Project MUSE Hosts New Interactive, Open-Access, Born-Digital Chapter
By Project MUSE
Project MUSE is pleased to host a new interactive, open-access, born-digital chapter, “The Web of History” from A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir published by the MIT Press. The chapter of the publication hosted on MUSE mirrors the content from the born-digital product’s primary site, and is intended to provide an additional pathway to discovery, as well as spotlight the MUSE platform’s suitability for hosting robust and innovative digital humanities works.
A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures brings together the MIT Press’s global publishing experience and the Brown University Library’s digital publication expertise. The groundbreaking scholarship decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones. Aimed at a wide international audience, the publication consists of engaging stories and audiovisual materials that will enable readers at all levels to appreciate Islam as an aspect of global history for centuries. The book URL is islamic-pasts-futures.org.
“Project MUSE enthusiastically supports projects that apply digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities,” said Kelley Squazzo, Director of Publisher Relations at Project MUSE. “We are excited to host Shahzad Bashir’s chapter and to ensure the full publication is discovered, experienced, and cited by researchers around the globe.”
“Through multimedia enhancements and an interactive navigation system, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures allows for engagement with rich visual material and multimedia evidence not possible in a printed volume,” explains Amy Brand, Director and Publisher, the MIT Press. “We are thrilled to partner with Project MUSE to increase the access, impact, and audience of this groundbreaking work.”
“Dynamic scholarly forms, such as Shahzad Bashir’s multimodal digital monograph, are transforming intellectual creativity and reader engagement,” said Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications. “We are delighted to collaborate once again with Project MUSE to bring cutting-edge, open-access content to the broadest audience possible.”
This dynamic content launch is the second initiative MUSE has embarked on with Brown University Digital Publications. MUSE also hosts a chapter from Furnace and Fugue, a multimodal scholarly monograph published as part of the University of Virginia Press’s distinguished academic series “Studies in Early Modern German History.” Chapters from both publications can be found via the MUSE Digital Humanities search facet.
Brown University Digital Publications is in the vanguard of digital monograph publishing, facilitating the creation and validation of new scholarly forms that demonstrate a range of ways in which the digital environment is necessary for articulating and advancing scholarly argument beyond the capabilities of print. With oversight from Allison Levy and drawing on the expertise of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, faculty at Brown are enabled to develop their scholarship in ways that take advantage of emerging digital methods and formats. These pathbreaking scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.
