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Experimenting with Audio: Announcing Our First OA Audiobooks
We are excited to announce the release of our first open access audiobooks! At OBP, we are always looking for ways to meet readers where they are. We are aware of an increased demand for audio formats in recent years, whether that be for accessibility reasons or simply because some readers enjoy listening over reading! We have thus decided to release a small sample of audio titles to gauge reader reception and listen to feedback.
Three out of the four titles in this initial collection were created with the help of AI technology, the use of which presents a number of ethical questions. We are monitoring and reflecting on the energy demands of AI in our effort to be as sustainable as possible in our publishing practice. We hope that in creating these audiobooks, we will save readers the effort (and energy) of using AI audio software themselves.
We also wish to address the potential displacement of human voice actors and other creative professionals involved in audio production. As a small, non-profit press, producing audiobooks read by professional voice actors is unfortunately beyond our means. Though we are thrilled that some of our authors have chosen to record their own books, we acknowledge that this is a time-consuming process which might not be possible or attractive to every writer. AI has enabled us to meet the demand for audio formats within these constraints.
Our decision to experiment with audiobook creation is rooted in our dedication to providing accessible, enjoyable formats for all readers. We would love to hear your feedback on these first titles as we evaluate the potential role of AI in our production process, so feel free to send your thoughts to raegan@openbookpublishers after you’ve had a listen. We hope you enjoy the books and look forward to hearing your feedback!
The following titles are now available as audiobooks:
- The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents by Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber
- Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin
- Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy edited by Karen Attar, Adrian Rice, and Christopher Stray
- After the Miners’ Strike: A39 and Cornish Political Theatre versus Thatcher’s Britain: Volume 1 by Paul Farmer
Navigating AI in Academic Publishing: Balancing Efficiency, Expertise and Ethics
by Adèle Kreager
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming many sectors, from its role in breakthrough research on protein structure prediction, which recently earned a Nobel Prize, to more controversial uses in film and entertainment. As AI infiltrates our digital world, internet users are increasingly exposed to what has been evocatively termed ‘AI slop’—from seemingly innocuous AI-generated meme trends, such as ‘Shrimp Jesus’, to more demonstrably dangerous outputs, such as AI-generated mushroom-foraging books that contain bogus advice. In turn, AI now powers everyday tools like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks, or Gmail’s email filters, often without us even noticing.
Amid this surge in AI capabilities and applications, many industries, including academic publishing, are recognising the opportunities and challenges posed by these tools. AI offers a way to enhance efficiency, streamlining the more time-consuming, repetitive and mundane tasks. Yet these advancements come with ethical and practical considerations that demand careful thought. As a small, scholar-led, non-profit publisher, we are experimenting with how AI can support, rather than replace, the human expertise and creativity that underpin high-quality academic research and its dissemination.
How We Use AI in Our Editorial Processes
We are adopting a cautious but practical approach to integrating AI, using it as an ancillary tool in various stages of the editorial process:
1. Assisting with index topic lists
Developing a list of index topics is a laborious task often shouldered by our authors. We’ve found that AI tools, like ChatGPT, can suggest preliminary lists of topics or place names, which serve as useful starting points. However, these AI-generated lists often focus on broad, main topics, lacking the nuance needed for a comprehensive index. Therefore, human oversight is essential, and we rely on our authors and editors to review and refine the suggestions to ensure that the final index is accurate and usable.
2. Crafting first drafts for book blurbs
We have also experimented with using AI to generate first drafts of book blurbs. By inputting key information about the book, ChatGPT can produce a structured summary that provides a useful point of departure. However, the critical insight needed to highlight a book’s key contributions is something that AI cannot replicate, since the responses are based on algorithmic combinations of text rather than a deeper understanding of the content. This is why these drafts are always reworked by our editors and authors.
3. Creating alt-text for accessibility
Alt-text (alternative text) provides a textual description of images, making content more accessible to people with visual impairments. Assistive technologies, like screen readers, can then translate the alt-text into speech or braille. Alt-text can also be helpful for those with unreliable internet connections, serving as a stand-in for visual content when an image fails to load.
Creating alt-text for images is essential for improving the accessibility of our books, but it can also be a labour-intensive task. Using ChatGPT’s alt-text assistant reduces the time involved in generating alt-text descriptions, and even allows for multi-language output. Still, AI-generated alt-text isn’t flawless: it can struggle to identify the most relevant elements of an image, and can overlook important context. Again, human input is necessary, with all AI-generated alt-text outputs for images reviewed by our team and authors.
