David Roskies’ Yiddish literature archive now online – The Forward

“This week marked the official unveiling of a new, freely accessible Yiddish archive composed of previously unpublished teaching materials, scholarship, literature, notes and ephemera from the collections of Yiddish literature scholar David G. Roskies.

All Things Yiddish: The Lerer Roskes Archive is named after the affectionate Yiddish title given to Roskies by his students, Lerer Roskes, or “Teacher” Roskies. Sponsored by the Naomi Foundation, the online launch event was a chance for Roskies, alongside a panel of his peers, to introduce the archive and offer a digital tour of some of its contents. The event was moderated by the executive director of the Naomi Foundation, Lindsey Bodner….”

[2302.04084] Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications

Abstract:  The Reception Reader is a web tool for studying text reuse in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) data. Users can: 1) explore a visual overview of the reception of a work, or its incoming connections, across time based on shared text segments, 2) interactively survey the details of connected documents, and 3) examine the context of reused text for “close reading”. We show examples of how the tool streamlines research and exploration tasks, and discuss the utility and limitations of the user interface along with its current data sources.

 

UBC Library digitizes William Shakespeare’s First Folio – About UBC Library

“UBC Library has made its first edition of William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies openly accessible to the public by publishing a digitized version of the volume online through Open Collections. The process to digitize the First Folio took more than a year to facilitate due to the Folio’s age and fragility….”

Enter an Archive of 7,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online | Open Culture

“And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collection currently holds over 7,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe….”

Enter an Archive of 7,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online | Open Culture

“And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collection currently holds over 7,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe….”

English professor develops virtual Open Corpus Project | The Justice

“Prof. Dorothy Kim (ENG) is currently working to develop a virtual corpus, or collection of written texts, of Early Middle English language. This would give researchers the opportunity to search across multiple archives and databases of manuscripts. The current status of the Open Corpus Project, as the site is titled, was unveiled at a Faculty Lunch Symposium on Thursday, March 17….

There are many existing corpora for Early Middle English and other languages, but each one has a different set of pros and cons, Kim explained. …

She explained that the design for the Open Corpus Project will be mainly based on a digital platform called Open Context, which is an open access archeological database. She said that Open Context has a landing page with a map, clickable links, and search filters; searches are presented in an organized list so that documents are easy to view and further searches can be done from the results. In order to develop the Open Corpus Project in a similar manner, Kim is partnering with Geocene, an engineering consultancy….”

 

Modern Languages Open – ScienceOpen

“Modern Languages Open (MLO) is a peer-reviewed platform for the open access publication of research from across the modern languages to a global audience.  It provides

Interdisciplinarity across the modern languages and engagement with other fields from a modern languages perspective
Gold Open Access under a CC-BY licence
Rigorous peer review pre-publication interactivity post-publication
Rewards for article reviewers
Flexibility on article length from 3,000-15,000 words
International dissemination under the imprimatur of a university press

 

MLO is published by Liverpool University Press, one of the world’s leading publishers in the modern languages, in partnership with the University of Liverpool Library….”

Frontiers | Collaborative Processes in Science and Literature: an In-Depth Look at the Cases of CERN and SIC | Research Metrics and Analytics

Abstract:  In this paper we examine how the process of collaboration works in science and literature. In the first part, we discuss the features of scientific collaboration and literary collaboration and the differences between them. In the second part, we analyze two processes of collaboration, each from a different field: the case of CERN and high-energy physics and the case of Scrittura Industriale Collettiva and its Great Open Novel. Lastly, we try to compare those two processes and deduce the common traits of a successful collaboration.

 

Scriptorium: Creating an Open-Access Creative Writing Journal in Brazil

“The university press (EDIPUCRS) holds an open access-only policy when it comes to journal publishing, so every PUCRS journal is available without cost.5 Authors are not charged—publishing costs are covered by the university—and the editorial team is comprised by faculty members, helped by graduate and undergraduate students. In 2018, according to a report by Science-Metrix, Brazil had 75% of scholarly articles freely available. More recent data from Nature (2019) shows that, while the country remains one of the world leaders in open access, Brazil is now in fourth place, following Indonesia, Colombia, and Bangladesh.6

This kind of output of open access journals in Brazil can be explained by the fact that a large portion of research in Brazil is funded by public money. As such, one of the demands from funding agencies is that the results need to be shared in open access publications, leading more researchers to submit their work to OA journals. In addition, OA periodicals receive a higher evaluation from the Ministry of Education—which translates to more funding to the universities that publish them….”

