Interdisciplinary literature comes together in online reading platform

To help research be recognized and read outside of peer-reviewed journals, the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) created ARTECA, an online reading platform that integrates the arts and humanities with science and technology.

Developed by ArtSciLab, the UT Dallas transdisciplinary research lab, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) and MIT Press, the platform is a curated online area for academic literature from several disciplines. It now includes over 200 books and gives readers access to three different journals from MIT Press.

“The ArtSciLab seeks to be a pioneer in the field of experimental publishing,” Dr. Roger Malina, Arts and Technology distinguished chair and director of the lab, said. “We hope to probe, test and experiment with new ways for professionals to document their work and show it to others. ARTECA provides a way for us to ‘beta test’ the future for the art-science-technology community.”

This new platform allows scholarly work to be read and honored even if it is not included in traditional academic journals.

“There are a lot of issues in how we disseminate research in academia,” alumnus Chaz Lilly, research assistant for the platform and doctoral candidate at the UT Dallas School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication, said. “We live in a digital world where online research and publishing is an immediate resource, but a lot of it doesn’t reach its audience without an access point.”