Digital

Publishing Institutes: Authoring and

Editing Digital Humanities Scholarship
Significance
Multimedia-rich scholarship is a growing area of interest in scholarly communication for academics,
journals, and university presses. Since the mid-1990s, multiple journals have been experimenting with
publishing digital, interactive multimedia as part of the scholarly record. This multimedia has taken
several forms, across a spectrum of print-like to fully screen-based, from a majority of alphabetic text to
fully interactive, audio-and video-based websites. Commercial publishers such as Elsevier and Sage have
begun offering online appendices where authors can publish multimedia and data content that is
supplemental to the print-like articles appearing in their closed-access journals. Other journals, presses,
and venuesmostly those in the humanitieshave been including multimedia and network-based writing
in more radical ways, such as Kairos, Vectors, the Journal of Artistic Research, DH Commons, and
university presses such as Michigan, Duke and MIT, which have very recently begun publishing fully
multimedia articles and books that have no print correspondent.
However, these multimedia publications are not without their growing pains, in part because most
humanities scholars are still new to composing born digital, multimedia-rich scholarship and, in part,
because editors and publishers are still learning how to edit, publish, and preserve such work. For
instance, film scholar Alex Juhaszwho attended a Vectors Journal IATDH-funded author workshop in
2009 to learn how to build her screen-based book, Learning From YouTube, in an early version of the
Scalar multimedia-authoring platformpublished her book with MIT Press in 2010, she wrote about the
editorial process that her work underwent1, in which copy editors at MIT Press removed all of her written
content from Scalar, placed that content into Microsoft Word, and copyedited in that program. Juhasz
specifically questioned in her contract with MIT how the book would be copy-edited. She wrote on her
blog, Editing, Proofing: Unclear how this will be done given the unique quality of the material in the
Work: i.e. design, words, videos. I certainly want it to be edited and proofed but how and by whom?
These combined problemshow authors learn how to compose scholarly multimedia for peer-reviewed
venues and how that work is then edited and by whomhas been a perpetual refrain this PI has had to
address in conversations with journal and press editors moving into multimedia publishing realms.
While the process of removing written content from a design may sound legitimate to many copy editors,
we arguebased on 20 years of experience editing scholarly multimedia like Juhaszs bookthat
separating form and content (the written content from its design) can potentially introduce hundreds of
small errors that must be undone once written content is reinserted into the design of a webtext. This
process of removing content runs counter to the purpose of scholarly multimedia in which form and
content are inseparable. This process also assumes that, in a copy-editing workflow, it is even possible to
remove the written content from the design of a webtext (e.g., many webtexts take the form of proprietary
videos with embedded linguistic content) or that written content is the only mode of communication that
needs copy-editing. Indeed, as scholarly multimedia becomes an increasingly employed genre of
academic publishing, design editing will need to be foregrounded in editorial workflows. Design editing
ensures that a scholarly multimedia text is not only appropriate in scholarship and design but also in
technical ways that will allow the piece to be read without significant interruption far into the future.

Juhasz makes this point in her blog: http://aljean.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/contractual-mayhem-on-the-absurdities-of-movingfrom-paper-to-digital-in-academic-publishing/

