UChicago OPS—Publications

Born-digital Volumes

In the OPS, we envision a new type of publication venue. All products will be digital and data-driven. Publications may be a combination of narrative text and data, integrated in ways that make the reading experience more dynamic, investigative, and rich. Some volumes may look like a traditional publication, but enhanced with dynamic and interactive features; and with much more data available for consumption. Some volumes may contain considerable narrative analysis; but supplemented by visual, audio, spatial, and various other types of data.

Digital Companions

An OPS digital publication may also take the form of a digital companion that supplements a print volume. While academia is in the liminal space between print and digital, we acknowledge that a digital companion may serve as a comfortable and safe first step in the direction of a fully digital future. A digital companion may contain a set of data that could never be presented in print—catalogs of cultural hertiage objects, a full set of digital images, a multitude of maps. A digital companion may serve also as a multimedia supplement to a print publication where audio, video, or other interactive resources are available as supplements to a book. Researchers using the OCHRE database platform have already produced a number of digital companions meant to accompany printed archaeological reports.

Animated Wor(l)ds

Elizabeth Tavella and Eva Spiegelhofer, editors

Animated Wor(l)ds is a multimedia born-digital project that brings together a collective of scholars, poets, artists and activists from around the world. The project builds upon and contributes to ongoing interdisciplinary conversations in the fields of the environmental humanities and of critical animal and plant studies. Animated Wor(l)ds promotes multispecies kinship through experimental, speculative, and creative practices and aims to pave ways towards coexisting more justly with other animals and lifeforms. At the heart of Animated Wor(l)ds lies a relational ethics that embraces the semiotic dimensions of relationality and language in its relational capacity.

Volume editors and contributors collectively embrace the vision of a multispecies society that celebrates the voices of our more-than-human kin, while striving to create a regenerative paradigm that counters human supremacy and other interlinked systems of oppression at the root of the current ecological crisis. By animating the words of multispecies worlds, we turn the exclusionary logic of anthropocentrism on its head and encourage antispeciesist practices that acknowledge the personhood and autonomy of other living beings, honoring their role as worldbuilders and agents of change. This entails giving up language practices that reduce living beings to objects and commodities, and instead adopting languages that transform harmful epistemic and linguistic oppositions into interspecies dialogues.

Contributors to this volume pursue these core objectives by addressing themes ranging from interspecies communication and (auto-)ethnography to care ethics, ecocriticism, and non-western epistemologies. The media-rich contributions feature poetry, photos, video and/or audio components, all of which animate multispecies flourishing and collaboration with more-than-human wor(l)ds.

Animated Wor(l)ds is generously supported by the Culture and Animals Foundation.