Last week I trekked off to Didcot to lead a session in the Commissioning and List Management course run by the Publishing Training Centre. I must have attended this course nearly twenty years ago, but there wasn’t a digital component to it then. This was a shorter, refocussed version of the session I gave at the University of the Arts back in November.
Which blogs are the most useful and inspiring sources for digital publishing? Some of the publishing students at University of the Arts asked me what I read recently, so I trawled through and was quite surprised to see which blogs I’ve been bookmarking most; some of them are not necessarily the obvious candidates. Still, this is what has been getting most of my attention:
The Arden Shakespeare has had several digital incarnations since 1996, when I was heavily involved with the creation of the first, the Arden Shakespeare CD-ROM. Each has been innovative in its own way, often engaging with interesting challenges in the context of rapidly changing technology.
Yesterday John Lavagnino (KCL) and I took part in the London Shakespeare Seminar at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, talking about digital Shakespeares. Both of us took the opportunity to look back at what has happened over the last couple of decades to better understand the challenges and constraints in developing digital Shakespeare resources. I’m writing up the talk in a more extended form, so hope to make that available at some point in the future, but for the moment here are the slides, though Slideshare seems to have done something with the formatting of the timelines.
New projects, data and taxonomies. No wonder my blogging has been minimal. I thought I’d have a week or two to catch my breath, but it looks like another busy period is about to start.
I’ve been lucky to have an interesting few months with some lovely clients and projects. First off was a London-based corporation who needed some consultancy advice on a taxonomy and metadata strategy. They have a huge amount of data from lots of different sources, and a pressing need to integrate it together for users to be able to draw greater benefit from it, whether through a conventional classification, using an existing thesaurus or even developing the folksonomies they already have. I gave them a roadmap for the next stages, and a pragmatic sense of where they could end up.
Then it was back to the more familiar academic publishing environment for some project planning. The new project needed to be started urgently, so I’ve spent the last couple of months working with the extremely bright publishing team to pull together the outline requirements for an exciting new service to be launched next year. Despite a subject area with which I was relatively unfamiliar, it proved to be a fascinating resource, with an extremely innovative back-end system for linking data. Nice to know I can still throw in a few quirky insights that add something challenging to a project…
And finally, there’s the data. I’ve always enjoyed the data side of digital publishing, ever since I managed the editorial and the technical ends of projects at Routledge in the 90s when it was clear that to manage data well it really helped to have a detailed understanding of what it does, and of the fine attention to picky detail that proofing and copy-editing gives you. Consequently, I’ve done lots of modelling and converting publishers’ data over the years, so it was a pleasure to have to convert some very lightly-HTML-tagged encyclopedia data to rather more robust TEI markup using XSLT. The highlights this time have been the rather extensive use of the for-each-group and inordinate complex regexes in analyze-string to add structure to the bibliographies so that OpenURL linking might work. Needless to say, Michael Kay’s book is always by my side.
I’ve been asked to talk to the MA Publishing students at the University of the Arts in London again. In the past I’ve focussed more on the mechanics of digital publishing, outlining what the process of putting content online looks like and that has gone down very well. This time, though, I’m thinking that it might be interesting to address other angles as well.
One way of coming at it could be by looking at what issues are we trying to solve by making it available digitally in the first place. Of course it’s about protecting revenue streams, and of finding new ones, but there’s also the opportunities to enhance the offering, through linked data, other media, better pedagogical support, and by working with the community of users. Each of these force us to look back at the objectives of the publishing project, perhaps modify them, and assess whether we can get the technology to deliver.
I’m also mindful of the changes in the way that the spaces we work in are being re-described. Not only does “publishing” as an activity now seem to cover a much broader range of people and content than was the case, say thirty years ago, but I know I’ve described myself as an “information professional” on occasion, and we attend trade shows which focus on “Online Information” and “Knowledge Management”. While these labels have their purpose, they’re not synonymous with “publishing”; not all publishing is informational and fact-based. There’s the whole evaluative and narrative side to content as well, and that doesn’t respond to the same kind of digital treatment as patents, dictionaries and pharmaceutical data.
Furthermore, in thinking about the transition from print to online, though the benefits can be considerable, what are we in danger of losing? Is it important? If we wind the clock back a bit further, in previous transitions, be it from manuscript to print, or indeed from oral culture to the written, what was lost then? And, if they might be important, could those features too be reinstated in some form in a digital universe?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you know of some useful materials that I could read around this whole area, please let me know or add a comment.
With twenty years' experience in the information industry, and a broad range of activities in the digital/new media sector since 1994, Brambletye Publishing offer invaluable expertise for publishers and other information professionals. Read more