Origin Story: Digital Publishing F5 | Refreshed First, two overtures: “The flight of our human hours, not really more rapid at any one moment than another, yet oftentimes to our feelings seems more rapid; and this flight startles us like guilty things with a more affecting sense of its rapidity when a distant church-clock strikes in the night-time, or when, upon some solemn summer evening, the sun’s disc, after settling for a minute with farewell horizontal rays, suddenly drops out of sight. The record of our loss in such a case seems to us the first intimation of its possibility. .…
Author: Cristen Fitzpatrick
David Blakesley
Cristen Fitzpatrick, M.A., is a PhD candidate in English at St. John's University, and her research interests are focused on Beat literature, digital humanities, and first-year composition. She is also an adjunct English instructor at St. Thomas Aquinas and Dominican colleges, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate literature and composition courses.
As the DIY movement has flourished in the early 21st century, it has extended its reach far into academia. With the advent of desktop publishing, scholars have been utilizing these technologies to create content that in previous eras would have been unthinkable. Publishing, the life support system of the academy, has also in recent years been subsumed into the “Maker Revolution.” Clemson University Professor of English David Blakesley was among some of the early adopters of using technology to create an academic press. He and PhD student Brian Gaines recently “sat down” virtually and had a discussion about the rise…