This year PressForward has been focused on outreach. The PressForward team has been working to develop the plugin’s user interface and to help several pilot partners get PressForward publications up and running. As the fellow positioned on this project I’ve been involved with the continued development of the plugin. Last weekend, Amanda Morton, a former DH Fellow, and I were given the opportunity to give a PressForward workshop at the Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship (ARCS) conference in Philadelphia. The ARCS conference is “a new conference focused on the evolving and increasingly complex scholarly communication network.” Interdisciplinary in nature, the conference featured a set of workshops on Sunday and a set of diverse panels on Monday. Many of the panels focused on linked and open data, alternative publishing models, alt metrics and other ways of measuring impact, and open access digital repositories. The conference was a great opportunity to interact with organizations and communities that might be interested in PressForward and get an idea of what features might be important to these groups.

Our workshop focused on PressForward and covered topics such as the origins of the project, features that make the plugin standout, and an overview of how we use the plugin to maintain DH Now’s editorial process. Lastly, we set up a sandbox and gave users logins so they could follow along as we walked through important features of the plugin. We had about thirty people from libraries and science organizations attend and it was interesting to hear different ideas about how the plugin might be useful. The workshop was a nice break from some of the more technical things I’ve been doing this semester and it was great to get to talk about the project as a whole and how it fits into the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Below is a copy of the powerpoint we put together for the workshop.