Project MUSE Hosts Born-Digital Essay from Furnace and Fugue
By Project MUSE
A multimodal digital essay from the University of Virginia Press’ Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary is now available open access on Project MUSE. The MUSE version of the essay 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.
This dynamic content pilot on MUSE was completed in collaboration with UVA Press and with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, which developed the Furnace and Fugue multimodal scholarly monograph. Published as part of the UVA Press’ distinguished academic series “Studies in Early Modern German History” and under Brown University’s Mellon Foundation-supported Digital Publications Initiative, Furnace and Fugue re-renders Michael Maier’s seventeenth-century multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced and interactive digital scholarly work that allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now.
Project MUSE is hosting “Sound and Vision: The Alchemical Epistemology of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens,” by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History at Brown University and co-editor of Furnace and Fugue with Independent Scholar Donna Bilak. This is one of eight multimodal essays included in the complete born-digital, open access work, and the MUSE version of the essay offers a rich experience consistent with the original edition. It was the goal of MUSE’s technical development team to provide the same compelling interactive user experience of the content, while encouraging readers to continue on to explore the full work hosted at Brown.
“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 help ensure projects like Furnace and Fugue achieve ample visibility and are discovered, experienced, and cited by researchers around the globe.”
"As UVA Press and our new collaborators at the Brown University Library considered the question of dissemination, we naturally turned to MUSE, which has been a major distributor of our publications at UVAP for nearly as long as there has been e-content," said Jason Coleman, Marketing and Sales Director at University of Virginia Press. "Innovative and open-source, Furnace and Fugue is a different kind of publication, but like any scholarly work it needs to reach the best and broadest audience possible. MUSE provides an invaluable gateway for this resource."
Brown University 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 Digital Scholarship Editor Allison Levy and drawing upon the expertise of the 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. The development of Furnace and Fugue through Brown University’s Digital Publications Initiative was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University.
Project MUSE has been hosting digital versions of books from the University of Virginia Press since 2012, with nearly 500 of the Press’ titles currently available on the platform for library acquisition and access. The UVA Press has established their reputation as a publisher of digital scholarship through their renowned Rotunda platform, which hosts original scholarship along with newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social sciences. Project MUSE is pleased to support the pathbreaking open access digital monograph Furnace and Fugue in partnership with UVA Press and the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, and to enhance its visibility and discoverability alongside the thousands of peer-reviewed open access publications, from a broad spectrum of not-for-profit scholarly publishers, now available on MUSE.
