The chief function of NINES is to protect, sustain, and enhance digital scholarship and criticism in “the long 19th century.” Developing an aggregated body of peer-reviewed scholarly and educational tools and materials will have a significant impact in several important areas of our work.
MISSION
- to create a robust framework to support the authority of digital scholarship and its relevance in tenure and other scholarly assessment procedures;
- to encourage a real, practical publishing alternative to the paper-based academic publishing system, which is in an accelerating state of crisis;
- to address in a coordinated and practical way the question of how to sustain scholarly and educational projects that have been built in digital forms;
- to establish a base for promoting new modes of criticism and scholarship promised by digital tools.
PUBLISHING MODEL
NINES includes various kinds of content: traditional texts and documents — editions, bibliographic entries, and critical works of all kinds — as well as “born-digital” materials relating to all aspects of nineteenth-century culture. NINES is a model and working example for scholarship that takes advantage of digital resources and internet connectivity, while allowing scholars to integrate their contributions fully into their local IT environments. It provides scholars with access to a federated digital environment and a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools. A key goal of NINES is to go beyond presenting static images or transcriptions of manuscripts on-screen. Software tools that aid collation, comparative analysis, and enable pedagogical application of scholarly electronic resources expose the richness of the electronic medium.
Over the past ten years a growing body of digital scholarly work has appeared online, nearly all of it executed without peer review processes and none of it integrated except by hyperlinking. NINES is working to establish an integrated publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American. NINES was created as a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, published, and recognized by the discipline.
The NINES editorial boards continue to refine peer review procedures and solicit new resources. (See “submissions.”) If you administer an existing online collection and would like to contribute freely-accessible online resources in nineteenth-century studies for peer review and possible inclusion in NINES, please contact us at inquiries@nines.org. You can also reach the heads of our editorial boards at $$$$, $$$$, or $$$$. Scholars initiating digital projects in nineteenth-century studies may be interested in our summer workshop series.
The NINES Exhibit Builder allows you to create illustrated essays using materials collected in NINES and/or available on the web. We encourage the use of objects in NINES, since these have the best chance of remaining available over time. Your essays can be shared with other NINES users, or they can be kept private as working notebooks. The Exhibit Builder was developed so that scholars could make use of the rich resources in NINES and on the web without having to download objects and create websites in order to produce online content. Because Exhibits rely on links to material already available on the web, they avoid permissions issues that might otherwise obtain in such repurposing.
Recently NINES implemented a peer-review process for these Exhibits, through our Publication Groups. Users interested in publishing their materials authored in NINES should join one of these groups and communicate with its editors about peer review and questions of workflow. NINES aims to develop a practical alternative to traditional academic publishing models, and the Exhibit Builder is imagined as an initial step in that direction.
NINES Exhibits are maintained on the servers that host nines.org and at this point can only be accessed through your browser. We are considering other export functions that will allow you to convert and download your exhibits into other formats.
To explore current NINES Exhibits, click the “Community” tab above, or follow this link.