Digital publishing expert to present 'Promises and Pitfalls: ARL Institutional Digital Scholarship and Collaboration'

The Purdue University Libraries Seminar Series is bringing an expert in digital publishing to campus to present "Promises and Pitfalls: ARL Institutional Digital Scholarship and Collaboration."

The presentation by Rikk Mulligan, program officer for scholarly publishing at the Association of Research Libraries, will be 11 a.m. to noon Jan. 21 in Stewart Center, Room 278 and is open to the public.

Mulligan is also a public fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. His work for ARL includes tracking developments in digital publishing, with specific attention to innovations in digital monographs, hybrid publications, and emerging digital humanities and cultural heritage projects.

He holds a doctorate in American studies from Michigan State University, where his interdisciplinary research focused on American history, popular literature and media, and culture of the postwar 20th century.

ARL recently published a series of his articles on the transformation of scholarly publishing since the advent of the Internet. His scholarly publications consider the failure of democratic institutions in post-apocalyptic speculative texts, examine popular anxieties ranging from biowarfare and pandemics to automated weapons and artificial intelligence, and extend to critical studies of science fiction and graphic novels.

He has presented on these topics at a number of international academic conferences and is currently a peer reviewer and editorial board member of the Journal of Popular Culture and Dialogue: The Journal of Pedagogy and Popular Culture.

ABSTRACT: The World Wide Web is only 22 years old, yet in little more than two decades the Web and its rapidly evolving and proliferating applications have radically changed all spheres of human endeavor including industry, commerce, entertainment, and for higher education, research and scholarly communication. Computing has been part of research in the sciences and humanities since the 1940s, but digital scholarship began to truly blossom with the new affordances of multimedia, data visualization, and big data in the past decade or so. Some academic departments and research libraries began to support and enable digital scholarship in the mid-1990s, but for most such efforts have been far more recent and active collaboration between many academic departments and research libraries is only now on the distant horizon.

Source: Aimee McComb, 765-494-2900, mccomba@purdue.edu