Experimental Publishing Compendium

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Experimental Publishing Compendium Tools Practices Books About /
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The Experimental Publishing Compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. The compendium brings together tools, practices, and books to promote the publication of experimental scholarly works. Read more

practice

Collaborative writing

Academic publishing and reward structures are set up to reproduce individualised, liberal humanist forms of authorship. Experiments with more...

Jupyter Notebook

File format for creating and sharing computational documents. A popular choice for authors putting together documents with live, interactive code...

Manifold

Large-scale publishing platform for publishing text and accompanying digital resources. Able to incorporate a range of rich digital media. Strong...

Etherpad

Web based collaborative real-time editor.

HedgeDoc (formerly CodiMD)

Web based collaborative real-time editor and documentation management project.

Cryptpad

Privacy-by-design project management suite of web-based collaborative tools (text, code, presentation, sheet, poll, todo, whiteboard).

ONLYOFFICE

A complete office productivity suite.

FidusWriter

Web based collaborative text editor made for academics with support for citations and formulas.

JupyterLite

A full JupyterLab distribution running in the browser.

PubPub

Supports community-based collaborative drafting, review, and publication of scholarly work "using an integrated and iterative process".

Overleaf

A collaborative cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing, editing, and publishing scientific documents

Wikibooks

Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia...

Wikisource

Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of...

Ketida (formerly Editoria)

A web-based tool for producing scholarly monographs in both print and ebook forms.

Scalar

Enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with text in a variety of ways with minimal technical expertise required....

Sandpoints

Git, Gitea, Hugo, Markdown editor integration for collaborative writing and publishing

(No longer maintained)

TypeMill

An open-source flat-file CMS for text-driven websites, can be used to produce eBooks via plugin (implementation of paged.js).

Bookdown

An open-source R package that facilitates writing books and long-form articles/reports with R Markdown, a markup language easier to learn than...

Pressbooks

A WordPress-based book content management system which produces multiple formats: ebooks, webbooks, print-ready PDF, and various XML flavours.

Quire

Quire offers an elegant and affordable digital publishing solution ideal for creating dynamic publications in a variety of formats, including web,...

Stylo

A text editor that simplifies writing and editing scientific articles in the Human and Social Sciences. It is designed for authors and publishers...

Storyspace

Storyspace is a tool for complex, interlinked narrative, both fiction and nonfiction. Twenty years ago, the original Storyspace ushered in the era...

MediaWiki

Collaboration and publishing platform used to run Wikipedia. Easily adaptable to monograph publishing and can incorporate a range of rich digital...

XWiki

Xwiki is an open source wiki platform for collaborative writing and knowledge sharing.

Wiki.js

Open source and extensible wiki software designed for sharing technical documentation.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile open source wiki software that doesn't require a database. It is loved by users for its clean and...

BookStack

BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.

octomode

Octomode is a collective editing space for PDF making, using Etherpad, Paged.js and Flask.

Ethertoff

Ethertoff is a simple collaborative web platform, much resembling a wiki but featuring realtime editing thanks to Etherpad. Its output is...

etherdump

Tool to help manage periodic publishing of etherpads to static files, preserving metadata. Uses the etherpad API (and so it requires having the...

(Minimally maintained)

Pad2Print

Pad2Print is a collaborative printed document layout tool in the web browser. It uses pads on which it is possible to edit the CSS and allows a...

(No longer maintained)

Living Books About Life

This book series published by Open Humanities Press ‘repackaged’ previously published open access content into curated edited collections. The...

cover for Speculate This!

Speculate This!

2013, Uncertain Commons

As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation. A short,...

cover for Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

2018, The Multigraph Collective

The Multigraph Collective is a team of twenty-two scholars at sixteen universities in Canada, the US, and the UK. Its members are Mark...

cover for Book of Anonymity

Book of Anonymity

2021, Anon Collective

The Book of Anonymity is written in the tradition of author-less texts. Editing and contributing anonymously constitute experiments in...

The Turing Way: A Handbook for Reproducible Data Science

2019, The Turing Way Community

The Turing Way is an open source community-driven guide to reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. Its goal is to...

cover for Phone & Spear: A Yut̲a Anthropology

Phone & Spear: A Yut̲a Anthropology

2019, Miyarrka Media

Building on a ten-year collaboration by the community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, the project is an experiment in the anthropology of...

Performing Archive: Curtis + “the vanishing race”

2018, Jacqueline Wernmont, Heather Blackmore, David Kim, Ulia Popova, Beatrice Schuster, Amy Borsuk

Created as a pilot project for the Claremont Center for Digital Humanities, Performing Archive: Edward S. Curtis + ‘the vanishing...