4. Expanding access with AI-generated audiobooks
AI also has the potential to make academic content accessible to a broader audience by converting texts into audiobooks through Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, at a fraction of the cost associated with professional audiobook production. Audiobooks can provide a new way to engage with scholarly content, especially for those who prefer listening over reading. The audiobook conversion process isn’t entirely automated, and adjustments like excluding bibliographies and non-essential footnotes are necessary to ensure the listenability of the end product.
However, while we don’t have the resources to employ professional narrators, we are mindful of the ethical implications of using AI narrators, which risk displacing human voice actors. Striking a balance between efficiency, accessibility and ethical responsibility is a challenge to take seriously, and we welcome reader and listener feedback on the few AI-generated audiobooks we’ve made available so far. If there is demand for audiobooks, producing them in-house is more environmentally friendly than leaving the conversion to individual readers.
How We Use AI in Our Marketing Processes
AI has proved helpful in compiling lists of relevant journals and societies for marketing purposes. However, we’ve noticed that AI chatbots often prioritise Anglo-American journals. To ensure broader international representation, we adjust our prompts to include foreign-language journals, allowing us to reach a more diverse audience. The same strengths that make chatbots effective for drafting preliminary blurbs also make them handy for condensing our policy statements into more succinct, audience-friendly summaries for marketing materials.
How Our Developers Use AI
Our developers integrate AI into their coding environments to streamline specific tasks, such as code explanation, generating snippets of code and automating test writing (a tedious activity that AI can handle efficiently).
How Our Authors Are Using AI
Since the summer of 2024, we have asked our authors to disclose any use of AI tools in their research and writing, with the aim to understand how AI is being integrated into academic work and to ensure transparency in the research process. Although uptake has been relatively limited so far, some authors have reported using AI for tasks such as translating texts, clarifying complex ideas, improving language accuracy, and providing feedback on grammar, vocabulary and style.
Zooming Out: Ethical Considerations for AI in Publishing and Beyond
As AI becomes more embedded in academic publishing, it raises a host of ethical questions, with implications within and beyond the industry itself.
1. Data, accountability and algorithmic bias
AI’s outputs are shaped by the datasets used to train it, many of which are harvested without the consent of creators. In turn, these datasets can be biased or incomplete (often underrepresenting marginalised groups), leading to baked-in algorithmic biases that can perpetuate social inequalities. For this reason, we avoid using AI for editorial decision-making, especially in evaluating research: a practice that could effectively institutionalise past prejudices through new technologies.
2. The environmental cost of AI
AI is an extractive industry, at multiple levels: not only is it exploitative of human labour,[1] but it is highly resource-intensive, with a single request made through ChatGPT consuming nearly ten times the electricity of a typical Google Search. Data centres consume significant electricity, produce harmful e-waste, and rely on the extraction of critical minerals, which are often mined unsustainably and traded in areas of conflict (as discussed in one of our recent publications). AI may appear as a kind of disembodied computation, but its material, environmental impacts are very real.
3. AI and job displacement in creative fields
Widespread use of AI in creative industries risks crowding out human expertise and creativity, depending on its implementation. A revealing comment made by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, earlier this year—that ‘Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place’—is darkly suggestive of the company’s priorities and attitudes towards AI’s role in the profit-driven workplace.
AI: A Complement to Human Expertise
At OBP, AI currently plays a useful but limited role in our workflows. We use it to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks, enabling our staff and authors to allocate more time and energy to the critical and creative work involved in high-quality academic publishing. As we explore AI’s potential, we remain committed to responsible use, ensuring that human creativity, transparency and fairness remain central to our work.
[1] ChatGPT-creator OpenAI not only faces accusations of intellectual property theft by training their systems on works under copyright, without consent; they also employed contractors in Kenya, earning less than $2 per hour, as content moderators to label horrific and harmful content.
October 2024 Newsletter
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Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’
Since the theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Community over commercialisation’, we thought we would offer some thoughts about how our focus on community, rather than profit, has benefited our press—and some reflections on the potential for community-driven open access (OA) to grow over the next few years.
The practical benefits of a non-commercial and community-focused structure
Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an independent, non-profit, scholar-led OA book publisher. We were founded in 2008 by academics with a clear mission: to make high-quality academic research freely accessible everywhere. In order to serve this mission, OBP was founded as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a regulated non-profit that is obligated to serve a community purpose.
This structure meant that OBP has had a community focus since its beginning—but it was a practical and strategic choice, as well as a principled one. As a CIC, OBP has never had to meet obligations to shareholders on top of its running costs. This has enabled the press to be light and agile, to innovate, and to grow at its own pace.
This was important in the early days of OBP: OA was a new way of publishing that demanded new workflows, business models and infrastructures. Being a non-profit financed by grants and a loan rather than by investment capital gave the founders and directors, Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti, the time to experiment and pilot these while publishing only a very small number of books a year.
