The web beyond academia has had to develop mechanisms for filtering for quantity, on sites such as Techmeme and The Browser; the academy has honed a set of methods of filtering for quality, through peer review. PressForward aims to marry these old and new methods to expose and disseminate the very best in online scholarship.

PressForward will pioneer new methods for capturing and highlighting presently orphaned or underappreciated scholarship—including “gray literature” such as conference papers, white papers, reports, scholarly blogs, and digital projects—in ways that are useful to scholarly communities. Through a structured study of existing methods and by modeling a new kind of active publication, PressForward will collect data to provide the project and other organizations improved knowledge about open-web scholarly curation. Meanwhile, PressForward will release an open-source platform for scholarly communities and organizations to create their own trusted, high-value streams of relevant content. All data and code produced by PressForward will be freely available on this site.

For some time here at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media we have been thinking about the state of scholarly publishing, and its increasing disconnect with how we have come to communicate online. Among our concerns:

• A variety of scholarly work is flourishing online, ranging from long-form writing on blogs, to “gray literature” such as conference papers, to well-curated corpora or data sets, to entirely novel formats enabled by the web

• This scholarship is decentralized, thriving on personal and institutional sites, as well as the open web, but could use some way to receive attention from scholarly communities so works can receive credit and influence others

• The existing scholarly publishing infrastructure has been slow-moving in accounting for this growing and multifaceted realm of online scholarship

• Too much academic publishing remains inert—publication-as-broadcast rather than taking advantage of the web’s peer-to-peer interactivity

• Too much scholarship remains gated when it could be open

Legacy formats like the journal of course have considerable merit, and they are rightly valued: they act as critical, if sometimes imperfect, arbiters of the good and important. At the same time, the web has found ways to filter the abundance of online work, ranging from the tech world (Techmeme) to long-form posts (The Browser), which act as screening agents for those interested in an area of thought or practice.

What if we could combine the best of the scholarly review process with the best of open-web filters? What if we had a scholarly communication system that was digital first?

Today we’re announcing a new initiative to do just that: PressForward, generously supported by a $862,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation‘s Digital Information Technology program.

PressForward will bring together the best scholarship from across the web, producing vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around. PressForward will:

Develop effective methods for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the best online scholarship, including scholarly blogs, digital projects, and other web genres that don’t fit into traditional articles or books, as well as conference papers, white papers, and reports

Encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship through active new forms of publication, concentrating the attention of scholarly communities around high-quality, digital-first scholarship

Create a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to launch similar publications and give guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who wish to supplement their current journals with online outlets

We hope you’ll join us making this new form of scholarly communication a reality. You may be a researcher in a field that is underserved by traditional outlets, because it is new, interdisciplinary, or involves non-textual media. Perhaps you have a digital project that can only be “published” if you describe it in an article. You may be an editor of a journal who would like to supplement standard articles with digital content from across the web, or a scholarly society that wants to find and feature online work. As PressForward evolves, we hope to serve all of these constituencies, as well as a broad audience currently locked out of gated scholarship.

Learn more about PressForward on our new site, or by sending us an email. You can also follow us on Twitter or via RSS.

One Week | One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting-edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for “barn raisings” when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash “startup” or “blitz weekends” that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week | One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for humanities work and to help balance learning and doing in digital humanities training.

• Sheila Brennan – Looks at the online museum world and history resources,
  with detours into discussions about life in Texas and dissertation work.
• Jeremy Boggs – Clioweb, thoughts on how historians can use the electronic form as a tool for academic and educational expression.
• Dan Cohen – Dan Cohen, covers the digital humanities, the world of Google and search technologies, and programming and software for academics.
• Amanda French – Professional site of Amanda L. French, Ph.D. – digital humanities teaching, training, research, writing, unconference organizing, and web development.
• Lee Ann Ghajar – The Digital Dissertation, a conceptual beta.
• Mills Kelly – Edwired, a blog devoted to the teaching and learning of history online.
• Sharon Leon – Bracket, postings on history, religion, science and occasional cultural topics.
• Mike O’Malley – The Aporetic, obser­va­tions about his­tory, music and music mak­ing, the forms and modes of aca­d­e­mic and semi-academic pub­lish­ing, and rethink­ing the pro­fes­sion.
• Chris Raymond – Chris Raymond, PhD, is a designer, craft artist, and writer. She blogs about interesting and inspirational examples of print and web design at www.designtank.tumblr.com, and about the creative process at www.girlmeetsart.com.
• Tom Scheinfeldt – Found History, chronicling the myriad ways and places non-professionals do history—sometimes without even knowing it.
• Ammon Shepherd – Historical Webber, finding things of historical interest on the web and chronicling my adventures through a PhD in History at GMU.
• Sean Takats -The Quintessence of Ham, blogging about food and history and the history of food.

Podcasts

• DigitalCampus.tv – A biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums
• MozillaMemory.org – The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank collects and permanently preserves digital texts, images, audio, video, personal narratives, and oral histories related to Mozilla, its products, and its community of developers, testers, and users.
• Voices From The Storm – HurricaneArchive.org features “Voices from the Storm”, short podcasts of online stories contributed to the archive. Mills Kelly and Sheila Brennan will read new stories each week until the end of September.
• HistoryConversations.org – An occasional dialogue with historians and history lovers about their interests, their ideas, and their lives in history.

The project will first conduct a survey of historians to examine their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. It will then explore three main areas where text mining might facilitate the research process: locating documents of interest in the ocean of online materials; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations. The most promising approaches will inform two case studies, one based on Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, in collaboration with the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, and the other on the correspondence of Victorian mathematicians.