Virginia Tech Publishing, Virginia Tech’s scholarly publishing hub housed in the University Libraries, recently launched “Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History,” the first peer-reviewed book to be released solely under the Virginia Tech Publishing imprint.
Edited by E. Thomas Ewing, a professor of history, and Katherine Randall, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and writing, the book is the culmination of the 2018 Viral Networks workshop.
The workshop was hosted by the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine in the National Institutes of Health through a formal partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was also organised by Virginia Tech and funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This partnership between two government agencies and a university makes this volume a distinctive academic achievement.
Virginia Tech Publishing and the University Libraries were partners from the beginning of this project, as they were part of the initial proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Library of Medicine. Peter Potter, publishing director of the University Libraries, and Nathaniel Porter, a data scientist at the libraries, attended the workshop, and was thus part of the first round of reviews of papers that became the chapters.
Robert Browder, a digital publishing specialist, and colleagues in the University Libraries worked with the co-editors on the structure of the book, editing of chapters, data visualizations, cover design, and dissemination.
Inspired by models of networked teaching methods, the Viral Networks workshop brought together scholars whose research focuses on medical history topics, from the Black Death in 14th-century Provence to psychiatric hospitals in 20th-century Alabama. During this workshop, these scholars discussed how they use networks as a tool for historical analysis. They also read, edited, and evaluated each other’s writings and chapter contributions to “Viral Networks.”
This volume brings together many priorities in both the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and Virginia Tech, such as supporting innovative research, trans-disciplinary integration across disciplines, open-access publication, graduate student and faculty scholarship, and experiments with new forms of scholarly dissemination to broad audiences.
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