Introducing Micah Bloom’s Codex

Traditionally, academic publishers fulfill several key steps in moving a manuscript to publication. Once they receive the manuscript, they coordinate peer review, offer editorial and even content suggestions, and perform copy edits, layout pages, and, most importantly, produce the final publication (before distributing and marketing this product from which they take a cut).

In other words, the publication process is creative, generative, and adds value, but also tends to be distinct from the process that generated the manuscript. In other words, a wall exists between author and publisher that helps establish publishing as separate from writing and to justify the role of publisher as playing an economically independent role in the process of knowledge creation. To be clear: this system works and has worked well for over a century. 

In some cases, this wall is good, like when an author relies on a publisher to manage peer review or copy editing. In other cases, the wall is awkward like when the book is not just the end result of the author’s creative process or the vessel that allows the hard work of the manuscript to become manifest. When the book in totality is the product of a single creative vision that extends from the content of the book to its physical form, publishing draws upon earlier traditions of craft where authors and publishers were often interchangeable.

This past year, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota has been working with Micah Bloom to bring his remarkable book, Codex, to a wider audience. The original version of the book was designed to complement an installation that focused on the destruction of books by the Minot flood of 2011. It featured a series of remarkable photographs of the aftermath of the flood that critically engaged how we consider the destruction of books as both intimate objects and disposable commodities. We worked with Micah to add nine critical essays that engage the books and his art in new ways. Micah then produced a book about books that integrated the new essays with his photographs in a unified design.

We prepared 20, numbered, signed print versions that we will circulate to local institutions through the generous support of the North Dakota Humanities Council. We’re also going to release the book digitally under a CC-BY-ND license this fall. And because you can never have enough books in enough ways, we’re also going to produce a trade paperback for folks who want the experience of the paper book at a low price.

It was thrilling to receive photographs of the book this week! Be sure to stay tuned for more on this project.

The Digital Press on Longreads

While I’m settling into my summer research in Cyprus, I’m still thinking of some of my projects this spring. Some good news from my colleagues at The Digital Press.

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is excited to announce that Josh Roiland’s story, “It Was Like Nothing Else in My Life Up to Now” in David Haeselin’s edited volume, Haunted by Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997 (2017) has appeared on the iconic long-read internet site, Longreads, this week.

Go check it out, and if you like their work (and their support of a wide range web publishing), click the Support Us button and give them some support. At very least, click through to their page and support their mission by reading.

Or, click through to the Haunted by Waters page and download the book or buy it in paper!

 

 

Updates from The Digital Press: Haunted by Waters and the Corinth Excavation Manual

Some good news today from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

David Haeselin’s Haunted by Water: the Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997 is now available in print from Amazon for the low, low price of $20! We’ve also added a few supplemental pages that developed during the editing and production of the book. One offers some additional reading on the Red River Flood of 1997 and other provides some useful insights into the class that produced this fine book.

If you haven’t already downloaded this book for free. You really should. And if you like it enough to add to your analogue paper book collection, do it, and leave a little review. It helps others make good decisions where they spend their $20 and bookshelf space.

  

The other bit of good news is that the Corinth Excavation Archaeological Manual is on pace to break all of The Digital Press’s download records. It has been available for a little over two weeks and seen almost 500 downloads! 

To celebrate this, we’ve made it available for purchase through Amazon for $9.99 for the rest of the month (it’ll take a little time for the price to change on Amazon. In the meantime, you can buy it here for $9.99 or be patient!). I can think of no reason not to go and grab a copy. If you like it and find it useful, it’s great for the Digital Press if you leave a comment! 

Finally, if you have an excavation manual that is gathering digital dust on your hard drive and think it’s pretty good and useful, drop me an email. When I first began work on the Corinth Excavation Archaeological Manual, I had this idea that it might be the first in a series of published field manuals. A few people expressed some interest and I’d be keen to get a sense for whether other projects might be interested too!

Codex Project: Formation Processes, Floods, and Books

This spring saw the publication of two new books from the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. A third will appear this fall with a limited edition print publication appearing of the course of the summer: Micah Bloom’s Codex. For more on that project, go here.

