Martin Paul Eve bio photo

Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects at this stage:

  1. Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds., Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) is currently in the final stages of production. We are expecting typeset proofs for final checking this week! This book offers reflections on the past, present and future of scholarly communication in the context of open access from leading and emerging scholars in the humanities and social sciences - including historians, legal scholars, social scientists, anthropologists and media and communications researchers. By rethinking and recontextualising contemporary debates about open access and digital scholarship, this book will encourage readers to critically and constructively engage with current debates about the role of research in society and its transition into the digital age. The book will be open access.

  2. Eve, Martin Paul, Cameron Neylon, Daniel O’Donnell, Samuel Moore, Robert Gadie, Victoria Odeniyi, and Shahina Parvin, Peer Review and Institutional Change in Academia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) is under submission. In this book, we describe for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which we had unique access. Specifically, this book presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which we had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work hopes to yield a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. The book will be open access.

  3. Eve, Martin Paul, The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press) is almost written now. This short book delivers an introduction and overview of developing intersections between digital methods and literary studies. The volume will serve as the best starting place for those who wish to learn more about the possibilities, but also the limitations, of the oft-touted digital humanities in the literary space. The volume will engage with the proponents of digital humanities and its detractors alike, aiming to offer a fair and balanced perspective on this controversial topic. The book combines a survey and background approach with my own original literary research and is, therefore, well-placed to straddle the divide between seasoned digital experts and interested newcomers. I am negotiating on open-access status for this book.

  4. Eve, Martin Paul, Trading Scenes: Reading the Digital Archive of the Underground Warez Scene (New York: punctum books) is in the writing process. I’ve probably written about 1/3 of it so far and hope to ramp up the schedule this year. This book offers the first academic study of the gigabytes of digital material surfaced by “The Scene” in the form of ASCII .nfo files and DemoScene executables from the Defacto2 archive, charting the structure, organization, and history of the criminal underground networks that race to release material before their competitors with bleeding-edge technology and connections. Using a combination of traditional and digital reading methodologies, this book presents both the historical structures but also aesthetic strictures of the underground warez scene at the turn of the twenty-first century. As such, this book is also one of the first studies to construct a distant-ethnography from a digital archive, reading from the digital-material traces the contexts and after-images of an otherwise inaccessible digital-cultural sphere. The book will be open access.

  5. Finally, I have just signed a contract with Stanford University Press for a work provisionally titled New Leaves: Broken Material Metaphor & Digital-Textual History (but I am also considering the titles: Paper Thin: The Misleading Metaphors of Digital-Textual History [with thanks to Rose Harris-Birtill for the suggestion!] and Moveable Hype: Overstated Digital-Textual History). New Leaves exposes the weakness of our digital-textual, material metaphors. This book tackles and rewrites the most common assumption in UI design: that user interface designs for digital reading and writing are mentally constrained by and designed to mimic physical correlates. Conducting a new media archaeology of several digital forms – from pagination, whitespace, virtual typography, keyboards, directionality, and dimensionality, to technical protection measures – this book revises our understanding of material path dependencies, which are often erroneous or misplaced. This book is in the Stanford Text Technologies series, edited by Elaine Treharne and Ruth Ahnert under the SUP editorship of Erica Wetter. I am negotiating on open-access status for this book.

As a post-script, I also have a germinative background project writing a book about commonalities in our changing relationships to music over our lives in Western cultures.