Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Brown University Library has received a three-year $246,000 Implementation Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to establish a cross-organizational training and support program for HBCU library professionals seeking to gain or expand expertise in developing open access born-digital scholarship. 

Born-digital publications create exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge by advancing scholarly arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Combined with open access publishing models, these new scholarly forms are increasing the visibility and reach of humanities scholarship to global audiences both within and beyond the academy in unprecedented ways. Yet the majority of this innovative work is being generated at well-resourced, predominantly white institutions.

“Advancing HBCU Scholarship, Diversifying Digital Publishing,” developed in close collaboration with the HBCU Library Alliance, will help to build capacity at HBCU libraries. Three librarians — at Fisk University, Kentucky State University, and Prairie View A&M University — will obtain a highly specialized skill set fully realized through the development of a born-digital publication authored by a member of their faculty. The University of Michigan Press, with its demonstrated commitment to issues of equity, diversity, and social justice, will collaborate with Brown Library to mentor the cohort and, via an open access publishing model, disseminate HBCU-generated digital publications to the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. 

In addition, HBCU students involved in the work will gain experiences and training relevant for a wide range of careers where knowledge and skills with digital media are central. Sandra M. Phoenix, Executive Director of the HBCU Library Alliance, emphasizes the importance of involving students in the initiative:

We look forward, with enthusiasm, to this project and its impact on the HBCU Library Alliance Community — especially the students. Recruited students will gain relevant experiences as they consider digital publishing as a career option. To that end, we are excited that this project will diversify the digital publishing community and extend the reach of scholarship generated within the HBCU Library Alliance.

“This first-of-its-kind partnership between a predominantly white R1 university library, a consortium of HBCU libraries, and a leading university press will nucleate networks of HBCU content generators/facilitators and publishers to produce outstanding scholarship that, without developmental investment and enhanced visibility, might not have had the same kind of impact on the academy,” according to Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications and Principal Investigator for the grant. “The collaboration will promote a broader array of scholars and research programs to help shape scholarly discourse going forward.” 

Moreover, this multi-pronged intervention, which addresses equity issues endemic to the academic publishing ecosystem, will provide a replicable model for similar mutually beneficial collaborations in the service of diversifying scholarly publishing — and scholarship more broadly — by taking an HBCU-centered approach that both contributes to longer-term structures for capacity-building and sets the stage for further funding directly to HBCUs. According to Charles Watkinson, Director of the University of Michigan Press:

The university press community aspires to advance equity, justice, inclusion, and belonging. We also recognize that our organizations too often replicate legacy structures based on exclusion. The chance to learn together with HBCU colleagues is a precious one, and the University of Michigan Press is grateful to Brown Library for this opportunity.

Additionally, via a public-facing website designed by Brown University Library, the curriculum will be readily accessible and adaptable by other institutions and communities nationally and internationally. The benefits of the project will thus be sustained well beyond the 2023-2026 grant period.

Brown University Library is uniquely positioned to implement this program. Launched with generous support from the Mellon Foundation and with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP) — widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive — is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age via its novel, university-based approach to digital content development. The HBCU Library Alliance has established a formal partnership with Brown University Library, welcoming Brown into its community of practice as its first invited, non-HBCU affiliate member. For the last three years, Brown has served as a host site for the HBCU Library Alliance Conservation / Preservation Internship Program, and with the support of a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program planning grant, the partnership recently concluded the joint Stronger Together, Excellence in Library Leadership Program. “It is very exciting to see our collaboration with the HBCU Library Alliance continue to grow,” said Joseph Meisel, Joukowsky Family University Librarian. “I’m also delighted to be expanding the reach and impact of our efforts to advance born-digital scholarly publications and create new opportunities for outstanding researchers.”

About Brown University Library

The Brown University Library is central to Brown’s academic mission to support teaching and learning at the highest level, and in a spirit of free and open inquiry. The Library is home to the Center for Digital Scholarship, a hub for the creation of new scholarly forms and other innovations in scholarly communication. An area of distinction for the Library and the University, Brown University Digital Publications is one of the ways in which the Library activates and guides intellectual exploration and creativity.

About the HBCU Library Alliance

The HBCU Library Alliance is a consortium that supports the work of the information professionals at the libraries, archives, and special collections of the country’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Guided by the historic significance of HBCUs, the strength and voice of the HBCU Library Alliance is displayed through its ongoing involvement and connection to its membership of libraries serving HBCU institutions. Since its founding, the HBCU Library Alliance has provided an array of resources and programs to transform and strengthen its member libraries by developing library leaders, preserving member collections and making them more accessible, and planning for the future.

About the University of Michigan Press

The University of Michigan Press is a vital component of the University of Michigan Library and the primary academic publishing division of the University. In partnership with our authors and series editors, it publishes in a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines. The Press leads in the development of digital scholarship and supports the dissemination of knowledge as widely and freely as possible. U-M Press is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

About the Institute of Museum and Library ServicesThe Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. IMLS envisions a nation where individuals and communities have access to museums and libraries to learn from and be inspired by the trusted information, ideas, and stories they contain about our diverse natural and cultural heritage. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Presented by the Association of American Publishers, PROSE awards recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing

The Association of American Publishers has named Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World by Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva the category winner in eProduct for the 47th Annual PROSE Awards. PROSE awards recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by celebrating the authors, editors, and publishers whose landmark works have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study each year.