Below is my first draft of the preface for the book and a sneak preview of the contents:

Archaeologists study formation processes. These are the various natural and cultural processes that transform human activity into archaeological sites. To make meaning from the physical traces of the past, archaeologists disentangle the various events that create what we see in the present. The result of this work is both an appreciation for the complexity of time and experiences as well as an emphasis on objects and contexts that co-produce meaning. 

Micah Bloom’s Codex, here expanded with a series of new essays, is about formation processes.The surging waters of the 2011 Souris River flood left the city of Minot coated in mud and strewn with debris and Bethany Andreasen’s contribution to this book provides a sweeping overview of those events. Micah Bloom’s camera, however, focused on the books that the river deposited across the landscape. Robert Kibler the work of the flood and Bloom’s work has produced hybrid that embodies both natural and human transformations. As Ryan Stander shows, each photograph echoes both the book-littered landscape of the post-flood Souris and the myriad photographic images that have gone before.

I became familiar with Blooks’s project during its installation at the North Dakota Museum of Art in May of 2015. Laurel Reuter’s essay provides a perspective on that event from her position as director of the museum. The exhibit combined his photographs with various approaches to dealing with the damaged and waterlogged books. Some approaches were archaeological and featured careful indexing, systematic photograph, and scientific precisions. Others approaches embraced a religious cast manifest in a neatly-arranged book cemetery commemorating each volume lost. As Brian Prugh’s essay notes, books are special objects. 

In many ways, formation processes also produce books. Thora Brylowe reminds us that books themselves emerge from natural processes mediated by human intentions. Sheila Liming’s essay reveals that books are always in the process of decomposition as both the physical objects and the ephemeral containers of ideas. Bloom’s lens presents the blurred words and water soaked pages and encourages us to recognize that the intent of the book is, as Justin Sorensen notes, part of what gives it meaning. Books are to be read, but even when they’re not readable, they still speak to us as artifacts. The meaning of the books in Bloom’s photographs compels us to take their materiality seriously and to recognize, using David Haeselin’s term, that they are constructed.

This book too was constructed in a very particular way. The contributors hail from around the U.S. and, as this brief introduction has shown, bring a range of perspectives from the fields of history, literature, art history, and criticism to Bloom’s work. These essays were copy edited by the students in David Haeselin’s writing, editing, and publishing course at the University of North Dakota. Micah Bloom supervised the design of the book with the help of Marissa Dyke at Minot State University. The book is published by Bill Caraher’s project, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota with funding from both UND and Minot State University.

Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual

It is my pleasure to announce the publication of the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Written and compiled by Guy Sanders, Sarah James, and Alicia Carter Johnson as well as other longtime contributors to the Corinth Excavations, the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual is the first major field manual published from an American excavation in Greece and among a very small number of manuals published from the Eastern Mediterranean in the last generation.

The book is available under a CC-By 4.0 license as a free download as are all the forms used at Corinth Excavations. Download it here and should be available in glorious paper by the end of the week!

The appearance of this book is timely as there is a growing interest in field methods and the history of excavation practices throughout the discipline of archaeology. Moreover, Corinth Excavations has long held a special place in American archaeology in Greece as the primary training excavation for graduate students associated with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. As a result, the field manual has had a particular influence among American excavators and projects in Greece, among Mediterranean archaeologists, and in archaeology classrooms.

Published as a technical field manual, an archival document, and a key statement of practice from a major excavation, the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual presents a guide for daily procedures at the Corinth Excavations, a complete record of documentation forms used in the field, and a practical glimpse into the functioning of a complex, major, project. The manual is a landmark text appropriate for the university student, the scholar of methodology, and the working field archaeologist.

More Mobilizing the Past

With all the exciting new stuff happening at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, I’ve let some updates on (slightly) older projects slide. So here’s a bit of an update.