Basic Internet Security

2011, FLOSS Manuals

A collaboratively-produced book written in a Book Sprint by members of FLOSS Manuals, an open and voluntary organisation of approx. 3000...

Energy Worlds in Experiment

2021, James Maguire, Laura Watts, Brit Ross Winthereik

Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments....

tool

CommentPress

CommentPress is an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph-by-paragraph,...

cover for Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

2011, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Planned Obsolescence springs from the author Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication...

cover for Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

2019, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Developed in an open way by a process of community review, still using the CommentPress plugin, but now on the Humanities Commons platform:...

The Ethnographic Case

2017, Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski

The Ethnographic Case is an experimental, online, Open Access book, that invites readers to interact with it in a process of post-publication...

cover for Gamer Theory

Gamer Theory

2007, McKenzie Wark

Together with the Institute for the Future of the Book I produced this website as a way to think about games. We released Version 1.1 back in...

Annotating

Annotations, notes scribbled in the margins or digitally overlain, spin out from a source text, adding layers of meaning, interpretations,...

Reviewing

Evaluation of research by the scholarly community is essential to conducting and publishing research. In response to changing publication...

book

As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder

2019, Elsie Paul with Davis McKenzie, Paige Raibmon, and Harmony Johnson

This media-rich, multi-path book offers a rare glimpse into the life of a Coast Salish woman and the history and lifeways of her people. It...

Scalar

Enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with text in a variety of ways with minimal technical expertise required....

TK Licenses

A range of alternative Traditional Knowledge Licenses designed to address the diversity of Indigenous needs in relation to intellectual property.

Acknowledging

Preserving

Preservation aims to keep valuable objects safe from harm. Experiment, by contrast, implies potential failure and the possibility that value is...

Designing

Licensing

Copyright licensing determines the rights for the publication, distribution, and use of research on a spectrum from completely closed fully...

Translating

Translating is inherently experimental because it requires the approximation of meaning through trial and error. Translating experiments have...

book

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

2021, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Aesthetic Programming asks “how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the...

GitLab

Hosting for Git repositories which can be turned into static sites for monograph publications. Able to include live code snippets which can be...

Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator written in Python that requires no database or server-side logic. It allows the user to make a site by writing...

paged.js

Paged.js is a free and open source JavaScript library that paginates content in the browser to create PDF output from any HTML content. This means...

Computational publishing

Computational publishing broadly refers to publishing a book using techniques or processes from software development. This can include software...

Forking

Forking is a form of computational publishing that involves creating a derivative version of a previously published text or book to make...

Translating

Translating is inherently experimental because it requires the approximation of meaning through trial and error. Translating experiments have...

Versioning

Versioning (also known as processual, iterative, or continuous publishing), as a concept and practice used within academic research and...

practice

Forking

Forking is a form of computational publishing that involves creating a derivative version of a previously published text or book to make...

Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Subversion

Apache Subversion is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical...

Gitea

Gitea is a software package for hosting software development version control using Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking,...

GitLab

Hosting for Git repositories which can be turned into static sites for monograph publications. Able to include live code snippets which can be...

GitHub Pages

Static site generator using Jekyll to publish Git repositories as websites. Easily adapted to hosted a website for a monograph publication with a...

ACLS Workbench

A fork of Scalar that promoted scholarly collaboration by allowing scholars to "create, join, or clone online arguments enhanced with multimedia content".

(No longer maintained)

Sandpoints

Git, Gitea, Hugo, Markdown editor integration for collaborative writing and publishing

(No longer maintained)

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

2021, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Aesthetic Programming asks “how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the...

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Ciston & Marino fork)

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Ciston & Marino fork)

2021, Sarah Ciston and Mark C. Marino

A fork of Soon & Cox's Aesthetic Programming with an additional chapter 8.5 and additional features throughout.

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

2022, Winnie Soon, Geoff Cox, Tzu Tung Lee, Ren Yu, and Shih-yu Hsu

A fork of Soon & Cox's Aesthetic Programming translating the whole text into Traditional Chinese

The CryptoParty Handbook

2013, CryptoParty

A handbook of computer and internet security and a practical guide for CryptoParties. Created as a GitHub repository by forking two existing...

Basic Internet Security

2011, FLOSS Manuals

A collaboratively-produced book written in a Book Sprint by members of FLOSS Manuals, an open and voluntary organisation of approx. 3000...

cover for Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}

Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}

2015, Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, and Jeremy Douglass

Reading Project had an online companion to the print book built in ACLS Workbench for cloning, forking, and building upon the original text.

practice

Translating

Translating is inherently experimental because it requires the approximation of meaning through trial and error. Translating experiments have...

