Digitally Speaking
All Texts Look Alike in the Dark : How ebook Platforms Erase the Publisher and Democratize Publishing
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wendy Stephens
The predominance of platforms providing plain-text ebooks has stripped the usual visual hallmarks identifying amateur and small press publications. How has that visual sameness of epubs changed the literary landscape? Small run “vanity presses” of the analog era have given way to push-button publishing, with the ease of digital production leading to major shifts in the percentage of books coming from outside traditional publishing gatekeepers. Optimistically, this could add avenues for developing new voices with “the long tail” of the online marketplace collocating demand for even the most niche products. But the situation of these born-digital books within online marketplaces creates a confusion about the nature of publishing that consumers and readers, complicated by the range of traditional publication (proofreading, editing, and marketing) available a la carte. How do the Big Five publishers attempt to signal unitary value in the digital book marketplace? How do authors from smaller digital presses conceive of their publishing relationships? How are library collections and literary awards are handling the proliferation of self-published and print-on-demand texts?
Fair Trade in African Publishing in the Digital Era
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Audrey Holdhus Small
This paper builds upon recent scholarly work on publishing in Africa, to explore questions of fair trade in the digital era. Regional studies of publishing and print in the late twentieth century (UNESCO, the Bellagio Centre) have given way to research at the national level, with recent monographs on Burkina Faso, Cameroun and Ivory Coast, among others. There is, however, a push to re-energise transnational co-operation, with the revival of the African Publishers’ Network and the establishment of the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, and an intensifying focus on the role of new technologies in publishing. The latter organisation focusses on “bibliodiversity” and has supported several West African publishers in working across national borders, for example on co-publishing and sharing physical and online distribution networks. Key current questions for publishers, publishers’ associations, and professionals in the book trade in the region centre around fair trade in publishing, particularly with regard to European imports in the school market; sustainability of local publishing industries; and building awareness of the “bibliodiverse” ecosystem of the book trade to encourage investors and policymakers to support local industry. A particular focus is on opportunities for young people to build careers in the trade, from traditional commercial or editorial roles to newer challenges such as making print on demand work in the West African market.
Versions, Instantiations, And Meanings Of A Text: Possibilities and Limitations Of Digital Editions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Palacio
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, textual criticism took shifted by the hand of D. F. McKenzie and George Bornstein, who proposed a new approach to this field by claiming that both textual history and the physical features of a document produce meaning. However, even if McKenzie and Bornstein’s proposals affected the way scholars approach works, their claims have not produced a great effect in the way scholarly editions are made. In consequence, linguistic features have continued to be the predominant sources of these editions, while the bibliographical features of the works have remained hidden in archives and unknown to the general reader. This phenomenon could be caused by the inherent limitations of the book as a medium. With the birth of electronic mediums, new digital scholarly projects have tried to show how form and reception have an impact on a text's meaning. In this paper, I explore digital humanities’ attempts to give an account of the sociology of the text, as well as the implications de digital as a medium. To do so, I begin by studying McKenzie and Bronstein’s propositions to try to answer why paper-based critical editions have been unable to put the propositions of these theorists into practice. Secondly, I study the implications and limitations of the remediation from paper to electronic mediums. Finally, I analyze some digital humanities’ case-studies, to study how digital editions have tried to fill the gaps that prevent paper-based editions from successfully joining bibliography and textual criticism.
Who is Reading Maldives National Journal of Research? : A Scientometric Analysis of Scholarly Publication in the Maldives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aminath Riyaz
The Maldives, as a small island developing state, embarked on fostering a research culture only within the last few years. This paper presents a bibliometric and scientometric analysis of this early phase of Maldives’ research and publication trajectory based on the output of the Maldives National Journal of Research (MNJR), which is an open-access multi-disciplinary journal and is the first continuing academic publication in the country. Google Scholar citation analysis was utilized for the scientometric analysis. A total of 34 documents has been published in the MNJR from 2013 to date, with 68% of the documents categorized as research articles/reports. The documents were authored by 37 individuals, with 5 of them contributing 2 articles each. During the first 3 years, all contributions were single-authored articles by local researchers, with a significant proportion of collaborative articles in recent years from local as well as overseas researchers. The bibliographic investigation shows that the Relative Citation Impact for the six years ranged from 0 (2016) at the lowest to 2.55 (2014) at the highest, with the Impact Factor at 0 for all years. The h-index for MNJR is 1 and signifies a low research performance. While the data might appear dismal, the findings highlight comparatively positive citations for a new journal even when it has not been indexed. The findings also highlight the potential for MNJR as a scholarly publication; which can be achieved by increasing the number of papers and enhancing online access and proper indexing for efficient retrieval.