Kairosthe first online journal to publish webtexts, and the journal that this PI has edited since 2001
has spent 20 years, since its inception in 1996, following these changes and creating best practices for
authors of born-digital scholarship and editorpublishers who are tasked with maintaining the scholarly
record. Some of these best practices are outlined in the Kairos submission guidelines that have been
developed through extensive critical practice, and have been adapted for use by several online journals
that publish scholarly multimedia, including the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy,
Southern Spaces, and Computers and Composition Digital Press. These venues and otherssuch as
Syracuse University Press, X/Changes, Itineration, Journal of Basic Writing, CCC Online, and venues
still in the making, such as a design journal out of Bard Graduate Centerhave consulted with us over
the last decade to learn about and implement Kaiross best practices for publishing scholarly multimedia.
Some of these best practices include requiring authors to submit editable versions of as many design
elements of their webtexts as possible for copy and design-editing purposes, submitting metadata and
transcripts specific to any audio or video content they have, using file-naming conventions and
information architectures that are web-friendly, requiring all webtexts to pass accessibility checkers, and
mandating that all media files exist on the journals host server. These basic practices ensure accessibility
to editors and readers, now and into the future.
These proposed IATDH workshops for authors and editors will provide a mechanism for helping
academic-publishing stakeholders understand the importance and usefulness of design and designediting in scholarly multimedia and digital humanities projects. We will teach authors and editors the
concept of composing and editing form and content together, and through that process, create a digital
humanities community that encourages and promotes multimedia publishing, implements best practices in
media-rich authoring and editorial workflows, and makes this scholarship accessible and sustainable.
Similar/previous institutes
In this proposal, editing refers to the developmental and production workflows for academic publications,
not the preparation of scholarly editions such as those that require TEI tagging of digitized texts. The
content of these proposed workshops is focused on the writing, editing, and publishing processes
and infrastructures of original research designed by an author in multimedia formats. Previous
IATDH institutes on TEI tagging (201216), data mining (201215), and high-performance computing
(200811; 201112) in which this PI has participated have provided a few days of basic instruction on
Digital Humanities-related tools and methods, but almost always within too short of a period to help an
author build or complete her original research project. Content in these institutes is always presented in a
project-agnostic way, which has made them less useful for some participants needs. This has been a
constant critique of the IATDH workshops: At multiple institutes, I have been asked by other participants
to translate presentations into practical applications and work plans so that users can engage in a way that
matters to their proposed projects, which are often never discussed despite being part of the proposal
process for these institutes. This is not a critique of the concepts of these institutes so much as it is an
argument towards a still-unfilled need: Authors and editors want instruction that is specifically tailored to
their own projects, at the point of need. This pedagogy is a primary function of the discipline of rhetoric
and composition, the field in which all of the staff of this proposed institute reside. I will discuss this
pedagogy and how it is best suited for this proposed institute in more detail in the Curriculum section.
None of the previous IATDH institutes have addressed a primary stakeholder in the digital scholarly
ecosystem: academic publishers. While the NINES Summer Workshop on Emerging Issues in Digital
Scholarship (201113) did address institutional stakeholders in terms of discussing tenure and promotion
issues for literary-critical versions of digital scholarship, it did not address the middle role of academic
publishingthat of editors and publishers who have to manage, develop, and produce scholarship and
who need to know how to retain their value-added processes in an age of multimedia scholarship. There
are no existing workshops for editors learning to edit multimedia content outside of individual, oneoff sessions at conferences such as the Association of American University Presses. Those sessions most

