“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
Challenges of Digital Publishing
Xchanges: What’s been the most challenging issue(s) over time with TheJUMP+? Do they tend toward the technical, the archival, the human resources, or other area?
JH: I’ll start with the archival issue because I think it’s easier and more important to how the field sees things. We are, by design, married to the archive drive. We really believe that things should be archived, they should remain forever into perpetuity, and that people should be able to access them forever. But if that’s the goal, then that causes all kinds of problems because the vast majority of things students can produce are in black box corporate-owned software. If a student makes a really cool Wix project, I can’t publish it, because I can’t host it. Wix owns it. So what we did was build masks on top of projects to add that kind of academic validity and a community around the projects.
The downside is that means we can’t guarantee that all the projects will be archived forever. For example, I’m at a conference in Seattle a couple years back and it’s four in the morning, and I get a phone call from somebody in Michigan who is looking for a project that he uses in his classes every year, and it’s no longer on TheJUMP+. The faculty member who had run the site stopped working in academia and went into industry, and her university website was shut down. There was no way for us to get to the work. It was gone. I understand that’s frustrating, and it does violate this archive drive. But if we limit ourselves to only those things that we can house, we dramatically limit the students, the kinds of projects we can see and share from students.
Lastly and probably the biggest issue for me is building the system. TheJUMP has been built three times, or four if you count the prototype. I built a prototype in IWEB and then built the first operating version in Drupal. We rebuilt it after a couple years in the Drupal 6 platform. We were scheduled to try out Cheryl Ball’s new Vega platform, but it wasn’t quite ready for beta testing when we were, so I rebuilt it again from scratch in the WordPress platform.
I think we’ll forever be undergoing this kind of transformation as the publishing tools improve and the platforms improve and the systems improve. That is a definite labor-intensive kind of practice, particularly if there’s a labor of one or one and a half. Those are my headaches, but they’re good headaches because that means we’re doing things well enough that people want to use what we have. I never thought in a million years that I would learn nearly this much about the infrastructural back-end of digital publishing.