Join the Brown University Library for “Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution of 1848-1849,” a Commencement Forum presented by Professor David Kertzer on Saturday, May 27 from 9 – 10 a.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library.
Video recording of Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution of 1848 – 1849 with Author David Kertzer
Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution of 1848 – 1849
Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolutionrevolves around a trove of the titular American diplomat’s recently rediscovered correspondence — one of the most important collections of original manuscripts linked to the Roman Revolution found outside of Italy (Brown was U.S. consul when Pope Pius IX fled Rome). The interactive publication permits a deeper understanding of the historical significance of the Nicholas Brown papers, housed at the John Hay Library.
David Kertzer
David Kertzer joined Brown in 1992 as Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science. A Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies, he was appointed Provost in 2006, serving in that role until 2011. Kertzer founded and directed the Anthropological Demography program. He was also founding director of the Politics, Culture, and Identity research program of the Watson Institute for International Studies.
A Brown alumnus (A.B., 1969), Kertzer received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University in 1974. He was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at Bowdoin College from 1989 to 1992. Kertzer twice won the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best book in Italian history. Kertzer co-founded and for a decade co-edited the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He served as president of the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and co-edited the book series New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography for Cambridge University Press. His book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and is published in 17 languages. In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015. His most recent book, The Pope at War (2022), tells the story of Pope Pius XII’s relations with Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War.
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.
Join David Kertzer, Paul R. Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies; Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications; Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies; and Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, for a born-digital book presentation on Tuesday, April 25 from 4 – 5 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library.
Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution of 1848 – 1849
Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolutionrevolves around a trove of the titular American diplomat’s recently rediscovered correspondence—one of the most important collections of original manuscripts linked to the Roman Revolution found outside of Italy (Brown was U.S. consul when Pope Pius IX fled Rome). The interactive publication permits a deeper understanding of the historical significance of the Nicholas Brown papers, housed at the John Hay Library.
David Kertzer
David Kertzer joined Brown in 1992 as Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science. A Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies, he was appointed Provost in 2006, serving in that role until 2011. Kertzer founded and directed the Anthropological Demography program. He was also founding director of the Politics, Culture, and Identity research program of the Watson Institute for International Studies.
A Brown alumnus (A.B., 1969), Kertzer received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University in 1974. He was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at Bowdoin College from 1989 to 1992. Kertzer twice won the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best book in Italian history. Kertzer co-founded and for a decade co-edited the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He served as president of the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and co-edited the book series New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography for Cambridge University Press. His book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and is published in 17 languages. In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015. His most recent book, The Pope at War (2022), tells the story of Pope Pius XII’s relations with Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War.
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.
An open letter from the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC), consisting of the directors from thirteen libraries including the Brown University Library, was sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in support of the Nelson Memo, which aims to expand equitable access to federally-funded publications and data. The letter also communicates the directors’ concerns about potential journal expense increases for libraries and other stakeholders.
The Congressionally-established (OSTP) and its Senate-confirmed Director provide advice to the U.S. President and the Executive Office of the President and Executive branch on all matters related to science and technology. In August of 2022, current OSTP Director Dr. Alondra Nelson released an important memorandum to the directors of federal agencies funding scientific research and development, now referred to as the “Nelson Memo.”
More agencies to require free access
The memo outlines significant updates to policies that provide public access to federally-funded publications and data to be made by 2025. One of the major directives within the memo that impacts faculty is the expansion of the OSTP’s former public access directive to cover more federal agencies, including those with $100 million or more or $100 million or less in scientific research and development expenditures. These agencies will now be required to develop plans for grantees to make the published results of federally-funded research freely available to the public and manage and share the digital data resulting from that research.
Eliminating 12-month embargo
Another of the memo’s groundbreaking advances that will impact faculty is that final peer-reviewed manuscripts will be required to be made immediately available, ending the historical practice of permitting a 12-month embargo. The 12-month embargo, required by many publishers, delayed the public’s access to the final peer-reviewed manuscripts, allowing their journals one year of being the sole venue to disseminate the article to their subscribers.
Faculty impact
In general, libraries, including the Brown University Library, are very much in support of the public’s free, equitable, and immediate access to federally-funded research. We want to emphasize that the Nelson Memo does notrequire that faculty publish in an open access journal, and it does not require faculty to publish in a journal that requires authors to pay a fee or article processing charge (APC) for immediate access. It is expected that faculty compliance will be facilitated via deposit of final peer-reviewed manuscripts in agencies’ specific public access repositories, such as NIH’s PMC, NSF-PAR, or DOE PAGES, among others.
Concerns about cost
Over the years the increase in the annual costs to the University’s budget for paying for subscriptions to scholarly journals has severely outpaced inflation; today roughly half of the Library’s collection budget is dedicated to the acquisition of journal databases and other resources to support STEM. Thus, there are serious concerns shared by libraries about how publishers might respond and adapt their business models in advance of losing this 12-month embargo, potentially impacting the cost of already expensive subscriptions and limiting and bundling of titles within packages made available to institutions. Libraries also have significant concerns about some publishers’ APC-based publication models and worry that the industry might take advantage of these changes promoted by the Nelson Memo to promote its expansion.