often relate to eBook production outsourcing and XML tagging, which are important parts of a digitalbook process but do not translate to understanding how to edit the multimedia or networked-writing assets
within that content. Thus, when it comes to similar institutes for the proposed editorial workshop, these
seminars will be a first. (Workshop content is discussed in the Curriculum section below.)
The author workshops that most closely resembled this proposed IATDH application include the three
Broadening the Digital Humanities institutes on multimodal scholarship that the Vectors Journal hosted
with various partners in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and the 2015 Middlebury Institute on Scholarship in
Sound and Image. The 2009 Vectors summer institute (which this PI attended) ran for a month in
residence in Los Angeles, where 12 attendees gathered to learn about four major topics in multimodal
scholarship: Introduction to Multimodal Scholarship, Design Issues in Multimedia, Database Design
and Information Architecture, and Collaboration and Process. Attendees ranged from beginners to
experienced multimedia authors, from graduate students writing their dissertations to senior, pre-eminent
scholarsthe purpose was to build a community of digital humanities authors who could create
multimedia-driven webtexts appropriate to the stages of their composing process (e.g., just starting out,
data collection, curating digital assets, or interface design towards a completed project) and to potentially
publish those in Vectors Journal. Because of the broad range of participants expertise, the curriculum
was also broad, which meant participants were always at different stages (some radically so) in relation to
the work plan over the month. And although the publication venue in Vectors was not mandated, the
discussion of technical infrastructures necessary to publish scholarly multimedia tended to be limited (for
most participants) to the author platform Vectors used: Scalar. As a more recent version of IATDH
workshop on this topic, the Middlebury institute also proposes publication in a single venue, which limits
the range of scholars from various disciplines who can participate. I took the following lessonsas a PI
proposing a similar workshopfrom the Vectors institute: The need for author workshops that attend to
their different stages of project progress, multimedia-authoring knowledge, and proposed publication
venue, which may be radically different for each participant. Thus, I am proposing beginning and
advanced author workshops where we will assist participants in reaching their publication goals,
regardless of venue or technical infrastructural need. An updated version of these previous IATDH
workshops is necessary in 2016, thanks to the slate of publication venues that have radically increased
since 2009, the significant body of research on and practical experience in digital composing and editing
that this PI has participated in over two decades, and the writing-process pedagogy that will be used to
best suit participants needs. (See the Curriculum section and Appendix A for the course outline).
Indeed, the field of rhetoric and composition has had the longest-running institute similar to the one being
proposed: The Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) institute is celebrating its 31st anniversary this
summer (http://www.dmacinstitute.com/). DMAC began as Computers in Writing-Intensive Classrooms
(CIWIC) in 1985 at Michigan Technological University under the directorship of Dr. Cynthia Selfe.
(When Selfe moved to The Ohio State University in 2006, the institute moved with her, and changed
names.) CIWIC was and DMAC is a two-week, residential summer institute aimed primarily at
university-level rhetoric and composition teachers who want to learn how to teach multimodal
composition and digital writing in their classrooms. Participants currently pay $2000 for tuition, plus their
own room and board. It enrolls approximately 30 participants every summeralways with a waitlist. A
significant draw of this institute has been its founder and lead instructor, Dr. Selfe, who is renowned
within composition studies as being a kind, empathetic person who puts people first, pedagogy second,
technology thirda saying that the hundreds of attendees at CIWIC and DMAC over the years can tell
you is the primary refrain of these workshops.
The PI on this grant studied under Dr. Selfe at Michigan Tech and served as Associate Director of CIWIC
from 200104, responsible for creating the curriculum and managing all administrative and pedagogical
aspects of the institute (designing the institute website; coordinating budgets, organizing participant
registration and information, planning cultural activities; teaching the daily workshops; etc.). She also
served in various staff positions including Lead Instructor at DMAC from 200513. During her 12 years

working on these institutes, she learned the art of the two-week residential curriculum; the importance of
people first, pedagogy (or, in this proposed case, scholarly production) second, and technology third; and
the draw of hands-on professional development for busy teachers, including graduate students, nontenuretrack faculty, and tenure-track scholars as well as senior scholars wanting to retrain.
The deliverable for participants in these institutes has primarily been teaching materials to implement in
their multimodal classrooms, but in the last five years (in part due to the growing number of webtextbased journals and presses in digital writing studies and spurred by DMAC instructors, such as this PI,
who are editorially affiliated with these venues), attendees have wanted to create more multimedia
scholarly projects instead of pedagogical projects. While DMAC has tried to shift to accommodate this
change in interest, it still has to attend to the beginners in multimodal composition. (In all seriousness, it
is not unusual that at least a handful of users at DMAC each year need to be taught how to use a mouse,
create a folder, or move files from one location to another.) We would still recommend that absolute
beginners to multimodal composition attend DMAC, although Dr. Selfe is retiring this year, and the fate
of DMAC is unknown; recently begun one-week workshops such as the new Digital Pedagogy Lab
(http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/institute/) and some of the Digital Humanities Summer and Winter
Institutes may fill those pedagogical needs. This IATDH institute, however, is necessary to fill the
scholarly need for multimedia authoring and publishing.

