access, but there are numerous serious issues that need to be resolved before it can become more widespread. It also seems that digital publication (whether open or closed) is not likely to replace print entirely in the near future, especially for music publication, but innovations will continue to push the boundaries.

The academic book in Chile: present and future contexts

Posted on May 9, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, Open Access and tagged Chile, Manuel Loyola.

Today’s guest blog post considers the academic book from a Chilean perspective. The author Manuel Loyola is academic and scientific editor at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and director of Ariadna Editions (open access) http://ariadnaediciones.cl/, as well as editor of the peer-reviewed journal Izquierdas: http://www.izquierdas.cl/.

According to ISBN records, the academic book in Chile has had little relevance during the last decade with regard to titles published every year. In fact, the books published by all the universities of the country (of which there are 57 in total) represent 11% of the roughly 5500 books published here each year. In addition to university publications, there are also many small and medium publishing houses focused on academic content, which may increase the figure for academic books from 11% to around 20%.

Behind these numbers, the Chilean academic book is subject to different and usually problematic realities. For example, we are not talking about a relatively homogeneous production in terms of national geography: the capital, Santiago, is responsible for more than 60% of the output. Additionally, within this geographical area there are just a few higher education institutions that concentrate most of the production, especially the University of Chile, Pontifical Catholic University, and the University of Santiago – all in Santiago.

The distribution and use of academic books also presents some interesting considerations. They have a low circulation – usually they do not have their own distribution channels because there is not a proper business model defined according to formative and educational goals. Often academic books depend on the mechanisms and strategies of private firms that are usually not interested in these kinds of books. These issues hinder the already precarious life of academic publishing, combining with a lack of collaboration and common strategies.

Why is the Chilean academic book (published by universities in particular) in this situation? I believe that the answer is in the lack of effective and coherent publishing policies. The university authorities as well as those from other scientific entities of the country know little or nothing about publishing activity. Maybe this would not be a problem if these authorities promoted the development and growth of this area. But unfortunately this is not the case. Academic publishing work is in the hands of people with good intentions, but who may be inexperienced. This causes frustrations.

However, the goal of this post is not to suggest a dramatic and pessimistic forecast. Despite what I have previously stated, our field offers many possibilities to improve and develop a better performance of the local academic book. In the short run, we must take advantage of the importance of the state in the provision of human and financial resources focused on academic production. Related to that is the increasing support for open access publishing, providing easier access to research. Additionally, there have been advancements in scientific publishing and enhanced discussions for those working in this field, establishing relationships with foreign academic and publishing organisations, and with the scientific community. Finally, the continued development of academic journals offers hope for a favourable change with books too, showing the potential for improvement.

Manuel Loyola, PhD

Scientific editor

Universidad de Santiago de Chile

Away with the monotonous monograph

Posted on April 26, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, authors and tagged crossover book, Martyn Lawrence, monograph.

I was fortunate to attend a terrific session at this year’s London Book Fair, organised by the brilliant project, The Academic Book of the Future. It was about the appeal of the crossover book: the holy grail of scholarly publishing that, like base metal turned into gold, somehow goes mass market and sells by the million.

But it got me thinking. The thrust of the discussion seemed to be about the challenge of commissioning: how to find the perfect topical book that goes viral. That’s great, but lots of authors research in areas that don’t tick those boxes, and precious few are in a position to abandon their research area just to work on something more media-friendly. I wonder if a different kind of crossover book lies just a little more within the grasp of the author.

Here’s the thing. Publishers define the success of a crossover book – no, in fact, they define a crossover book per se – by commercial return. A book has become a crossover book if it crosses the revenue divide between short-run university library market and Waterstones-at-Christmas mass market.

But I wonder if that distinction misses the point. Academic success isn’t measured by sales, but by that frightening concept, ‘impact’. You need to advance the conversation, cross disciplines, move on the lumbering caravan of debate, change the world. No pressure then.

I can’t helping thinking that a crossover book is more than just a bestseller (although let’s not pretend we don’t all want one or two of those). Surely the challenge lies less with our material and more with the way we communicate. I don’t buy this idea that only a handful of subjects are of wider interest. Readers are intelligent. They don’t need a Leverhulme Fellowship to follow your ideas… but they might need one to follow your writing style. I believe that if you can communicate better, you can cross over.

A monotonous book, written with heavy prose and a healthy dose of navel-gazing, a book that doesn’t give a damn about its audience and simply says ‘my ideas are good enough; I don’t need to explain them to you’, isn’t just failing to cross over. It’s failing full stop. In fact, some of the definitions of an academic book flying around at London Book Fair are enough to make us all pack up and go home: ‘when the author doesn’t care if the book is read or not’; ‘heavy, thick, annoying, dull, expensive’; ‘monotonous’.

But…

If you can write beautifully, clearly, passionately; if by your very words you can spin a story and engage an audience; if the prose is not scabrous but seductive (well, OK: let’s stick with ‘relatively jargon-free’); if you can make people sit up and say ‘my word, the Battle of Bramham Moor was about real people with real lives doing real things, not just three men and a horse having a barney in the fog’; well, then you’ve written a crossover book and hang the sales. Because you’ve reached out beyond your peer group. That may not be how publishers define crossover, but it surely improves the image of traditional academic writing.

So let’s write with a wider audience in mind. Not because it’s easy. But because the buck stops with us, the authors. Because revelling in obscurity is downright silly. And because it’s our research. Ours. Let’s write it as gloriously as we know how.

Martyn Lawrence

@martynlawrence

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/martynlawrence

Martyn Lawrence is Publisher at Emerald Group Publishing, with almost ten years experience of journals and serials acquisition. He holds a PhD from the University of York, and sits on taskforces that monitor open access, bibliometrics and the wider impact of scholarly research. A frequent contributor to international publishing workshops, he is a member of the ALPSP Government Affairs committee and incoming Publishing Manager at the Royal Armouries, Leeds.

Notes on the Future of the Academic Book in Africa

Posted on April 5, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academia, academic books, publishing and tagged Africa, Dr Ola Uduku, KNUST.

This guest blog post is by Dr Ola Uduku (University of Edinburgh) and is associated with The Academic Book in the South, a two-day conference held at the British Library on 7-8 March 2016. Organised by the British Library in collaboration with Professor Marilyn Deegan (KCL and The Academic Book of the Future project) and Dr Caroline Davis (Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University), you can read more about the conference here: http://www.bl.uk/events/the-academic-book-in-the-south#sthash.ne453DAQ.dpuf and view the Storify of conference tweets here: https://storify.com/AcBookFuture/the-academic-book-in-the-south

Academic books in Africa, despite being produced and available for at least half a century, are now a rare sight to behold in the continent’s academic institutions. Locally-authored academic books are even harder to find. As a frequent traveller to West Africa over the past five years, and a writer on school design in Africa’s schools, higher institutions and libraries, I have both encountered and studied many of the buildings that hold these repositories of knowledge. Beginning with this educational infrastructure, this post will explore the spaces which books and readers inhabit and then consider what books are being written and published, and what kind of future both academic publishing and the physical book might have in Africa.

KNUST Library. Credit: Dr Ola Uduku

For the purposes of this discussion I am restricting my investigation of the academic book to undergraduate textbooks. These are perhaps the most basic form of the definition: more high level academic texts in this context would be even rarer to find in tertiary institutions. In both Ghanaian universities I visited recently, undergraduate courses in the humanities still had academic textbooks on their curriculum reading lists. At this level, the texts are a mix of locally- and internationally-published books, with a predominance of the latter. No journal articles were available to view on public open access, making them extremely difficult to obtain, although with the open access computer lab at KNUST (the Kwami Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana) journal articles were available digitally.

Credit: Dr Ola Uduku

Temples of Knowledge

Despite being a few hundred miles south of Timbuktu, libraries and universities in this area of Africa can hardly live up to their scholarly description. In my experience of libraries in Ghana and Nigeria, it seems that the buildings themselves are still important components of university campuses, but their physical book stocks and use are less certain.

Empty shelves. Credit: Dr Ola Uduku

On a recent visit to libraries at the KNUST and Legon Universities in Ghana I was able to make certain first-hand observations. The libraries seemed reasonably well-maintained, furnished, and staffed, making these historic ‘modernist’-designed structures appear to be viable places to study and borrow books. However the reality is somewhat different: library stacks are sparsely stocked, holding some editions of historic text books, but rarely any up-to-date journals or printed matter. Unsurprisingly there are few students using the library reading spaces for study – proportionally it seems there are often more staff than users of these libraries.

The only exceptions to this depressing state of affairs are the ‘IT’ and ‘open access’ computer suites, which provide banks of desktop computers in air-cooled spaces, allowing students access to digital resources online. At KNUST, this was the most student-populated space in the entire library – one floor up a further computer suite was being fitted out during my visit. For Ghana’s historic ‘premier’ universities then this was the state of affairs: poorly resourced physical book and journal stock, with emerging digital resources being available via centralised library desktop computer facilities.

Computer areas at KNUST Library. Credit: Dr Ola Uduku.

The Challenges Faced

Discussing my own observations with academics in Ghana, a number of key issues surfaced.

Firstly the generic problem of all academics: the time to write.

Most academic departments were overstretched and understaffed, and lecturers therefore did not have the time to do more than fulfil the teaching required of them. Some schools, such as the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana, did have a sabbatical system in place, but this seems to be an exception to the general state of affairs.

Secondly, undeniably many academics in Africa lack the training or support to write academically. Whilst the African Studies Association UK (ASAUK) has hosted a number of successful writing workshops, mainly targeted at emerging and young staff, these have tended to be ‘one off’ events, driven by UK researcher interests. The example of the Wits Writing Centre at the University of the Witswatersrand would perhaps be a more appropriate way to address this. By having the Writing Centre on campus, always available to staff and students, this both foregrounds the importance of writing and gives access to writing support to all staff and students at the university.

Finally, as with the UK, in most African universities, for career advancement and promotion academic books are less critical than the refereed academic paper. In Africa, publishing itself takes significantly more time to achieve with the vagaries of production, editing, and printing in the African setting. There are of course publishing houses in Africa, but their focus is not on academic book publishing.

The Future of Academic Books in Africa

So what might the future look like for academic publishing in Africa? A piece I worked on last year considering specifically the issues related to the future 21^st-century classroom for primary and secondary education has some relevance to the tertiary sector also. If we start from the premise that academic material for student study will need to be provided, and the current system of distribution, via the academic textbook, either individually purchased or available for loan via university library outlets, is flawed and no longer works, then we need to explore what the future learning landscape might be.

In my work on schools the idea of the ICT-linked classroom came to the fore, which posits a situation where students from higher primary level learn through networked cheap personal ‘tablet’ readers to which material is downloaded in ‘packets’ (Uduku, 2015). ‘Packets’ are small units of material, such as chapters or homework/task exercises, which can be downloaded by students using today’s cut-price mobile devices. This is predicated on the further spread of wireless hotspots to more inaccessible areas through the use of GPS satellite technology, already in use by health and aid organisations in remote regions of the world.

Taking this idea to tertiary education, the concept translates to publishing also becoming increasingly digital, with materials being produced in smaller ‘packets’, likely to be chapters or sections, which student mobile devices would be able to deal with. Thus, instead of publishing a 7-chapter ‘e-book’ on anthropology, this would be distributed as seven separate chapters, downloadable, either for purchase as digital mini e-books or for borrowing sequentially, using a university server.

The facilities needed for this would change the face of library facilities – the book stacks would disappear, with only a limited reserve section left, whilst there would be significantly less investment in computer hardware and more in ethernet and wifi infrastructure needed to support better, high speed access and download rates. The library spaces thus would not disappear, but be used more as areas of access to high speed broadband and wifi connections that students and staff could use for free to link their own devices to the the internet to download material for study and reading, at differential pricing: free for loan periods, or at a discounted price by chapter.

In the West this would be termed a ‘BYOD: bring your own device’ policy, which gives the responsibility of the hardware required for online access to the students and users of the material. In my recent experience in Ghana, most tertiary level students had both computers and also smartphones, so this policy could easily be implemented, although clearly it would take longer to institute in poorer countries.