It also made it more feasible to resist the Book Processing Charge model of funding, an inequitable approach that requires an author (or funder) to cover the costs and, in some cases, the expected profit margin of a book before publication as a hedge against OA reducing sales. This deeply risk-averse model is common among presses that usually publish closed access, for whom OA is an occasional and unfamiliar mode of publishing—and the fees tend to be higher for presses that are expected to return high dividends to their shareholders (or for those university presses that return a substantial amount of money to their parent institutions every year).
Instead, OBP piloted a Library Membership programme in 2015 to provide an additional income stream, employing a mixed model to fund our costs via income from i) sales of paperback, hardback and EPUB formats, ii) the income from our Library Membership programme, and iii) any grant funding that the author is able to secure. (Publication does not depend on funding, and most of our books are published without it—last year, 35 out of 49 books were published with no additional funding.) The directors began to grow the press by taking on more staff and publishing more books only once this model began to provide sufficient reliable income.
Choosing not to impose fees on authors means we are not limited to only working with those who can afford to pay, thus broadening the communities of scholars we serve. Some have chosen us for precisely this reason—Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge and the series editor of ‘Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures’, writes about the importance of not excluding authors from his series in a recent blog post, as well as reflecting powerfully on the extractive relationship closed-access research can have with communities that are studied.
‘Scaling small’: growth through community
Once OBP began to grow, its non-profit status and community focus enabled the directors to set a strategic direction focused on the press’s mission, without the need to pursue higher levels of revenue as an additional responsibility. Currently OBP publishes around 50 books per year and, if the directors chose, we could put all our energies into our own growth and development (as we might if we had a commercial imperative). But instead, Gatti and Tosi decided there was a potentially more exciting and impactful route to be taken by collaborating with like-minded presses, libraries, funders, community organisations and infrastructure providers to build open, non-profit infrastructures and networks that could enable many more presses to publish OA books in an equitable way. This is now a core component of OBP's company ethos, and it is an approach that Copim has described as ‘scaling small’.
This mindset governed our involvement in Copim, an international partnership funded by Arcadia and Research England that, among other developments, has created the Open Book Collective, a community-governed charity currently supporting 13 publisher and service provider members with more than £674k raised from 79 supporting libraries, and which will also award more than £84k in small grants to mission-driven OA initiatives by 2026. Copim has also supported the development of Thoth, a non-profit open metadata management and dissemination service (also a Community Interest Company) that has more than 27 publishers using its platform to manage & disseminate open metadata for OA books (as well as underlying OBP’s own revamped catalogue).
We co-founded ScholarLed, a group of seven independent, academic-led, OA book publishers sharing skills, knowledge and resources to further all of our work, as well as the Open Access Books Network (OABN), a broad and growing community of publishers, librarians, authors and others interested in learning more about, and developing, OA book publishing. Hosting open events, fostering collaborations and sharing free resources, the OABN has also recently been involved in the EU-funded PALOMERA project, exploring why so few OA policies involve books, and what might be done to change this.
As well as contributing to these communities, we are supported by them. Infrastructures built by Copim are part of our workflows; collaborations fostered by ScholarLed and the OABN inform and improve what we do. Essential funding flows from our Library Members, whose substantial contribution is so necessary to our work, and our advisory and editorial boards offer invaluable advice and expertise as we look to innovate and grow our impact in different ways. Some readers choose to donate to us in support of our approach. Finally, our community of authors trust us with their work, the foundation of any publisher’s activity, and in return we do all we can to share that work as widely as we can, in the best form possible.
It's also worth noting that several of these larger ongoing initiatives were first sparked by small grants. The Polonsky foundation funded OBP to develop an open source metadata database and website, which was a crucial seed for the idea that became Thoth. And an OpenAIRE grant brought together the presses that founded ScholarLed (itself a subset of the Radical Open Access Collective) which went on to devise the initial bid for Copim. These early, small grants brought like-minded people and organisations together and facilitated deeper collaboration and opportunities for development—so by enabling collaboration, these smaller grants made space for alternatives to commercialisation.
A growing role for communities in OA publishing?
Open Access Week offers a moment to reflect on developments in OA, and, given our investment in community ways of working, we are particularly interested to see the founding and development of other communities of practice based around OA. These include the Open Institutional Publishing Association (a UK network), as well as the New University Presses in the Netherlands, the Irish Open Access Publishers. (There is also the recently-announced University-Based Publishing Futures group in North America, which we're keen to learn more about). These organisations are invested in growing equitable and resilient OA publishing via mutual support and collaboration rather than competition, which is a spirit we recognise from our work with Copim and other communities. It is an approach that is developing fast.