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.
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.
This illustration featured in the poster above is by Khyati Trehan, an Indian graphic designer and 3D visual artist based in New York. As part of Trehan’s “Digital Biology” series, the illustration “uses scaffolding as a metaphor for AI’s quest in unearthing the underlying logic and structure of complex organic matter” (via Unsplash). For more about this image and to see Trehan’s other work, visit Trehan’s page on the Visualising AI website and Trehan’s website.
On March 3 – 4, 2023, History and Theory,partnering with Brown University Library, will bring the contributors to the December 2022 theme issue, “Digital History and Theory: Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narrators,” together for an open exchange inspired by their contributions but focused on the ways to make that change happen now. Digital history has provided us with an incredible array of tools for acquiring and processing data, but critical theoretical reflections have been few and widespread imaginative historical innovations are scarce. The tools have changed, and the possibilities have changed, but the discipline of history is in danger of using them to simply replicate its old ways. Of course, in the end, it is not the tools that will lead to a change; it is ideas and imagination.
At #DigitalHT2023, our contributors will reflect on their past work and offer concrete suggestions as to how the digital can change the way we research, write, and teach about the past—that is, the way we do history.
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.
Rebecca Louise Carter
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.
John Cayley
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.
Christopher Grasso
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.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
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); andA New Vision forIslamic 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]).
Prize will support a companion website to amplify the pedagogical and public engagement possibilities of Furnace and Fugue.
The American Historical Association has awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History to Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, the first born-digital monograph developed by Brown University Digital Publications. Edited by Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History at Brown, and Independent Scholar Donna Bilak, the open access book was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2020. Furnace and Fugue brings to life in digital form an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier’s musical alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text from 1618 reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced born-digital publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize before now.
Screen captures of interactive features from Furnace and Fugue
According to Professor Nummedal, “Furnace and Fugue makes possible the playful capabilities implied by Atalanta fugiens while also enabling and encouraging new interpretations of this early modern emblem book. The prize funds,” she explains, “will be used to build a companion website to amplify the pedagogical and public engagement possibilities of Furnace and Fugue.”
The interactive publication has attracted more than 16,000 unique visitors from across 167 countries since its launch just over two years ago, reaching specialist and non-specialist audiences alike. By contrast, the print run would have been 500 copies. “Born-digital publication is not only allowing scholars to realize their most innovative ideas in ways not previously possible,” says University Librarian Joseph Meisel, “it is also radically expanding the reach and impact of their work.”
The Rosenzweig Prize, sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, is awarded annually to honor and support innovative, freely available work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history.
Furnace and Fugue was developed by Brown University Digital Publications, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and, at Brown, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute.
Screen captures from Furnace and Fugue
Questions about Furnace and Fugue can be addressed to Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications ([email protected]).
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.
Open access publication expands series delving into comparative perspectives on the roots and effects of racism in the U.S.
For the second year running, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown partnered with the Office of the Provost on the pioneering Race & … in America webinar series, a systematic investigation of the foundational and enduring effects of anti-Black racism in America. Over the course of the 2021-22 academic year, the series again served as a virtual platform for the Brown community to think through the myriad, complex ways that race defines American society and to share these insights with each other and the public at large. Exploring the arts more fully, five new panels featuring Brown faculty continued to generate critical engagements with society’s most fundamental and urgent questions. The informed and illuminating discussions deepened knowledge and awareness in the service of promoting a more just and inclusive community and world. The Race & … in America digital publication series, now complete with 13 volumes, amplifies the impact and extends the reach of this important and timely panel series.
Developed by Brown University Digital Publications in close coordination with Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Race & … in America digital publication series re-presents the compelling original panel discussions with expanded content and resources in an innovative, interactive format, designed to heighten understanding and broaden critical conversations.
“As the Brown community continues to tackle the contentious and important subject of anti-Black racism, the Race & in America series allows us to increase awareness of the factors fueling racial injustice through the expertise of Brown’s faculty,” said Provost Richard M. Locke. “We recognize that all members of our community need the courage, dedication and willingness to work on transformational change. We fully support the digital delivery of this critical content for greater access and broader community reach.”
As an open access publication, the digital series provides enduring, barrier-free access to knowledge, and has been developed with universal design principles for equitable use by all persons, including those with disabilities. In addition, the series features responsive design — readable on all digital devices, from smartphones to desktops — and robust highlighting, annotation, and sharing tools that encourage deep reader engagement and allow users to interact with one another.
“Brown’s long-standing leadership in the study of race in American society is matched by its pathbreaking history in the use of technology to convey innovative scholarship in new and newly powerful ways,” said University Librarian Joseph Meisel. “Like the initial volumes in the digital series, this new set of topics adds more penetrating insights by leading scholars that can continue to be studied and discussed, shaping how we think about some of the most challenging questions in our society and culture.”
Each of the thirteen volumes in the series includes:
A recording of one of the 90-minute panel discussions that took place throughout the 2021-2022 academic year
Student Voices podcast episodes in which Brown University students engage the panelists in follow-up discussion
Recommendations for entry-point materials on the subject
Multimedia resource collections of readings, online exhibitions, podcasts, and other materials referenced during the panel discussions
Suggestions for further exploration
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.
