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The following list of goals of the NINES/Rice Press partnership is not comprehensive but is included to give an idea of the nature and scope of the intended products and their distinctive nature. Of key importance is that scholarly priorities structure these goals as well as the overall mission of this undertaking.

  1. Reflective pauses. This describes short works that scholars who design, organize, and conduct research against the NINES datasets will write at intervals of the evolution of NINES. These works will articulate the rationale for the goals and structure of the datasets (e.g., the Rossetti Archive ; Blake ; Whitman ), and the scholarly requirements that inform the organization of the digital materials. This ongoing series is meant to capture the evolving strategy of a digital environment as complex as NINES—inevitably the design and structure of the datasets are altered—over time becoming an archive in its own right. This kind of reflective pause is uncommon; the datasets tend to be changed or redesigned without a thoughtful commentary describing scholarly needs and support. Such a series would be valuable not only as a record of NINES’s evolution but also document organizational principles and tactics that could be adopted by other scholarly digital environments.
  2. Complex extrapolations from the database. RUP/NINES would publish occasional artifacts from the NINES collections that would be too expensive or time-consuming to be undertaken by a traditional print-based press. Blake facsimile editions are examples of what the joint imprint could do: reproduce faithfully and cost-effectively major works that are rarely produced well except in prohibitively expensive editions. Such works would be modeled on a set of scholarly books that Rice Press has ongoing now with NINES: the Literature by Design series that focuses on literary works published between 1880 and 1930. These include important works with crucial design features, such as Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and other lines (the first book published in America with a full Modernist design) and Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx . These works employ the vehicle of the book and the visible nature of language itself as a central expressive feature. Each title is beautifully reproduced from a scan of the original, with a fine introduction to each by a well-known scholar. The first five titles are already available: Le Petit Journal des Refusées by Gelett Burgess, edited by the book scholar Johanna Drucker; Crane’s Black Riders , edited by Jerome McGann; Robert Carlton (“Bob”) Brown’s The Readies , and his Words , both edited by the Modernist scholar Craig Saper; and The Sphinx , edited by the noted Wilde scholar Nicholas Frankel.
  3. Special, occasional publications. Two examples, to be published in early 2010: the special edition of the Poetess Archive Journal that will be thematically devoted to "Visualizing the Digital Archive." Essays by Drucker, Jeffrey Schnapp, Lev Manovich, Ira Greenberg, Susan Schriebman, and others cover a rich array of topics and issues.  Some of the essays may be experimental and include media other than just text.
  4. Redacted monographs. Full-length manuscripts submitted to RUP/NINES, assuming successful, rigorous peer review, would be published as digital objects. A redacted version of about one hundred pages would be available as a digital object and print-on-demand volume. The redacted, shorter version is a requisite element of the agreement to publish. 
  5. Born digital scholarship. This would represent works that do not conform to traditional models of scholarly communication. These would most likely be multimedia, multiformat works that can only be captured by a digital press; part of the experiment would be to see what can and can not be done in new media. For some works, a two-dimensional printed page format would be adequate. New kinds of analytic tools would be employed and assessed; Juxta and Ivanhoe are good examples. Emerging projects using geo-temporal software may also hold significant promise for deep interpretive studies on humanities works and material environments." The model would help to usher in a new generation of scholarly methods and inquiry.
  6. Long tail press. Making available out-of-print books from other presses that pertain to the NINES community of research.
  7. Out-of-print with commentary. Selecting authors whose out-of-print books were in their day important and influential, and bringing back the book as a digital object/print-on-demand title with updated notes and commentary by the author.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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