Rethinking Scholarship Beyond the Protomonograph
The monograph has long served as the gold standard of academic achievement, particularly in the humanities. Yet a growing number of scholars and professional associations are questioning whether this form alone can capture the complexity, collaboration, and public engagement that define contemporary research. Moving "beyond the protomonograph" is less a rejection of the book and more a recognition that scholarship now lives across media, platforms, and publics.
At the center of this shift is a simple but powerful question: what counts as knowledge, and how should we value the diverse ways it is created and shared? As interdisciplinary conversations expand and digital technologies reshape research practices, the boundaries of legitimate scholarship are opening in unprecedented ways.
The Rise of Interdisciplinary and Intermedial Scholarship
Interdisciplinary work has exposed the limitations of a single, linear format for representing research. Projects that blend literary analysis with data visualization, or history with interactive mapping, resist being fully contained within a conventional protomonograph. Instead, they often require multimodal forms that integrate text, image, sound, and code.
Events and initiatives focused on expanding forms of scholarship highlight how researchers now routinely move between disciplines and media. A project examining climate narratives might include a written critical study, an online archive of testimonies, a podcast series, and a set of open data tools. None of these alone encapsulates the project; together, they form a scholarly ecosystem.
Why the Protomonograph Is No Longer Enough
The protomonograph emerged in an era when print was the primary medium, disciplinary boundaries were tightly policed, and evaluation systems were built around relatively stable publishing models. Contemporary scholarship, however, is characterized by fluid collaboration, iterative development, and public-facing engagement. The assumptions underpinning the traditional model no longer map onto the realities of research practice.
Several pressures are driving this transformation:
- Digital infrastructures: Online platforms enable the creation of complex, dynamic projects that cannot be flattened into linear text.
- Collaborative research cultures: Teams spanning institutions, fields, and sectors demand credit systems that recognize multiple roles and formats.
- Public engagement imperatives: Funders, institutions, and communities increasingly seek accessible, interactive forms of knowledge sharing.
- Open access movements: Calls for more equitable access to research encourage experimentation with formats beyond paywalled print books.
Expanding Forms of Scholarship: Key Modalities
As scholarship moves beyond the protomonograph, certain genres and modalities are emerging as especially influential. Many of these do not replace the book but complement or extend it, forming constellations of research outputs.
Multimodal Digital Projects
Multimodal digital projects bring together text, visuals, sound, databases, and user interaction. They might include:
- Interactive websites that invite readers to navigate archival materials, maps, timelines, and essays.
- Data-rich platforms that allow users to explore patterns, annotations, and context at multiple scales.
- Experimental narrative forms that shift perspective depending on user choices or research questions.
These projects do more than illustrate research; they often constitute the research itself, enabling questions that cannot be asked—or answered—through linear prose alone.
Podcasts, Video Essays, and Audio Scholarship
Audio and audiovisual forms have grown from supplementary outreach tools into rigorous modes of scholarly inquiry. A carefully produced podcast series can stage complex arguments through interviews, soundscapes, and narrative arcs. Video essays can analyze film, performance, or visual culture using the very media under study, making the interpretive process visible and audible.
These formats reward attention to storytelling, structure, and sound design, while still operating within frameworks of citation, evidence, and peer critique.
Data-Driven and Computational Work
Computational methods and data-driven research often generate artifacts that do not resemble traditional publications: code repositories, datasets, dashboards, and algorithmic tools. When these are designed and documented with care, they too represent scholarly contributions.
Recognizing them as such requires evaluation criteria that look beyond the polished narrative of a book to assess methodological rigor, transparency, reproducibility, and ethical design.
Collaborative and Community-Engaged Scholarship
Many expanding forms of scholarship are collaborative by design. Community archives, co-authored digital exhibits, and participatory research platforms invite non-academic partners into the knowledge-making process. The resulting outputs may be shaped as toolkits, public reports, digital collections, or creative works.
These forms challenge the lone-author logic implicit in the protomonograph and foreground relational, process-oriented understandings of scholarship.
Challenges in Evaluation and Recognition
While enthusiasm for new forms of scholarship is high, structures for evaluating and rewarding them often lag behind. Tenure and promotion systems, grant criteria, and institutional repositories remain heavily aligned with monographs and journal articles.
Key challenges include:
- Establishing clear standards: Committees need criteria to assess design quality, technical robustness, collaboration, and impact without defaulting to traditional proxies like page count or publisher prestige.
- Documenting contributions: Collaborative, multimodal projects require careful crediting of roles—from coding and design to curation and editing.
- Ensuring preservation: Digital projects must be planned with sustainability and long-term accessibility in mind to be genuinely citable scholarly contributions.
- Aligning with disciplinary expectations: Fields vary widely in their openness to experimental formats, creating uneven risks for early-career scholars.
Strategies for Scholars Exploring New Forms
For researchers interested in going beyond the protomonograph, strategic planning can make experimentation both intellectually fruitful and professionally legible.
Articulate the Scholarly Argument
Regardless of form, the core scholarly contribution should be explicit. What question drives the work? What intervention does it make in existing conversations? How do the chosen media strengthen the argument? A succinct research statement can guide collaborators, evaluators, and audiences through unfamiliar formats.
Design for Accessibility and Usability
Expanded forms of scholarship should be navigable and accessible. Clear structure, intuitive interfaces, transcripts, and alternative text are not ancillary; they are integral to ensuring that the scholarly work can be engaged by diverse users across contexts and abilities.
Plan for Documentation and Credit
From the outset, teams should decide how contributions will be documented—through project charters, contributor statements, or version histories. This not only supports fair recognition but also provides committees with concrete evidence of work performed.
Align Innovation with Institutional Frameworks
Innovation is most sustainable when it is legible to existing evaluative structures. Scholars can map their projects to established categories—such as "peer-reviewed digital publication," "curated collection," or "research tool"—and supply external reviews or impact narratives that parallel traditional letters of evaluation.
The Cultural Shift: From Product to Process
Moving beyond the protomonograph is ultimately a cultural shift. It invites the academy to see scholarship not only as a finished product but also as an ongoing process—iterative, collaborative, and interconnected. Digital and interdisciplinary projects often exist in evolving versions, shaped by user feedback, new data, and changing contexts.
Recognizing this processual nature encourages more open practices: sharing work in progress, inviting public participation, and embracing revision as a core scholarly virtue rather than a sign of incompleteness.
Implications for Teaching and Mentoring
As forms of scholarship expand, so too must our pedagogies. Graduate and undergraduate programs can prepare students by integrating multimodal assignments, collaborative projects, and critical engagement with digital tools into their curricula. Mentoring should address both the creative possibilities and the professional risks of nontraditional formats.
Students who learn to move fluently between essays, podcasts, data visualizations, and interactive exhibits develop a versatile scholarly toolkit. They become adept at matching form to research question, audience, and ethical considerations.
Looking Ahead: A Plural Future for Scholarly Communication
The future of scholarly communication is unlikely to be defined by a single new dominant form. Instead, it will be plural, with books, articles, digital projects, datasets, podcasts, and other emergent genres coexisting and intersecting. The challenge is not to crown a successor to the monograph but to build infrastructures, policies, and evaluative cultures that recognize the full spectrum of serious scholarly work.
Beyond the protomonograph lies a landscape in which form follows inquiry, and where intellectual rigor is measured not by adherence to a single genre but by clarity of question, depth of engagement, and openness to diverse publics.