acrymble
commented
7 years ago I've dragged out the original pitch from 2011. The project very quickly evolved, but this is what it was originally pitched as (by me to Bill Turkel):
Academic publishing, meet the Internet. Most academics are suspicious of online work. The criticisms are justified; online publishing lacks peer review, the writing tends to be unpolished, and works are impermanent or frequently changed, frustrating attempts to cite. Those who support open access publishing – of whom there are many amongst digital humanists - dismiss the cost, sluggishness and rigidity of the academic publishing model. And yet relatively little work has been done to bring the two sides together. Instead, the conversations are dismissive and divisive. Digital humanists publish to their blogs or Twitter feeds, and traditional academics ignore them, while opting for more respectable places to publish. Rather than perpetuate the divide, a positive solution-based model is needed, one that addresses the concerns of those who support academic publishing and leads by example. This solution is a collaborative, open access version of The Programming Historian, which maintains rigorous standards, peer review, and relative permanence, while taking advantage of the flexibility of Web 2.0, Drupal and an engaged community.
This web-based project, of which NiCHE will be the “publisher”, will provide an infrastructure to allow members of the community to contribute modules (chapters) for review under a Creative Commons “by-sa” license. The editor(s) will try each module to ensure it is accurate and work with the author to ensure the lesson is comprehensive for our target user: an educated but non-specialist researcher interested in learning new techniques. Approved modules will then added to the collection. Quality modules will be sought over quantity of content.
To ensure the site does not become a code repository, mechanisms will be put in place to promote a linear learning model similar to a book, but with a bit of choose your own adventure thrown in. Authors seeking to make submissions will be required to build directly upon an existing module, or to ensure that their module is entirely self-sufficient. In this way readers can always find the beginning of a set of lessons, and contributors are encouraged to work within the existing structure. The image to the left shows how this collaborative building might look, colour-coded by contributor. The entire project may have several starting branches, depending on what type of project the authors seek to contribute: physical computing, text mining, website building etc.
drjwbaker
jerielizabeth
walshbr
mdlincoln
JMParr
ianmilligan1
alsalin
Issue to flag a conversation for our Editorial Meeting agenda.
With the change over in editors and with an increase in lesson proposals, it seems time to have a conversation as an Editorial team about what we want to build with The Programming Historian. I see this as important given our recent conversations about new lesson proposals and our recent conversations about updating lessons.
Some of the possible paths I can see or have been mentioned are:
It would be useful to get a sense of the different goals the publication has had over time, and then clarify what this editorial team wants to push toward.