Institutional profile
Providing a residential workshop for authors is an important component to ensuring that hands-on
professional development leads to scholarly production in this institute. It also helps build a cohort of
scholars with shared concerns, who will be given tools to promote digital scholarship and become change
agents at their institutional and disciplinary homes. For this residential aspect to succeed, the author
workshops will take place on the beautiful and compact downtown campus of West Virginia University,
hosted by the Digital Publishing Institute (a WVU Libraries center) and the Department of English in the
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. (The editor workshops are addressed at the end of this section.)
WVU Profile & Locale. Since its original land-grant commission, West Virginia University (WVU) has
maintained its commitment to high-quality education, discovery and innovation, diversity and inclusion,
health and vitality, and knowledge pathways and opportunities among the state, the nation, and the world.
West Virginia University (WVU) is the flagship institution of the state of West Virginia and is classified
by the Carnegie Foundation as a doctoral very high research university (R1). Formed in 1867 and funded
by the Morrill Act, WVU is the only doctoral land-grant institution in West Virginia, with an annual
budget of $1.04 billion. The school is governed by the WVU Board of Governors in tandem with the
West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. West Virginia University is accredited by the
Higher Learning Commission, with several individual programs holding additional specialized
accreditation. WVU students consistently garner nationally recognized awards and ranks among the top
15 public universities in the number of Rhodes Scholars. WVU is committed to celebrating the diverse
and valuable experiences of its students and faculty, supported by The Division of Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion, the Center for Womens and Gender Studies, and a brand new LGBTQ Center.
The Eberly College of Arts & Sciences (ECAS), within which the PI is based, is the largest college at
West Virginia University, with 415 full-time faculty and 98 classified staff across 23 academic
departments, programs, and centers. The Colleges $55 million endowment supports 27 distinguished
professorships and 5 chairs, in addition to faculty development programs and student scholarships. The
Eberly College has 129 active principle investigators who engage in humanities, natural science, and
social science research. Annual research expenditures for the College total approximately $15.2 million,
with researchers earning nearly $23.4 million in grants and contracts during FY 2015.
Facilities. One of the universitys primary community outreach stations is its collection of eight libraries
on the Morgantown campus and across West Virginia. As of the 20122013 academic year, the WVU
Library system housed 2,483,241 volumes, with Interlibrary Loan system totaling over 50,000. Onsite

digital and electronic resources include access to over 246 networked databases, over 300,000 eBooks,
and 47,500 online journals. The West Virginia Regional History Center, part of the downtown campus
library specializing in West Virginia History and rare books, contains all four of Shakespeares folios,
among other amazing collections. (An optional tour of this center will be scheduled as part of the author
workshops.) The WVU Libraries system also includes the WVU Press, a not-for-profit books and journals
publisher established by the University in 1966. Its publications include the journals Tolkien Studies and
West Virginia History and the book series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. As the Library
system develops, it is allowing more opportunities for open-access publishing by offering faculty reduced
fees for publishing in open-access journals.
As part of that initiative and in collaboration with WVU Press, WVU Libraries recently created the
Digital Publishing Institute (DPI), which offers research, teaching, and editorial support for online
scholarly publishing to faculty, staff, and students on and off campus. Dr. Ball was named director of
the DPI in January 2016, and this IATDH grant proposal is part of her vision to offer professional
development workshops to digital publishing stakeholders locally, nationally, and internationally.
By Fall 2017, the DPI will have a physical space on the second floor of the downtown libraries (alongside
WVU Press) to include conference rooms, open classroom and production space, and offices. While it
may not be ready in time for the first summer authors workshop, this space would be an ideal location to
host future summer workshops, and the library has other newly designed rooms large enough to
accommodate the author workshops. In addition, the English departmentjust across the street from the
downtown campus library and Balls home departmenthas a recently renovated building with two
computer classrooms and a large lecture room with moveable furniture. (Current room reservation
practices require only a few months noticeplenty of time to reserve the best rooms between grant
notification and the first workshop, which would occur the following summer.)
Housing. While in residence at WVU, authorparticipants are offered free lodging (as part of the grant) at
the Honors residence hall, which was built in 2009, located just two blocks from the library/English
building on WVUs compact downtown campus, and offer single- or double-occupancy with suite-style
bathrooms. We have had previous participants of summer seminars stay in these halls, and they have
enjoyed the experiencethey are the newest residence halls downtown and a block from the nearest
Sheetz grocery store/pub. The residence halls are convenient, accessible, quiet, and will re-enforce the
sense of shared scholarly pursuit and community building that this workshop seeks to create.
If participants do not want to stay in the residence halls, we will coordinate to have them pay only the
difference for a hotel (or we will pay, if travel money allows). Three hotels are located within walking
distance of the downtown campus on/near Morgantowns historic High Street. Parking costs will be up to
individual participants, but are not at all exorbitant in Morgantownusually $10 for a weekly pass in a
nearby garage or surface lot of the university. For participants needing mobility assistance, WVU will
provide a shuttle. All housing and work locations on campus offer reliable WVU Guest wifi access as
well as eduroam (the international, educational wifi network). The dorms also offer Ethernet access.
Editor workshops
The editor workshops will draw on the WVU expertise of PI and DPI Director Cheryl Ball and the
editorial teaching staff, butto facilitate participation by editors and publishers who have limited time
available for residential workshopsthe seminars will be located in conjunction with two major
publishing conferences during the 2018 calendar year, not on the WVU campus. These conference
locations are still to be determined, given their projected dates, but the two conferences we plan to attend
are the Association of American University Presses and the Library Publishing Forum. Both conferences
offer pre-meeting or first-day workshops. We propose to offer two-day seminars at the same, or a nearby,
conference hotel immediately prior to the conferences. The AAUP conference is scheduled for June 17
19, 2018 in San Francisco, while the Library Publishing Forum has yet to announce its 2017 or 2018
venue, but is usually held in a smaller locale such as a university campus. By holding one workshop at a

