Virginia Tech Publishing launches first peer-reviewed book under its own imprint

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 organized 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 thus were part of the first round of reviews of papers that became the chapters.