Supporting Research in Languages and Literature | Ithaka S+R

“In general, language and literature scholars do not prioritize publishing in open access journals and are reluctant to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make their articles in hybrid journals open access. A few subfields, such as video game studies and digital humanities, have many open access journals and may represent exceptions to this trend.

Numerous interviewees expressed positive sentiments around the idea of their research being openly available, although they often conflated “open access”—free access to published, peer-reviewed articles—with other forms of online dissemination, such as digital archives and Academia.edu. However, these interviewees usually did not report having taken concrete actions to make their research open access. The pressure to publish in prestige journals—which are usually not open access—and the cost of article processing charges[56] contravenes any desire to make their work open.[57] As one unusually well-informed interviewee explained, “I would like [my work] to be copyrighted under a Creative Commons [open access copyright license] and I have absolutely no way of doing that because of the tenure system. . . . After I get tenure I’ll start to try to push that forward.” This resonates with findings from the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018, which showed that younger faculty members across disciplines place less of a priority on publishing in open access journals than older faculty members.[58]

The continuing supremacy of the monograph within the field of languages and literature may also contribute to scholars’ ambivalence toward open access publishing, since the open access movement broadly focuses on journal articles. Although some publishers are experimenting with open access monographs—at least one interviewee reported having published a book both in print and in a free online version—this was not a priority for the scholars interviewed for this project.

Only a few interviewees reported that they had uploaded preprints of their articles to their campus repositories. Many scholars simply do not understand that they are able to do this or why they should. Others are confused about whether and how the copyright terms of their own work allow them to share it on platforms outside the publisher’s website.[59] Several interviewees reported that they share PDFs of their articles on Academia.edu, Facebook groups, or, less commonly, their personal websites; only some of these scholars mentioned paying attention to the copyright status of their work when doing so….

Most interviewees who spoke about public humanities in relation to digital outputs did not articulate a vision for how they would measure or promote public engagement with these outputs, other than making them available. It is also important to note that language and literature scholars generally do not view open access publishing as a proxy for public engagement; there is an implicit sense that traditional scholarly research outputs are inappropriate for wider audiences….”

Friday: the new digital-first, pay-what-you-want Lovecraftian YA detective comic from Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente / Boing Boing

“Award-winning comic creators Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin launched Panel Syndicate in 2013 as a digital-only, name-your-price publishing outlet for their near-future Internet noir The Private Eye. They’ve released several comics through this imprint since then — from themselves, and from other creators — that all fit under the same DRM-free, pay-what-you-want f0rmat, with horizontally-oriented pages specifically designed to be read on a computer screen or tablet….”

Friday: the new digital-first, pay-what-you-want Lovecraftian YA detective comic from Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente / Boing Boing

“Award-winning comic creators Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin launched Panel Syndicate in 2013 as a digital-only, name-your-price publishing outlet for their near-future Internet noir The Private Eye. They’ve released several comics through this imprint since then — from themselves, and from other creators — that all fit under the same DRM-free, pay-what-you-want f0rmat, with horizontally-oriented pages specifically designed to be read on a computer screen or tablet….”

The entire Animorphs book series is now available for free online / Boing Boing

“Animorphs was a YA sci-fi series that took the mid-90s Scholastic book fair circuit by storm. Written by K.A. Applegate, the books focus on a group of kids who gain the ability to transform into any animal they touch — but only for two hours, or else they’re stuck that way. …

Lucky for all of us, the entire 54-book series is now available as free ebooks. I can’t imagine they take that long to read, so maybe they could be a good distraction from the other invisible enemy outside right now….”

Thousands of Copyrighted Works Will Now Be Freely Available to Teachers – Teaching Now – Education Week Teacher

“Teachers—especially those of English or the arts—rely on famous works of literature, music, and film in their classes, copying and repurposing them to analyze with students.

But often, embedding these works in curricula to share with other teachers or making them available to students can raise questions about copyright: How much of an original movie or poem can a teacher include, and how widely can resources made with these materials be distributed?

As of Jan. 1, thousands of works are newly exempt from these questions. At the beginning of 2019, anything that was originally copyrighted in 1923 passed into the public domain—meaning that anyone can use and reprint it, free of charge and without permission….”