Copies of Erin Walcek Averett, Derek B. Counts, and Jody Michael Gordon eds., Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: the potential of digital archaeology (2016), went out to reviewers this winter and the first reviews are coming in. Benjamin Ducke of the DAI in Berlin offered a largely positive review of the book for the German journal Archäologische Informationen here. He concludes by saying that while “Zu den inhaltlichen Mankos einiger Beiträge gehören der kaum hinterfragte Einsatz proprietärer Software und Serverdienste zur Datenprozessierung und -speicherung, welche einer Blackbox gleichkommen, sowie eine zu autodidaktische Herangehensweise bei der Suche nach technischen Lösungen,” Mobilizing the Past “repräsentiert den Stand des Wissens am Übergang zur Phase der vollständigen digitalen Dokumentation archäologischer Feldarbeit. Since this is what the authors really set out to do from the start, we’re pretty happy with that assessment.

The editors of Mobilizing the Past funded the conference and the book through a NEH grant, for which they have written a final report. Read alongside Ducke’s review, this report confirms the fundamentally practical motivations for the conference and accounts from the practical character of many of the papers. When I decided to publish this book, I regarded this as a good thing because it offered a state-of-the-field (Stand des Wissens) perspective which will give it longevity as both a historical document and a critical reflection on a moment of particularly creative and accelerated change in field practices.

Finally, the book has been downloaded over 1500 times and we’ve sold a steady number of volumes in paper as well. Interestingly, the numbers for this book are almost identical to The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota (2016).

Download a copy of Mobilizing the Past here or buy it in paper here.

  

Book Day: Haunted by Waters

Please do join me in congratulating David Haeselin and his students in the Writing, Editing, and Publishing program at the University of North Dakota for their first collaboration with The Digital Press: Haunted By Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997.

The book is now available for FREE download from The Digital Press’s page. Originally we had decided to release a teaser for the book during “flood week,” but for some crazy reason, David Haeselin and I decided to accelerate production to get the digital version of the book out this week. So it is READY.

The project is a great example of a kind of local, civic-minded, public, digital humanities project. The students, who had no memories of the flood, explored the archives, the earlier literature on the flood, and constructed a book that spoke to the social memories of the flood that they encountered through their time at UND and in Grand Forks. So the book is both a reflection of their experiences and a contribution to the mediated memory of the flood.

Download it today! 

A Forthcoming Book from The Digital Press: Haunted by Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997

With any luck and a little concentration, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota will release two books next week. I already mentioned the first book yesterday: Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual. Today’s book is a bit more close to home here in the Red River Valley: Haunted By Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997, edited by David Haeselin and the advanced writing, editing, and publishing class in the English Department at the University of North Dakota. Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents!

Here is press release that the class prepared announcing the book:

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is proud to announce the publication of Haunted by Waters, an anthology written, collected, and edited by Dr. David Haeselin and students from the writing, editing, and publishing certificate program in UND’s English department. Including new additions from various contributors and archival documents, this anthology explores the Greater Grand Forks area twenty years after the devastating Red River of the North flood of 1997.

As the twentieth anniversary of the Red River flood approaches, many citizens of Grand Forks have pushed the disaster to the back of their minds. People have since moved on, their houses rebuilt and their minds focused on the present. Grand Forks stands as a model of recovery for this reason: the city managed to recover and grow stronger. 

Scheduled for digital publication on April 20, 2017 (with a print version available from May 1, 2017 via Amazon), Haunted by Waters offers readers a new chance to explore how communities came together to face of the historic disaster, how they recovered, and, for the first time, the composition of the community that survives the disaster two decades later. 

Many University students are almost oblivious about the flood. If anything, they notice the monument standing proud and mighty near the Greenway, but few take the time to read the plaque or even approach the monument. They glimpse at it and then move on with their lives. Haunted by Waters offer readers the chance to slow down, to notice, to create a sense of memory. According to Dr. David Haeselin, the collection hopes to give these students all other readers “the occasion to look backward so that they can look forward.”

Janet Rex, librarian at the Chester Fritz, asks in her poem included in the book: “How can one convey disaster? The spaces of loss. Nothing flows so smoothly as water oozing over land, creeping through the grass, seeping into windows, cellars, filling streets like rivers, basements like pools.” Haunted by Waters tries it best to answer not just that question, but it also asks: what kind of Grand Forks do we want to see in the future? This collection provides new ways to enter to the historical conversation while also considering what it means to live in the Red River Valley today as workers, as neighbors, as authors, as professors, as students, and, most of all, as citizens. Twenty years later, these voices have more to say. 

