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Digitally enhanced publishing in the social sciences

The first bit of my notes from an excellent event at KCL last week.

Before we can talk meaningfully of ‘enhanced publication’, we need to attend to the question of how ‘enhancement’ is conceptualised and operationalised. What does it mean for a publication to be enhanced? What role does enhancement serve and how does this sit vis-a-vis non-enhanced modes of publication? One common definition construes it as:

A publication enhanced with research data, extra materials, post publication data, database records and that has an object based structure with explicit links between the objects. In this definition an object can be part of an article, a dataset, an image, a move, a comment, a module or a link to information in a database.

However the speaker critiqued this definition, putting forward the view that an argument is not just the summation of the objects within the enhanced publication. I took his point to be that the definition above risks occluding the underlying intention behind publication i.e. that an excessively technical focus risks losing sight of the role publications play in advancing arguments and constructing stories about the world. Activity supporting digitally enhanced publishing (which is new, as opposed to enhanced publication more broadly, which is not) must be grounded in an appreciation of publishing an academic practice, engaged in by individuals as an outcome of projects and driven by their personal concerns and commitments. The enhancement of the publication becomes valuable because it enables their project to find new forms of expression, which they value engaging in, rather than because digital enhancement is seen to be a virtue in its own right. This might involve making them aware of the creative possibilities which digital enhancement affords but this should be done in a way sympathetic to the underlying aims of the project and avoids pressuring the author to engage in digital enhancement for reasons extrinsic to their existing publishing project.

The speaker suggested a number of questions relating to digitally enhanced publishing which I think are absolutely crucial. Any attempt to support enhanced publishing at an institutional level must be grounded in at least provisional answers to these, otherwise it’s going to risk some unintended consequences e.g.  the occlusion of scholarly argument suggested in the previous paragraph. I plan to try and address these questions through my GPP literature review:

  1. How does enhancement contribute to the quality of a scholarly argument?
  2. What solutions address the challenge facing enhancement of scholarly publication – preserving objects, interrelating objects, engaging key players in enhancement (publishers, editors, authors)?
  3. What enhancements are desired by scholars and students? What are the differences between disciplines?
  4. How is the material actually attended to? i.e. how do scholarly readers engage with the enhanced material.
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