Why is jstor a valuable tool for writers

Featured in the Harvard Gazette in How Plants Have Influenced Human Societies , the site includes eleven visual essays written by students and faculty using Juncture that explore the impacts of plants like cacao, sunflowers, and the powerful peony. Juncture has also been used to tell the story of Kent , a county in Southeast England that inspired artists and writers such as Edith Nesbit and H.

Wells, through the lens of historical maps. Their bibliographies contained appropriate citations to secondary works, rather than websites. And they got to nerd out a little bit by falling down fun research rabbit holes. Other scholars before me have noticed that its search results tend to feature works by authors who are overwhelmingly male and white.

This problem, however, does not seem insurmountable to me; my colleagues and I teach biased primary source material to understand how notions of race developed in early America. I could imagine an interesting seminar for advanced graduate students on digital methods discussing bias in search algorithms. Which topics get prioritized and why? Why does a Native American history class send back a prioritized term for Native American literature, for example?

Recent scholarship has also emphasized the need to move beyond printed sources, to envision expansive definitions of writing to reckon with Native American Studies. You can upload your syllabi onto the site and see what happens.

I uploaded mine on Native American history. The Analyzer results mean that I can see many of the topics I assigned:. I can therefore increase the importance of prioritized terms:. I can add my own terms, too. Text Analyzer offers an additional way to find missed articles, not only in specific journals but also in venues I might have failed to consider entirely.

But it offers teachers a new way to show students research strategies. My students need that guidance on finding appropriate material, and they need to be encouraged to find that material early on in the semester.

If it helps them to begin thinking about how material gets digitized, catalogued, and displayed, even better. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. At this point she has six file drawers full of printed text, a reduction after she recently downsized to move from the Midwest to the East Coast of the United States. Further highlighting her dependence on paper documents, Karen owns a specialized digital camera for generating her own printed materials.

As she is reviewing print materials, when she finds a useful section, she takes photos of the pages, uploads them to her computer, prints them out, and then deletes the photos from the camera and computer.

She then reads, annotates, and files the printed copies. When she left the Midwest for the East, Karen was also moving from a large university to a small university, and she feels the impact of that in her research budget. She is now able to attend only one conference a year that requires travel. She chooses to attend small, topic-specific conferences for networking instead of the larger conferences.

She does, however, still use the large conference catalogs and other documents to see who is presenting and track down interesting publications. Aaron conducts the majority of his research from his home office in a historic East Coast neighborhood.

The walls are lined with bookshelves, on which he has categorized sections to his own needs. Although he does reference these physical books, and values the context that their covers and texture provide, the majority of his work is done on his computer and within a few select computer programs. He uses ProCite, which houses all his notes, comments, uses, and reference information going back over 20 years; this includes thousands of individual entries. Within this program, he has created his own taxonomy and fields such as journal information, call number, language, and frequency of publication.

The program is dated and requires significant workarounds. For example, apostrophes cause the program to delete sections of text, so when he includes text from other sources he copies the work into a Word document and manually replaces the apostrophes with another keystroke.

Even with all the issues Aaron experiences with ProCite, he continues to use it because he believes he would not be able to retain all the information he has collected over the last 20 years were he to move to another program. He even takes downloaded book chapters and stitches them together so he is able to save full PDF versions of digital books. Angela is an affiliated scholar at a midwestern university—a status that offers no financial compensation.

She has been at various universities for two-year stints as an adjunct faculty member. She describes that lifestyle as stressful and taxing, with very little pay. She is currently working in a university cafeteria to support herself.

With these frequent moves and transitions between institutions, Angela has several times found herself without access to academic resources. At one point she even shifted her focus of study from earlier to more current social movements, so that she could make greater use of open web and news sources in her work.

On the interview day, Angela began her work with free writing, which she often does to begin her day. As she describes it, this process is intended to function as inspiration and may ultimately turn into a conference presentation or publication. To do her free writing she uses one continuous Word document.

She scrolls to the bottom of the page document, enters the date, and begins writing. The writing is fairly unstructured; sometimes she adds specific notes and citations from books, other times she is simply expressing her thoughts or ideas, without reference to any source.

The document she was working on this day represents three years of writing. She explains that at times she will revisit notes from previous dates. She has no particular method for doing this; she just scrolls and scans the document.

The basic motivation behind the Reimagining the Digital Monograph project—to harness the power of the digital environment to change the presentation of the book—is nothing new. Almost since the introduction of widespread Internet access in the United States, scholars, librarians, publishers, technology intermediaries, and others have been experimenting with new ways to reshape the most traditional and durable of content formats around the most revolutionary of technologies.

These experiments have been as diverse as the content found within the books they sought to reinvent, but many have focused on scholarly books and support for the researchers using them. Nowhere does Valley begin to defend that argument. An interesting footnote to the meta-discussion of whether or not The Valley of the Shadow could rightly be thought of as a monograph: the work seemed to attract academic reviews only when Ayers and Anne S.

Norton in Around the same time, the American Historical Association AHA and Columbia University Press collaborated to solve a number of perceived ills with the print monograph in the history discipline. The Gutenberg-e program, which was underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, enabled the publication of first books by young historians working in specialized subfields.

The aim of the program was not only to subvent the publication of books that scholarly presses might not otherwise take on because of the narrow audiences for such specialized subject areas even by the standards of a university press circa but to do so in digital form and in ways that would encourage the embedding of primary sources both text based and in other formats alongside the scholarly argument and enable potentially different ways of presenting a scholarly argument.