A focus on community is also being driven by the increased profile of Diamond OA, with the DIAMAS project in Europe, the UNESCO Global Diamond Open Access Alliance, and the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access helping to drive debates about whether Diamond is ‘just’ a model (free to read and free to publish) or whether it also requires community ownership and/or control over the publishing outlets themselves. Understanding what that control might look like requires a firm focus on governance, a topic that is currently not receiving the serious attention it deserves in conversations about OA.
The increased emphasis on community has not gone unnoticed in commercial circles either, and casual claims of being ‘community-driven’ are cropping up more often. We would encourage caution when hearing these warm words—what do they mean in practice? Can they be backed up by robust governance models, or by evidence of tangible investment in the communities in question, or are they simply a marketing label designed to part libraries and funders from their cash?
It will be fascinating to see where these currents have taken us when we arrive at next year’s Open Access Week.
On bi-musicality: a passage to Indian music
By David Clarke
Image: David Clarke and Vijay Rajput, Recital Room, Newcastle University, 25 April 2024. Image: John Donoghue (www.jdphotographer.co.uk). Licence held by Newcastle University.
‘Bi-musicality’ was a term first coined by the ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1960). It was an aspiration of his programme at UCLA in the 1950s, that students should explore the music of an unfamiliar culture not by ‘passive observation’ or ‘museum studies’, but through practical, first-hand engagement: they were to acquire a second musicianship in the way you might learn a second language. To this day, experiential immersion in the music of other cultures (and its modes of pedagogy) lives on as a fundamental tenet of ethnomusicological fieldwork.
Nowadays, however, you don’t hear the word ‘bi-musicality’ itself so much. Ethnomusicologist John Baily (2001), for example, favours the more prosaic phrase ‘learning to perform’ when he writes of his own apprenticeship on the Afghan dutār and rubāb. Even so, I still find Hood’s original notion suggestive. It captures something of the inner and outer game of learning another’s music: a dialogue, a negotiation—between cultures, between people, between different facets of your musical mind and being. This is certainly what my own experience as a westerner learning North Indian classical music has felt like. And that experience is under the skin of my book Rags Around the Clock, produced collaboratively with my Hindustani vocal teacher, Dr Vijay Rajput.
Vijay ji is an outstanding singer in the North Indian khayāl style, a disciple of the much-feted Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. Vijay relocated from New Delhi to Newcastle upon Tyne in 2004, not long after I had taken my own first steps into Hindustani music (my first Indian-music teacher, a remarkable musician called Arun Debnath, had returned to India a couple of years earlier). Previously, I’d trained as a western classical musician; and my academic role at Newcastle University was focused on western classical music and theory. Gradually, with Vijay as my new guru, and with the experience of a several trips to India, I absorbed more and more of Hindustani classical music and the culture that underpins it. Crucially, however, this journey never meant relinquishing my prior identity as a western musician. For me, the two experiences have always jostled together, with all their differences and similarities.
Bi-musicality is not an explicit theme of Rāgs Around the Clock. Yet this dual standpoint has shaped the work, as have the many dialogues between Vijay and myself. The book and its audio materials offer a resource for the study of North Indian classical music in general and the khayāl style in particular. It includes materials—songs and their notations—useful to student practitioners. It comes with two online albums by Vijay, which provide windows onto the many colours and subtleties of rāg – an essential concept of Indian classical music. It provides contextual, theoretical and historical perspectives informed by recent research, including from western scholarship. And it ventures analysis of Vijay’s recordings, and of the conventions and complexities of the music. This last aspect, which perhaps represents the book’s principal research contribution, is informed by both my own insider knowledge of singing this music and by many years as an analyst of western music. In other words, like so much else in this project, it emerges from the crucible of becoming a musician and musicologist twice over. We hope that there is something for everyone to enjoy in this compendium, regardless of their prior level of knowledge of Indian music or their cultural entry point.
REFERENCES
Baily, John (2001). ‘Learning to Perform as a Research Technique in Ethnomusicology’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology10(2), 85–98.
Hood, Mantle (1960). ‘The Challenge of “Bi-Musicality”’, Ethnomusicology 4, 55–9.
Rāgs Around the Clock is available now. Read for free or get a hard copy here. Listen to an audio sample from the book here.
A Greco-Roman Look at Sanskrit Theater
By Roberto Morales-Harley
Comparing Theaters
Any well-read person who has had the pleasure to read both Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā will probably know that the differences between the two far surpass their similarities. The Greek tragedy begins with a deathly plague, progresses through several ominous oracles, and touches on themes like murder, suicide and self-injury, only to wrap things up with a protagonist defeated at the hands of fate, as well as an audience likely pitying him and fearing suchlike disgrace. The Sanskrit nāṭaka, on the other hand, covers such a wide range of topics as the idyllic life of hermitages, the ludicrous nature of buffoons, the power of curses, the ways in which bad and good luck can tilt the scales, and the relationship between gods and men, all this while both characters and spectators ride along in an emotional roller-coaster, encompassing not only the joy of a love story, but also the didactics of genealogy. Apples and oranges.
