Literary scholars, librarians, publishers and foundation officers raised a variety of crucial issues, including reading practices, archives, network culture and university presses, at a forum on academic publishing in the humanities, Nov. 7-8 in A.D. White House.

"In addition to the publishing of traditional academic monographs or scholarly editions, electronic culture provides a whole range of opportunities such as blogging, Internet listservs and new forms of global communication," said Timothy Murray, director of Cornell's Society for the Humanities, which co-sponsored the conference with Cornell University Library.

The forum focused on new technologies versus traditional models of publishing and the future of scholarly exchange in the humanities.

"The scholarly print monograph remains the gold standard for credentialing," Duke University's Katherine Hayles said in her presentation, "Transforming the Humanities: Implications for Publishing."

"Our exemplary scholar is someone who spent years honing his knowledge through reading," Hayles said. "The scholar working in the digital humanities is no less accomplished and learned, but his time is also spent implementing and working with digital tools."

Projects requiring a diversity of skills also inspire new collaborations, Hayles noted. "Not every scholar in the digital humanities needs to be an expert programmer, but he needs to understand how much you can do with the technology," she said. "Students can make contributions as undergraduates [and] complete small parts of a larger project."

Cornell faculty members moderated and responded to forum speakers. María Fernández, history of art, said that in her field, "nothing obstructs publishing more than the cost of publishing." A book with 100 images requires expensive rights and clearances for each image, she said.

"We need to be involved in these digital technologies precisely because they are opening up our discourses to larger audiences," Fernández said.

Susan Buck-Morss, government, brought up technology's positives, including interactivity in Web 2.0; and negatives, such as the loss of graphic annotation when a text is digitized. She also addressed Hayles' example of a scholar sequestered in a study, "writing that all-important book."

"Thinking is damned hard work -- when you are in your study, you are doing social labor," Buck-Morss said.

Joseph Meisel of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation traced the history of university presses (and their funding) from 1929 to 1979.

"One change from the late 1970s, when the university presses were in their heyday, is the tendency to cut subsistence funding for presses so that they're on their own -- which has made it very tough for scholars to publish wide-ranging academic monographs," Murray said.

Peter Hohendahl, German studies and comparative literature, described a new series of electronic German monographs, a project of Cornell Library and Cornell University Press. Hohendahl participated in a roundtable discussion with the Press' Peter Potter and Naoki Sakai, Asian studies and comparative literature, who stressed the importance of serving a global audience with multiple translations. Sakai is founding senior editor of Traces, a multilingual journal of cultural theory.

Donald Waters of the Mellon Foundation sees "real promise" in digital versions of new editions of primary texts and making them available online.

"I'm a case in point of someone who works heavily in electronic and digital platforms. There are reasons to go both ways," Murray said. "A new generation of scholars is very passionate about new technologies and the opportunities they provide. We are very lucky to be able to celebrate that."

Co-organizers of the forum were former Society for the Humanities director Brett de Bary and Kizer Walker, a librarian and collection development coordinator at Olin Library.