major academic publishing convention and the other at an up-and-coming area of service publishing
within universities (via libraries), these workshops hope to reach both potential participant types.
Once the IATDH grant has been awarded, the PI will make contact with the conference hosts to
coordinate crossover benefits that may be applicable to institute attendees (e.g., discounted hotel and
travel rates, etc.). This grant pays for two nights of a hotel at the conference location, or nearby, but
attendees of the conferences would be expected to pay their own travel since it is part of the larger
conference period. Wifi will be provided as part of the seminars, which will be held in a rented or donated
(if on campus) classroom or conference space.

Curriculum
The proposed digital publishing institutes for authors and editors are built on decades of digital writing
pedagogies at the university level that value making the material and multimodal components of reaching
actual audiences visible through process-based writing instruction. (Writing instruction includes technical
writing, which incorporates editorial practice as a key content area.) In other words, unlike any of the
prior IATDH institutes on similar topics, this proposal comes from a discipline steeped in teaching people
how to write for publications across disciplines in multiple media and is staffed by trained writing
teachers who have multiple decades of experience teaching authors and editors to work in digital media
scholarship. A best practice within writing instruction pedagogy is small class sizes and a low student-toteacher ratio to allow for individual and small-group conferences and guided workshopping (peer-review)
of in-progress texts, which is implemented into both the author and editor workshops of this proposal.
Author workshops
Proposed dates for these institutes will be during the month of July in 2017 and 2018. (Most major DH
conferences that are already scheduled will fall in June or August of those years.) The institutes are
structured similar to any Writing for Publication class and draw on the curriculum written by the PI in the
textbook, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects (Bedford/St. Martins, 2014), which
will be provided for free to participants. That curriculum takes authors through a writing process of (1)
analyzing similar multimodal projects to create evaluation criteria for venues/audiences, to (2) proposing
a technical infrastructure and media elements they would need based on their own research question, to
(3) creating, collecting, and curating assets for use in a prototype, to (4) drafting and peer-reviewing inprogress work based on the proposed venues evaluation criteria, and (5) revising for publication to meet
archival standards. Curriculum specific to the beginning and advanced workshops is detailed in brief
below and in Appendix A. The following general information applies to both author workshops:
Participants are expected to be in attendance on time and every day over the two weeks. The workshop
runs 9am to 4pm Monday through Friday with lunch provided. Optional social events in the evening and
weekend in-between will also be offered to build a social community as well as a scholarly one. The
structure generally consists of morning seminars with discussion of the readings/themes and introduction
of a particular exercise/assignment that will forward participants project concepts. Lunch breaks may
include optional technical or thematic discussion sections from additional on-campus experts. In the
afternoon, participants will have access to multiple staff members during lab times, which will be guided
by a staff member early in the two weeks (to help them jumpstart an assignment from the morning). Due
to the individual nature of participants projects, however, much of the lab time later in the two weeks
will be unstructured so that participants can draw on the free time to work and ask the circulating staff for
advice at the point of need in their projects. The two-week workshop format is honed from working on
the CIWIC/DMAC workshops, in which a two-week residential period (with enough staff support and
distraction-free work-time as this institute proposes) allows participants to create a full model of their
multimodal project, whether it be a work plan/prototype or completed project. Participants will have
access to Macs and some PCs with relevant multimedia software, but are encouraged to bring their own
laptop, if available.