It is also likely that not many people will know the complexity of each of these theatrical traditions. Besides Tragedy, Greek theater has Comedy. But more importantly, even the Greeks were not as dualistic as often thought of, since they also developed a third subgenre in the form of Satyr Drama. In Rome, the scene is still more intricate, since tragedy is not viewed as monolith but treated separately as either Fabula Crepidata or Fabula Praetexta, and likewise, comedy manifests itself in the forms of Fabula Palliata, Fabula Togata, Fabula Atellana, and Mimus. India is no exception, given the fact that there are as many as ten main forms of theater: Nāṭaka and Prakaraṇa, but also tragic-like subgenres like Aṅka; comic-like subgenres like Prahasana, Bhāṇa, and Vīthī; and even heroic-like subgenres like Samavakāra, Īhāmṛga, Ḍima, and Vyāyoga. Some mix and match between all this can at least allow us to compare varieties of apples.
The Greek Influence Hypothesis
In 1852, Albrecht Weber first formulated what then came to be known as the “Greek Influence Hypothesis”. According to him, (a) we have no preserved early Sanskrit plays, but (b) we have testimonies of Greek plays being represented in Bactria and in North- and West India; therefore, (c) it is possible to presuppose a Greek influence in the origins of Sanskrit theater, even though (d) there seems to be no specific manifestations of such general influence.
Since Weber, new developments allow us to rethink these four statements. (A) In 1906, Ganapati Shastri discovered thirteen Sanskrit plays and attributed them to the early playwright Bhāsa. (B) In 1975, Paul Bernard discovered a building that used to function as a Greek theater in the region. (C) Greco-Roman influences in Sanskrit romance, fable, and epic have been argued for, respectively, in 1940 by Vittore Pisani, in 1987 by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, and in 2008 by Fernando Wulff Alonso. If influences happened not only in theater but also in other literary genres, we could move on from considering it a mere possibility and start talking about a highly probable practice. (D) Lastly, specific borrowings from Roman theater into Sanskrit theater were suggested in 2012 also by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados.
When comparing some Greco-Roman texts to some of the Sanskrit plays attributed to Bhāsa, the parallelisms are shockingly detailed: paintings being described in words, intentional avoidance of death and violence on stage, merging of two plots into one. I believe that any Indologist who reads this short list would without a doubt be reminded of Sanskrit theater. But I assure you that the same would happen for a Classicist thinking of Greek or Roman theater! Could this be more than a series of lucky coincidences?
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre
The book The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater tackles an issue that, although first raised nearly two centuries ago, still had not received a full-length treatment in the form of a monograph. The study is based on three literary motifs: the embassies from Iliad 9, Mahābhārata 5, Euripides’ Phoenix, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Embassy; the ambushes from Iliad 10, Mahābhārata 4, Ps.-Euripides’ Rhesus, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Five Nights; and the ogres from Odyssey 9, Mahābhārata 1, Euripides’ Cyclops, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Middle One. But the comparisons do not end there. Other plays by the Greek playwright Aeschylus or by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence are also compared here for the first time with some works of Sanskrit theater. Hopefully a study like this will start a long-overdue conversation between Classicists and Indologists about these subjects.
Access The Embassey, The Ambush, and the Ogre for free at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417
Why you should read ancient law as social networks
By Christian Canu Højgaard
Law texts are not usually the literature you would prefer for learning about culture, ideas, and values. They are often tedious, repetitive, and essentially impersonal. They must of course be impersonal because they present the laws of an authority and not any personal opinions. Ancient laws are similar to modern laws in many respects, but there are also import differences.
My own interest in ancient Near Eastern laws was sparked when I encountered scholarly works done since the 1990s on the laws of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars such as the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that Leviticus and other legal books of the Hebrew Bible were not merely legal stipulations but articulations of a certain worldview that needed other interpretational tools than Biblical scholars have normally used.
The so-called Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) is a case in point. Alongside its lists of stipulations of various sorts, it contains concrete—even heartbreaking—cases that are meant to impress the hearer/reader. For example, when a fellow is pictured as literally shaking of poverty (Lev. 25.35).
Through this lens of personal experiences and concrete, everyday disputes, the Holiness Code deals with issues that continue to be relevant: poverty, inequality, immigration, religion. Not in abstract ways but by exemplifying how poor immigrants should be helped and included while preserving the core identity of the community.