Enhancing and increasing African academic authorship is likely to take a longer sustained programme of local and international support. The need for sabbatical time off is crucial for all academics, arguably more so in Africa and other emerging economies where staff are overburdened with teaching. As not all staff are going to be lucky enough to receive scholarships or collaborative grants, the need to work on developing local writing centres and support programmes for writing in critical. As mentioned above, there are existing models such as the ‘Wits Writing centre’ that could be instituted in universities, or perhaps at regional level.

This would mean that there would be less dependence on programmes from abroad or occasional workshops, and could result in the development of an African academic writers network, likely to be in association with African publishers. Thus an academic ‘hub for writing and publishing’ at larger universities or at regional level would be a possible way forward, to be refined to best suit the needs of regional or large universities. Again such ‘hubs’ would by definition not be insular but hopefully prove to be forums, both physical and ‘in the ether’ for international collaborations also to take place. It seems to me that the ubiquitous nature of the Ethernet and high speed networks, combined with ‘Moore’s law’ bringing down the cost of personal mobile devices, could be a positive force for African book publishing to make the move from physical to digital and enjoy a 21^st century renaissance .

References:

Uduku, O. (2015) Designing Schools for Quality: An International Case study-based review, International Journal of Educational Development, vol. 44 September 2015. 56 – 64.
Uduku, O. (2015) Chapter 15: Spaces for 21^stCentury Learning. In Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development. Eds. McGrath and Gu Q. Routledge. pp. 196 – 209

Quadrivium XI: Identity, Use, and Creation of Academic ‘Books’ for Medievalists

Posted on March 10, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academia, academic books, Community Coalition and tagged medievalists, Quadrivium.

Continuing the Project’s emphasis on working with specialist academic disciplines, on 25-26 February 2016 the Project consulted with medievalist Early Career Researchers, sponsoring this year’s Quadrivium, with the theme: ‘The Academic Book of the Future: Identity, Use, and Creation of Academic “Books” for Medievalists.’ This scholarly group has a very specialist set of research requirements – often studying content that can only be found in ancient manuscripts, or in archaic languages such as Latin or Old English. This specialism raises specific issues around the academic book, which the Project is keen to investigate. Quadrivium is an annual research, careers, and skills training event for postgraduates and ECRs of medieval and early modern textual studies. The two-day event took place at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Dr Takako Kato, organiser of this year’s Quadrivium, began by asking the following questions:

When you finish your PhD, will you want to write an academic book?

If so, what sort of academic book would you want to create?

The resulting discussion revealed the complexity inherent in these seemingly simple questions.

What is an academic book?

The first response was: what IS an academic book? The ECRs set about trying to define it what an academic book is, so that they could decide whether or not they would like to write one. Upon discussion, the following were agreed as some (although not all) of the indicators of an academic book:

Audience and authors – who reads academic books, and who writes them?

Academics
Researchers of all kinds
‘Mad people who do this for pleasure’
‘My grandparents read academic books’
Policy-makers, government departments
The queen?
Written for academics, by academics
Books for students by academics
BUT – academic books not just for people in the ‘ivory tower’ – Vera Wang was apparently reading an academic book when inspired to create some of her famous designs
Assume a certain level of knowledge and interest

Function and tone:

Transmission of knowledge
Must be part of a conversation – unlike books for general reading, which may not refer to previous scholarship
Didactic/instructional
Heavily researched
Specific academic ‘tone’
Peer review – must be vetted by others in the field

For medievalists academic books may also include the actual manuscripts, as well as their critical editions

The important question was also raised: What IS an academic? This was highlighted as requiring definition too, but was outside of the scope of this conversation.

How do you feel about making an academic book?

The ECRs stated their awareness that the monograph still commands huge respect, and is also expected in terms of research output and evaluation purposes, such as the REF. However, it was suggested by some that in the future it would be good to have the option of the academic book in other forms, such as a portfolio of work.

Dr Ryan Perry (Uni. of Kent) suggested that research output could take the form of a collection of case studies, without the enforced requirement to be synthesised into a central thesis.

How do medieval scholars use academic books?

This suggestion connected to notions of reading methods. Prof. Andrew Prescott (Uni. of Glasgow) for instance, stated that he usually reads monographs from cover to cover, whereas Dr Perry tends to dip in and out of them, using the index to navigate to required material: ‘There’s something beautiful about a well-constructed monograph, but I most often enter them from the index, rather than reading them from cover to cover.

Prof. Prescott replied, ‘That would worry me – because it’s very easy to miss connections… Perhaps it’s a disciplinary thing – in history so many things are interconnected, it’s not just discrete blocks of information.’

Credit: Hollie Morgan/Quadrivium

The ECRs engaged in this debate, with some suggesting that entering into an academic book via the index can be problematic – headwords can be quite arbitrary, and indices can be put together hastily, or inconsistently. One ECR claimed: ‘Reading a long book from start to finish is important for concentration, and for the practice of our discipline. If we carry on with this bite-sized attitude, only entering into the book in chunks from the index, we will lose a lot of the capacity of our discipline.’ Another suggested that this attitude might be ‘ableist’, as not everyone can undertake research in that way. She went on: ‘I don’t always have time to read around a topic in an academic book, especially depending on the language – if it’s an academic book in antiquated language, I am not encouraged to read further, especially as I am dyslexic.’

This, the group concluded, is why readable/searchable digital academic books are so important – offering the choice of deep reading from start to finish, as well as meaningful possibilities to search effectively; to dip in and out as required, depending on the scholar’s requirements and preferred reading style.

What do (medieval) scholars want from academic books?

The group listed their basic requirements as:

Information
If a physical book, then a free digital copy should be made available, too
Useful publishing apparatus: functional contents pages, introductions, prefaces, chapter titles, page numbers, index
Bibliography and further reading
Should look good on the shelf – aesthetic appeal
An order and structure that makes content and knowledge easily accessible
Linearity of argument – should be easy to follow

With the following requests for books specifically for medievalists:

Translations of primary sources
Videos and enriched content – such an animated marginalia!
Access to things that are lost or endangered – for instance digitised versions of rare or delicate manuscripts

What can technology do to help make academic books more accessible for medievalists?

The medievalist ECRs were asked to consider ways in which technology does, or should, make their research life easier. Having an electronic copy of an academic book or a digitised manuscript allows for a more global scholarship on that material, eliminating the requirement of being in the physical vicinity of that book. However, the pitfalls of digital versions include the possibility of being locked behind a paywall if your institution does not subscribe or if you are an independent scholar. It also excludes scholars with technological impairments – such as those living in areas without consistent Internet connections. It also means that undigitised books or manuscripts may be neglected, with a glut of scholarship being written on manuscripts that are available online.

The group emphasised the following technological features for enhancing general accessibility to academic books:

Catering for different types of learners – e.g. providing content that is useful to those with auditory or visual learning styles, or as already discussed, for those readers with varying abilities or impairments, or for deep readers as well as those who like to dip in and out of content
Discoverability: finding books easily enables scholars to read them, rather than waste time hunting one book down

Medievalists have specialist requirements, so further suggestions specific to this group of researchers included:

Clarify specialist content – e.g. recordings of pronunciations of difficult/specialist/dead words
A database of ALL medieval manuscripts – and digitised versions, if possible

After this group discussion, Michael Pidd (Sheffield), Dr Ryan Perry (Kent), and Dr Hollie Morgan (Lincoln) presented their own experiences and thoughts around the academic book using case studies of innovative research and outputs that they have produced, as well as other ongoing work – followed by a fantastic plenary talk by Professor Andrew Prescott, and a second day of workshops and discussions. This part of Quadrivium will be discussed in a separate blog post.

A Storify of the discussion, and the rest of the two-day event, is available here: https://storify.com/Codicologist/quadrivium-xi

Huge thanks to Dr Takako Kato for organising this fantastic event, and to all of the speakers and participants for attending and contributing.

International Arthurian Society: Books, Libraries, and Learned Societies

Posted on March 2, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, libraries, research and tagged Carlos Sanz Mingo, International Arthurian Society, Natalie Goodison, Victoria Shirley, Zoe Enstone.

Last year, the Project consulted with several specialist academic groups, including Miltonists, Eighteenth-century studies scholars, and the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society (IASBB). A competition was launched with the Arthurians to write and submit a blog post on a topic related to reading influences or practices – including favoured locations and ways to read, academically; iconic texts; or the place that belonging to a learned society has in their research life. Full details of the competition can be found here. The entries were judged by Professor P.J.C. Field (Bangor) and Sue Hodges, Bangor University’s Director of Libraries and Archives. The winning entry was judged to be that written by Anastasija Ropa, who completed her BA and MA at the University of Latvia, and her PhD at Bangor University. An edited version of Anastaija’s winning entry was published on this blog last week. Today’s blog post publishes all of the runner-up entries. The Project would like to extend its congratulations to Anastasija and all the competition entrants for their stimulating and honest posts. The runners up were:

Zoe Enstone (University of Leeds)
Natalie Goodison (Durham University)
Victoria Shirley (Cardiff University)

Lonely library or collaborative centre? – Zoe Enstone

Dr Zoe Enstone’s PhD explored the origin and development of Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian texts, and she is currently researching the use of the image of luxuria in the romances. Zoe is an Arts, Humanities and Academic Skills Tutor for the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds.

My university recently opened a new library. It’s light and modern and well-suited to the way that my students work, with a focus on collaboration, group work and technology in the shared study spaces, group rooms and computer clusters (as well as plug sockets EVERYWHERE for all their gadgets). But as much as I appreciate the adaptability of the new space, this library is not where I work best. This isn’t because I’m a medievalist and I can’t understand all this ‘new-fangled’ gadgetry; we’re sometimes perceived as being unable to progress beyond the quill pen, but I actually think that we’re quite technologically attuned (as the wonderful array of manuscript digitisation projects and other resources will attest). Although I understand and appreciate all this new architecture and the range of technology, for my own research I prefer to work in the old library.

I think that part of my preference lies in the very heart of my ideas about academic research and teaching in the arts and humanities; that sense of looking back to the past to inform the work that we do in the present. I love the idea that generations of scholars have shared this space and these objects – the possibility that fifty years ago, someone might have been sitting in the same seat, reading the same book as me for the first time and thinking the same thing (or the complete opposite – what’s academia without a bit of debate?).

As wonderful as group study in the shiny new library might be, nothing seems quite as closely shared as the realisation that you have somehow connected with someone from the past’s ideas and that in the future you could be sharing those ideas with a student or colleague. For me, the first academic book that ‘spoke’ to me in this way was a particularly dusty copy of Sir Orfeo to which a number of previous students had ‘contributed’ their own reactions and interpretations through a range of scrawling comments in the margins – there was one particular comment that reflected my own reaction to an aspect of the text and I felt a wonderful sense of being part of an academic community that extended beyond my own immediate cohort. I have this same sense of recognition sometimes with manuscript marginalia – even if I don’t agree with their comments, a sense of having shared an experience of a text is fascinating and motivational in equal measures.

For as much as academia is portrayed as a solitary activity (no ‘welcome’ mats in our ivory towers, apparently), it is, in fact, an intensely collaborative affair – it is merely that our collaboration is often with those who are not immediately at hand or who are long dead. I don’t intend to suggest that academics are covert mediums, communicating through Ouija Boards, merely that the ideas that we read, discuss, debate, and share are often hundreds of years old and are preserved in these precious artefacts that we have hoarded into collections in libraries. The physical presence of these books reminds me of the long and often complicated route that these ideas have traversed to make it through to the present day.

And that sense of history and our involvement in it inspires me to study; to create new ideas to add to the collection or to inspire someone else to make their contribution through sharing these precious resources. I can only hope that, one day, the academics of the future have a workspace and resources that are equally inspiring- perhaps one day the new library will be imbued with the same sense of history and tradition that I find in my beloved older library. But for now, for me, my desk in the corner, surrounded by the ideas of others, is where I find my inspiration and collaboration.

The International Arthurian Society: an academic family – Natalie Goodison

In 2011 Natalie completed her masters in Medieval Studies at Edinburgh University with a thesis focusing on the French and English Breton Lay. In the autumn of 2011, she commenced her PhD at Durham University under the supervision of Corinne Saunders, on supernatural transformation in medieval romance.

That day I was just dropping off a form to the English department.

‘Ah Natalie, do you have a moment to complete your annual review?’, a commanding voice asked behind me.

