Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Innovation Through Hybrid Forms of Publication

Abstract

Enhancing scholarly publication involves presentation in a Web environment with interlinking of the 'objects' of a document: datasets, supplementary materials, secondary analyses, and post-publication interventions. Development of the Semantic Web is aimed at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized meta-data formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. At the same time, ad-hoc scholarly discourse, facilitated by the participatory dynamics of Web 2.0 applications, contributes to an emergent content structure through compliance with open Web standards. While the top-down Semantic Web and bottom-up intertextuality structure are not inherently incompatible, their differences have implications for the design, use, and diffusion of enhanced scholarly publications. In this paper we illustrate a hybrid approach that employs Semantic Web techniques while focusing on practices entailed in contemporary intertextual discourses. This approach is applied to four books prepared for traditional academic publishers; the Web sites and functions for three of these books are described in this paper.