The community of the Holiness Code is relatively small. I found it to consist of 59 members, some of them concrete persons like Moses or Aaron, but most of them representing social groups such as peasants, women, priests, immigrants, and poor. The Holiness Code is therefore a model community that represents the most pressing issues in the eyes of the legislator.
It is interesting to see how the community is intertwined in so many different ways. It is clear that encounters with an immigrant do not only affect the ones encountering him but the entire society because ideas and physical goods are exchanged and diffused through the society.
To capture and visualize this intricate network of social roles and relations, I developed a social network model. The benefit of applying social network analysis (SNA) is that it is sensible to how the interactions between two members of a community or between a member and an outsider affect the entire community.
The social network model proposed in my book diverges from most other SNA-approaches in at least three ways:
1. The social network of the Holiness Code is naturally derived from a text. This is not unusual, and there are many interesting social network analyses on the basis of written literature. I have tried to advance this area of research by applying a semi-automatic, computational approach to capture and delineate the persons of the text (chapter 3).
2. Unlike traditional social network approaches, which focus on one particular type of interaction (e.g., marriage ties, friendship, or economical transactions, etc.), the model I created took into account all possible types of interaction including communicational, juridical, cultic, economical, and emotional ones. The benefit of which was to glean as much information from the text as possible. In order to compare quite diverse interactions, I sought out to measure the interactions on the basis of how much agency was required to perform the event (chapters 4–6). For example, speech and harvest are very different events, but each of them requires a certain amount of agency which can be measured given an appropriate linguistic framework.
3. I came to realize that SNA of a text must somehow take into account the structure of the text because the role of a person is not only dependent on his/her interactions but also on how it is positioned in the text. Accordingly, I included the syntactic structure of the text as a third dimension to the social network apart from persons and interactions (chapter 7).
The social network of the Holiness Code is complex but illuminating. As a law text, it offers a glimpse into how an ancient society dealt with pressing issues of immigration, poverty, and increasing inequality. And by capturing the interactions as a social network, we can detect patterns of behaviour that reveal ancient ethics.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on.…
Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde
Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen The avant-garde is dead… long live the avant-garde Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the … Continue reading →
Open Book Publishers – Spring Newsletter – May 2024
Greetings and welcome to our Spring Newsletter!
In this edition, you'll find a treasure trove of updates, interesting insights into our practices and industry practices, and an array of exciting new open-access books, videos, resources and more. Get ready to dive into a world of knowledge, innovation, and our upcoming releases. Here's a sneak peek at what's waiting for you inside:
Announcements
• Announcing the Winner of the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award
• OBP Author Survey: Share Your Feedback!
• Open Access Books Network
• The PALOMERA project Survey
• Featured Article: Open-access books need more support from universities by Lucy Barnes
• Featured Blog Post: Where does the money go? Explaining our Library Membership Programme by Lucy Barnes
Books, Resources and Reviews
• Featured Books: Now in OA!
• New Open Access Publications
• Forthcoming Open Access Publications
• New Blogs, Articles and Resources
• Call for Proposals
• Latest Reviews
Announcing the Winner of the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award
We are thrilled to announce that Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, has been awarded the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award!
This groundbreaking collection, featuring contributions from academics and professionals spanning 17 countries and numerous disciplines, offers insightful perspectives on the future of higher education. In the face of ongoing challenges and crises, the book boldly reimagines the values and purpose of universities, advocating for a shift away from financial incentives and performance metrics towards a focus on resilience, collective action, and innovative solutions.
Read and download for free or get your own ebook or hard copy at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0363
OBP Author Survey: Share Your Feedback
Your input matters!
If you're an OBP author, contributor, or editor, we want to hear from you. Share your insights on our publishing process and help us better understand our community.
We're also keen to hear your suggestions on how we can enhance title dissemination and broaden our readership. Together, let's make OBP even better!
Access the survey now at https://forms.gle/SzhWX4wffAMbEkML9
Open Access Books Network
SIGN UP for the latest OABN webinar, free and open to all: 'How are open access associations supporting OA book publishing?' On Thursday 23 May at 2pm BST, join representatives of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA) in the UK, the Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP) in Ireland, the New University Presses (NUPs) from the Netherlands, and the AG Universitätsverlage for German-speaking presses to discuss how these associations are supporting OA book publishing in their regions.
Access here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdSAWcJYHBQB9btjTEskIgcIyvd1JrO1cyMHeItKi4SPzAu6Q/viewform
The PALOMERA project Survey
The PALOMERA project, which is investigating OA book policymaking across Europe, has recently released their Knowledge Base. How might you use it? Let them know! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfJI3M0o4B7AZi6hWBMTFJUaUrM8a5fTdfT4hxlLG8LHde5Lg/viewform
You can also read this blog post about the recent PALOMERA-led event bringing together OA projects across Europe with a representative from the European Commission, to discuss their latest developments and how these projects contribute to a broader vision for open access: https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/2024/05/01/creating-community-driven-pathways-to-equitable-open-scholarly-publishing-where-are-we-now/
Featured Article: Open-access books need more support from universities by Lucy Barnes
Our Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Lucy Barnes, has written a piece for Research Fortnight: 'Open-access books need more support from universities'.