Beginners
Authors in this workshop will move from conception of a DH project idea to a proposal/work plan or
prototype (depending on the overall speed of the individual and course). During the course, participants
will learn to evaluate existing multimedia scholarship in terms of research questions, media selection,
technical infrastructure, submission guidelines, accessibility needs, and archival procedures so that they
can settle on a research question appropriate to their venues media and technology requirements and
create a work plan (or prototype) to complete the project after the workshop concludes.
Advanced
Authors in this workshop will move from work plan/prototype or rough draft of their project to a final
draft of a submissible project (with an additional written justification for their tenure or hiring narrative)
over the two weeks. During the course, participants will learn how to bring their project to completion,
including focusing on peer-review evaluation, ensuring proper technical infrastructure, adding metadata
for searchability and accessibility, creating a data/asset management plan (when/if publishing venues
dont already have one), and justifying their project to their home institutions and disciplines.
Editor workshops
Because these workshops are the first of their kind for this population of academic publishers, they are
shorter and more informational than the author workshops. The two-day seminar appended to conferences
editors already attend is meant to accommodate their work schedules. Dates will correspond with major
publishing conferences. We are hoping to provide a workshop at the Association of American University
Presses, scheduled for June 2018 in San Francisco, as well as the Library Publishing Forum or DPLAFest,
neither of which is scheduled yet for 2018.
Both editor workshops will feature the same content (discussed below and elaborated in Appendix A).
They will meet from 9am to 4pm over two days, with lunch included. Participants will be asked to bring
their own laptops to take notes and review materials, although they wont need a laptop to participate
much of the discussion will take place collaboratively in the large group, or in smaller groups with a
workshop leader guiding the discussion. Editors will receive readings on digital publishing in advance
and participate in four interactive seminars over the two days, on topics related to the scholarly, social,
and technical infrastructures of digital media publishing: history and examples of scholarly multimedia
publishing, developmental editing of digital media (e.g., peer review, evaluation criteria), design-editing
digital media (e.g., practical tips on editing multimedia texts in development and production workflows),
and publishing digital media with access and preservation in mind (e.g., technical infrastructures,
metadata, preservation issues, etc.). Our goal is for editors to leave the workshop with a set of digital
media best practices so they can create action plans for further learning and implementation.
The DPI plans to offer future, residential workshops for editorseither on a tuition model or funded
through another IATDH grantthat provides in-depth, hands-on editorial knowledge in transitioning
from subscriber models to open access, using technical infrastructures for digital media publishing, and
creating business plans and editorial workflows for integrating multimedia projects in academic
publishing houses. In the meantime, we will encourage participants to join the Council of Editors of
Learned Journals ($40 annually) where they can continue these discussions on editorial concerns,
including open access, digital media, peer review, workflows, and so on.

Work Plan
Fall 2016
Spring 2017
May 2017
July 2017

Staff Skype to finalize curriculum & proposal CFP; Research assistant (already
assigned to PI) designs institute website & print publicity materials
Author proposals CFP & acceptances; WVU & conference arrangements made
Staff reviews pedagogical approaches & individual sessions for author workshop
First author workshop (then: repeat schedule for 2018 author workshop)

Fall 2017
Spring/Summer 2018
August 2018

Staff Skype for editor curriculum; RA builds/distributes editor publicity materials

Finalize local arrangements for editor workshops
Post-mortem discussion with staff to plan for future potential workshops

