September 14, 2015

Digital Publishing and Social Media Working Group

Lisl Hampton Anthropology UNC
Chris Kennedy Political Science Duke
Dan Trigoboff Communications, Rhetoric & Digital Media NC State
Heather Woods Communication UNC

Our group explores the ways scholars, institutions, and the general public create, share, discover, and engage with knowledge in the digital age. Our diverse members reflect the perspectives of lawyers, journalists, university press publishers, librarians, teachers, and social media researchers, among others. During this academic year we will develop and organize events on publishing literacy, in order to distill and focus our shared understanding on issues that impact graduate students.

Topics and issues of particular interest to us include:

  • Public intellectualism in the digital sphere
  • The role of the academy in the development of public knowledge
  • Citational practices, and ways of tracking and measuring scholarly impact
  • Transformations of authorship roles and responsibilities
  • Gatekeeping structures and ways in which authority is projected and negotiated
  • Managing and protecting intellectual property rights and privacy
  • Information and computer security

 

 

  • Meetings:

 

    • Brainstormed 4 different events/colloquia/workshops – need some feedback:
      • which topics you’re most interested in?
      • Are there speakers you would select?
        • Scholarly communications office
        • Duke Press – Courtney Berger?
        • UNC Press?  
        • Cultural Anthropology journal
        • Harris Cooper
      • Would you be interested in opening this up more broadly?
      • Logistics: How much time would you be willing to commit?

 

  • Publishing LIteracy Workshop Series (Spring 2016)

 

    • Meetup with Press etc. publishers (FHI-sponsored)
    • Managing your digital identity as an author: copyright, licensing, broader questions of authorships — how do you negotiate with publishers and with others? publishers, librarians and others on a panel. Making your material discoverable. Self-branding.
    • Making Your Work freely available – how do you recognize a reputable journal? How do you recognize a journal with a high impact factor? How do you balance out the reputation and the impact of the journal? are there costs? how do you deal with those costs. This is sort of a hands-on. Legal and ethical considerations.
    • Debate on Public scholarship: do people have a right to make information public? do intellectuals have responsibilities once they’ve made it public to make it more interpretable and discoverable?
    • Public intellectualism in a network society (public-facing event)– public intellectualism is a contested term. We could have a panel and/or workshop that asks the questions about what it means to be a public intellectual? how that functions within academe? and commonly used tools — social media, blogs, press applets.
    • Alt Metrics. New forms of peer review. Measurement systems, different sources. Altmetrics explorer from the Libraries.
  • Hosting a reading group on the structure and function of wikipedia. What does the encyclopedia mean to us today?  
  • Nov 19: Publishing Makerspace Workshop: Adventures in Digital Publications — bring your early-stage projects that have a digital component and workshop them with publication experts to get feedback on the project plan. These will be 15-20 minutes for each project.
  • (in Spring) Bring in speakers who have been pushing the boundaries in digital publication