Questions about the Race & … in America digital publication series can be addressed to Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications ([email protected]).
An interactive, open-access born-digital publication, this groundbreaking book’s interface encourages engagement with rich visual material and multimedia evidence
The MIT Press and Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative announce the publication of A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir. An interactive, open-access born-digital work, this groundbreaking book decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones. Aimed at a wide international audience, the book consists of engaging stories and audiovisual materials that will enable readers at all levels to appreciate Islam as an aspect of global history for centuries. The book URL is islamic-pasts-futures.org.
In A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, Bashir discusses Islam as phenomenon and as discourse—observed in the built environment, material objects, paintings, linguistic traces, narratives, and social situations. He draws on literary genres, including epics, devotional poetry and prayers, and modern novels; art and architecture in varied forms; material culture, from luxury objects to cheap trinkets; and such forms of media as photographs, graffiti, and films.
“Ideas pertaining to Islam and other matters of social significance are enmeshed in structures of power. Understandings of history, including our own, are changeable; they appear and dissolve in tandem with particular human circumstances,” explains Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University. “This book urges us to see pasts and futures as fields of unlimited possibility that come alive through a combination of close observation and ethical positioning.”
Through multimedia enhancements and an interactive navigation system, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures allows for an exploration of and engagement with rich visual material and multimedia evidence not possible in a printed volume. The book encourages readers to enter Islam through a diverse set of doorways, each leading to different time periods across different parts of the world.
“The MIT Press has a long and rich history of publishing books that give unique form to unique arguments,” says Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press. “We are thrilled to partner with Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative on this book, which creates exciting new opportunities to share knowledge.”
“With A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, Professor Bashir not only advances new ways of conceptualizing time as a human construct, but also puts theory into action within a dynamic digital structure that breaks free of the linearity that has always seemed an inescapable given in history writing,” says Joseph Meisel, Joukowsky Family University Librarian at Brown University. “To realize this reimagining of historical analysis in four dimensions, Professor Bashir has also enlarged how we can think about the possibilities and practices of digital scholarly publication.”
The publication of ANew Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures brings together the MIT Press’s global publishing experience and the Brown University Library’s digital publication expertise. This cross-institutional collaboration extends to the recently announced On Seeing series, an experiment in multimodal publishing that will explore how we see, comprehend, and participate in visual culture. The series will center the lived experience and knowledge of diverse authors.
The publication of A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the MIT Press, and the Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative.
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design.
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, including the Mellon- and NEH-supported Digital Publications Initiative. An area of distinction for the Library and Brown, the Digital Publications Initiative is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.
Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, based at the University Library, announces the publication of the second born-digital scholarly monograph under the Digital Publications Initiative, a collaboration between the Library and the Dean of the Faculty. Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World, by Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva,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, XR).
Published by Stanford University Press, Shadow Plays examines themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination through six case histories and eight interactive simulations. “The digital format was ideal for my project, which traces a genealogy of virtual reality through analog technologies such as the cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope, all of which foreshadow our contemporary digital technologies,” said Professor Riva. “I look forward to using my digital monograph in the classroom this fall for a course on immersive experiences.” Shadow Plays is an open access publication; it is freely available to anyone, anywhere. According to Friederike Sundaram, Senior Editor for Digital Projects, “The Brown University Library’s dedication to moving interactive scholarship forward has made this collaboration enormously fruitful, and I cannot wait for the project to find its way onto the screens and minds of its readers. I have no doubt it will teach and inspire many.”
Screenshot from Shadow Plays
Brown is in the vanguard of supporting and promoting innovative faculty scholarship that opens up dynamic new possibilities beyond the boundaries of the traditional printed monograph. “With projects including Decameron Web in the 1990s and The Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento in the 2000s, Professor Riva has been expanding the horizons of digital humanities scholarship throughout his career,” said Joukowsky Family University Librarian Joseph S. Meisel. “Shadow Plays brings his innovative contributions to a new level, demonstrating yet again the possibilities for developing and presenting research in the digital realm and extending its reach well beyond the academy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a topic such as the early modern history of virtual reality could be successfully explored in any other form.” The development of Shadow Plays was supported by the Mellon Foundation through the Digital Publications Initiative and the Office of the Vice President for Research at Brown University.
With oversight from Digital Scholarship Editor Allison Levy and drawing upon the expertise of the Center for Digital Scholarship, nine additional born-digital publications covering a range of humanistic fields are currently in various stages of development. One is forthcoming with MIT Press in August. An area of distinction for the Library and Brown, the Digital Publications Initiative, launched with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, activates and guides intellectual exploration and creativity with faculty and other partners across campus. The Initiative also collaborates with publishers to help shape new systems of evaluation, peer review, and scholarly validation for born-digital scholarship. Brown University Library and MIT Press recently launchedOn Seeing, a book series committed to centering underrepresented perspectives in visual culture.
Questions about the Library’s Digital Publications Initiative can be addressed to Allison Levy, Digital Scholarship Editor ([email protected]).
