The TEI's Extramural Journal Project: Exploring New Digital Environments and Defining a New Genre in Academic Publishing

1
The TEI's Extramural
Journal Project: Exploring
New Digital Environments
and Defining a New Genre
in Academic Publishing
Schlitz, Stephanie A.
sschlitz@bloomu.edu
Bloomsburg University
The Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) Extramural
Journal (EJ) project was conceived early in
2009 when the conveners of the TEI Education
Special Interest Group (SIG) proposed, as a
matter of urgency, the development of an online
publishing suite to address the shortage of TEI
educational resources.
1
Following approval by
the TEI Board and Council and the receipt of a
small SIG grant in support of the project, TEI-
EJ advanced into development.
Because TEI-EJ is being researched and
developed in an era where “print is no
longer the exclusive or the normative
medium in which knowledge is produced
and/or disseminated” (“A Digital Humanities
Manifesto”) and where electronic publication
is increasingly common (see Waltham; Maron
and Smith; Willett), it is crucial to point out
that typologically, TEI-EJ is positioned outside
of two disparate points on the web publishing
continuum, media-driven journals which are
designed primarily for the publication of media-
driven content (e.g.
Vectors Journal
<
http:/
/www.vectorsjournal.org/
>,
Southern Spaces
<
http://www.southernspaces.org/
>; also see
Toton and Martin) and text-driven journals
which are designed to reproduce the print
journal model in a web publication (e.g.
Journal of Writing Research
<
http://www.jow
r.org
>,
International Journal of Teaching and
Learning in Higher Education
<
http://www.is
etl.org/ijtlhe/
>).
Although TEI-EJ’s ‘journal’ designation is
suggestive of a single aim, from the outset,
project objectives have been defined as both
experimental and extramural, and TEI-EJ has
been envisaged not only as a publishing venue
but also as a community-driven online forum
that offers members of the TEI, whether
novice or expert, as well as the broader DH
community new educational insights into the
TEI. Significantly, the steps being taken to
achieve these objectives contribute to a newly
emerging body of scholarship which explores
the development of new digital environments
and which defines a new genre in academic
publishing.
The first stage of the project has been the
development of TEI-EJ as a born digital,
open access, peer reviewed scholarly journal
where communicative modes are bidirectional
rather than exclusively unidirectional, articles
are media-driven (including video, audio, and
image) as well as text-driven, and where the
aims of publication extend beyond print journal
mimesis to include education and community
building.
Given the hybrid nature of the project’s goals
(publishing and learning community; see Dal
Fiore, Koku and Wellman) and the novel design
for implementation, TEI-EJ’s site infrastructure
(see
Fig. 1
) was designed to be extensible,
capable of managing text articles (e.g. TEI-
XML as well as formats such as .txt and .doc
which are converted to TEI-XML), multimedia
articles (e.g. video, audio, image), moderated
responses to articles, and community-driven
communications (e.g. forum and blog) (see
Fig. 2
). This is achieved through Drupal,
2
a
customizable, open source content management
system, which facilitates the social media as well
as the publishing and educational aspects of the
project.
3
Fig. 1.
Schlitz TEI-EJ project planning 'mindmap'

2
Fig. 2.
Screenshot of TEI-EJ website
This paper will introduce the TEI-EJ project,
describing the
why
and
how
of the key
theoretical, technological and editorial decisions
that drove development as we advanced
from theory into practice. In doing so, it
aims to establish the project as a new
model for academic publishing which is
designed to harness emerging technologies,
to leverage the fact that “Open access is
changing the public and scholarly presence of
the research article” (Willinsky), to promote
learning objectives beside dissemination of
scholarship, and to elevate the role of reader/
end-user to the position of chief stakeholder.
References
A Digital Humanities Manifesto.
15 Dec. 2008
23 July 2009
http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digital
humanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-m
anifesto/
.
Dal Fiore, Filippo
(2007). 'Communities
Versus Networks: The Implications on
Innovation and Social Change'.
American
Behavioral Scientist.
(50)7
: 857-866.
Koku, Emmanuel F., Wellman, Barry
(2002). 'Scholarly Networks as Learning
Communities: The Case of TechNet'.
Designing
Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning.
Sasha Barab, Rob Kling (eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Maron, Nancy L., Kirby Smith, K.
(2009). 'Current Models of Digital Scholarly
Communication: Results of an Investigation
Conducted by Ithaka Strategic Services for the
Association of Research Libraries'.
The Journal
of Electronic Publishing.
12(1)
.
http://quod.l
ib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text- idx?c=jep;vie
w=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0012.105
.
TEI: Text Encoding Initiative.
http://www.tei-
c.org/index.xml
(accessed 7 July 2009).
Terras, Melissa, Van den Branden, Ron,
Vanhoutte, Edward
(2009). 'Teaching TEI:
The Need for TEI by Example'.
Literary and
Linguistic Computing.
24(3)
: 297-306.
Toton, Sarah, Martin, Stacey
(2009).
'Teaching and Learning from the U.S. South
in Global Contexts: A Case Study of Southern
Spaces and Southcomb'.
Digital Humanities
Quarterly.
3(2)
.
http://digitalhumanities.o
rg/dhq/vol/3/2/000047.html
.
Waltham, Mary
(12 Oct. 2009). 'The Future of
Scholarly Journals Publishing'.
http://www.nha
lliance.org/bm~doc/hssreport.pdf
.
Willett, Perry
(2004).
Electronic Texts:
Audiences and Purposes.
'A Companion
to Digital Humanities'. Schreibman, Susan ,
Siemens, Ray , Unsworth, John (eds.). Oxford:
Blackwell.
http://digitalhumanities.org/comp
anion/
.
Willinsky, J.
(25 Sept. 2009). '9 Flavors
of Open Access'.
E-MEDICINE.
49
(3)
.
http://cssp.us/pdf/9%20Flavors%20of%20
Open%20Access.pdf
.
Notes
1.
Two of the notable TEI teaching resources which are
available include the Women Writers Project’s NEH-
funded series of “Advanced Seminars on Scholarly Text
Encoding” (see <
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding
/seminars/neh_advanced.html
>) and TEI by Example
(see <
http://www.kantl.be/ctb/project/2006/tei-
ex.htm
> and Terras et al.).
2.
For a good, comparative discussion of content management
systems, see “Comparing Open Source Content Management
Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone,” available at
<
http://idealware.org/comparing_os_cms/
>. TEI-
XML content is being handled by the Drupal XML Content
module, and the journal’s publishing workflow is being handled
by the Drupal E- Journal module.
3.
A preview of the publishing website and a fully functional mock
journal issue are being presented at the TEI Members’ Meeting
in November 2009.