Charles Lilly, a Phd Student in the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication and member of ArtSciLab, received a Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellowship in March, 2016.
Lilly attended the 38th Annual Meeting of Society for Scholarly Publishing took place in Vancouver, Canada. This was the first year of the SSP Fellowship Program. While its previous incarnation (the Travel Grant Program) provided funds to attend the Annual Meeting, the Fellowship Program adds something much more valuable than money: mentorship, and immersion in everything that the SSP has to offer, through the opportunity to join committees and conversations.
The group of 12 Fellows consisted of seven early career professionals and five students – of whom three were “international Fellows” from outside the US. The different types of organizations, universities and backgrounds that we represented led to a thought-provoking number of perspectives.
Lilly talked about his role in the program:
To start, SSP has smartly invested in the future by providing resources for students and young professionals to attend the annual meeting. The fellowship program provided instant community: to walk through contemporary issues in scholarly communication with a diverse group of mentors and peers was energizing. As a student, my research revolves around the future of the monograph. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination offered discussion on potential transformations of the scholarly book. We “sprinted” down our thoughts using the collaborative authoring and publishing tool Overleaf. Some represented our conversation with multimedia; others penned poems. The end result was a multi-authored collection of essays, media and more.
In the panel “Transformative Publishing Platforms for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities,” university presses, largely funded by the Mellon Foundation, presented tools and platforms that aim to make open, networked, living (constantly editable, “always in beta”), digital monographs. I ran up to Susan Doerr from the University of Minnesota Press to discuss Manifold, which promises to think beyond static replications of print. I also found myself racing up to Dr. John Maxwell after he spoke about radical openness and networked books at the closing plenary, “Change is Already Here: Revolutionary Examples.” Dr. Maxwell, who is director of Simon Fraser University’s publishing program, promised to send materials on monographs.
Everyone I chased was accommodating and quick to give out their card. I expect many fruitful conversations to follow. So, the question may not be what did I learn, but what will I learn. Thanks to SSP’s generous fellowship program, I am certainly on a new, exciting path in my research.
Parts of this article originally appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen website on June 10, 2016.