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An important project that is in the planning stage, and that has implications over time for the partnership of NINES and the Rice University Press, is also worth noting.

NINES is now beginning a collaboration with scholars working in eighteenth-century studies to promote the emergence of 18thConnect, a collective devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the period 1660-1800. As it develops, 18thConnect will both extend the framework of NINES and provide essential digital resources for scholars working in the long eighteenth century.

The rationale for this collaboration is several-fold and should be easily intuited: the NINES community is strong, established, and can provide the most rigorous peer review of materials relating to its academic fields of interest; the Rice Press can take advantage of peer review groups already extant through NINES. The RUP/NINES imprint would encourage new forms of scholarship while providing a safe, experimental environment that a free-standing press could not. An archive of the iterative evolution of NINES would be produced over time. The Connexions platform and its automated features allow for a lean, flexible publishing model so that special publications like conference proceedings and journal editions can be produced quickly and efficiently, with enormous time savings. Shorter versions of scholarly works are encouraged because the shorter books/objects are much less costly to produce and print; most scholarly books are read in sections, not the whole; and many if not most monographs should be more tightly summarized. The high integrity and resolution achieved by printing older titles, such as the Literature by Design series, makes rare, intellectually foundational materials available at low cost, allowing for much easier inclusion on classroom reading lists and thereby engaging and supporting the next generation of readers.

Excursus: a conceptual divide?

In ruminating about the great difficulty and effort of positioning a digital press—both rhetorically and operationally—in higher education, and the default context of the history of printed books that comes about almost instinctively, it may be worthwhile to briefly explore how we understand the world in an analog environment, and how we understand and interpret the world in a digital, virtual environment. This excursus was precipitated by another challenge to the ongoing dialogue about the Rice Press that arises from the fact that it is not, fundamentally, a digital surrogate for a print-based academic press, and that most of the terms inherited to describe the products and procedures of a traditional press have no meaning in a digital environment. There is, in fact, no press at all; nothing is technically in print or out of print; there is no warehouse; no printing runs; no shipping and receiving operations; nothing gets stored, pulped, or remaindered.

Notice of Stephen Toulmin’s passing last year caused me to return to Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts . Toulmin’s complex goal was succinctly stated: “The general aim is to piece together a new ‘epistemic self-portrait’: that is, a fresh account of the capacities, processes, and activities, in virtue of which Man acquires an understanding of Nature, and Nature in turn becomes intelligible to Man.” Written in 1972, it is an important philosophical treatise for us today for at least two reasons. In writing his book, Toulmin broke with the long tradition of Cartesian reasoning that strove to explicate human understanding in terms that described a universally shared set of concepts that were unwavering, immutable, and abstracted from the world around us.