I spun around to see Professor Elizabeth Archibald was speaking to me from inside her office. Review, what review? Oh, my annual review. Oh my days, what had I put on that form? Did I say anything horrible? I try never to say horrible things, only to think them, and certainly not to write them. No, I doubt I would have put anything awful on that form, but Lord Almighty, what did I say?

‘I think so.’

‘Are you busy just now? It will only take a moment.’

She ordered her thoughts so logically. How could I not have a moment?

‘Yes, of course. Although, I don’t remember what I put on my review.’

I shuffled into Elizabeth’s office, thinking how woefully unprepared I was. It was a meeting with Elizabeth Archibald! She’d only just come to Durham as new Principal of Cuths – a proficient academic, and roaring public speaker. She once gave a lecture on Secular verses Sacred Love and I still have the chart of when it’s okay to have sex in the Middle Ages affixed to my office desk. (The answer? Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday; and don’t enjoy it.) This was my first full year at Durham University, the beautiful Durham with its castle and cathedral and river and archives and colleges and evensong. I was meant to be completing research towards a PhD. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was actually doing.

We work through the questionnaire.

‘What training needs do you have? Some languages? French and German?’ Elizabeth jots those down.

‘And what is the outline so far of your thesis?’

Good Lord. I’d spent the last year compiling a database of supernatural moments in saints’ lives. I could tell you some pretty racy stories about baby Jesus in the ‘Life of St Anne’, but chapter outlines? I blustered through the general direction I thought I should take.

‘What is your goal in the next two months? How about you complete a chapter? Which one?’

I cannot for the life of me remember what I said, but I must have answered something because she wrote that down too and added, ‘Right. The next time I see you I hope it will be progressing well.’

I replied with a guttural, ‘I hope so.’

‘Now, Natalie, have you yet joined the IAS?’

The IAS? The IAS. The…

I must have demonstrated my bewilderment on my face—a fault of mine since childhood. By all means, invite me to play poker with you. You will surely win.

‘The International Arthurian Society, Natalie’, she supplied.

Riiiiiiight. They had their international conference in Bristol just a few summers ago. I was waste deep in a Master’s thesis at Edinburgh then and didn’t dare take any time for such frivolity. Least of all to say I knew no one. I still wasn’t sure what it actually was. Earlier that summer I had been to a medieval day at the Arthurian Centre in Cornwall and it was, by far, one of the oddest experiences of my life. Everyone was dressed up in pseudo-medieval clothing. We watched men joust, and before they had even struck blows, one knight’s lance had already broken. Drinks were sold out of cow horns that still retained bovine sediment, which swirled unwelcome amid one’s ale. Those I spoke with seemed deeply put out that modernity existed, and there was an air of cultish fanaticism that put my boyfriend completely off anything to do with the Middle Ages. For the next two years, all I heard was how weird medievalists were, and please, would I not turn out like them. So maybe the IAS was something like that?

‘You must join, immediately. It’s great fun. Here, I’ll propose you.’

Why didn’t this sound like fun? And what did she mean by ‘propose’? I had been dating the same guy for four years and he’d never uttered the word propose. Here Elizabeth brings it up in the first ten minutes of conversation. This was certainly sounding more like a cult.

‘And I’m sure that Corinne will be very happy to second you.’

There was a moment of silence while I contemplated how to phrase a response without sounding like a total idiot.

‘Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.’

‘Right. We meet in Bangor this year. I’ll expect to see you there.’

I barely registered her final words, and when I do recall them, it is of one as in a dream. I felt like I had just walked down a very blustery alley, and for some reason felt bruised. There were many things I should have taken away from that conversation, but the only thing I certainly did was Google, ‘IAS’. With some probing (having avoided International Accounting Standards), I found the website, a very swish logo of a knight on a horse, and downloaded the application form.

The requirements said that one must be proposed and seconded. I sat for a very long time on my bed, laptop on knees, whiskey in hand, debating whether or not I wanted to join. The truth was I was absolutely terrified. The only people I vaguely knew in this society were erudite academics. I did not know another soul. My supervisor’s other students were much older than I was, and who knew if they’d be going? For permission to join, they required that I bandy around academics’ names on a silly proposal form. What if I needed to use those names again for something truly important? What if I had wasted them now on something ridiculous? Who did I even need to send this to? The secretary, who, at the time, was Professor Jane Taylor. It seemed everyone in this society was a tenured high-and-mighty. I certainly would not fit in. To stall for time, I flipped through the website pages. There was a photo. A photo of Professor Peter Field. Now, that was very exciting! Peter Field! He used to teach at Bangor! Peter was my first link with my love of Arthurian things. He was a friend of Professor Edward Donald (Don) Kennedy at UNC who had written my references to get into Durham and Edinburgh. In my final semester as an undergraduate, I was determined to take a course on Arthurian Literature. The Dean even had to grant me special permission to extend my course load. Don Kennedy’s class enchanted me. I remember holding Peter’s edition of Malory’s final two books in my hands; I remember my excitement as I read of Guinevere and the poisoned apple; I remembered my unexpectedly emotional response. That was why I was in Durham continuing to read medieval things. I took a sip of whiskey, and pressed the ‘send’ button to Jane. Cult or not, I was in.

You can imagine my surprise to receive a letter from Jane saying that my application was impressive (what did that mean?); my relief, several months later, to see the Call For Papers go out (‘Oh, it’s just a conference. There will be no animal sacrifices.’); my trepidation as I booked and boarded my train for Wales; and my delight at finding a few friendly faces I knew in the crowd. As I hesitantly queued up for the registry, I overheard an expressive voice say, ‘Oh, Elizabeth, we don’t NEED name badges. They’re so embarrassing. Besides, we already all know each other.’ This lady had clearly lost the argument by the time I had reached the top of the queue, because she was now sporting a name badge that read, ‘Sam’ (Dr Samantha Rayner). She seemed like she knew what was going on. I didn’t want to disagree with ‘Sam’, but I was thankful for the name badges.

As I took my seat, I quietly observed others interacting as I pretended to peruse the conference pack. They certainly laughed a lot. And they seemed to like each other. I was jolted out of my observations on this breed of people, when my eye caught something in the packet: Elizabeth Archibald was the President of the IAS! That’s why my application was impressive. Why hadn’t she told me she was President? And why wasn’t it on their stupid website? My thoughts were cut short as the first session began.

The coffee breaks were socially uncomfortable as coffee breaks generally are: they involve people. But, strangely, that didn’t keep people from speaking to me, and, as we bumped our elbows over sugar, ask me what area of research I worked on. I remember talking to a very tall lady (Gillian Rogers), and when I told her I was currently working on aspects of the supernatural in some late Middle English Gawain romances, she spilled her tea all over saucer in excitement. Walking back from a manuscript exhibition, Jane Bliss (I knew this was she thanks to those wonderful name badges) asked me what I was working on, and when Prof. Jane Taylor (in the flesh!) overheard, said she’d send me a reference of two white bears in French literature. I thought it was more likely that Arthur would return before I’d receive that reference, but at her request, I gave her my email. You can imagine my shock, though perhaps seasoned members will be unsurprised, when I received an email a few weeks later with the subject line: ‘Two White Bears’.

Younger scholars attended too. There was a person named ‘Bex’ (Rebecca Lyons) who seemed to be everywhere and knew everyone. She had a contagious laugh, but I was shy of making her acquaintance. There was a PhD student at St Andrews who grew up next to my home state. Another PhD student was looking at faeries—an interest we both shared. Others, like me, had travelled from Durham and Sunderland. Some weren’t medievalists, but modern Arthurian scholars. I remember a paper on Michael Morpurgo’s misogyny that thoroughly frightened me from ever reading that children’s author. (Thanks, Adele.)

I was soon becoming overwhelmed. One lady was looking for book reviewers; another offered to advise PhD students on publication strategies. I met Prof. Peter Field, in a spotlight as his newly edited Malory volumes were finally complete. I asked him when the set were to be released, and looking back, I’m still not sure how to process his response. He said, ‘Far be it from me to compare myself with that certain condition of women, but I feel as though I’ve had twins, and the second one simply won’t come out!’ I was nearing the brink of needing a drink when Elizabeth gave a speech. In it, she said how excited she was for Peter’s new volume and confessed that even now, reading Malory made her cry. While I have a very good imagination, the thought of Elizabeth Archibald crying seemed impossible, and at that very moment, distressing. I felt like I was the one on the verge of tears. I couldn’t quite express it. Here I was, a lowly small PhD student, and I had suddenly encountered a new world. Renowned scholars rubbed elbows with lowly grad students and seemed genuinely interested in their research. The lowly grad students teased the renowned academics like they were old friends. It was a room full of book lovers; of, on probability, introverts; of people who grew excited and emotional over the same things I did. They were even just as socially awkward as I was! Yet how very welcoming they were. I suspected that even if they disagreed with someone’s scholarship they would phrase their contention genially. Perhaps the disagreement was where the fun lay. I realised, in fact, that this was a room full of people like me.

As this realisation ran through my head, we exited en masse to the bar. It was a brisk starless evening. I was oddly content. Though I couldn’t keep out the thought that maybe I had got it wrong. Maybe after all this was a cult.

I blinked. Without realizing it, I had reached the head of the bar queue and I was completely unprepared for my order. Elizabeth must have recognized that familiar, bewildered, expression on my face.

‘Right, Natalie. What will it be? G&T? Drinks on me.’

I gratefully accepted. As I sipped my drink, I considered that this definitely was not like the experience at the Arthurian Centre in Delabole. Well, if it wasn’t a cult, then it had to be a family. I was in.

The books I consider to be the most iconic scholarly Arthurian texts – Victoria Shirley 

Victoria is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate working on the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the construction of ‘British’ history in England, Scotland, and Wales (1270-1530). She is interested in Arthurian literature, medievalism, medieval historical writing, nationalism and nation studies, and origin myths.

Faral and Griscom: two iconic editions of the Historia regum Britanniae

In 1929, two editions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae appeared in print. The first edition was by Edmond Faral, and it appeared in his three-volume work, La Légende arthurienne: études et documents. The second, by Acton Griscom, was entitled The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, with contributions to the Study of its place in early British History. Both editions are iconic Arthurian texts as they were the first critical editions of the Historia regum Britanniae. This short post begins with a brief overview of these two editions, and then examines their reception among medieval scholars during the twentieth century.

The texts

Faral and Griscom adopted two very different editorial approaches. Faral aimed to produce a critical edition of the Historia that was based on ten manuscripts, with the most important manuscripts being Cambridge, Trinity College, MS. 0.2.21 (1125), Bern, Burgerbiliothek, MS. 568, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijkuniversiteit, MS. B.P.L.20, and Paris, Biliotheque nationale, MS. Lat. 6233. The text of the Historia was printed in the third volume of Faral’s study, alongside Nennius’s Historia Britonnum, the Annales Cambriae, and Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini. Faral’s study focused exclusively on these Latin texts: he intended to demonstrate how educated writers influenced the formation of Arthurian romance, with a particular focus on the literary traditions that informed the work of Chrétien de Troyes.

In comparison, Griscom’s text of the Historia was a diplomatic edition of a single manuscript. The main manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, MS. Ii.1.14, was collated with Bern, Burgerbibliothethek, MS. 465 and Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS. Porkington 17. These manuscripts provided the Latin text for the edition, which was printed alongside an English translation of Jesus College, Oxford, LXI, a fifteenth-century version of the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd, by Robert Ellis Jones. Through this combination of Latin and Welsh materials, Griscom attempted to show the relationship between the Historia and the corpus of Welsh chronicles, and he argued that the manuscripts of the Welsh Brut provided the ‘best hope’ of discovering the main source the legendary ‘British’ book that Geoffrey used as his main source.[1] Griscom’s edition also included a list of one hundred and ninety manuscripts, from forty-nine different libraries and private collections, in eleven different countries.