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

2022, Winnie Soon, Geoff Cox, Tzu Tung Lee, Ren Yu, and Shih-yu Hsu

A fork of Soon & Cox's Aesthetic Programming translating the whole text into Traditional Chinese

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

2021, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Aesthetic Programming asks “how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the...

cover for Denis Diderot ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ – ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition

Denis Diderot ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ – ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition

2016, Denis Diderot

Incorporates specially-recorded musical pieces into the body of the text, offering a sensory and scholarly evocation of Diderot’s work for a...

As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder

2019, Elsie Paul with Davis McKenzie, Paige Raibmon, and Harmony Johnson

This media-rich, multi-path book offers a rare glimpse into the life of a Coast Salish woman and the history and lifeways of her people. It...

book

cover for Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen: Dritte, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage

Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen: Dritte, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage

2018, Roland Schäfer

The volume Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen like many Language Science Press titles, is published in a form...

docloop

docloop turns feedback into tasks, converting online annotations of a document into issues in the author's bug tracking system. It works with...

(Minimally maintained)

Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

GitHub Pages

Static site generator using Jekyll to publish Git repositories as websites. Easily adapted to hosted a website for a monograph publication with a...

PaperHive

A coworking hub for academic researchers enabling collaborative annotation of documents.

Annotating

Annotations, notes scribbled in the margins or digitally overlain, spin out from a source text, adding layers of meaning, interpretations,...

Reviewing

Evaluation of research by the scholarly community is essential to conducting and publishing research. In response to changing publication...

Versioning

Versioning (also known as processual, iterative, or continuous publishing), as a concept and practice used within academic research and...

book

cover for Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

2011, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Planned Obsolescence springs from the author Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication...

CommentPress

CommentPress is an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph-by-paragraph,...

Annotating

Annotations, notes scribbled in the margins or digitally overlain, spin out from a source text, adding layers of meaning, interpretations,...

Reviewing

Evaluation of research by the scholarly community is essential to conducting and publishing research. In response to changing publication...

Versioning

Versioning (also known as processual, iterative, or continuous publishing), as a concept and practice used within academic research and...

practice

Annotating

Annotations, notes scribbled in the margins or digitally overlain, spin out from a source text, adding layers of meaning, interpretations,...

Manifold

Large-scale publishing platform for publishing text and accompanying digital resources. Able to incorporate a range of rich digital media. Strong...

FidusWriter

Web based collaborative text editor made for academics with support for citations and formulas.

PubPub

Supports community-based collaborative drafting, review, and publication of scholarly work "using an integrated and iterative process".

Scalar

Enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with text in a variety of ways with minimal technical expertise required....

Pressbooks

A WordPress-based book content management system which produces multiple formats: ebooks, webbooks, print-ready PDF, and various XML flavours.

Hypothesis

Browser-based tool for making annotations on web pages. Can be integrated with other tools / platforms, functions as an overlay on existing...

Recogito

A web-based environment for collaborative semantic annotation. It is open source software and provides support for working with either text or...

(Minimally maintained)

eMargin

An online collaborative annotation tool. You can highlight, colour-code, write notes and assign tags to individual words or passages of a text....

(No longer maintained)

Annotation Studio

A suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools currently under development at MIT.

CATMA

With CATMA you can easily annotate your text just as you would do in a book.

Fulcrum

Host open access books in a values-based open source environment? Help your authors publish their interactive scholarly work without breaking the...

Pundit Annotator

With Pundit Annotator you can highlight or comment on any text on the web. It is the perfect tool for your work, research, study. Pundit Annotator...

(Minimally maintained)

CommentPress

CommentPress is an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph-by-paragraph,...

Open Monograph Press

Open Monograph Press is an open source software platform for managing and publishing scholarly books. It can be used for managing the editorial...

Mirador

Open-source, web based, multi-window image viewing platform with the ability to zoom, display, compare and annotate images from around the world.

Digital Mappa

An open-source digital humanities program for open-access workspaces, projects and publications

(Minimally maintained)

Enhanced Networked Monographs

Enhanced Networked Monographs (ENM) is an experimental publishing project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A collaboration between NYU...

(Minimally maintained)

WebAnno

WebAnno is a general purpose web-based annotation tool for a wide range of linguistic annotations including various layers of morphological,...

