It’s published at long last! I proposed a book chapter, “Imaginging a Future of Multimedia E-Books,” in late 2021, and it’s been a long journey to see it published in Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities, edited by Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies (University of Minnesota Press, 2026).
It was a special challenge for me to write and revise this short piece that became chapter 18 because the audience for this book is social scientists, not my usual one of humanities scholars, librarians, and publishers. At one point I was asked to explain and define so many things, while still making the chapter shorter—ah, the oft-contradictory practical demands of publishing! Having been on the editing side of countless contributed volumes myself, I am deeply appreciative of Alan, Urszula, and James and congratulate them on this achievement.
Having interviewed various publishing professionals in journalistic spirit while researching the chapter, I wonder whether their remarks are all still current now that years have passed. Nevertheless, I still feel strongly about my idea: I think that scholarly monographs should routinely include audio and video examples, in order to fully reflect and share scholarship today, and I don’t think the editorial or technological barriers are very high. The idea would work best at scale, meaning that publishers would have to support it collaboratively across the board. That’s the “manifesto” part. Unfortunately, this advancement is perhaps even more unlikely to happen now, when scholarly publishers are under more financial pressure than ever.
The “modest” part is that inserting bits of multimedia into otherwise traditional publications is a limited, even old-fashioned way to address the problem of archiving multimedia (“digital humanities”) scholarship, which is otherwise often short lived. It’s a partial solution, but way better than none.
The book is now available via Open Access! Here is the link to my modest manifesto.
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