My school just gave me the OK to produce my tenure materials in completely digital format, which is a good thing since half my work is born-digital (and I want tenure readers to SEE the work, not just read about it in a line on my vita).

I’m also in the middle of a born-digital book project to be published by Computers and Composition Digital Press (ccdigitalpress.org/). The press is open-access, peer-reviewed, sponsored by a well-respected university press (Utah State, a top choice in rhetoric and technology studies), and wants to publish more multimodal “books” (yes, the scare quotes, for all the reasons y’all are discussing above: What comes next?!). Although the first book CCDP published was pretty linear (mostly PDFs), this book, which will hopefully be their third, is set to be along the lines of the kinds of stuff that Vectors Journal — or closer to my heart, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (which I edit; kairos.technorhetoric.net) — publishes.

I’m happy to share the in-progress discussions we’ve been having with the press editors. And I’m happy to share the ways I’ve been able to make such work count in my tenure process. And, more over, I want to hear what the rest of y’all are working on!

Cheryl.

On the question of which tools to use, I really think this is less important than the question of what you use them for. I mean, if it’s a project I’m doing, I’ll probably use Drupal, but that’s me. I think, as your post and kfitz’ comments suggest, it’s may be more important to keep thinking about why and how a digital work leverages “impact” in a way that t+p committees can understand.

One possibility that occurs to me, though, in line with what I think Jeff is getting at, is that the access to a tool or platform for publishing this kind of scholarly work could intersect into the process of dissemination at a point similar to or in place of the standard academic vetting process. In other words, if it’s possible to develop the kind of innovative but accessible tool I think Dave is seeking, perhaps part of that tool can include a means for centralizing distribution, where access to that center is in somehow vetted.

(Actually, now that I type that out, I don’t like it. Not only does it just import the intellectual model from print [i.e. expertise based on scarcity of informaiton], the whole point of the web is that distribution and the means thereof don’t have to be centralized. Duh. Web hosting is cheap. Domain names are cheap. Content is king. I’ll leave the previous paragraph in place, though, in case someone else wants to run with it either way.)

But if there is no longer that chain, then lots of other pathways to publication become feasible. Maybe someone creates a multimedia website that is open to comments/reviews, and out of that come several journal articles, or a few semi-long monographs available in a university repository. The more experimental products will probably be ephemera from an archival standpoint, but that’s always been the case with working papers and similar works-in-progress-that-are-still-readable. Eventually, some publishers will accept previously-seen monographs in a print-on-demand series, one will sell like hotcakes, and a different model will evolve. I hope.

Fortunately, MLA has started to open the conversation about the inherent value of the long-form monograph.

It seems to me that there’s a grant (several grants) waiting to be started here. It might be particularly interesting to see a collaboration between a digital humanities center (for tech support and vision), an academic publishing house (for publishing “credibility” and editing/publishing experience), and 2-5 scholars willing to put their work forward like Dave (and take risks in publishing in a new format that might not translate easily to the old format). One question I’d want to explore is how to avoid the problems faced by the gutenberg-e program of the AHA (www.historians.org/prizes/gutenberg/Index.cfm).

Another is to see what such a project might gain from the HASTAC discussions on the subject (www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age), including the experiences of the multimodal journal Vectors (vectorsjournal.org/).

I’d like to see this session brainstorm tools _and_ data structures (with potential tools) needed to move forward on this process. I like the idea of a flexible, open-source, easy-to-install set of tools. I also think the notion of central hosted space has some strengths (ease of use, potential for increased credibility) and weaknesses (potentially viewed as limiting as the “publisher” makes choices about what to support/not) that we should explore in the session.