(No longer maintained)

INCEpTION

A semantic annotation platform offering intelligent assistance and knowledge management. The annotation of specific semantic phenomena often...

Taguette

Taguette is a free and open-source tool for qualitative research. You can import your research materials, highlight and tag quotes, and export the results!

brat rapid annotation tool

brat is a web-based tool for text annotation; that is, for adding notes to existing text documents. brat is designed in particular for structured...

(No longer maintained)

TextAE

An embeddable editor for text annotation. TextAE can be embedded in a HTML document.

Dokieli

dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.

Annotorious

JavaScript image library to add drawing, commenting and labeling capabilities to any website.

RecogitoJS

A JavaScript library for text annotation

(Minimally maintained)

PDFAnno

Linguistic Annotation and Visualization Tool for PDF Documents

(No longer maintained)

neonion

neonion is a user-centered, web application for the collaborative annotation of texts developed at the Human-Centered Computing group at Freie...

(No longer maintained)

AnnotateIt

A project for web annotation. Superseded by Hypothesis.

(No longer maintained)

PaperHive

A coworking hub for academic researchers enabling collaborative annotation of documents.

Open Square

Open Square is NYU Press’s platform for publishing and reading open access books. A browser-based reading platform, Open Square enables us to...

docloop

docloop turns feedback into tasks, converting online annotations of a document into issues in the author's bug tracking system. It works with...

(Minimally maintained)

Motion Bank

An annotation tool for video and image material designed specifically for annotating dance videos as part of choreography. Combines two previous...

cover for Annotation

Annotation

2021, Remi H. Kalir and Antero Garcia

cover for Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

2011, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Planned Obsolescence springs from the author Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication...

cover for Glas

Glas

1986, Jacques Derrida

Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading...

cover for Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

2019, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Developed in an open way by a process of community review, still using the CommentPress plugin, but now on the Humanities Commons platform:...

Frankenbook

2018, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenbook is a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern...

The Ethnographic Case

2017, Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski

The Ethnographic Case is an experimental, online, Open Access book, that invites readers to interact with it in a process of post-publication...

cover for Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen: Dritte, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage

Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen: Dritte, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage

2018, Roland Schäfer

The volume Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen like many Language Science Press titles, is published in a form...

cover for Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading

Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading

2014, Christopher P. Long

Recently, I have been working on two performative publications. The first, my enhanced digital book to be published by Cambridge University...

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

2023, Gabriela Méndez Cota

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering...

tool

GitLab

Hosting for Git repositories which can be turned into static sites for monograph publications. Able to include live code snippets which can be...

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies

2021, Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox

Aesthetic Programming asks “how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the...

cover for Phone & Spear: A Yut̲a Anthropology

Phone & Spear: A Yut̲a Anthropology

2019, Miyarrka Media

Building on a ten-year collaboration by the community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, the project is an experiment in the anthropology of...

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Ciston & Marino fork)

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Ciston & Marino fork)

2021, Sarah Ciston and Mark C. Marino

A fork of Soon & Cox's Aesthetic Programming with an additional chapter 8.5 and additional features throughout.

cover for Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Traditional Chinese fork)

2022, Winnie Soon, Geoff Cox, Tzu Tung Lee, Ren Yu, and Shih-yu Hsu

A fork of Soon & Cox's Aesthetic Programming translating the whole text into Traditional Chinese

Computational publishing

Computational publishing broadly refers to publishing a book using techniques or processes from software development. This can include software...

Forking

Forking is a form of computational publishing that involves creating a derivative version of a previously published text or book to make...

Versioning

Versioning (also known as processual, iterative, or continuous publishing), as a concept and practice used within academic research and...

tool

HedgeDoc (formerly CodiMD)

Web based collaborative real-time editor and documentation management project.

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

2023, Gabriela Méndez Cota

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering...

Collaborative writing

Academic publishing and reward structures are set up to reproduce individualised, liberal humanist forms of authorship. Experiments with more...

Rewriting

Rewriting involves the practice of re-envisioning an already existing text without (necessarily) intervening into the original source text. It...

tool

Hypothesis

Browser-based tool for making annotations on web pages. Can be integrated with other tools / platforms, functions as an overlay on existing...

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

2023, Gabriela Méndez Cota

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering...

Annotating

Annotations, notes scribbled in the margins or digitally overlain, spin out from a source text, adding layers of meaning, interpretations,...

Reviewing

Evaluation of research by the scholarly community is essential to conducting and publishing research. In response to changing publication...

Rewriting

Rewriting involves the practice of re-envisioning an already existing text without (necessarily) intervening into the original source text. It...