You can view and share the under 5-minute video version of this guide:
OpenPressTiU - short PubPub tutorial
What is PubPub?
PubPub is a platform for building communities around publishing (be it journals, monographs, collective books, or museums). One of the main advantages of PubPub is the ability to annotate each other’s publications, contributing to a more dynamic and open-ended reading experience. Frankenbook is one of those communities in PubPub, defined as “a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience” of Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. PubPub offers the possibility for each student to annotate passages with their interpretation and follow assignments set by the instructors. The creators of Frankenbook encourage their PubPub community for its use in the classroom, and have designed specific tasks to facilitate an interactive, collective reading experience. You can see this ‘collective reading’ in action by looking at the Preface of Frankenstein (hover and click through the numbers on the right to see the annotations).
How do I navigate PubPub?
The book Second Thoughts. First Introductions to Philosophy is fully open access. Anybody can access it. You’ll find the different sections and chapters of the book, as well as the supplementary materials.
If you scroll, you’ll find a section called ‘Thinking About Book Sections’, where you’ll find the 4 main partitions of Second Thoughts:
If you click on any of these sections –let’s say ‘Thinking about Humans’– it’ll take you to the chapters contained in that section. It’ll look something like this:
Connections and supplementary materials
You’ll see that for each chapter it mentions the author and also a ‘Connection’. This is the accompanying supplementary mini-chapter that gives students some insights on a particular piece discussed within the chapter, like ‘Descartes’ Second Meditation’ is the supplementary material for the chapter by Monica Meijsing on Philosophy of Mind.
How can students annotate the chapters?
Anybody can simply select a passage that they may be interested in and add a commentary or a question.
Selecting the passage.
And annotating. Easy.
Can course instructors moderate the annotations?
Yes! Teachers with a ‘manager’ or ‘administrator’ account have moderation privileges. Simply to go the Open Press TiU Dashboard and head to Activity. There, you’ll see the latest discussions and links to the different chapters.
The latest will be under the Activity tab.
Respond or archive discussions. Simple.
For the book’s editors: how do we add more chapters? And more sections?
Also on the Open Press TiU Dashboard, you’ll see two blue-boxed buttons on the top: Create Collection and Create Pub.
Pubs
Pubs are the main unit of PubPub (i.e., each chapter is a Pub). Once you’ve created one, you can begin writing or importing an existing document. Don’t forget to hit Publish to create a publicrelease of your chapter. Once a Pub is released, you can modify it and put out several releases. Students and other teachers will be able to see the different publicreleases. The constant evolution of knowledge, at the student’s fingertips.
Collections
Collections are the different ways in which you can organise and categorise your different Pubs. The Second Thoughts book is organised, unsurprisingly, as a book. You can also add other kinds of collections, like Tags, which can serve, for example, as collections of chapters grouped by subject matter, to organise coursework for the students.
Create a Pub, type a title, import a document, and publish a public release.
There are four categories of Collections.
Who created this environment? Do you have any questions?
This PubPub community, as well as the bibliographic and copy-edition of Second Thoughts was set up by JOTE Publishers for the Open Press TiU. JOTE Publishers is a non-profit next-generation publishing initiative that brings raw manuscripts into shareable, indexable, publishable publications. If you have any questions, either technical or about the edition of the book itself, or spot any errata, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].
