Project overview
MORPHSS is a £829,000 project co-funded by Research England Development (RED) Fund, Wellcome Fund, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Co-Investigator Dr Siddharth Soni (Southampton) is leading a two-year research stream called ‘Reimagining Longform Humanities’ which looks at how longform scholarship can be ‘opened’ using historical practices and discipline-informed principles of openness rather than the more publisher-led ‘open access’ framework. Among the questions being explored include: what does it mean, at the level of form, to work on a longform writing project in the humanities disciplines? How can a lengthy engagement with a defined subject be communicated better, such as to account for its digressions, iterative form, multiple lines of influences and inherent collaborative processes? What experimental alternatives exist to the academic monograph or the ‘scholarly book’ form? What have they looked like, historically? What are its implications for how we define or think about universities, learned societies, disciplines, or schools of thought? The project has multiple outputs, including a report on open humanities practices in the present, a series of facilitated workshops with experimental writers and practitioners called Unbind, and a public interest toolkit to run a federated departmental blogging platform being developed in collaboration with the Research Software Group at Southampton. This is in addition to streams on open journals and collaborative peer review practices (Dr Samuel Moore, Cambridge University Libraries), open humanities data (Prof Stephen Pinfield, Sheffield University), and open humanities licensing (Dr Janneke Adema and Dr Rebekka Kiesewetter, Center for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University).