Shadow Plays was published in June 2022 by Stanford University Press. The open access book explores popular forms of entertainment used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, and XR). Typically studied as part of the pre-history of cinema or the archaeology of media, analog technologies such as the mondo nuovo or cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope evoked shadow-copies of our world long before the advent of digital technologies and exercised a powerful pull on minds and imaginations. Through six case histories and eight interactive simulations, Professor Riva explores themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination, shedding light on illustrious or, in some instances, forgotten figures and inventions from Italy’s past.

Shadow Plays is Brown Library’s second multimodal monograph developed by Brown University Digital Publications, with additional support provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research. The Library’s first born-digital monograph, Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, was awarded the 2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association.

Questions about Shadow Plays can be addressed to Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications ([email protected]).

About Brown University Digital Publications

Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.

The University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, together with the Digital Publications Faculty Advisory Committee, are pleased to announce the selection of the next four scholarly works to be developed by Brown University Digital Publications.

Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks by Rebecca Louise Carter, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies, is a meditation on Black death and its transformation, exploring the shift to Black aliveness in both scholarly work and everyday practice. A project of Black Study inspired by ethnohistoric and ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans, this short-form digital publication will consist of several connected essays accompanied by a series of visual and moving portraits of Black people who grapple with conditions of precarity and death but also find ways to conceptualize and embody Black aliveness as an aesthetic, orientation, or other mode of being. The animated scenes are crafted from interview recordings, archival materials, photographs, and sound, set in motion through new drawing, painting, collage, and stop motion photography. Together with the essays, the book presents a narrative arc and multimodal experience through which readers/viewers/listeners can witness and follow Black ways of being, knowing, and doing. 

In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation by John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts, will feature over fifty of the pioneering author’s works in “language art with computation,” dating from the late 1970s — when personal computing began to be possible — down to the present time. More than just a digital anthology, the project will be integrated with an original theoretically informed commentary, offering critical, discursive pathways around and about the selections themselves. The constituent works will be published digitally, as far as possible in the manner that they were conceived to be read. Saying as much will further establish this publication as another first because Cayley’s writing, his language art work, was composed to be dynamic and time-based, sometimes generative and self-modifying, not necessarily the same “text” each time the work is encountered. In Networked and Programmable Media will bring early and recent programmed language art to what are now both crucial and everyday real-world networks for both readers and scholars.

The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence by Christopher Grasso, Professor of History, is a case study at a hinge moment in American history: 1877, when the nation backed away from its first great experiment in racial justice. In a small town in Kemper County, Mississippi in the spring of that year, a political mob murdered five people, including Republican Judge William Wallace Chisolm, former state senator J. P. Gilmer, and two of Chisolm’s children. To ask why the “Chisolm Massacre” occurred is to plunge into a complex web of local, regional, and national causes and effects, motives, and consequences. National press coverage and two quickly produced books demonstrated that the meaning of the event was and is embedded in the larger moral history of Reconstruction. Politics was violent and violence was political in ways that linked this small place to the nation. Grasso’s historical narrative is based in part on an extensive private archive of Chisolm family papers. The digital publication will feature thematic document clusters, enabling readers to explore a variety of primary sources, surfacing epistemological issues and the practice of historical interpretation.

Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, focuses on the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome during two phases of its existence: first, under the fascist regime; second, in the content of recent populist phenomena in the Italian political and cultural landscape. Through an interdisciplinary lens (critical geography, ecology, landscape architecture, urbanism, architectural history, media studies, literary theory), Stewart-Steinberg considers “grounds” in wide terms, as they are invoked both literally as the making of a physical space and metaphorically as the making of a political or intellectual argument. “Reclamation” as a project and a concept becomes a useful conceptual tool to understand the many ways in which fascism has surfaced and continues to return in Italy today. The digital publication will be organized around the concept of the “grid,” and will feature excerpts from fascist films and documentaries on the region.

A collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown University Digital Publications creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.

Projects that are selected by the program’s Faculty Advisory Committee are developed as enhanced digital works that draw on the capabilities of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. These scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.

The program’s first born-digital monograph, Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, co-edited by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History, and Independent Scholar Donna Bilak (University of Virginia Press, 2020) was recently awarded the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History by the American Historical Association. The second and third faculty-authored digital monographs were published earlier this year to wide acclaim and already enjoy a global readership: Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World by Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies (Stanford University Press, 2022); and A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History (MIT Press, 2022).

Other digital works currently under development include: 

• The Sensory Monastery: Saint-Jean-des-Vignes co-authored by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Archaeology, and Clark Maines, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University; 
• Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Time by Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media; 
• Chika Sagawa, Japanese Modernist Poet by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts;
• Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies.
• Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism Toward Collective Liberation by Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies;
• Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt by Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology;
• Trojan Women in Performance by Avery Willis Hoffman, Inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute, Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics
• The Ruin Archive: Art and War at the Ends of Empire by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Associate Professor of History; and
• Border Assemblages: Re-collecting Moria by Yannis Hamilakis, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies.

In addition to developing the Mellon humanities portfolio, Brown University Digital Publications produces university projects such as the revised and expanded edition of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report and the 13-volume Race &…in America digital series. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown University Library has established a training institute, Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, designed for scholars who wish to develop innovative born-digital publications but may lack the necessary resources and capacity at their home institutions.

To learn more about Brown University Digital Publications, contact Director Allison Levy ([email protected]).