Today's guest post is by Sena Lee, Co-editor of Object 17.

I am pleased to have an opportunity to share my experience as an editor for Object 17.

Object is a journal produced entirely by graduate students in the History of Art Department at UCL, which has been produced in print form for the last 16 years. The contents of each edition represent the diversity of issues and methodologies with which graduate students in the department are currently engaged. Drawing upon object and theory-based analyses, the studies within Object indicate a continual questioning and renegotiation of meaning in the visual arts. As with previous editions, the essays and reviews included represent the wide range of historical and theoretical concerns of our current research students.

The seventeenth edition of Object was published in open access form online for the first time this year, with the intention – while maintaining the journal’s core values – of wider distribution, increased readership and public engagement via the department’s growing digital platform. As part of a proud departmental tradition, the relationship between Object and its readers has developed over a long period of time. In order to carry on the tradition, while making full use of the new digital platform, we had to think about how the original print format version could be transferred into Open Journal Systems (OJS). This required numerous departmental meetings to decide interface and customization work with UCL Press, who host OJS for the use of student journal publishing. As our original format was not entirely transferrable to OJS I had to think about the structure of the interface (such as how to reorganize the website to achieve clarity and momentum), focusing on what was best for the journal and for the community the journal serves.

Having now published our journal on UCL Press’s OJS platform, the impact of our articles and reviews has become more visible. On the website, our contributors and readers can check the most updated information on where, internationally, their journal has been downloaded. It is wonderful to see that Object is attracting readers from all over the world, which made us more passionate about our research activities.

Offering open access to an art history journal that had previously circulated mainly within universities and museums meant that copyright became an important issue. With a limited budget, I had to think about various ways of persuading the image copyright holders to contribute their images for free. This was challenging because revenue from copyright is an increasingly important source of income for museums and estates. Through constant communication, we eventually received lots of generous contributions.

Apart from dealing with designers to prepare the interface, and ensuring that each article was set within the OJS system, my own duties included setting the schedule for authors to complete manuscripts and have them reviewed, engaging proof-readers to check the articles and helping choose the cover image. Therefore, an eye for detail and building strong collaborative relationships between parties were vital. In discussions, I learnt a lot about editorial policy, the revision process as well as practical matters such as intellectual property rights and formatting.

As an editor, it was my responsibility to participate in the decision whether to accept or reject an article for publication in the journal. Sometimes it required an open and honest discussion and feedback in order to produce a common understanding and outcome that was in the best interest of the authors, the journal and the community. I discovered how to make an objective assessment of a manuscript from an editor’s perspective.

I was lucky that, as an editor for this issue, I could be involved in the initial conception of the project, managing production while working closely with my co-editor Tom Snow, our editorial board, various faculty and staff in the department and UCL Press. It was a rewarding experience to read and edit the many interesting manuscripts from contributors. Overall, I learnt that producing an academic journal is about effective communication between individuals with different kinds of expertise and valuable experience. I genuinely appreciate all the members of our department who were willing to contribute their time, knowledge and brilliant ideas for the publication. Particularly, Prof. Frederic Schwartz and Prof. Rose Marie San Juan, as they know Object‘s unique traditions well and have had long experience working as members of the editorial board of Oxford Art Journal. They helped the team to define and resolve issues for the project. Through the whole process, I learnt how to make good, effective editorial judgments and decisions for serving the needs of the academic community.

As an academic field, art history has abundant resources of invaluable discussion around visual images and culture that can help the wider public internationally to enrich their contemporary understanding. In this respect, open access is crucial, and thinking about the digital platforms was a small step toward that great, distant goal.

During the process, I had to invest a considerable amount of time and effort. But it was extremely rewarding because I could attain a more comprehensive perspective on the practical workings of the academic world. I came to see how my study can be positioned in a larger academic context and how I can grow as an academic who can contribute to the future academic world.

We all worked hard to produce Object online for the first time and had a wonderful departmental celebration during which we could share all the challenges we encountered over several glasses of wine. Although it feels like an important turning point to be launching online, I am fully aware that this is just the beginning of a journey. The new digital platform offers a glimpse of the potential yet to be explored. Fellow students liked the interface. And perhaps due to its enhanced visibility, the proposal for submission has increased this year so we now have two editors and three deputy editors working on the new edition.

Sena Lee

Co-editor, Object 17, History of Art, UCL

Today's guest post is by Daniel Miller, Professor of Anthropology at UCL.

Today’s guest post is written by Ralph Schroder and Niels Brugger, authors of the forthcoming UCL Press book The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present.

