Maxwell | A Prototyping Renaissance: Form, Content, and Scale in Open Publication in the Humanities | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

This essay argues that open research is, or should be, constitutionally central to the humanities, but going beyond content-only notions of “open access.” We make a case, based on the 16th-century Aldine press, that “prototyping in the humanities” is not just a digital humanities notion; rather, it was core to the roots of humanities scholarship, wrapped up in the origin of print culture. We explore the idea that a prototype “makes an argument” (Galey and Ruecker 2010), a conjecture about how a set of ideas might make a difference in the world and how the making and testing of prototypes provides a concrete means of evaluating them in social context, an idea we connect to Chris Kelty’s (2008) notion of “recursive publics.” We ask which publics are engaged by humanities scholarship and how answers to this question are conditioned by taken-for-granted infrastructure—and scale—that much of scholarly communication relies upon.