A Day of Digital Publishing & Quire at Penn Libraries

A Day of Digital Publishing and Quire

On November 8th, 2023, Penn Libraries’ Research Data and Digital Scholarship hosted a series of events around open digital scholarly publishing in collaboration with Quire, Getty’s open source digital publishing tool, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Museum Computer Network Conference.

The series of events kicked off with a roundtable discussion aimed at introducing considerations for creating and publishing digital scholarly publications in Quire and Manifold, an open source platform developed by CUNY, University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding, supported by Penn Libraries since spring 2023. The roundtable speakers included Erin Cecele Dunigan, Quire Community Manager at Getty, Chris Diaz, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for Research Computing Infrastructure at Northwestern University and formerly Digital Publishing Librarian at Northwestern University Libraries, and Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, and directs the M.A. Program in Digital Humanities and the M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization. The roundtable discussion was moderated by Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Contemporary Publishing Fellow at Penn Libraries and University of Pennsylvania Press. Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager at Getty, and Stewart Varner, Managing Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities also contributed to organizing the event.

The roundtable conversation provided an overview of publications being developed in Quire and Manifold, including their unique technical considerations and integration of multimodal and interactive digital features. In particular, the speakers addressed three main areas of consideration: 1) the ways in which digital publishing platforms like Manifold and Quire (in addition to Scalar, PubPub, Fulcrum, and WordPress), are introducing new structures, genres, and formats to the scholarly publishing landscape that would otherwise not be possible in conventional print publishing, such as bilingual publications,  iterative and interactive publications, and publications with embedded media, audio, and zoomable visual elements; 2) differences in the editorial workflow and production of digital publications from print including technical considerations and learning curve; 3) how digital publications are being counted and evaluated by hiring, tenure, and promotion committees and how this impacts who is authoring digital publications.

The roundtable discussion was followed by a Quire presentation and hands-on workshop to learn the backend of the platform, held in the new Research Data and Digital Scholarship Exchange space (RDDSx) located on the ground floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. Approximately 40 attendees participated in the series of events, including Penn faculty, students, and staff, as well as MCN conference attendees and museum professionals.

The day of digital publishing events and roundtable were organized as part of Penn Libraries’ initiative to expand digital publishing services and support to the Penn community in light of the growing interest in open digital publishing across campus, scholars’ increasing fluency in digital technologies, and the expanding conversations about making scholarship open access and globally accessible. At Penn, several paths for creating open digital scholarly publications, including those that integrate media and multimodal features, can be explored in consultation with the Contemporary Publishing Fellow and RDDS team. To learn more about open digital publishing support through Penn Libraries, access the Digital Publishing LibGuide or reach out to Cosette Bruhns Alonso (cabruhns@upenn.edu) to discuss digital publication support for research, publication, and teaching.