Critical reception

Faral and Griscom’s editions fared very differently with reviewers. Albert C. Baugh praised Faral’s edition for its ‘eminently readable’ style, but he was particularly critical of the methodology of the edition, and he suggested that the source-by-source analysis could have benefitted from ‘greater economy’.[2] Furthermore, Baugh questioned Faral’s lack of engagement with current scholarship on the chronicle materials, and he also noted that Faral held a particular skepticism for Celticist scholarship.[3] The most scathing review of Faral’s edition came from Roger Sherman Loomis, who often criticized scholars who did not consider the impact of Celtic literature on the production of Arthurian texts.[4] Loomis accused Faral of deliberately obscuring the evidence for the Celtic origins of Arthurian romance, and he even suggested that Farl was ignorant of the entire tradition, stating that ‘what he does not know he cannot recognize’.[5] Loomis ends his review with a particularly cutting remark:

It is to be hoped for the sake of scholarship and his own high reputation that M. Faral will realize these grave limitations, and that, when he continues his work, it will reveal a knowledge of Celtic literature and an understanding of how it would be affected by a long period of oral transmission.[6]

Loomis’ review demonstrates the divisions between scholars about the origins of the Arthurian legend in the early twentieth century, and his comments about Faral’s edition clearly reveals some of the limitations of viewing Geoffrey’s Historia in a wholly Latinate context.

Griscom’s edition elicited very different responses from reviewers. E. G. Withycombe referred to the edition as a ‘monument of industry’,[7] and insisted that Griscom ‘deserves the gratitude of scholars for at last providing what appears to be a sound text’.[8] Similarly, Arthur C. L. Brown praised Griscom’s edition for its ‘faithful transcription’ of the Cambridge Manuscript.[9] Nevertheless, both reviewers did raise some concerns about the edition. Withycombe argued that Griscom was unsuccessful in demonstrating how the Welsh Bruts could be used as evidence to establish the ancient ‘British’ sources of the Historia. Meanwhile, Brown raised some doubt over Griscom’s choice of manuscripts: in order for the edition to have a greater impact on scholarship, he suggested that an ‘ancient and more inaccessible’[10] version of the Welsh Brut could have been used, especially as Jesus College, Oxford MS LXI, had already been translated. Brown, however, recommended Griscom’s edition over Faral’s, claiming that ‘Mr Griscom’s edition is the one which will be used by scholars who are investigating the origins of Arthurian romance’.[11] Furthermore, the critical value of Griscom’s edition was later affirmed by J. S. P. Tatlock, who used it in his magisterial Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brianniae and its Early Verncular Versions (1950).

Critical legacy

In recent years, the editions of the Historia by Faral and Griscom have been criticized for not meeting the needs of modern scholarship. Both editions have been superseded by Neil Wright and Julia Crick’s work on Historia regum Britanniae, and the five volume series published by D. S Brewer includes an edition of Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568; and edition of the First Variant; a catalogue of the manuscripts of the Historia; a study of the dissemination and reception of the Historia; and an edition and translation of the Gesta Regum Britanniae. In his introduction to the Bern MS, Wright offers an assessment of the two editions. Despite the inaccuracies of Faral’s text, Wright praises his editorial approach, especially his attempt to collate the manuscripts. In comparison, Griscom’s edition receives much more criticism as the Cambridge MS he based his edition was actually corrupt in many places. Wright ultimately concludes that Faral’s edition is ‘more helpful to the reader than Griscom’s eccentric work’.[12]

Nevertheless, Griscom’s edition has not been entirely discredited. Siân Echard writes that

while Faral produced a reading edition for those who wanted to get the gist of Geoffrey on their way to Chrétien and others, Griscom makes an attempt at a truly scholarly edition.[13]

The best features of Griscom’s edition are its editorial paratexts. His introduction shows a comprehensive understanding of the manuscripts of the Historia, and he was convinced that Geoffrey’s work appeared in ‘various editions’ or recensions. The framework for his edition was also encouraged further scholarship, and he remarks that ‘I shall be content if I have succeeded in throwing open doors through which others may advance and carry forward the work of disentangling the historical from the imaginative elements in Geoffrey’s work’.[14] The authority of Geoffrey’s ‘British’ book – which for Griscom was a tangible reality – has been the subject of much Galfridian scholarship.[15] Moreover, Griscom’s catalogue of manuscripts of the Historia and the Brut y Brenhinedd enabled further study of the Latin and Welsh manuscript traditions throughout the twentieth century. Griscom must surely be commended for initiating these critical advances.

Summary

Faral and Griscom’s editions of the Historia regum Britanniae are iconic scholarly texts for two very different reasons. Faral’s edition and provided a sound text of the Historia for a generation of scholars. Griscom’s edition, however, has a greater intellectual longevity. The issue that Griscom raised about the Welsh origins of the Historia has now become a question about Geoffrey’s political allegiances, and his ideological use of ‘British’ historical sources is still open for debate.

[1] Acton Griscom, ‘Introduction’, The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth with contributions to the study of its place in early British History (London and New York: Longman, 1929), pp. 3-216 (p. 7).

[2] Albert C. Baugh, review of Edmond Faral, La Légende arthurienne. Première Partie: Les Plus Anciens Texts, Modern Philology, 29.3 (Feb, 1932) : 357-365 (365).

[3] Baugh, ‘Edmond Faral’, 365.

[4] Other subjects of Loomis’ critical ridicule included J. D. Bruce, J. S. P Tatlock, and Gordon Hall Gerould.

[5] Roger Sherman Loomis, review of Edmond Faral, La Légende arthurienne. Première Partie: Les Plus Anciens Texts, Modern Language Notes, 46.3 (March, 1931): 175-179 (179).

[6] Loomis, ‘Edmond Faral’, 179.

[7] E. G. Withycombe, review of The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth by Acton Griscom. Longman, 1929, Antiquity 5.19 (Sept, 1931): 383-384 (383).

[8] Withycombe, ‘Acton Griscom’, 383.

[9] Arthur C. L. Brown, review of The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth by Acton Griscom. Longman, 1929, Modern Language Notes, 46.3 (March, 1931): 182-183.

[10] Brown, ‘Acton Griscom’, 183.

[11] Brown, ‘Acton Griscom’, 183.

[12] Neil Wright, ‘Introduction’, The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), I, ix-lix (xlix).

[13] Siân Echard, ‘Latin Arthurian Literature, in A History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 62-76 (p. 65).

[14] Griscom, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

[15] See Echard, ‘Latin Arthurian Literature’, pp. 62-76.

Anastastija has won a week as Visiting Fellow at the new collection of Arthurian books housed in Bangor University Library, consisting of a week’s accommodation at the Management Centre in Bangor, and a £100 contribution from the IASBB towards travel costs to get there. As the winner, Anastasija has also agreed to write a report on your time in Bangor once the Visiting Fellowship is complete. The Project would like to extend its special thanks to the Management Centre in Bangor for their generous provision of a week’s accommodation, and to the IASBB for providing up to £100 in travel expenses for the winner. They would also like to thank Professor Raluca Radulescu, who has kindly agreed to meet with the Fellow to discuss research and use of the collection.

Why We Like Reading an Old Story in an Old Book

Posted on February 17, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, research and tagged Anastasija Ropa, competition, IASBB, International Arthurian Society British Branch.

Last year, the Project consulted with several specialist academic groups, including Miltonists, Eighteenth-century studies, and the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society (IASBB). A competition was launched with the IASBB to write and submit a blog post on a topic related to reading influences or practices – including favoured locations and ways to read, academically; iconic texts; or the place that a learned society like the IASBB has in their research life. Full details of the competition can be found here. The entries were judged by Professor P.J.C. Field (Bangor) and Sue Hodges, Bangor University’s Director of Libraries and Archives. The winning entry was judged to be that written by Anastasija Ropa, who completed her BA and MA at the University of Latvia, and her PhD at Bangor University. Anastasija has won a week as Visiting Fellow at the new collection of Arthurian books housed in Bangor University Library, consisting of a week’s accommodation at the Management Centre in Bangor, and a £100 contribution from the IASBB towards travel costs to get there. As the winner, Anastasija has also agreed to write a report on her time in Bangor once the Visiting Fellowship is complete.

An edited version of Anastaija’s winning entry is reproduced in this blog post in full, and the Project would like to extend its congratulations to Anastasija and all the competition entrants for their stimulating, thought-provoking, and honest posts.

Some books are boring, some are entertaining and some change your life. Which is going to be the book to change the lives of the next generation of Arthurian scholars? Is it Malory; is it Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; or Chretien de Troyes? Or something completely different? I would say these books have their potential, and are likely to remain significant for generations of students and scholars – especially given the brilliant new critical editions that facilitate their access and study. Yet I have a feeling there is something to be said for the less common candidates in the less glossy modern editions, for a number of reasons. Firstly, new critical editions are expensive and hard to come by, especially outside the UK and US. Students in smaller universities around the world will continue to read the older editions of the romances. When I was a student, my own library had only one edition of Malory – Vinaver’s, and no edition of Chretien’s romances or Sir Gawain.

However, the expensiveness of new editions is not the whole argument. Shall I confess my love of old books, including old scholarly books, to a community of progressive academics versed in the most recent trends in humanities studies? Yes, I shall – knowing that I am not alone. At the heart of it, much as we find the latest editions valuable and indispensible in our daily we work, we look at the old editions with affection, loving them as we love the stories told by our seniors.

I will tell you two stories of how I fell in love with Arthurian studies.

Imagine a cold winter day, a scratched wooden desk and a hard chair in the old building of the Latvian National Library. The building itself has a medieval feeling to it. The windows must date from the nineteenth century, and drafts of freezing air pass in and out freely through cracks as wide as your index finger.

Did it feel like this to be in a monastic scriptorium? I wondered – a second-year English undergraduate, remembering the opening scenes of Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995). Before me, the 2^nd corrected edition (1971) of Malory’s works by Eugene Vinaver, which certainly seemed like a substantial volume to read in situ in the current weather conditions. I opened the blue covers, the yellowish leaves rustling under my fingers as if they belonged to a different age and a different world.

I do not remember how far I got with my reading or how much I understood. The only thing I remember is the romantic charm of the cold outside, and the yellowish leaves and the perplexing spelling and layout of the text. I was there, because, one year ago, in my first study year, we had to choose the theme of our first term paper. But this is another story.

An undergraduate student anxious to get everything right knocks on the door of the most respectable professor in the department. The student has to choose the topic for her first term paper, which should, preferably, be in one way or another related to her eventual BA paper. A serious undertaking for the first term, requiring courage, daring, and ingenuity. After scrutinising the list of offered topics, the student decides to suggest her own:

‘I would like to write my first term paper with you, and I would like to suggest my own topic.’

‘Yes, of course. What is your topic?’

‘King Arthur and the Knights of the round Table.’

‘It is a very broad topic. Could you be more specific?’

I do not want to be more specific. But, to show my respect, I decide to compromise.

‘The Grail Quest Legend?’

‘Still too broad. Maybe you could choose one character or one aspect of the Grail quest?’

I really want to avoid limiting myself to one character or one aspect. There is perplexed silence on my part. But, genuinely respecting the professor whom I address, I make one desperate effort:

‘The Grail Quest in Celtic Literature.’

‘It is still too broad, but you can narrow it down while working on your paper.’

This is how my career in Arthurian studies began.

Indeed, the Grail quest in Celtic literature is not only too broad a topic; it is something of a non-topic! There is no Grail in Celtic literature before the French Vulgate romances were translated into Welsh. But, oblivious of the difficulties waylaying my newly selected path of studies, I rushed to the Faculty Library, to the British Council Library and to the National Library in quest of all texts Celtic.

There was a manageable amount of medieval Celtic texts containing cauldrons and cups and other Grail-like objects. Yet the text I remember best was in the Mabinogion translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, and it was the story of Culhwch and Olwen. As you may remember, it is the story of a young lad who tricked and blackmailed King Arthur and his warriors into looking for the lad’s future bride, whom no one had ever seen. Given the number of beautiful and noble ladies at Arthur’s court, Culhwch’s choice to seek Olwen may seem somewhat illogical, but this is how medieval romance works.

The most memorable part of the story is, of course, the list of characters present at Arthur’s court, most of whom we never see again in this or any other Mabinogion story. Names, some with descriptions and short stories attached: boozers, eaters, grotesquely ugly or impossibly heroic people. The list is nearly impossible to get through in one go, but not without its rewards. Somewhere towards the middle one stops trying to understand who all these people are and why they should be mentioned there, and begins to wonder if it is possible to find out more about these people and their achievements.

There was a certain attraction to Lady Guest’s translation: flowing and elegant language, absence of distraction in the form of footnotes. The latter was also its limitation: once you have read the story, and wanted to find out more, the only place was the preface to the edition, which did not tell much about the amazing list of characters. I do not think that more would have been available in an editorial note, but this silence was vexing, and made me want to read more. In fact, every piece of medieval Celtic literature I could lay my hands on in quest of the elusive members of Arthur’s court.