Participants
Author workshops
Potential participants can propose to the beginning or advanced workshopnone will be preselected.
Authors will be asked to submit a document that outlines the current state and description of their digital
project, their role (if it is a collaborative project), a potential publication venue, a brief vision for what
they want to accomplish at the institute, any obstacles they perceive for completion, a proposed work
plan, and a short CV. Materials will be reviewed by the author-workshop staff to determine whether their
project, role, goals, and potential obstacles are a good fit. CVs will be used as a second measurement for
placement fit in the beginning or advanced workshop. (The two summer workshops are not necessarily
consecutive. Participants could potentially attend the beginning workshop one summer and the advanced
workshop the next summer, but participants will not be required to attend both.) The applicant pool will
be solicited through print (postcard) and digital (workshop website, social media) publicity. Print
materials will be distributed at relevant major conferences (Modern Language Association, American
Historical Association, etc.), and online via social media, listservs, and websites such as DH NOW.
Editor Workshops
Participation in the editor workshops will be on a first-come, first-served basis. If registration is
monopolized by a particular venues staff, we will contact them prior to registration closure and ask that
they internally select a lesser number of participants who can function as delegates (if we need the space).
Otherwise, this short, free workshop will allow any interested editors to create plans for effecting change
at their institutional publishing venuesand, especially, to carry on those conversations during the
conference that these editor workshops will precede. (The PI will stay through the conferences in question
to function as a touch-point for editor-colleagues who may not have been able to attend the seminar.)
Publicity for the editor workshops will occur through the same means as the author workshopsprint
deliverables at relevant conferences (American Association of University Presses, Library Publishing
Forum, DPLAFest, etc.) and through digital media via social media, website links, CFP sites, as well as
through in-person networks as mentioned above. Registration (which will be free) for the editors
seminars will take place through the workshop website, which will be hosted through the Digital
Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries.

Impact and evaluation

These workshops will create more digital media scholarship by authors and more venues that know how
to ethically edit and sustainably publish that work. Expected results include built collections, published
scholarly multimedia in a range of academic venues, and completed digital dissertation projectsall of
which will have been authored and edited with best practices in digital publishing. The impact on the
digital humanities landscape will be significant: Authors and editors will learn the best, most up-to-date
practices on authoring and publishing scholarly multimedia, culled from two decades of research and
experience in this field. A related impact will be the additional numbers of scholars who can serve as
editorial reviewers for digitally mediated DH projects in venues such as online journals, DH Commons,
and NINES. This result will, in turn, promote the possibility of evaluating tenure and promotion cases that
use digital media artifacts, and which may lead to future workshops, like the NINES IATDH and those
offered at the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Association of Departments of English and
Foreign Languages (ADE/ADFL), which this PI is currently involved with MLA to create.
Many of the readings offered at both workshops are publicly available on open-access journals and
repositories, but we will collect them on the institutes informational website, which will also feature the

course syllabus. Although only 70 participants will get to directly engage in these institutes during this
grant period, we will encourage tweeting and live-blogging the institutes and will post summary feeds on
the DPI institute website. This social media outreach will serve as publicity for the next round of
workshops. In addition, these workshops will serve as prototypes that lay the foundation for an extended
series of author, editor, and publisher workshops hosted at the Digital Publishing Institute in the future as
well as webinars made available online. This work has already begun, in small measure, through the
reader-outreach section of Kairos called KairosCast, which features short videos and podcasts on
multimedia authoring topics. Continued education is also planned corresponding to the release of Vega,
the open-source academic publishing platform for multimedia scholarship that the PI is building with a
recent $1 million Mellon Foundation award (see http://vegapublish.com). That platform incorporates
features for collaborative and developmental authoring and editing (among many other items), but in lieu
of its readiness (in Fall 2017), participants at these workshops will be asked to use Slack, a project-based
closed discussion forum, to communicate with staff and other participants before, during, and after the
workshops. Slack will help us build a digital community that can exist far beyond the confines of the twoday or two-week institutes. Additionally, editors will be encouraged to join the Council of Editors of
Learned Journals, where they will have a much wider range of discussion partners in this 400+ editorsonly membership list.
Before they finish with each workshop, authors and editors will be asked to evaluate the course using a
survey instrument online. We will structure these to rate the effectiveness of individual seminar topics,
instructors, and the overall effectiveness of the course, which will be used to assess our instruction and
restructure the workshop before the second iterations, if needed. Additionally, staff will be assigned to
mentor specific authors or editor-cohorts, as needed, during the workshops, andfor the author
workshops in particularwe will follow-up with them six months and one year after the workshop to
gauge their progress towards publication and offer guidance.