A book release event is scheduled for Thursday, April 20 at 6:00 p.m. at Rhombus Guys Brewing Company, 116 S. Third Street. This release is being planned in coordination with the city of Grand Forks’ twentieth anniversary observation. At this event, student editors will discuss their experiences editing the book and how building their sense of memory about the flood has changed the way they see Grand Forks and the University.

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota serves “to publish timely works in the digital humanities, broadly conceived. Whenever possible, we produce open access, digital publications, that can attract local and global audiences” and the Writing/Editing/Publishing program at UND aims to teach its students “to produce and edit documents for diverse purposes in a variety of media and contexts.” Together, Haunted by Waters has been created by its editor(s) to embody these ideas while expanding the breadth of knowledge of the Red River Valley region’s history.

 

A Forthcoming Book from The Digital Press: Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual

This week has been pretty great. Yesterday I put the finishing touches (well, hopefully) on one of the most complex book projects to come through my little press: Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual. The manuscript has been sent to the printer (so to speak) and proofs are apparently ready to be sent.

As I have discussed earlier, the layout of this book was pretty tricky and even yesterday, the formatting complicated even very simple edits. The result was a marathon book making session that resulted in the final draft of the book being sent off just moments before I had to go to a meeting. Phew!

The good news is that the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual will be read next week in digital form and, with any luck, in print shortly there after. Just to prove it, the cover is ready:

The back cover reads:

The Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual is first major field manual published from an American excavation in Greece and among a very small number of manuals published from the Eastern Mediterranean in the last generation. The appearance of this book is timely, however, as there is a growing interest in methodology and the history of excavation practices across the entire discipline of archaeology. Moreover, Corinth Excavations has long held a special place among American archaeologists in Greece as the primary training excavation for graduate students associated with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. As a result, the field manual has a particular significance and influence among American excavators and the archaeology of Greece.

Published as a technical field manual, an archival document, and a key statement of practice from a major excavation, the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual presents a guide for daily procedures at the Corinth, a complete record of documentation forms used in the field, and a practical glimpse into the functioning of a complex, major, project. The manual is a landmark text appropriate for the university student, the scholar of methodology, and the working field archaeologist from the excavation team of a Corinth Excavations.

All of the authors have worked on the excavations at Corinth in various capacities. This manual was developed under the directorship of Dr. Guy Sanders by former field directors Alicia Carter and Dr. Sarah James. Additional contributions come from past and present Corinth staff including assistant director Dr. Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst, architect James Herbst, conservator Nicol Anastassatou, and archaeo-botanical specialist Katerina Ragkou. The authors would also like to recognize the contributions of the many ASCSA students that used earlier versions of this manual for their valuable feedback over the past 10 years.

As a little sneak peek, here’s a link to the downloadable packet of forms associated with book.

More on another new book tomorrow.

Layout Week at The Digital Press

Some deadlines you have to respect more than others. On April 17th, Grand Forks remembers the first day of the massive 1997 Red River flood that reshaped most of the town and shaped the community’s memory.

On April 20th, The Digital Press will release a new book edited by David Haeselin of University of North Dakota’s English Department and produced by a year long course in Writing, Editing, and Publishing in that department. The book is called Haunted by Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997, and students, most of whom were not alive in 1997, shaped the content to help them grasp the significance of the flood. The book brings together essays by community leaders, interviews, historical documents, and other reflections on the flood to create a work that looks both to future memories and the past.

I have almost nothing to do with the content in the book, but I am doing a good bit of the layout. I have a few draft templates prepared and I think that they look pretty good:

 

I played around a bit with a wavy line both under the chapter titles and under each page number which I located in the margins of the book rather than at the top or bottom. The text is set in Jansen (which I think is appropriate for a book with a bit of a somber tone) and the headings are in Avenir which I thought just looked right against the more formal Jansen. 

This is definitely not a link to a preview page.

And this is definitely not a preview of the cover: