The John Donne Society's Digital Prose Project has a side-hustle. While the primary work of JDSDPP is to build a set of primary-text resources related to Donne's prose works, we are already looking ahead to what comes next once we have a complete set of such resources in hand. This is the work of the Prototyping the Social Literary Archive project. The project team consists of Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan), Jesse Sharpe (Houghton University), Matt Sherman (Drexel University), Constantine Kaoukakis (PhD student, University of Saskatchewan), Joel Salt (PhD student, University of Saskatchewan), Kyle Dase (University of Victoria), and Miguel Dela Pena (recent MA graduate, University of Saskatchewan). We are in turn part of the "Community" cluster of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. With a thematic focus on "Open Social Scholarship," the INKE Partnership generally is engaged in "fostering open social scholarship: academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways" (inke.ca). The Prototyping project thus aims to use the digitized materials available in Digital Donne (dedicated to John Donne’s poetry) and those of the John Donne Society’s Digital Prose Project to model new ways for structuring, packaging, and disseminating digitized materials for the study of literary authors and their works in an Open Access, community engaged environment.
We are taking a community-based approach to building a digital literary archive and are in the process of consulting our primary stakeholders. The work outlined here has grown out of presentations and discussion in the Society over the last several years. Most recently, this past year we conducted a survey of the scholarly community of the John Donne Society regarding digital research practices, which we discussed in a Society-sponsored public webinar on 22 April, where we first presented the Prototyping project (available on YouTube). We also had a follow-up conversation with the Society at our annual meeting in Baton Rouge in February of this year. Arising out of our community consultations, both recent and previous, we are currently pursuing two projects.
1. We are looking for a new model for the society’s publication, the John Donne Journal, to give it a digital, Open Access presence while maintaining an annual print publication tied to Society membership and library subscription. The central question here is how to make Open Access sustainable for an independently published, society-based journal that that throughout its history to this point has relied on individual and institutional subscriptions. In the next few months, we will roll-out the first results of this inquiry.
2. We have also begun exploring possibilities for reconstituting an important work of legacy scholarship into an Open Access digital platform that will enable a community of contributors to extend that work and keep it current. This resource is John Roberts’s series of annotated bibliographies of scholarship on John Donne, published in four volumes from 1912 to 2012. Our first interest is in making the resource openly and powerfully accessible in digital form and then to imaging how we might, as a community, carry this work forward. We will also be reflecting on how resources like this might fit into a larger context with other Open Access resources, especially alongside the John Donne Journal and the digitized primary texts of Donne's poetry and prose.
So, watch this space for communications arising from this work. We look forward to hearing more from our community as we prototype the digital literary archive.