Then-AHA president Robert Darnton described his vision of the kind of book the Gutenberg-e program would enable to be published:. A new book of this kind would elicit a new kind of reading. Some readers might be satisfied with a quick run through the upper narrative. Others might want to read vertically, pursuing certain themes deeper and deeper into the supporting documentation. Still others might navigate in many directions, seeking connections that suit their own interests or reworking the material into constructions of their own.

In each case, the relevant texts could be printed and bound according to the specifications of the reader. The Gutenberg-e program ended the publication of new titles in As new digital book or book-like initiatives such as The Valley of the Shadow and Gutenberg-e launched, the potential problems around a lack of standards for technology and production became more apparent. Although this system resulted in highly original and innovative publications, it was also expensive in terms of time and staff.

Sophie, a software package for authoring books and journal articles that incorporate multimedia elements, was first released in Scalar, a software package for a similar set of uses, was developed later by Tara McPherson, a film studies professor at the University of Southern California, with early participation from a respected press that published a book via the platform.

Many of these originated with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, such as a library-press collaboration at West Virginia University that is developing software for assembling and displaying multimedia-rich books and journal articles. Despite the development of these innovative projects in the s and early twenty-first century, the pace of digitization for scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences arguably lagged far behind.

Scholarly publishers started to make monographs available online in reasonably large numbers at least as early as , when NetLibrary, an early e-book aggregation for libraries, launched. In that year, a group of American university presses received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an institutional sales program for scholarly e-books. With gradual improvements in user experience design and better understood standards around the production of digital scholarly books, several initiatives are working to make standard i.

UPScope uses subject keywords from book files to present a visual map of related books. A discussion of past innovations in the digital presentation of scholarly books can hardly be complete without a nod to the introduction of Amazon.

E-readers have also highlighted the tension that scholarly publishers and technologists face between a mission-based imperative to support innovative works of scholarship and the increasingly sophisticated tastes of a readership whose expectations for a digital reading experience are shaped by Amazon and other players in the commercial world. This project was largely concerned with the user-facing design of the digital monograph, but efforts to recalibrate the economic model for publishing digital monographs deserve a brief mention.

Almost from the beginning, scholarly e-book projects have learned from forerunner digital scholarly projects the importance of funding ongoing maintenance and technical development—costly activities that arguably had no analog in the print-only age. The Gutenberg-e program and the ACLS History E-Book project later the ACLS Humanities E-Book project both launched in the s with a subscription model for their collections of e-books—an access plan that, although not unprecedented, was certainly novel at the time when compared with the firm purchase model for print books.

Knowledge Unlatched, a not-for-profit partnership, effectively serves as a negotiating agent between two parties: scholarly publishers that are willing to make new, accepted titles openly available if sufficient publication funding can be found, and academic libraries that are willing to band together to subvent the publication of these titles. Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg, two well-known figures in the American scholarly communications community, have gone a step further, calling for a more coordinated migration of journals and books in the humanities and social sciences to an open-access model, starting with content published by scholarly societies.

A study of Indiana University and the University of Michigan and another covering a cohort of several other university presses show how deeply nuanced the cost-accounting activity for scholarly books is in practice. E-mail: laura. The JSTOR Labs team works with partner publishers, libraries, and scholars to create experimental tools for research and teaching.

Alex built an award-winning publishing platform for Oxford University Press, Inc. Twitter: abhumphreys. E-mail: alex. E-mail: matthew. Prior to joining ITHAKA, Ron worked in the aerospace industry for nearly 20 years in a variety of software engineering and leadership positions. E-mail: ronald. Her role is to ensure that deeply meaningful research concepts and activities are engrained within product discovery teams and within ITHAKA at large.

This is done by setting research strategy, directing user research staff, and conducting research firsthand. E-mail: christina. Some of these are explored in a landscape review found in appendix B. Kizer Walker et al. Alex Verstak et al. Roger C. While this project deals with efforts to improve the visual presentation of the monograph as an e-book, it does not focus on important but related issues around accessibility for impaired and disabled readers. In the United States, purveyors of digital content are required to meet certain standards for displaying text online in order for that content to be eligible for purchase or licensing by public institutions.

For more information about design thinking and lean start-up product development methodologies, see the bibliography. Martin Eve has described another kind of research tool leveraging the references found in books. This concept, and the quotation, comes from feedback provided on an early draft of this article. David M. Thomas J. Ayers and Anne S. Wittenberg oversaw the Gutenberg-e program at Columbia University Press and is now our colleague as managing director of the Portico digital preservation service.

The American Association of University Presses has assembled a helpful roster of recent multimedia-enhanced book publishing initiatives analogous to the one at West Virginia University. Lesley W. John B. Skip to main content Skip to quick search Skip to global navigation. Quick search:. About Editors Subscribe Submit Contact. Current Archive About Editors Submit. Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Introduction Scholarly books are increasingly being made available in digital form, joining the print-to-digital transition that scholarly journals began well over a decade ago.

The Print-to-Digital Transition for Monographs Over the past five years, there has been a tremendous increase in the availability of digital versions of academic monographs in the humanities and social sciences. The user ethnographies were presented in simple visualizations.

Brainstorming readers' tasks and goals. Using dot stickers to vote on promising ideas. The writing is what matters. The book, in the network of scholarly conversation.

Print and digital synchronicity. Early design iteration: Grayscale wireframe. Early design iteration: High-fidelity mock-up. The Topicgraph prototype. Andrea Overall, Andrea is organized and intentional about her time and activities.

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