Please read and share!
Featured Blog Post: Where does the money go? Explaining our Library Membership Programme by Lucy Barnes
Our Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Lucy Barnes, has written a new blog post where she delves into the Open Book Publishers' Library Membership Programme, detailing its pivotal role in supporting open access publishing while addressing what it funds, and why we also ask authors who are able to apply for funding to do so.
Read now at https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/where-does-the-money-go-explaining-our-library-membership-programme/
Featured Books: Now in OA!
Delve into the rich tapestry of intangible heritage with two captivating reads: A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape by Kathleen Ann Myers, translated by Grady C. Wray, and Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation edited by Lilia Makhloufi.
In A Country of Shepherds Myers intricately weaves together the life stories of shepherds and farmers in Spain's Andalusian region, offering profound insights into their cultural practices, traditions, and the intangible essence of their way of life. As these individuals navigate the challenges of their landscapes, their narratives provide a poignant reflection on the significance of intangible heritage amidst ecological shifts and global influences. From ancient traditions to contemporary challenges, this book paints a vivid portrait of the enduring cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean.
Complementing this exploration, Tangible and Intangible Heritage presents a diverse array of perspectives on heritage preservation across cultures and continents. Delving into the complex interplay between tangible sites and intangible practices, this collection offers critical insights into the dynamic nature of heritage in an increasingly interconnected world. From Algeria to Japan, each essay examines how tangible and intangible elements intertwine to shape cultural identities and communities, urging us to rethink traditional paradigms of preservation in the face of global challenges.
Together, these books invite readers on a journey to discover the intangible threads that weave through our cultural tapestry.
Access them now at:
A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0387
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0388
New Open Access Publications
In addition to the two titles featured above, these past two months we have released another 13 new Open Access titles:
Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce by Hans Walter Gabler
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London by Leslie Howsam
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins by Adrian Poole
This is a collection of reprinted essays about the life and writing of Lord Byron and the themes of ‘memorials, marbles and ruins’ that were prominent in his thinking and feeling.
No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s by Frank Felsenstein
The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context by Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context examines the translation and reception of Russian literature as a world-wide process. This volume aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. It also seeks to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and uses of Russian literature across the globe.
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies edited by Philippe Tortell
Heavy Metal brings together world-leading experts from across the globe to reimagine the future of mineral exploration and mining in a post-fossil fuel world.
A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes by Wiktor Gębski
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France. Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study's primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022.
(An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War edited by Mnemo ZIN
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of (An)Archive. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
No Prices No Games!: Four Economic Models by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein
While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions:
• A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will.
• A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden.
• A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent's choices.
• Systematic biases in agents' preferences.
The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition edited by Petri Hoppu, Egil Bakka and Anne Margrete Fiskvik
This major new anthology of the minuet in the Nordic countries comprehensively explores the dance as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon. One of the most significant dances in Europe, with a strong symbolic significance in western dance culture and dance scholarship, the minuet has evolved a distinctive pathway in this region, which these rigorous and pioneering essays explore.
Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 by Luke Clossey
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.
Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia by Geoffrey Khan
This volume presents an edition of a corpus of Arabic documents data-ble to the 11th and 12th centuries AD that were discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society at the site of the Nubian fortress Qaṣr Ibrīm (situated in the south of modern Egypt).
Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution by Adrian Desmond
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
As always, these titles are freely available to read and download at www.openbookpublishers.com.
Forthcoming Open Access Publications
Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research edited by Helen Julia Minors, Stefan Östersjö, Gilvano Dalagna, Jorge Salgado Correia
This book contributes presenting examples of artistic research projects that are embedded within Higher Music Performance courses at universities and conservatoires across Europe.