So, what is the bottom line of it all? That all students should read old books in uncomfortable surroundings before becoming real Arthurians? Maybe not. Maybe the real trick is to have a good edition, which either gives you the text as it is or gives you a readable translation of it, free of excessive notes. Ideally, the notes telling you everything about the text and a little more would be handily available, at the end of your volume or in a separate one, to satisfy the curiosity excited by the text itself. This description reminds of Professor Peter Field’s new edition of Malory: an ideal edition of the romance of all time, but, alas, this edition is unlikely to enter any of the local libraries in the near future. So, I turn back to my 1971 edition by Vinaver.

The Project would like to extend its special thanks to the Management Centre in Bangor for their generous provision of a week’s accommodation, and to the IASBB for providing up to £100 in travel expenses for the winner. They would also like to thank Professor Raluca Radulescu, who has kindly agreed to meet with the Fellow to discuss research and use of the collection.

#AcBookWeek: The Future of the English PhD

Posted on February 8, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academia, Academic Book Week and tagged De Montfort University, English PhD, Richard Vytniorgu, Riczhard Whitney.

On 12 November 2015 a dozen PhD students working in literary and creative writing areas came together at De Montfort University, Leicester, in order to consider the future of the PhD in English from as many different angles as possible. This guest post, written by Richard Vytniorgu (English PhD candidate, DMU), captures the day’s main points of discussion.

The day asked: To which tune are English PhDs dancing? And whose?

During the one-day workshop, considerations of the English PhD included:

Its place within the wider scope and roles of HE more generally in twenty-first-century society.
Possibilities for more creative approaches to the writing of the thesis/output(s).
The demands of REF (and potentially TEF) and further authorial activity in HE contexts, and how these affect the English PhD.
What academic publishers are looking for in the academic (literary) book of the future.

In order to stimulate small-group discussions later in the day around these topics, we were joined by a number of academics or stakeholders in literary studies/ creative writing at HE level, who offered thought-provoking positioning pieces from their own perspectives and experiences.

Nicholas Maxwell (UCL) tackled the first issue from the perspective of his career-long mission to adjust the aims and methods of university-level inquiry. Drawing particularly on his two books, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (1984, 2007) and How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World (2014), Maxwell reiterated the need for academia to shift from a knowledge-inquiry-based paradigm of learning to one of wisdom inquiry:

‘(a) to arrive at some kind of consensus as to what our most important problems of living are, and what we need to do about them, and at the same time (b) to carry on a sustained, lively, imaginative, and critical, intellectually responsible debate about these matters’.[i]

The essential shift here is from responsibility toward problems of knowledge to problems of living, while recognising that some problems of living are also problems of knowledge.

John Schad (Lancaster) went on to offer a précis of contemporary work on ‘creative criticism’ – a genre similar to creative nonfiction, but nevertheless distinctive as pertaining to literary study specifically. Schad admitted that it was difficult at present to adopt more creative instincts, approaches, and methods to the genre of literary criticism and scholarship. But by reading some of his own work, such as Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery (2007), he was able to demonstrate to an audience partly composed of creative writers who were also writing critical PhDs, how one could architect and execute that subjective presence so often felt in ‘creative criticism’.[ii]

After lunch the day moved in a more pragmatic direction by turning our attention to issues of REF and publishing. Ben Johnson (HEFCE) was unable to make it on the day, so we were very grateful to Deborah Cartmell (DMU), who stepped in to provide a concise summary of the REF and the general expectations for early career researchers, using her own experience at DMU to give some useful anecdotal reflections. Deborah was followed by Ben Doyle from Palgrave, who offered tips on publishing and turning the English PhD into a book. From Ben Johnson’s advice given in advance of the day and also from Ben Doyle’s talk, it was clear that those outside the academy are looking for more creative and innovative work that is somewhat loosened from the intense specificity and remoteness of some topics chosen for monographs.

The rest of the day was given over to small-group discussions, following a worksheet I devised in order to steer conversation around the four topic areas the day was devoted to. I collected the sheets at the close of day and I hope to publish a commentary on these proposals for action and areas of concern in the near future. This will be refracted through my own research into the wisdom quest and aesthetic experiences with literature, as a theory and ‘metaphorisation’ of literary study at HE level.

For the moment, the following were identified as issues worthy of further attention by students and academic staff alike:

The necessity in practice to ‘re-write’ the PhD in order to publish it in book form.
The lack of clarity surrounding creative writing and REF.
The dearth of discussion on ‘English Education’ at PhD level: its qualities, aims, methods, outputs etc.
The difficulties inherent in intense specialisation.

We are grateful to The Academic Book of the Future for supporting our discussions and for enabling us to invite speakers to assist these. The workshop-seminar was a refreshing departure from those glass-half-empty forecasts for the future of literary studies at HE level: the difficulties of proceeding in this line of work, etc. If I came away with one new conviction, it was probably confidence in the need to continually assess the status quo. As young academics it can be tempting to assent to the way things are simply because we assume we have no power to change things. But as one of my PhD subjects, the educator and theorist Louise Rosenblatt, continually asserted, this is the highroad to authoritarian regimes. Democracy invites us to collaborate when we lay aside our competitive natures; to be honest about our lived (rather than imagined) situations; to reject what seems to be anachronistic or harmful, to keep what nourishes and affirms, and to put forward proposals for change based on principles of mutual aid. We hope that in the future more PhD students in English will feel emboldened to question, and, eventually, to work for change from the starting point of their own lived situations.

The participants in the day were:

Hollie Johnson (University of Nottingham)

Jerome S. Wynter (University of Birmingham)

Becky Cullen (Nottingham Trent University)

Jo Dixon (Nottingham Trent University)

Lynda Clark (Nottingham Trent University)

Sean Donnelly (University of Birmingham)

Katie Hamilton (University of Nottingham)

Richard Vytniorgu (De Montfort University)

Emily Heathcote (University of Nottingham)

Richard Bromhall (Nottingham Trent University)

Hannah Murray (Nottingham University)

Martin Kratz (Manchester Metropolitan University)

[i] Nicholas Maxwell, How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World: The Urgent Need for an Academic Revolution (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014), p. 17.

[ii] See Stephen Benson and Clare Connors (eds), Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) for more discussion on this genre of writing.

#AcBookWeek: The Guadalajara International Book Fair (28 Nov-6 Dec 2015)

Posted on February 3, 2016 by academicbookfuture in Academic Book Week and tagged #AcBookWeek, FIL 2015, Guadalajara International Book Fair, Simon Mahony.

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Today’s guest post is by Simon Mahony (Department of Information Studies, UCL), who spoke about The Academic Book of the Future at the 2015 Guadalajara International Book Fair. This post is a brief summary of his talk.

I was very pleased to be invited by the British Council to take part in one of their Mexico in the UK and the UK in Mexico events and to speak in an academic panel at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) at the start of December. This is apparently the largest literary festival and most important publishing gathering in Latin America with the reputation of being the largest book fair in the world after Frankfurt. The title of the panel organised by the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Guadalajara was ‘The Challenges of Knowledge Production in Modern Societies’ and as part of the FIL there was plenty of excuse to showcase some of our publications.

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My talk ‘Reflections on knowledge production within the framework of UK academic institutions’ finished up with some slides about The Academic Book of the Future generously given to me by my colleague Samantha Rayner. This allowed me to go full circle in my talk about knowledge production and the academy as well as traditional versus new modes of production.

My talk started with the first Free Universities in the European Enlightenment period, with scholarship built on previous scholarship, and open discourse through the publication model – this being the cornerstone of Humanities scholarship. Moving through knowledge representation, I argued strongly for the Open Access movement with the modern university as a driver for this, particularly with the mandate for open publication of research output.

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I finished up with a showcase of some open UCL output including UCL Press and followed by The Academic Book of the Future project, more specifically the Palgrave Pivot publication of the same name, edited by Rebecca Lyons and Samantha Rayner. What is a Book Fair without some promotion and product placement?

Images of me, the panel, and the books (including this volume prominently placed on the desk!) were captured in video and stills and circulated by the University of Guadalajara, as well as on Twitter and other social media platforms.

I offered the two volumes generously donated by the authors to the University of Guadalajara library so the physical medium (and reputation of the authors and editors!) would have an immediate international and trans-continental impact factor. The FIL itself was definitely impressive and certainly lived up to its reputation as the biggest book fair in the world after Frankfurt: so many books and so many publishers.

What’s the Point of the Academic Book? Part Three: Tim Hitchcock

Posted on January 27, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, conference, digital and tagged BSECs, Tim Hitchcock.

The Project was invited to speak at the BSECS 45th Annual Conference, which took place on Thursday 7th January 2016 at the University of Oxford. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) is soon to launch its own book series, in association with Boydell & Brewer, and wanted to consult with its community on the form that this new series should take. Chaired by Professor Matthew Grenby (Newcastle), the provocatively-titled round table ‘What’s the Point of the Academic Book?’ included views from Project Research Associate Rebecca Lyons, Professor Tim Hitchcock (Sussex), and Mari Shullaw (Boydell & Brewer). The three views from each speaker will be posted in three parts – each perspective being published in its own blog post. The third and final part, given here, is Professor Tim Hitchcock’s. Part One, by Rebecca Lyons, is here: https://academicbookfuture.org/2016/01/25/the-point-of-the-academic-book-part-one/ and Part Two, by Mari Shullaw, is here: https://academicbookfuture.org/2016/01/26/the-point-of-the-academic-book-part-two/

To my undying frustration I find myself wedded to a position that I suspect will be unpopular with this audience. Although I have published some dozen books over what increasingly feels like a rather over-long academic career – most recently a monograph, co-written with Robert Shoemaker, called London Lives : Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, I don’t much like them. As a technology of knowledge they strike me as both inefficient and outmoded – and as importantly, I think the technology has changed what books are, making them just too fast to be good scholarship.

Having said this, academic books in particular, were undoubtedly wonderful components of a complex technology of knowing – the greatest product of the Enlightenment. And they worked beautifully within that context. The first course I took as a first-year undergraduate in the mid-1970s was in Library Science – and that course introduced me to the beauty of that remarkable integrated system that was the ‘library’ – from union catalogues, to card catalogues, to concordances. And I spent the next twenty years working in libraries of precisely the same sort, reading books. And I gladly admit that traditional footnotes citing hard copy books and journals, work when read while sitting in a major reference library – with those volumes and journals readily to hand. Bibliographies too, worked just fine, when the sources used to substantiate a discussion were composed exclusively of the sorts of materials that could be encompassed within the Dewey Decimal system, or archival catalogue. And Indexes represented an intelligent manual approach to mapping the contents of a single body of text – a mental model (ideally written by the author to guide the eye of the reader) designed to make the text more usable. Chapters and ISBNs, prefaces, acknowledgements, appendices and all the clarity of a well-formed colophon – were a great technology of knowing.

And they worked within a traditional ecology of institutional knowledge creation and dissemination. Academics were (and are) paid by the state and their students, to write books, which are then published either by traditional non-profit university presses; or else by commercial presses whose services are built into a wider academic ecology. And the economics of the publication is then made credible by the investment of university libraries – who purchase ninety percent of the product. A merry-go-round of creation, production and consumption that has gone on its merry way for a couple of centuries; and did the job of making, recording and disseminating knowledge; and enacting the slow form conversation that went with it. And while this system was grossly elitist, highly gendered, inherently Western centric and institutionally racist – it nevertheless had and has many pleasures – some of which the attendees at this conference are here to enjoy.

And, of course, books are also beautiful things. The heft of a heavy tome in your hand; the smell of old leather, and uncut pages; the romance of engaging with knowledge in the same form as it was originally ‘published’, a hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ago is a wonderful romantic experience – that anyone studying the past needs to have encountered. Like the journey in to the paper archive; reading a book with one hand or two, is a necessary part of knowing how the past worked.

But as a means of acting out and performing the all-important function of the academy – of generating deep knowledge as a background to modern civil society – I think academic books are a bit rubbish. In part they are rubbish because they don’t take advantage of the technologies around us to fulfil the purpose of academic writing more fully. And in part it is because the process of publication and production has in fact taken full advantage of those technologies.

Having said this, when I was originally invited to be on this panel, it was sold to me under the title and question of whether ‘the academic book has a future?’ And while I don’t like it or them very much, my conclusion is that yes, books do have a future. I think there is a continuing – though declining – demand for the technology needed to enact an older and traditional form of scholarship and intellectual authority. And since books are deeply mired in our still thriving hierarchies of authority, they will remain. As long as books form the easy tick box on a REF assessment; while they stand out on your CV – evidence of seriousness of purpose, and justification for just one more sabbatical – they will remain. And in the process, their publication and sale back to the universities that paid to have them written in the first instance, will continue to provide profits to commercial publishers, and justifications for library budgets, and paid employment for all the people involved in the process of turning an argument in to an object – a hard copy book.

In other words, as long as the requirements of ‘authority’ demand the existence books to evidence the existence of ‘authors’ who can be safely given academic jobs, the ‘book’ – as distinct from long-form writing – has a future. Like neo-liberal capitalism, the greengrocer’s apostrophe, poverty and herpes, academic books definitely have a future. I just don’t think that this is a particularly good thing.

We all know the affordances that the World Wide Web has created. We all use it every day, and if we are honest with ourselves we all know that it has fundamentally changed how we perform scholarship and research; certainly how we write; and how we engage in academic conversations.

Most of us access and read journal articles as pdfs downloaded from Jstor. Most of us access 18^th century printed material from Eighteenth-century Collections online, Google books, project Gutenberg or such. Even our primary manuscript research has been increasingly shaped by what is available online – whether that is the Newton Project, the Old Bailey Online, or the endless smaller projects that have sought to digitise the stuff of the dead.

And of course, how we work with text has also changed beyond recognition. All of us use the automated footnoting facility in Word, and most of us use one form or another of citation management, whether that is Nvivo, Zotero or Endnote. We now exchange ideas via Twitter, and generate camera ready copy with Word. And once written, we shunt the whole thing off to the publisher, who runs a quick and dirty bit of copy-editing – aided by an automated search and replace function – over the result, before bunging it into a standard design template, and generating an automated index, before Bob’s your uncle, you have a book, ready for the Autumn catalogue to go out to the 400 American research libraries whose budgets keep the whole financial edifice upright. With the possible exception of hard copy proofs, there is unlikely to be a single physical artefact of a modern book, from inception to the moment it lands with a thud on your doormat.

And all of this is a problem in part because it is all a bit easy.

Up until the early 1990s, generating a book was a different kind of process. Before email, every revision and every exchange of views took weeks and months; and when all the process of turning manuscript in to print was embedded within a form of production that still marched to the rhythms of the hand press – with proofs and galleys and all the joys of the ink stained fingers – books were not just long-form writing, but a remarkably slow form as well. Now, you can mimic the appearance of print with a few keystrokes. And the slow scholarship that was required no longer matters. In other words, the important thing about that old style process, producing that old style ‘book’, was that all the components of the system were tied to a single purpose, moving at a stately – ever so slow – pace.

And that pace was important. It meant that a book was a much more significant investment of time, than it has become. It required more hands, and more minds – from local librarian, to author, to editor, to copy-editor, to typesetter, to warehouseman. Each job done by hand; the privilege of publication was necessarily rationed. By contrast, we are now in a situation in which there are both many more books – getting on for one for every academic in the country, every six or seven years – and each one represents a substantially smaller investment of time and resource – both intellectual and financial. This has the benefit of giving voice to more individuals – though it should be noted that the retention of peer review, means those voices are still largely limited by class and race.

All of which is to simply say that academic books have if anything become an ever more important part of that wider academic ecology, which itself has become ever more demanding of book production. But that while the technology of creation – all the joys of Google Search, Word and the Adobe Suite – make these things much easier to publish, that does not mean that the product itself is any good. Or that they continue to serve that underlying function of performing that slow dance of scholarship and public engagement, of deep learning, leading to deep teaching, leading to a working civil society, that the academy, that Universities promise.

This seems to me a real shame. If instead of using the ‘affordances’ of the new technology to simply speed up and cheapen the monograph and academic book, we chose to do something new and different, that nevertheless supported that the underlying purpose of the academy, then we could still have long form writing, and deep thinking, without the ridiculous, Fordist – factory floor – world that has come to characterise the modern academy.

And I really just want to end with a suggestion. I want to suggest that instead of mooning over ‘books’, and worrying about whether the business model of the commercial presses will still be viable in a ten years, we work a bit harder at representing more truthfully the research process we all use.

I had a very interesting experience recently. In writing our last ‘book’, Bob Shoemaker and I deliberately chose to design and implement it as a thoroughgoing ebook. Every quote was linked to the original source, every footnote to the article, or ESTC entry cited; every graph to the underlying spreadsheet and data, and every cell in every spreadsheet to its source. We wrote the book collaboratively in a WIKI environment, and in the end it contained over 4000 hyperlinks. Building on the London Lives and Old Bailey websites, it was conceived and delivered to the publishers as a vertically integrated research archive and commentary that was designed to serve all the purposes of traditional scholarship. The publishers had contracted to deliver this ebook, but when it came to submission – when we delivered the manuscript in Mobi and Epub formats – with floating formats, and colour images – they turned around as said, that they could only accept a book in a flat Word format. In the end, after some two years, that book is now out – and though an e-version exists, there is no provision for libraries to buy it, and it looks and works like a slightly up-market pdf.

The reasons for my failure in this instance is a long story. But the point I want to make today is that it is entirely possible to represent modern scholarship in three dimensions – to capture that journey in to the literature, and Google Books, and online primary sources – and to create a ‘book’ that fully reflects that journey. Even if we believe that long-form writing is important (and I am in three minds), let’s make books that take advantage of the online, that serve the real function of footnotes, and stop making books that feel like the dead husks of a previous generation’s form of scholarship.

And along the way, let’s think again about the institutions that tie us ever more tightly in to this ever more demanding system of production for production’s sake – this increasingly Fordist dystopia of academic publication for the mere purpose of demonstrating productivity, over purpose.

I do believe the academic book has a future, and in my imagination a bright and positive one – as a graphic novel, and a Twitter stream, as a curated collection of blogs, or a string of comments and responses. I believe we can continue to think deeply and engage deeply, as long as we simply keep in mind the limitations of the technology, and the purpose of our thinking. I very much hope that academic book in its weird, flat, 19^th century form is dying. Long live the book.

[Editor’s Note: For more on the alternative academic book, check out the Call for Content for BOOC (Book as Open Online Content) – an exciting new collaborative project between The Academic Book of the Future and UCL Press: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/ucl-press-news/call-for-content-booc]

A Storify of live tweets from the panel is available here: https://storify.com/AcBookFuture/what-is-the-point-of-the-academic-book

What’s the Point of the Academic Book? Part Two: Mari Shullaw

Posted on January 26, 2016 by academicbookfuture in academic books, conference, Publishers and tagged Boydell & Brewer, Mari Shullaw.

The Project was invited to speak at the BSECS 45th Annual Conference, which took place on Thursday 7th January 2016 at the University of Oxford. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) is soon to launch its own book series, in association with Boydell & Brewer, and wanted to consult with its community on the form that this new series should take. Chaired by Professor Matthew Grenby (Newcastle), the provocatively-titled round table ‘What’s the Point of the Academic Book?’ included views from Project Research Associate Rebecca Lyons, Professor Tim Hitchcock (Sussex), and Mari Shullaw (Boydell & Brewer). The three views from each speaker will be posted in three parts – each perspective being published in its own blog post. The second, given here, is Mari Shullaw’s. Part One, by Rebecca Lyons, is here: https://academicbookfuture.org/2016/01/25/the-point-of-the-academic-book-part-one/

Boydell & Brewer is proud and pleased to be working with BSECS on the eighteenth-century studies series. We hope that it will be, in many ways, a reflection of this conference – a place where all the disciplines involved in eighteenth-century studies can meet and learn from each other.

Background on Boydell and Brewer

We are a smallish independent academic press, publishing about 150 books a year across the humanities. Founded by two medievalists – Derek Brewer and Richard Barber – and their ethos of scholarly publishing is still very much with us. The core of our publishing is monographs. We don’t publish journals and we don’t publish sciences.

Books are available to libraries on a variety of digital platforms including JSTOR and CUP’s University Publishing online and increasingly our more accessible titles are available as Kindle and ibooks. Nevertheless 80% of our sales are still “woodpulp” – not unusual among publishers in the humanities.

We haven’t yet published anything in Open Access, but that is because we have not been asked to do so. That is sure to change in the near future. At this stage rather than setting a tariff as some of our colleagues have done we’d prefer to talk to authors individually about what they and their funders are looking for and work from there.

In this paper I am going to side-step the philosophic and pedagogic issues involved in defining the point of the academic book, and settle instead for some reflections on the related but more manageable question of function.

Crisis – What crisis?

Signs of health for the academic book:

The long form academic book maintains its position at the heart of the humanities disciplines.

We are not short of new monograph publications. The Crossick report noted the four largest academic publishers had doubled monograph output in the last ten years, and seemed to regard this as a sign of health. I’m not so sure. Are there really twice as many monographs worthy of publication now as there were in 2004? It seems unlikely.

Signs of sickness for the academic book:

Sales have dwindled, and as the print runs have decreased so the prices have increased – and all this at a time when library budgets in the UK and other parts of the are being squeezed.

It is important not to overstate the importance of price here. The sheer bulk of what is available also plays its part, so bringing down prices, as we do when we publish in paperback, makes worryingly little difference to the numbers sold.

This story applies as much to books available in digital form as it does to print. Open Access as currently exercised would simply put the gate at the other end, with the authors of certain kinds of work and authors in certain institutional positions being unable to publish, rather than the public unable to read what they have written.

The way forward

In The Academic Book of the Future – the recent Palgrave Pivot (Nov 2015) [available to download for free here: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137595768] commissioned and editing by the Project, Frances Pinter, of Manchester University Press and Knowledge Unlatched stated that:

The meaning of the word ‘book’ itself will never again be confined to that of a physical object to be held, admired, loved, subject to spilt coffee, or burning by dictators. The ‘book’ will be defined more around its function than any of its other characteristics.

In fact the elegy for the book as an object of love and a repository of memory is probably premature – but the point about function is well taken. We need to be looking at it where the book fits into the academic eco system and we need to look at this I think both from the point of view of the user of books – how does the academic book work as a tool of the academic trade? – and from that of the author – why do you write the books in the first place?

For the user a book has two main functions, which in the digital age one might describe very crudely as ‘browse’ and ‘search’, and which have implications for the medium in which books are accessed.

To the ‘browser’, the whole book is important. The browser values the journey – the way the argument is shaped, the meanders and the digressions. For this reader even noting the faults – the points where the argument is thin and the evidence is overstated – is part of the pleasure of the journey, and to this reader or to be more accurate to a reader in this mode style matters. It’s difficult to read in this way if a book is badly written. It is also – it is increasingly clear – somewhat difficult to read in this way electronically, at least as things stand at the moment. This is the sort of reading where you flip back and forth, remembering that there was a relevant passage two thirds of the way back at the top of the left hand page, where you underline and scrawl things in the margins. The full experience, which is sensory as well as intellectual, seems to require print and paper.

It has to be admitted that there are simply not enough hours in the day for browsing. Mostly we need to get through stuff, find what we need and move on. It’s here that the digital form comes into its own. There are three key requirements here:

Discoverability: you need to know that the book exists and that it is relevant.
Accessibility: you want it when you want it. This is one of the major advantages of the ebook, whether available through the university library or bought by an individual
Searchability: find key information and arguments and move on.

And one thing which ebooks alone have the potential to provide is access to the original source material through hyperlinks, which as Tim [Hitchcock] discovered [during the London Lives project: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/58047/], can be a tricky business for publishers, but is still quite clearly the way of the future.

Working out these questions of function for the user is relatively simple, though the delivery may be more complicated. From the publishers’ point of view this is not a zero sum game. There is no reason why print and digital should not coexist happily for decades to come.

As far as the author’s side is concerned my role is to ask the questions, not to give the answers. In an interview after the publication of his report Crossick made the interesting point that “the monograph was not simply about dissemination but a way to think about the research itself – I call this ‘thinking through writing the book.’ There is an element of personal development here. It is in the process of turning a thesis into a first book – if this is done well – that a student becomes a scholar and this process is reiterated throughout an academic career. The writing of a book in the humanities in particular is a key part of the academic digestion.

But is this route too readily accepted as the norm? When I was a student, a good many of my older lecturers published relatively seldom and certainly not in monograph form. The pressures of a much more competitive job market and the REF have put paid to that, but are we simply assuming that the monograph is the point to which research tends? Are there actually too many, and should we be thinking instead of alternative modes of production? As the current problems with Open Access are ironed out there may be room for more journals, for instance. Digital publishing has made it easier for publishers to be more flexible about length, so we have experiments like the Palgrave Pivot series of intermediate publications of 30-50k words. The current Pivot publications are mostly in the social sciences, but would there be more room for similar in the humanities?

More radically the digital revolution, stuttering as it is, does provide the means by which the relation between author and readership, whether academic or more general can be reconfigured. As Bob Shoemaker states of the London Lives project on his Sheffield blog:

The reader would then be given the evidence to question our interpretations, come to different conclusions, or simply follow their own interests through the linked sources. The book we wanted to create would be so extensively interlinked that we would cede control of the narrative and our authority as authors could be challenged by readers following their own agendas.

There is a political project here about the balance of power between author and reader, which could be taken further.

What is the point of the academic publisher?

Finally, a few words on the question ‘what is the point of the academic publisher?’ – because I suppose that must be why I am part of this panel.

The first thing to be said is that there really is now no part of the publishing process, taken individually, that you could not do on your own if you wanted to. Nevertheless, I believe that we do still have a contribution to make.

Three things in particular:

Time and consistency of effort

Between teaching, research, writing and university admin, self-publishing might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for you [the academic].

An academic publisher pulls together experience and efficiency across a range of things: editing, production and marketing.

Attention

Good editors really want their authors to do well, and will invest time in this. A good editor, especially when working with a junior scholar, will spend time on helping to shape the proposal before it goes out for review, will interpret and mediate the reviews which often ask for contradictory or impossible things and will also do a fair amount of hand-holding and cheer-leading during the ups and downs of the process of writing a book.

Detachment

All organisations have their own politics, but at least we [the publishers] are outside of the institutional politics of your universities.

We have no axe to grind apart from the rather innocent one of trying to make your book pay its way so that we can make a little profit and go on publishing more books.

One last word: I mentioned detachment just now, but of course as academic publishers we are only ever semi-detached. It is worth remembering that, however the power relations may look when you are in the middle of a dispute with your editor or having difficulty getting something published, in the end we are wholly dependent on you. If you sink, we sink, and if you really want us to go in a particular direction – and by that I mean not just as authors but as consumers – then that is the direction we will go.

We are in your hands.

A Storify of live tweets from the panel is available here: https://storify.com/AcBookFuture/what-is-the-point-of-the-academic-book

What’s the Point of the Academic Book? Part One: Rebecca Lyons

Posted on January 25, 2016 by academicbookfuture in About the project, academic books and tagged BSECs, conference paper.

The Project was invited to speak at the BSECS 45th Annual Conference, which took place on Thursday 7th January 2016 at the University of Oxford. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) is soon to launch its own book series, in association with Boydell & Brewer, and wanted to consult with its community on the form that this new series should take. Chaired by Professor Matthew Grenby (Newcastle), the provocatively-titled round table ‘What’s the Point of the Academic Book?’ included views from Project Research Associate Rebecca Lyons, Professor Tim Hitchcock (Sussex), and Mari Shullaw (Boydell & Brewer). The three views from each speaker will be posted in three parts – each perspective being published in its own blog post. The first, given here, is from Rebecca Lyons.

I work as the Research Associate on The Academic Book of the Future Project, but I’ve also worked as an editor in academic publishing, in a university library, and I am an academic researcher myself. So I’m talking to you with an almost holistic awareness of the different roles, approaches, and perspectives involved with academic books and their authoring, editing, production, distribution, and consumption by various groups and individuals. Besides this, The Academic Book of the Future Project used its first year to go out and talk to several of the different communities and stakeholders involved with the academic book – including booksellers, publishers, academics, librarians, funders, and policy-makers. We harvested views, opinions, concerns, questions and thoughts from all of these groups, offered funding and support for discrete events, activities, or pieces of research into areas of particular interest to them and the academic book more broadly, such as peer review, the role of the editor, and audio-visual resources in research outputs. The Project also edited a book of twelve essays offering views on the academic book by contributors across publishing, academia, bookselling, and libraries, which was published by Palgrave in November as a short-form monograph, a Palgrave Pivot. The book is called The Academic Book of the Future and is available to download free as an Open Access ebook, as well as being available to order in hard copy here: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137595768. So as well as offering my own opinion on what the point of the academic book is (which is actually quite a refreshing thing for me to do after listening to so many views!) I’ll also be referring to some of the pertinent or recurring points that have arisen during our first year of research and collaboration with our stakeholder communities involved with academic books.

So for starters, what do we mean when we say ‘academic book’? Right at the Project’s outset I gave a talk to the staff at the British Library, and this was one of the questions asked by the audience. I threw it back to them, and in the ensuing discussion no consensus was reached. If the staff at the BL can’t agree on what an academic book is, this already points to an interesting issue in the ways in which academic books are considered and categorised. For the purposes of the Project we have been inclusive, rather than exclusive, and count critical editions, textbooks, edited collections, and of course the academic monograph as academic books, as well as the whole gamut of formats in which academic books might be found – from hard copy to PDF to ebook to other new digital iterations, such as book apps – as well as more performative formats such as video essays or media-rich resources. This too – the proliferation of forms and formats that academic books are increasingly available in – surely indicates something about the value, and uses, and perceptions around the academic book. They are enduring, yet mutable. Fixed, yet fluid. They are evolving. I wonder if this would be the case, if there was no point to them?

I will honestly state my position here: I believe there IS a point to the academic book. In fact, I think there are several. Arguably, when I need a quick fact check or to check a date, I might turn to Wikipedia. But I might doubt the veracity and trustworthiness of a Wikipedia entry. Former British Library Wikimedian-in-Residence Andrew Gray, speaking at an event called ‘Should we trust Wikipedia?’ during the inaugural Academic Book Week in November, cited various studies on the factual quality of Wikipedia, which have shown that the average Wikipedia article has 4 mistakes. He pointed out that this varies quite considerably across subjects and languages (for instance the pages in German on pharmaceutical subjects are 99.7% factually correct, reassuringly). The full video of the event, including Andrew’s talk, is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwSYcLHOf-E&app=desktop. So as a medievalist, not a pharmacologist, for peace of mind I might instead check my date in an historical timeline in the front of a peer-reviewed academic monograph on the Wars of the Roses, or flick to the index to find a reference to a specific historical individual discussed in that volume, or I might hop to a page on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online. Why? Because academic resources published by respected publishers – whether hard copy or digital – carry a certain assurance of academic quality. Already one of the keys to defining an academic book, as well as why we need them, is coming through here, and that is the value added by academic publishers and reviewers during peer review and the editorial process. A good, respected academic publisher is like a stamp of quality upon a publication. Not to mention the fact that they usually make the books aesthetically appealing too, which helps when you’re trawling through them all day for research!

‘Ok, that’s true,’ you might say, ‘but you can have all that in an article. Why do you need an academic book? Why not an article or a series of articles, or a special issue of a journal on a particular topic?’ And I would answer that yes, all of these resources are valid, necessary, and useful. However, when I want to sink my teeth into a topic – when I require a considered, in-depth treatment of a research subject – academic monographs are where I turn. They have a form and structure to them that makes them familiar, and (usually!) eminently usable. I own scores of them in hard copy format, and revisit them often in my research. From previous readings I also have an idea of the type of content that each one contains, and even whereabouts in the book that content can be located. There’s a real geography to the physical academic book, which for me has a powerful mnemonic function. They are treasured possessions, and I look at them fondly on my bookshelves.

In my own research I look at marginalia – notes and doodles in the margins of medieval manuscripts. As well as their aesthetic appeal (which should not be undervalued) I love physical, hard-copy books for this type of embedded history, contained within their pages. I am also a scribbler in the margins of my own academic books, and it has been both a joy and an embarrassment upon re-use of a book to rediscover some of the notes I scrawled earlier on in my academic career. However, I am also a web editor and blogger, and a fan of the flexibility offered by digital formats that I can call up remotely and read on my laptop or iPad on the go, wherever I am, and use search functions to find specific words or phrases quickly and easily within that content. When it comes to academic books I want to have the choice of both digital and hard copy, and the different possibilities and uses that each has to offer me as a researcher.

And in terms of my status as an Early Career Researcher, I have found the best academic monographs to be instructive – I’ve learned more from them than from any module or supervisor about how to phrase my academic voice, how to construct an argument, and how to lead a set of thoughts and ideas based upon evidence to a conclusion. Here I am concentrating on the monograph, but other academic books are incredibly valuable too in terms of arts and humanities research – the importance and usefulness of a good scholarly edition cannot be overemphasised, and edited collections of essays can illuminate a particular topic from a plethora of angles. The long-form argument that the academic monograph allows is an important one in our disciplines of literature and history. The space and word count enabled by academic monographs to pursue complex and interlinking ideas to their conclusions is vital, and although other disciplines such as the social sciences may argue that the thesis-as-articles academic book works better for them, for me as a medievalist, the academic monograph has been key. Again, the availability of choice here for each individual and each discipline to use the type of research output best suited to them is hugely important.

‘But academic books are too expensive’, you might also say. ‘No one buys them, library budgets are too stretched by journal subscriptions and everything else, so no one reads them.’ It’s true that print runs for academic monographs now tend to be quite low – in the few hundreds. So you might argue that the research is in them is pointless, because it isn’t reaching anyone. Researchers are shouting into the void. But are they? Personally I’ve never had problems sourcing a book via my academic library or interlending, although I’m aware that the availability and cost of these services can vary across institutions. As I said, I’ve also bought plenty of academic books for myself, even when, as a poor student, paying the rent has sometimes been an issue. But that’s me. What about everyone else with more common sense, who buys food instead of books? The issue of research distribution and availability has prompted some very useful and interesting innovations of late. Digitisation and Open Access are the ones that are on everyone’s lips at the moment, for various reasons, and I won’t go into those too much here because I’m sure they will be covered in the discussion later, except to say that they have brought new possibilities (and challenges) for readers and publishers. Digital books arguably cut production costs involved with hard copy books, and print-on-demand technology has enabled publishers to offer the choice of hard copy format as well as digital to their readers. Shifts in funding have also brought new possibilities and challenges, with academic institutions footing some or all of the bill for Open Access publication, and in some cases even becoming their own publishers, as we have seen with the burgeoning increase in University Presses in the UK (and here I include another quick plug for the first UK University Presses Conference on the 16^th and 17^th March 2016).

But another innovation in a bid to reach a greater audience has been the crossover book. The REF’s impact agenda (perhaps combined with publishers’ enthusiasm for books that sell!) has encouraged researcher-authors to write books that are academic in content, but also appeal to a wider audience of reader in terms of style, tone, and approach. Perhaps there are fewer footnotes, or even none at all (gasp!). There have been some real successes here, such as Oxford’s very own Professor Carolyne Larrington, a medievalist who has written some wonderful crossover books. Her most recent publication considers the medieval basis for the book and TV series Game of Thrones. The general popularity of such a topic, combined with radio appearances and other publicity, has ensured that her research on the Middle Ages has reached an audience that it otherwise probably would not have.

Publishers and researcher-authors will continue to find ways to make the academic book relevant in terms of format, approach, accessibility, and funding. It’s an exciting and challenging time for the academic book: lots of factors are shifting and many new possibilities are opening up. I’d like to finish by quoting one of our wonderful Pivot contributors, Jaki Hawker, the Academic Manager at Blackwell’s Edinburgh. Jaki views the future of the academic book as “inclusive, collaborative, available across multiple platforms and in a number of formats” (p. 92). Given innovations such as I’ve discussed, it seems that the academic book of the future has infinite possibilities. And maybe it does. But Hawker argues that they will be “created, enabled and shaped by the market” (p. 92). The academic book, in essence, will continue to be what people want or need it to be – and for me, I think that means it will offer more and more choice in terms of price, format, and access.

