The abundance of gray literature on the open web has created a need for the development of web publications that aid research communities by aggregating, curating and redistributing material of value to that community. The use of technologies, like the PressForward plugin, makes this possible for those with only modest time and labor to dedicate... Read more »
Category: Research Reports
Prototyping a Curated Scholarly Publication: Digital Humanities Now
Is it possible for scholars to scan the rapidly growing corpus of scholarship available on the open web? How can communities identify relevant and timely materials and share these discoveries with peers? Anyone who tries to stay current with new research and conversations in their field -- ourselves included -- faces an overwhelming amount of material scattered across the web. For the past three years the PressForward team has been experimenting with methods for catching and highlighting web-based scholarly communication by concurrently developing our Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) publication and our PressForward plugin for WordPress. Read about how we prototyped a scalable and reproducible publication model here.
Scholarly Communication, the Web Way – A New Blog Series
With this post we begin a new series on the PressForward blog that reflect on three years of research on sourcing and circulating scholarly communication on the open web. In the coming weeks we will share our discoveries, processes, and code developed through rapid prototyping and iterative design: the PressForward plugin for WordPress; the collaboratively-edited weekly publication Digital Humanities Now; and the experimental overlay Journal of Digital Humanities. We hope these resources will encourage and assist others who wish to collect, select, and share content from the web with an engaged community of readers. Read more here.
Two Years of the Journal of Digital Humanities
Seven issues. Nearly 90 works by over 120 authors and a half dozen institutions. More than 600 pages. Who says that there is no scholarship on the open web? With the first two volumes of the Journal of Digital Humanities (JDH) we have offered an overlay journal for this diverse and emerging field, sourced almost entirely from scholarship on the open web in the previous six months. This post provides background on some frequently asked questions about the production of JDH content and issues.
PressForward at the Museum Computer Network
Slides are now available for project director Joan Fragaszy Troyano and RRCHNM colleague Sheila Brennan's presentation at the “New Approaches to Museum Publishing” panel at the Museum Computer Network meeting in Montreal on November 23, 2013. View Slides Here.
Digital Humanities Now (and Then)
Over the past four years, Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) has used a variety of approaches to aggregating, reviewing, selecting, and disseminating scholarly content from the open web. By experimenting with DHNow, we are developing methodologies and technologies to facilitate community-sourced publications beyond digital humanities. In this post we detail some of the methods and technologies we have used along the way and our wishlist and plans for the future.
PressForward at the Western Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting
Slides are now available for PressForward project director Joan Fragaszy Troyano's presentation for the "New Publishing Tools, Aggregators and Presses" panel at the Western Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting in San Diego, California on November 1, 2013. View slides here.
Survey of Scholarship Available on Scholarly Association and Community Websites
Do visitors to the websites of professional scholarly associations and communities actually find any scholarship? This report by Caitlin Wolters, a George Mason MA Student and intern at PressForward, assesses the scholarly communication available on the websites of twelve professional associations and communities from the sciences and the humanities. Report
Filtering Scholarly Writing from the Open Web using Active Learning SVM
In this report Xin Guan, a graduate student of computer science at George Mason University, introduces the Support Vector Machine (SVM) program he developed to identify valuable pieces from the large pool of potential content for Digital Humanities Now. Those interested in the concepts and logistics behind the classifier program will be interested to read his explanation of the Active Learning method of Machine Learning he used. Report
Discovering Scholarship on the Open Web: Communities and Methods
Online publications that aggregate content from a wide variety of sources have become increasingly valuable to readers and publishers. The academy, however, is still unsure how to efficiently identify, collect, survey, evaluate, and redistribute the valuable scholarly writing published both formally and informally on the open web. Fortunately, some scholarly communities are developing methods to draw attention to upcoming work in their fields. This report by project director Joan Fragaszy Troyano outlines the current state of the aggregation, curation, evaluation, and distribution of scholarship on the open web. HTML | PDF