Reimagining the Humanities Book: Bringing Living With Machines to Life Through Experimental Publishing Workflows and Open Research Practices

Although calls to experiment with the form and publication of the scholarly book are not new (see Wittenberg 2009 on Project Gutenberg; Crossick 2015; and Rayner and Lyons 2017), the case for innovation is perhaps being made more strongly now than ever. Rapid technological advancement and developments in open access models and infrastructure are creating new opportunities to innovate. At the same time, in the current context of increasing pressures on library budgets, re-evaluation of the publication metrics used in research assessment and growing recognition of the structural inequalities underpinning academic publishing, efforts to ‘rethink, reimagine and critique the forms, structures and systems that underlie our system of scholarly communications’ are becoming more urgent (Adema et al. 2022). In the humanities, in which the academic monograph continues to have a central role, the arguments to experiment with the forms, modes of production and ‘relationalities’ involved in book publication (Adema 2021, 20) are various, including: a need to move beyond a sciences-led approach to open research models, infrastructure, funding and policies, which risks excluding the humanities from the benefits of open (Arthur and Hearn 2021); to develop a variety of publication approaches that better suit the diverse forms that humanities research takes (Adema et al. 2022); to create more inclusive and collaborative knowledge infrastructures (Okune et al. 2019; Adema 2024); to disrupt corporate publishing monopolies over measures of ‘prestige’ and control of knowledge production (Kiesewetter 2024; Worthington 2015); and to prioritise a scholarship of ‘care’ and ‘decolonial integrity […] allowing for and legitimizing diverse voices, methods and ways of thinking’ (Gilby et al. 2022). By ‘experimental book’ we are referring here to practices that involve use of unconventional formats, reimagined publishing workflows and collaborations, integration of multimedia content, open and community peer review, multilingual publishing and embedded reader engagement and layering tools, among other approaches (see COPIM's Experimental Publishing Compendium for further examples, COPIM 2022–2024).

Nevertheless, beyond pockets of excellent innovative work that is being carried out in experimental publishing, and the development of open-source platforms such as Scalar and Manifold to enable it, little change is happening at scale. Several reasons can be suggested for this. First, the traditional monograph format that advances a single, specialised argument remains a valuable form for the publication of much humanities research, offering a substantive space for extended exploration and synthesis of complex ideas, and detailed engagement with supporting texts. Second, the largest-scale efforts towards innovation (led primarily by the biggest scholarly publishers) are being directed towards the development of open access models and economic flows that, in reality, sustain approaches to and forms of book publishing which are as close to the status quo as possible. And third, knowledge gaps around the workflows and practicalities required can be significant barriers for presses looking to trial more experimental modes of book publishing—it can be difficult to know where and how to start, and how to resource it (financially and with human labour). This means that the humanities researchers who increasingly want or need to innovate and engage with broader open research practices in their publications find few publishing options available to them that are aligned with the nature and processes of their research and that maximise the sharing of that research at every stage.

At the University of London Press (UoL Press), our primary aim is to ‘open up humanities research’. Open access—the publication of works that are both free to read and made available under an open licence for reuse—is a central element of this, and roughly 80% of our books per year are published open access. We are also working on new projects that use the affordances of open publishing and technology to experiment with open research methods more broadly, such as integrating and disseminating open data, trialling new collaborative workflows and publishing approaches, networking publications to other sources, and exploring opportunities for public engagement. This case study will provide an overview of our ongoing experimental book project, Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry (edited by Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin and Jon Lawrence, and written by the Living with Machines Team), arising out of the digital humanities research project of the same name. With this experiment we set out to develop new publishing approaches and forms that recast the humanities book as a collaborative ‘process’ rather than a ‘product’ (Gilby et al. 2022), reflecting the open research principles underpinning the research project itself. A key aim is to open up our workflows for this project through transparent documentation. This case study outlines the adaptations we have made to our standard publishing processes, our use of the Manifold platform to facilitate this, and our reflections on the project's first two phases carried out to date.

The Living with Machines research project (2018–2023) was a large-scale, highly interdisciplinary humanities initiative carried out at the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, in partnership with the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia and Exeter, Queen Mary University of London and King's College London, and funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund. Bringing together a team of historians, data scientists, digital humanists, library professionals, computational linguists, research software engineers, urban geographers and curators, the project explored the extraordinary impact of technology on human lives in Britain's industrial revolution. The team developed data-driven and open-source methods to analyse massive digitised historical collections of, for example, newspapers, maps and census returns, revealing new insights into the human, social and cultural consequences of the historical moment. Vital to the project's conception was an approach to the creation and dissemination of its outputs that was in line with the collaborative, experimental, open and transparent way in which the research itself was conducted, and that the array of new datasets, tools, video, code and other digital resources developed as part of the project could be integrated for reuse by other researchers. The resulting publishing partnership between UoL Press and the project team for the open access Living with Machines book was therefore born out of this shared ethos and central areas of focus.

It is important to note that the book is collectively authored by members of the Living with Machines team, comprising 19 authors in total with Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin and Jon Lawrence in editorial roles—a model of ‘distributed authorship’ (Adema et al. 2022) that, again, upholds the collaborative principles of this project. An authorship statement in the book's front matter credits the range of contributions involved.

In terms of technical requirements, in 2023 we launched our own instance of the Manifold platform—an open source scholarly publishing platform created by the University of Minnesota Press with CUNY and Cast Iron Coding—after being awarded a Manifold Digital Services Support Grant. Manifold supports publication of enhanced, networked and media-rich editions of texts, which readers can annotate, highlight and otherwise engage with using interactive tools, providing us with the functionality we needed to facilitate the planned experiments for Living with Machines.

At the time of writing, we are at a midway stage of this project, working towards final publication of the version of record in 2026, and have completed a planned interim evaluation. It was important to build waypoints into the project to provide opportunities to evaluate progress and reflect on key early learnings for incorporation into the later project stages. The remainder of this case study presents the results of our evaluation, with the aim of sharing our processes, opportunities and challenges, and lessons learned for use by other publishers and their collaborators working with innovative book formats and testing new publishing workflows.

As a next step we aim to build on what we've learned for the later stages of this book project and to apply these lessons to new experimental projects that we have underway, such as the collaborative review process we are carrying out for Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship (Sichani and Donnay 2025). We also hope our reflections are useful to the wider scholarly publishing community and will continue to document and share project updates, for example via our website and through our work with the Open Institutional Publishing Association. Ultimately, in experimenting with the publishing workflows and form of Living with Machines we have been able to explore the potential of reimagining the humanities monograph as a ‘process’ rather than a ‘product’. By sharing our approach we hope to join others innovating in this space to offer models for furthering open research practices, and to provide similar options for researchers looking to reflect the collaborative, exploratory, multimedia and intertextual nature of humanities research in its published form.

Emma Gallon: conceptualisation, project adminstration, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review and editing. Jamie Bowman: conceptualisation, project administration, writing – review and editing.

The authors confirm that this article adheres to ethical standards in publication.

The authors are both current employees of the University of London Press. The authors otherwise declare no conflicts of interest.