The World Wide Web has now been with us for more than twenty years. From its early incarnation as the Mosaic browser, to today’s ubiquitous uses of the Web as a source of information, entertainment, and much else, the Web has become part of our daily lives. It is therefore curious that scholars have thus far made little use of the Web as a source for understanding historical patterns of culture and society. Future historians and social scientists are bound to look to the Web, its content and structure, to understand how society was changing – just as they have used letters, novels, newspapers, radio and television programmes, and other artefacts as a record of the past in pre-digital times. What can we learn from the Web so far?

Our forthcoming book, an edited volume entitled The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (eds. Niels Brügger & Ralph Schroeder) will present a series of chapters about how culture and society has evolved with the Web. It will include a number of histories of national Web spaces, accounts of different domains such as government and media websites, and case studies of topics such as religion, and education, the online community of GeoCities, and the evolution of the abortion debate in Australia 2005-2015.

We believe that Open Access is a good policy: it has been shown to increase audience reach and access. Our book can also have plenty of images – pictures of websites: very important, for obvious reasons, in this case. Our book is about the Web, and will have a diverse readership, who can hopefully also find it easily online.

UCL Press has published an impressive set of books in internet research, especially How the World Changed Social Media, and other books in the Why We Post series by Daniel Miller and colleagues. The fact that the book can be both in print and online is the best of both worlds. Finally, they have a helpful team, good to work with!

About the authors

Ralph Schroeder is MSc Course Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. Niels Brugger is Professor in Internet Studies and Digital Humanities at Aarhus University, Head of NetLab, part of the Danish Digital Humanities Lab, and head of the Centre for Internet Studies. Their book, The Web as History, will be published by UCL Press in spring 2017.

Today's guest post is by Chris Penfold, UCL Press Commisioning Editor.

On 23 May I was invited to speak at the ‘Audio and Audio-Visual Academic Book of the Future’ event, a symposium hosted by the British Library. The event was convened by Steven Dryden, a sound librarian at the BL, and aimed to bring together publishers, librarians and researchers to discuss the use of audio-visual content in scholarly books. I presented alongside two other speakers: Richard Mason, a novelist who showcased his new co-venture, Orson & Co, a platform that publishes audio-visual books, and Rebecca Lyons, who provided an overview of the Academic Book of the Future project, which she co-investigates.

Following the three presentations, the group engaged in an open discussion where all delegates reflected on their experiences of working with AV content in their careers or in their research. One question, which was pertinent to those attending from the BL, was on the issue of archiving: how do we determine which version of a book is the original when it is published simultaneously in different formats? Are ISBNs enough to identify each version, and how realistic is a future in which copyright clearance will be required for multiple e-formats even though print rights are challenging enough for authors to secure?

The floor was offered to a number of the ECRs in attendance who discussed their practice-based research and collectively emphasised a need for broader publishing options. They also raised the issue of attribution and lamented the difficulty of describing their contributions to online platforms and non-traditional forms of publishing. It was agreed that continued collaboration will be required between authors, publishers, librarians, archivists and coders to build a future in which AV content can be welcomed as a critical component of online publishing rather than viewed as an awkward luxury.

Today’s guest blog is by Edward King, Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. His book, Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America will publish in 2017.

Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America will be the first book-length study of the graphic novel form in the region. Latin America is currently experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are very sophisticated, both in the concepts they are exploring and in the way they are reworking the genre. We believe that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America and elsewhere as a uniquely powerful medium through which to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity and especially forms of embodiment or mediatization that bind humans to their non-human environment. These can be very productively drawn out in relation to modes of posthuman thought and experience, and that is the focus of our book. We discuss a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, all of which experiment in exciting ways with transmediality, the topological representation of space in the city, or embodied modes of perception and cognition. They are often concerned with finding a new form of ethics for a posthuman world in which agency is both dispersed beyond the human self and (paradoxically) rooted in the materiality of an embodied existence.

Publishing open access with UCL Press will enable us to distribute our research much more effectively. The community of scholars interested in Latin American culture, graphic fiction and the study of posthuman subjectivities is geographically extremely dispersed so being able to download the book from the internet should be a great help. Researchers and students in Latin America often find the cost of importing books prohibitive, so the open access route will allow us to establish a much closer dialogue with them. Furthermore, as our focus in the book is on texts that intersect with the technologies of the information age in a number of ways, it is appropriate that it bestrides both print and digital media.

About the author

Edward King is a Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). UCL Press will publis his forthcoming book (co-authored with Joanna Page) Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America in 2017.  Sign up for more details here.