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert by Margaret Mehl
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills: Research in the Western Balkans and Western Europe edited by Blanka Bogunović, Renee Timmers, and Sanela Nikolić
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents by Henrike Lähnemann, Eva Schlotheuber and Anne Simon
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Trix: The Other Kipling by Barbara Fisher
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
Human Evolutionary Demography edited by Oskar Burger, Ronald Lee and Rebecca Sear
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
To find out more about this and other forthcoming titles visit: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/forthcoming
New Blogs, Articles and Resources
Blogs
[blog post] One woman’s challenge to the Victorian Legal Professions by Leslie Howsam
[blog post] “NO LIFE WITHOUT YOU”: REFUGEE LOVE LETTERS FROM THE 1930s by Frank Felsenstein
[blog post] On 'Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context' by Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer
[blog post] Unveiling The Human Journey by Frank Felsenstein
[blog post] How do languages die? The case of the Jewish Arabic dialect of Gabes (Southern Tunisia) by Wiktor Gębski
Articles
[article] Coming Soon: The Life of Nunsby Henrike Lähnemann
[article] The trials of migrant academics: The ‘Outsider Within’ at academic conferences (Ladan Rahbari & Olga Burlyuk)
Videos
[video] Godstow Abbey - the Life of Nuns Trailer
[video] 'Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London' - An Interview with Leslie Howsam
Call for Proposals
We have various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!
Global Communications
Global Communications is a book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
Latest Reviews
Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South by Carmen Martinez-Vargas
In this context, Martínez-Vargas presents a broad theoretical landscape, highlighting prominent authors of participatory approaches, their most relevant research contributions, ideas, and singularities. A unique aspect of this book is the invitation, in different moments of the text, to propose pluralist understandings of participatory approaches: not as a homogenous “participatory perspective”, but as a constellation of academic and political views which share family characteristics. This pluralist view offers an understanding of the changing and contextual character of participatory social theories. Specifically, it helps identify connections and elective affinities among four families of participatory approaches: a) an “industrial family”, or perspectives related to the world of labour; b) a “development family”, or approaches linked to debates on development and social change; c) an “indigenous family”, or views interested in intercultural and decolonial dialogues, and d) an “educational family”, or tendencies focused in democracy production of knowledge in pedagogical environments.In analysing these families of participatory views, the author recovers the academic sources, the central problems for social research, and the different understandings of the relationship between theories and practices.
César Osorio Sánchez
Journal of Human Development and Capabilities , 2024. doi:10.1080/19452829.2024.2330175
Ecocene Politics by Mihnea Tănăsescu
It is certainly the merit of Ecocene politics, a very carefully composed work that engages with many thinkers who commented on the Anthropocene, that it takes philosophy further to what political practice for this new era might mean. It ties together useful concepts, different traditions and concrete examples.
Nele Buyst
Environmental Values, 2024. doi:10.1177/09632719241245532
Ecocene Politics aims to ward off the paralysis that can afflict those who inherit a tragedy in progress. […] This [is] a book that will change conversations.
Lisa Disch
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Ecocene Politics is a political theory that emerges from actual places and thinks through relations that are situated in landscapes and personal histories. This book offers something other than what readers might expect from political theory. […] It exemplifies a form of political thought that resonates closely with more-than-human geography.
Clemens Driessen
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Ecocene Politics […] offers a wealth of trenchant insight and analysis, lucidly and passionately presented, for understanding the challenges and opportunities ahead.
David Bollier
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Why am I not also tending to an olive tree, planting tomatoes, guiding the flock to pasture, or sailing on a sailboat? […] We are yet to ascertain whether this occasional inclination to put down the book is positive or negative. It might very well be positive, exactly what Tănăsescu was willing to inspire.
Xenia Chiaramonte and Marco Malavasi
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber, Jesse C. Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R. Glenn Cummins, Lyombe Eko and Kerk F. Kee
[...] what Koerber, Starkey and their coauthors have created here is a genuinely useful, coherent and clearly written text which will, I hope, become a valuable resource for early career researchers in particular. The book very effectively uses its focus of predatory journals as a window into the ever-shifting world of contemporary scholarly publishing.
David Barker, University of Derby
Publishing Research Quarterly, 2024. doi:10.1007/s12109-024-09984-2
The result is an impressive collection of chapters which summarise recent debates and report the authors’ own research examining the impact of these changes on the views of researchers and crucially their reading and publishing habits. [...] Overall I would strongly recommend this book and suggest that it should be required or background reading on research methods courses for doctoral and research masters programmes.
Huw Morris, Honorary Professor of Tertiary Education, UCL Institute of Education
Open@UCL Blog, 2024.
The Official Indonesian Qurʾān Translation: The History and Politics of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya by Fadhli Lukman
Divided into seven chapters (plus concluding remarks) and organized around a chronological framework, this book is a scintillating read for those interested in the politics and perils of translation. It is a major addition to the growing literature on Islam in Southeast Asia.
Khairudin Aljunied
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2024. doi:10.1093/jis/etae011
Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné by Bendi Tso, Marnyi Gyatso, Naljor Tsering and Mark Turin acting as Trustees for the Members of the Choné Tibetan Community
More importantly, the book is an invaluable documentation of an oral tradition that is hanging by its thread, made accessible because of the translation of the stanzas into English and Mandarin.
Kunda Dixit
Nepali Times, 2024.