Jaime Ding: Digital Publishing for Near Future
jaime ding works in Creative Works at the Robert E. Kennedy Library, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Before Kennedy Library, jaime worked with trash for years, beginning in the history and visual arts departments at Princeton University. She earned a master of arts in Decorative Arts, Design History at the Bard Graduate Center, learning from questions about cleanliness, beauty and value in things and spaces. She worked in waste management, museum education, and private corporate archives in Princeton, New York, Chicago, and LA, always working to rethink ideas about the “public,” accessibility, and circulation of ideas.
This was hard to write during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic: what, and how can I share this project as useful? Clearly, the systems within our institutions are broken. They have never been strong, but their weaknesses are now exposed, though so many in the past years have pointed out these disparities in access and equity. How (if at all) does this project I am working on fit within this new landscape? This two-year Digital Publishing Project, started in August of 2019, aims to raise visibility and enhance access to scholarship by transposing library exhibitions into digital representations, exploring the notion of what scholarship looks as accessible digital publications.
Before we were consumed with sheltering at home, I often did not have a response to the age-old capitalistic, occupational question: “What do you do?” Generally, I simply ended up answering that I work in a library, though I have no prerequisite standard library credentials and, it has been made clear to me, am not to be called a librarian. My name is Jaime Ding (she/her/hers), and currently work at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Robert E. Kennedy Library. At this polytechnic public university, I am tasked with the unique and challenging project of creating an equitable, accessible digital publishing platform. In working to create an immersive, interactive digital project, this alternative approach to present and disseminate academic scholarship hopes to rethink accessibility and assessment of digital scholarship.
This pilot should create a system where the validation of such scholarship can provide academic publishing opportunities for non-traditional scholars, and will provide a platform to access their scholarship — especially for those voices who have been largely underrepresented in the past.
Understanding the histories of publishing, of women of color in academia, and of digital scholarship has led me to a broad understanding of what it really means to value scholarship. The formation of the discipline of gaming, the emergence of projects like HCommons (an online community for humanities scholars led by Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick), the relative newness of the phrase ‘external validation,’ the scholarship on multimodal assessment, the tracing of prestigious grant money to already prestigious institutions, the systems of editing in Wikipedia, all have contributed to a larger picture of how this digital system will be able to possibly nudge the direction of scholarship overall at this university.
Of course, this research and the likes of this project isn’t new. For years, there has been scholarship in a multitude of disciplines about whiteness and its structural barriers in publishing, in hiring systems, and in diversity of ideas. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars such as Kathleen Absolon, Cynthia Cole Robinson, Patricia Matthews, Roopika Risam, Andrea Long Chu, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Sara Ahmed have all made the case for differences in writing, understanding and sharing scholarship, since the higher education institution has a racist legacy that continues to operate within the same systems today. It is only novel in its locality, at the moment.
I have watched as higher education gets wrapped up in the power of data, and often uses it as a new way to exclude. This is frightening especially as Covid-19 pushes many institutions to online learning with distorted standards about productivity, surveillance, and privacy, all while maintaining normalcy and relevancy.
Ideally, this publishing project will push back against the quantitative methods of making decisions. I want to make sure that this system can fully understand the often racist algorithms that it might need to integrate with to be considered a 'legitimate academic publication' - that is, publications that are considered legitmate. I want to incorporate user acknowledgement and choices, community collaboration, transparency of labor, local sustainability, multimodality, commonality of language, and simplicity in usability.
This effort requires a huge network of support. A large part of my job is to outreach to faculty and administration, not only to find out what they are interested in and hope to work on, but also to take note of what is currently being used and continue to sustain a community in a digital publishing platform for the future. This publishing platform will create a microcosm of a macrosystem of digital scholarship, and hopefully it will grow into a central digital working resource hub, and a central support system in the library to encourage, establish, and disseminate digital scholarship; this centrality is what so many people at Cal Poly wish for. I want to call the finished project the Poly Publishing Co-op, as the project will attest to a cooperative’s democratic, transparent and scaled structures.
As a cis East Asian American woman in a predominately white institution, my investment in changing these structural systems of power is crucial in changing what and who is valued in academia.
This project began with me grateful for a chance to work on a project dedicated to my own ideals: access to resources, in a visual form. I come from a museum education background and private higher ed institutions, hoping to change accessibility to collections and systems of value in regard to visual art and history in gallery spaces. I have been a little bit surprised at the parallels between the museum industry and the library industry. I always wanted a museum to operate more like a public library than a mausoleum, but systems of order are reverent in both industries.
During these times, the potential for this project has been a fishing line of hope. This is a chance to slow down, and to reconfigure what has not been working: new systems, new ways of teaching, take time. It took centuries for print to be its own medium, the format of novels separate from transcribed oral histories. A TV show is different from a play. A lecture is going to be different from a webinar, and a published PDF paper is different from what we are trying to accomplish with this non-traditional way of viewing scholarship.
Some of the questions that I remind myself are integral to this project:
How do we open networks to connect with each other?
How do I keep myself accountable in transparency?
What forms of assessment are viable, and how do they provide ‘legitimacy’?
What does visual accessibility look like?
What does sustainability actually look like - for users, maintainers, and scholars?
How can I make sure this system is equitable?
I don’t have exact, finite, quantitative data to all of these questions, but many semblances of answers seem to constantly come back to the idea of community, centering people first, and flexibility. The time for context can be spared. Traditional practices of assessing value can be set aside. Sometimes I am tired of constantly reading, researching, and living through how inequitable our systems are, but I know I am not alone. Thank you for reading — I’m happy to hear feedback, ideas and thoughts.