Sylvia Miller

In this talk, Sylvia will make a blue-skies proposal to redefine publishing to include all forms of work that scholars are creating today. In so doing, she will take up the following questions:
What are publishing principles, and what problems might we solve by applying them to the panoply of forms that research and the outcomes of research can take? Is the term "digital humanities" boxing us in and preventing us from moving scholarly communications forward? Why is the form of the book so persistent, and how might we connect it more meaningfully to other forms of scholarship? What might a post-digital era look like, in which we value and harness the endless interplay of analog and digital? Stepping back from the blue-skies vision, what are the structural barriers and possible first steps needed to overcome them? What can we learn from recent changes in peer review guidelines and from faculty who have successfully pushed their departments to consider digital work for promotion and tenure? What are the potential risks and benefits for university presses and academic libraries in collaborating on new forms of publication? Will there eventually be lock-in of new forms and genres of publishing, and would that be good or bad for scholarship?

Miller discusses what makes a good collaboration in the humanities, drawing on her experiences as manager of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, program manager at Duke University's Franklin Humanities Institute, co-founder of the inter-institutional Publishing Makerspace working group, and director or coordinator of several international scholarly collaborations funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. How can faculty and institutions structure, create, and support "humanities labs"? What do humanities faculty need to have and know in order to collaborate successfully across disciplines and around themes?

For a list of events, see: https://fhi.duke.edu/lab-program-events/454