Conversations in Contemporary Publishing

Multimodal digital scholarly publications offer unique affordances over traditional print publishing formats by enabling authors to integrate innovative digital tools and/or data, as well as media-rich enhancements in their scholarly publications. Recent publications taking advantage of such digital affordances have included monographs, enhanced journals, hybrid digital & print projects, as well as podcasts. How are these projects designed and developed to be sustainable, discoverable, and accessible in the long term? Who is publishing them? And how can graduate students and early career scholars acquire the skills and/or find support to develop digital publications?

This presentation will address how academic publishers are approaching multimodal born-digital and hybrid publications, as well as how libraries are supporting contemporary digital publishing methods. In particular it will introduce the range of recent scholarly digital publications and the University Presses actively seeking proposals. It will also touch on considerations for developing a digital publication, including the DH skill set learning curve, pitching a project to an editor, writing for a public audience, platforms, preservation, and accessibility, and resources for getting started.