Teaching Staff
Principal faculty
Cheryl E. Ball is Associate Professor of Digital Publishing Studies at West Virginia University and has
been editor of the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and
Pedagogy for 15 years. She teaches classes and workshops internationally on editing, multimedia
authoring, and digital publishing and is Executive Director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
She directs the newly inaugurated Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and is co-PI on a $1
million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to build an open-source academic publishing platform,
Vega. In this proposed set of workshops, Ball is responsible for creating the curriculum, leading the
workshops and seminars, and ensuring participant satisfaction.
Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at George Mason University. His most
recent book, Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, was published by the University of Michigan
Press in 2015, and, with Ball, has recently co-authored more than a half-dozen articles on digital media
publishing and technical infrastructures. Eyman has held a number of editorial roles on Kairos since
1996; he is currently the Senior Editor and Publisher. Eyman will serve as a project mentor and facilitator
for both sets of workshops and provide presentations on issues related to the technical, scholarly, and
social infrastructures that support digital scholarship and online publication.
Master teachers: Author workshops
David M. Rieder is Associate Professor of English, Co-Director of Circuit Research Studio, and
Associate Director of the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program at NC State
University. Recent scholarly and creative works include the co-edited collection, Small Tech, a
forthcoming book titled Suasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing, essays and
award-winning scholarship in Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Hyperrhiz, Present Tense,

Itineration, and Enculturation, and numerous digital interactive works. He serves on the editorial board of
Kairos. In this institute, Rieder is responsible for contributing to the seminar sessions on rhetorical and
technical design issues and working one-on-one with authors to help them build their projects.
Madeleine Sorapure is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara, where
she has been teaching courses in digital and multimodal composing for the past two decades. Sorapure
designed and directs the Multimedia Communication track of the Professional Writing Minor at UC Santa
Barbara. As editor of Kaiross Inventio section, Sorapure has helped novice and expert authors develop
their multimedia-rich scholarship. She has published her own award-winning multimedia scholarship in
Kairos, as well as print publications on information visualization, digital autobiographical writing,
popular culture, and Web 2.0, among other topics. In this institute, Sorapure is responsible for contributing
to the seminar sessions on rhetorical and technical design issues and working one-on-one with authors.
Scott Lloyd DeWitt is Associate Professor of English and Vice Chair of Rhetoric, Composition, and
Literacy at The Ohio State University. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award
recipient, DeWitt has served as the director of The Digital Media Project, the English Department's digital
media production and teaching studio. With Cynthia L. Selfe, he has directed the Digital Media and
Composition Institute (DMAC) at Ohio State since 2006. He is the editor of a scholarly collection of
curated digital exhibits (with H. Louis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe), Stories That Speak To Us: Exhibits
from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013), and is
an editorial board member for Kairos. DeWitt is responsible for contributing to the seminar sessions on
rhetorical and technical design issues and working one-on-one with authors in this institute.
Karl Stolley is Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric in the Department of Humanities at the
Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Stolley teaches courses on web design and development,
information architecture, and humanizing technology. He directs Gewgaws Lab, a digital design and
development research group and physical lab space dedicated to investigating open-source technologies.
Stolley is the author of the book How to Design and Write Web Pages Today (Greenwood Press, 2011;
2nd edition under contract). His publications have appeared in IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Kairos. In this proposed
institute, Stolley is responsible for contributing to the seminar sessions on rhetorical and technical design
issues and working one-on-one with authors to help them build their projects.
Master teachers: Editor workshops
Stephanie Vie is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. She is
the managing editor for Kairos and a consulting editor for the Community Literacy Journal. She is a
former project director with the Computers and Composition Digital Press and has worked in an editorial
capacity with the journal Rhetoric Review. Her work has appeared in such journals as First Monday,
Computers and Composition, Technoculture, and Computers and Composition Online, and her textbook
E-Dentity (Fountainhead Press, 2011) examines the impact of social media on twenty-first century
literacies. For the editor workshops, Vie draws on her expertise with scholarly and multimodal editing to
help facilitate workshops on developmental and design-level editing.
Michael J. Faris is an Assistant Professor in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech
University. He has published about social media and mobile devices in the Journal of Business and
Technical Communication, Composition Forum, College Composition and Communication, and
Communication Design Quarterly. He is an associate editor of Kairos and teaches graduate and
undergraduate courses on publications management and new media as well as directs the Media Lab in
Texas Techs English Department. For the editor workshops, Faris draws on his expertise with scholarly
and multimodal editing to help facilitate workshops on developmental and design-level editing.

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