PubPub
What is PubPub?
PubPub is focused on community publishing – emphasizing collaborative editing and writing, multimedia/multimodal incorporation, and free community building. Through this, it is open and accessible for all.
Their mission: “PubPub gives research communities of all stripes and sizes a simple, affordable, and nonprofit alternative to existing publishing models and tools.”
Beyond all this – PubPub is incredibly easy to use. You do not need to know any coding. You do not need publishing experience. You just have to make a free account and start running with it!
Examples
I have used PubPub to create and contribute to several communities, which I have listed below if you want to explore them:
- Fermentology — Fermentology is a series of talks and related resources about the culture, history, and science behind the foods you have at home. It began as a project of the NC State University Public Science Lab, with support and partnerships from the NC State University Libraries and the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. With this project, I have been able to help develop content within PubPub, while also co-designing our workflow.
- Futurama; Autogeddon — Written by Helen Burgess and Jeanne Hamming, this PubPub community is a rehoming project of an ebook to encourage and facilitate increased accessibility for the public.
- Esse quam videri: “make America again” — This PubPub community is currently in development, by Margaret Baker and myself, to compile interviews, videos, stories, and poetry readings from North Carolinians. In housing this project through PubPub, we are able to maintain public accessibility alongside our heavy media incorporation.
- Out of the Archives: Digital Projects as Early Modern Research Objects — I developed this PubPub community to complement Folger Seminar’s event in our library spaces, and to offer access to the event for those who could not physically visit the spaces to interact with the various projects that were being showcased.
- Mobile Networked Creativity — This project is striving to construct a grassroots repository of individually identified examples of Mobile Networked Creativity. Here, PubPub was great because it is compatible with Google Forms for submissions – and it is also accessible via mobile devices folks that do not have computers.
- Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook — If you are looking for a publication avenue for anything DH related, consider submitting here! I have been able to submit a couple pieces here, and it is inspiring to look at the other projects and case studies shared This handbook is run through PubPub, and they have a fantastic editing/revision process.
If you are interested in seeing the original presentation slides for the Cool Tools Seminar talk I gave on PubPub, view them here.
Header image attribution: Leo Gestel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