A Storify of live tweets from the panel is available here: https://storify.com/AcBookFuture/what-is-the-point-of-the-academic-book

Note: Views are Rebecca’s own and are not necessarily representative of the Project.

#AcBookWeek: The Future of the Academic Book in the USA

Posted on January 8, 2016 by academicbookfuture in Academic Book Week and tagged American Mathematical Society, Amy Brand, Anne Brackenbury, Brown University, Educopia Institute, MIT Press, Robert Harington, Sarah Lippincott, Sheila Bonde, University of Toronto Press, USA.

On 16^th November 2015 Brown University hosted a panel discussion as part of Academic Book Week. This post outlines the key issues raised during the debate.

Note: The video recording of the full discussion is available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl7O7DUB__8&list=PL2PwShbFBf4Bk6AaDM2mGixpS_7TYasyT

The discussion was moderated by Sheila Bonde, Brown University Professor and Chair of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World. The publishers and editors that participated in the panel discussion were

Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press
Anne Brackenbury, Executive Editor, Higher Education Division, University of Toronto Press
Robert Harington, Associate Executive Director for Publishing, American Mathematical Society
Sarah Lippincott, Program Director, Educopia Institute

Sheila Bonde introduced the questions up for discussion:

What is an academic book?
What is a digital book?
Who reads them?
How do we train scholars to write these “books of the future”?

The first respondent was Amy Brand, MIT Press. Brand stated that MIT Press has been at the forefront of digital publishing (mostly PDF and open access). The digital book, Brand argued, is more than an innovation of the print book, but rather adds to/builds on the foundation of the book – it does not supplant it

How do we juggle both print and digital? Brand suggested that a uniform model is being replaced by a multiplicity of models: publishers need to remain nimble and responsive to the needs of researchers and readers. We have an opportunity now to open up books to be seen in new ways – ‘permeable’, ‘altered’, ‘sculpted’. In terms of innovation, the University of Minnesota Press’ iterative publishing offers another form of ‘permeability’, with various new opportunities for readers to annotate texts.

Brand acknowledged that print books are still objects of desire – perhaps even more so now that there are other options. MIT does print and digital simultaneously, including open versions in response to author desires. So far, Brand stated, this seems to have helped sales. Online versions offer additional/supplementary and updatable materials.

Brand drew attention to other practical issues around the academic book in current contexts. For instance, the average publication cost of a digital monograph is around $30K. These costs are significant. The question of discoverability is also an important one: how do publishers make digital books more visible/accessible to readers? Linking chapters? Indexing? And how do we effectively evaluate scholarly online publications? Bookmetrix can track citations, downloads, readers, and mentions – is this a legitimizing tool? Amazon’s line-by-line payment to authors provides an opportunity for authors to see into reading behavior – should this count as we evaluate digital publications? There is a difference, however, between short-term and long-term uses of the book. Evaluations such as Bookmetrix are useful, but don’t pick up value that accrues after several years. Same for Amazon – they both measure what is being read now, but not what is being bought and read later. There are potentially unforeseen uses of knowledge that we can’t yet tap in to.

Brand finished with a closing question: how do we make sure content remains accessible?

The second panelist was Ann Brackenbury, University of Toronto (Higher Ed division). Brackenbury highlighted that much digital content is still static (such as PDFs). She asked: Why are we trying to change, despite the resilience of the book (as an object)?

The mission of the Higher Ed division at the University of Toronto is to bring scholarship and teaching together in a more productive relationship by, for example:

Creating websites
Publishing mostly small, case-study books
Creative non-fiction strategies

Brackenbury spoke about their new series/initiative: EthnoGRAPHIC, which is ethnography in a graphic illustrated novel form. The hybrid of linear text-based culture and visual culture in this series keys into the ways students take in information today. This hybridity, Brackenbury argued, requires complex decoding skills, but it also offers a theoretical and disciplinary challenge, too. It allows author/scholars to build rich worlds, characters, and locations. The value added is the creation of the narrative or story, and the ability to rewrite scholarly content for different audiences.

Brackenbury suggested that graphic novels, or comics, build communities around them. They are also useful for ‘showing’ (rather than just ‘telling’) a story, and mean that audiences can be extended through transmedia: telling a variety of stories across different channels. Importantly, she argued, combining traditional and new media approaches means building new connections, and she suggested that the academic book of the future is connected in a broader sphere via multimedia presentation formats and multiple incarnations.

The third speaker was Sarah Lippincott from the Library Publishing Coalition. Lippincott started with an explanation that the publishing landscape is diverse, including print and digital, and that the production of research is outstripping the capacity for publishing it. She also suggested that new forms of inquiry and understanding by authors and readers may change the way we engage with books, and that the most important element of the academic book of the future will be openness, meaning it is free to use, free to read, and free to remix. This openness, according to Lippincott, is both attainable and sustainable, and involves a re-imagining of the monograph as tied into—not separate from—the academy. This model, she argued, can work for the humanities; subsidizing monograph publishing up-front through the university.

Lippincott went on to further define what she means by the term ‘openness’:

It is diverse: reliance on the market forces certain choices that diminish access to certain types of scholarship, and open access eliminates this issue.
It is dynamic: openness enables new forms of inquiry and understanding – low barriers to entry open up the field.
It is impactful: researchers turn frequently to the web rather than the library catalogue. Open books are searchable, and possibly more broadly read.
It is accessible and preservable: open digital books are easily adapted for various needs, and can be preserved in ways that proprietary ebooks cannot.
It is aligned with the mission of the university: advocating open publishing promotes knowledge.

The final speaker was Robert Harrington of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The AMS commits to keeping its books in print in perpetuity – in math disciplines older books are still studied, and Harrington argued, print is here to stay. However, regardless of form, we need to create relevant, high quality content.

Harrington broke down the academic monograph into several factors:

Culture: Books are as much of a process of exploration and discovery for authors as they are for readers
Form and Function
Delivery
Business Models

He also offered an argument against open access: if you publish on the basis of merit vs. market, then you have to define merit. Perhaps instead, he suggested, we need mixed economic/business models – and, he asked, isn’t applicability to the highest number of readers (market) one way to do that?

In addition to continuing with conventional monographic publishing, even in electronic form (PDF), AMS is experimenting with innovative digital features for readers and for authors, including:

Annotation
Working more with LaTeX and TeX as markup
Experimenting with Hypothes.is and Manifold Scholarship

The official debate ended there. The Academic Book of the Future Project would like to thank Brown for organizing and hosting this event, and would like the extend the debate to you: what do you think of the issues raised here? Let us know!

#AcBookWeek: Interdisciplinary Research and Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities

Posted on December 12, 2015 by academicbookfuture in academia, Academic Book Week and tagged #AcBookWeek, Early Career Researchers, publishing, research, Rowman & Littlefield.

In today’s guest post, independent academic publisher Rowman & Littlefield International reflects on the highlights that the publishing industry celebrated in 2015, and especially #AcBookWeek.

Rowman and Littlefield When the first Academic Book Week was first announced earlier this year, we were thrilled to be given the opportunity to raise awareness what we do every day: publishing interdisciplinary academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Academic publishing is traditionally divided up into strict segments according to what disciplines are taught by universities. As an interdisciplinary publisher, our aim is to bridge gaps between the disciplines and offer new insights based on a more inclusive, innovative approach, and Academic Book Week offered us the ideal opportunity to share these principles with the wider academic community. Our event ‘Interdisciplinary Research and Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities’ was initiated!

Martina O’Sullivan, our Senior Commissioning Editor in Cultural Studies, secured a fabulous panel of speakers who are published experts in the field of interdisciplinary research and publishing. They were joined by our Editorial Director, Sarah Campbell, to offer a broad range of perspectives on the topic. Our panel covered everything from some tips on how to get interdisciplinary work published, to alternative modes of research and publishing, right through to very practical advice for early career researchers.

The speakers were:

Sarah Campbell, Editorial Director, Rowman & Littlefield International
Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University
Laurence Hemming, Professor, Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University
Danielle Sands, Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture, Royal Holloway
David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster

All we needed was an event location, and thanks to Peter Garner, Library Liaison Manager, and the excellent team at the Maughan Library, King’s College, we had the opportunity to secure the prestigious Weston Room, a magnificent Grade II listed edifice which is part of King’s College.

Although our event was free, we asked attendees to register their interest via the AcBookWeek website. We were sold out of tickets the day before the event and so a crowd of interested current and future academic researchers and authors entered the gates of the Maughan Library on Tuesday, 10 November. After a brief introduction from Martina O’Sullivan, Sarah Campbell opened the panel session with her talk on getting interdisciplinary work published.

See the video recording of Sarah Campbell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRY0deRkdHE

“What is required is an opening towards non-knowledge”―Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts

Gary Hall, presenting on Alternative Modes of Academic Research and Publishing, focused his talk on the three keywords audience, book and interdisciplinarity, maintaining that the task of every writer should be to challenge pre-existing definitions in academic disciplines.

See the video recording of Gary Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Y551Es1Lk

“What is Interdisciplinary Research?”―Laurence Hemming

Laurence Hemming followed by asking: ‘What is Interdisciplinary Research?’ and pointed out that many publishers nowadays publish books in increasingly more narrow categories, likening the current situation of interdisciplinary research to a house without a heating system, thereby also stressing the importance of letting traditional phenomena speak for themselves, based on traditional knowledge of a discipline.

See the video recording of Laurence Hemming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7szuOGhYU

“Tips for Early Career Researchers”―Danielle Sands

But how to go about it and where to start as an early career researcher? Danielle Sands’ engaging and useful lecture contained tips and advice for interdisciplinary researchers, including how to navigate one’s way through academic conferences and job adverts as an academic with an interdisciplinary approach.

See the video recording of Danielle Sands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wqJ5G_FChg

“The problems of the world call for interdisciplinarity”―David Chandler, Professor of International Relations

David Chandler rounded up the session with his lively panel about how interdisciplinary projects are perceived, and how they act in today’s academic world.

See the video recording of David Chandler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O89z-cn4x4

In the Q&A session that followed, our panellists answered a range of detailed questions from the audience, and the lively discussion continued until late into the evening with drinks and canapés. For us, it was a brilliant event which not only provided us with a chance to meet upcoming interdisciplinary scholars, but also an opportunity to listen to first-hand experiences of top academics who do interdisciplinary work; inspiring us to bring the ever-evolving academic book publishing process into its next age. A round-up of the event can be viewed alongside all other videos here.

We from Rowman & Littlefield International are sure that Academic Book Week will prove to be another highlight for us in 2016, and indeed become a regular highlight in the diary of every academic. For now, I would very much like to thank the organisers of Academic Book Week for providing us with a platform to create an event like this; our panellists and the Maughan Library again for making this stimulating event happen; and everyone who contributed with their attendance and questions. I hope to see you again next year!

Archives

Handling, storing, and accessing non-text-based research outputs

Embracing multimodal research outputs in academia

Digital Conversation event: British Library, 29 September 2016

Further reading materials

1. Changes in the nature of research, the research environment and the research process

What do academic books do?

What changes have taken place in the research environment?

New forms of books

2. How are the processes through which books are commissioned, approved or accepted, edited, produced, published, marketed, distributed, made accessible, and preserved changing, and what are the implications for the following?

Publishers

Aggregators

Booksellers

Libraries

How might the relationships between the different kinds of agents in the publishing supply chain develop in the future?

Conclusion

Discoverability

Open Access mandates and institutional repositories

Intellectual Property

Version control

Piracy

Embargoes

Ethics

Practical Guidance for Creative Writing PhD Theses

Martyn Lawrence

Temples of Knowledge

The Challenges Faced

The Future of Academic Books in Africa

What is an academic book?

How do you feel about making an academic book?

How do medieval scholars use academic books?

What do (medieval) scholars want from academic books?

What can technology do to help make academic books more accessible for medievalists?

Faral and Griscom: two iconic editions of the Historia regum Britanniae

The texts

Critical reception

Critical legacy

Summary

Background on Boydell and Brewer

Crisis – What crisis?

The way forward

What is the point of the academic publisher?

“What is required is an opening towards non-knowledge”―Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts

“What is Interdisciplinary Research?”―Laurence Hemming

“Tips for Early Career Researchers”―Danielle Sands

“The problems of the world call for interdisciplinarity”―David Chandler, Professor of International Relations

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