Book publishing master’s programs are positioned within various departments. The location of PSU’s book publishing program within the English department on the one hand seems like a natural extension of the study of literature, but on the other like a strange marriage of humanities and social sciences. Indeed, scholars who research within the academic discipline of book publishing often draw from concepts and methodologies that are associated with sociology (such as Bourdieu 1993, Thompson 2012). It’s possible that one factor in the prevalence of sociological methods in book publishing is due to an effort to distinguish book publishing from literary analysis of the text itself. However, book publishing is very much a humanist endeavor because while both humanities and social sciences have human subjects, relationships, and interactions as crucial to the research and fields, the primary difference between humanities and social sciences is method — qualitative vs quantitative, philosophical vs scientific. For this reason, book publishing might be called applied humanities, which demonstrates the pairing of conceptual and theoretical knowledge with practical application that typifies book publishing degree programs. Book publishing has a vocational tie in the same way that business schools, engineering departments, and other social and natural science fields prepare their students for work in the world. However, much like these other fields, book publishing is not only vocational.

Only four other teaching presses exist, and all four of them are fairly recent initiatives, without the infrastructure, institutional history, and integration that are central to Ooligan Press. Bowen Street Press is part of the publishing master’s program at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia (established in 1988), which houses the oldest publishing program in Australia [Weber and Mannion 2017]. Bowen Street Press is student-run, founded in 2016, and publishes primarily anthologies, zines, and magazines. Lamplight Press is the only student-run press as part of a publishing program in the UK, at Loughborough University, but Lamplight Press is for undergraduate students, not graduate students. Lamplight previously published 4 books a year, was self-distributed, and was founded in 2013, but it hasn’t been since 2015 that anything has been published at the press, presumably in part because the faculty member who founded and championed the press moved to a position at another university. The third example of book publishing teaching presses is New Rivers Press, based at Minnesota State University Moorhead. This press is not integrated with a book publishing program; however, it is a student-run publishing company, with distribution through Small Press Distribution, a trade book distributor that does not have the national reach that large distributors like Ingram do. The fourth example is Lookout Books, launched in 2011, a literary book publishing press located within the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington; students work in the press as part of coursework for a BFA certificate in Publishing. Lookout Books is distributed by Consortium (owned by Ingram). Of these four teaching presses, Lookout Books and Bowen Street Press are the ones that come closest to the kind of teaching press experience and output that Ooligan Press provides, but even that is a far cry from the national distribution, varied output, integrated systems, and longevity that characterize Ooligan.

Book publishing programs assess student knowledge and prepare students for work in the publishing industry through individual book projects. This often entails a student taking a book through the various stages of the publication process (editing, marketing, design) and finally culminating in a printed and bound (or digital) product. This corresponds generally with a publishing program guiding and instructing students through the various aspects, agents, and processes within the book publishing workflow, value chain, or communications circuit [Darnton 2007, Squires and Murray 2013]. Examples of programs that integrate final book projects include Drexel University, Emerson College, New York University, University of Stirling, University of Sydney, University of Central Lancashire, and Kingston University. Other programs utilize the publication of a student-run journal as the collaborative book project that culminates or at least contributes to the book publishing master’s degree experience. Examples of such programs include National University of Ireland Galway, Simon Fraser University, and University College London.

However, neither of these culminating experiences (student-run journals or individual student-produced book projects) replicate the chaos, uncertainty, and changing nature of the industry. In other words, these hypothetical publishing scenarios and individual projects offer a small window into what publishing is and what publishing professionals do, but it’s only through a lab like Ooligan Press, with real time and money constraints and a constant influx of new problems to solve, that students gain and practice the problem solving, critical thinking, and reflection skills that are necessary in book publishing.

Ooligan Press became a structured entity through a set of accidents and precarities: backdoor founding by a non-tenure track English department faculty member; little funding; grandfathered-in national distribution; and lab integration into the curriculum only because there developed a one-credit gap between graduate class credit hours (two classes = 8 credits) and the nine-credit minimum to qualify for loans and financial aid. These contingencies made Ooligan Press possible to exist, and shape its present-day characteristics. Such serendipity makes the press difficult to replicate in a top-down DH lab model. A bottom-up approach rife with contingencies led to Ooligan’s success.

It is the core belief at Ooligan Press that students own the press. Being a student at Ooligan is to be responsible for the editorial direction of the press and the success or failure of the books we publish. Founded in 2001 alongside the master’s in publishing program at Portland State University, Ooligan Press is staffed by one full-time non-tenure-track professor (the Publisher) and a rotating cohort of approximately sixty students. The two other faculty in the program, Berens and Noorda, advise the press.

Distribution services from Ingram Publishing Group give Ooligan’s books access to the same retail outlets and opportunities as major publishers like Taunton Press, Indiana University Press, and Granta Books. Without this access, Ooligan would be unable to sell the books it produces beyond what personal outreach to retail outlets could net, and would make its operations unsustainable. Through a connection with a community advisor, who was also the publisher of a local company called Graphic Arts Books, Ooligan found a new distributor through Graphic Arts. About a year after solidifying this relationship, Graphic Arts was partially sold to Ingram Publisher Services and Ooligan found itself lucky enough to be brought in under Graphic Arts’ wing.

This development turned out to be one of the best in Ooligan’s history: with the guidance of IPS’s experienced sales reps and with the clout of the Ingram name behind them, the books produced after this partnership quickly became more successful than any of Ooligan’s previous titles. Without a personal connection between two publishers, Ooligan would have struggled to convince such a large, nationally known entity to take it on as a client. Producing only three or four titles a year, Ooligan’s output would not be large enough to entice a major distributor. But Ooligan’s placement with Graphic Arts, combined with its singularity in publishing education, allows the relationship to be successful.

As the press operations have matured over time, so have the digital tools used on a daily basis to improve communication, keep records, produce books, and maintain history. Adoption of these tools has been, like most things at Ooligan, organic. Early in the press’s history, Apple iMacs were procured and local licenses for Adobe Creative Suite products like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat were installed to assist with print book production. These tools were purchased with one-time infusions of tech money from either the Dean’s office or the University’s Office of Information Technology. As ebook production entered the press’s operational scope, these tools, combined with other free programs like Sigil, BbEdit, Wordpress, and Kindle Previewer, were repurposed to make digital books.

Project management tools have been used since the beginning, but have become more integrated and sophisticated as freely available, high-quality digital tools have appeared on the market. Ooligan adopted the Google Suite of products in 2009 and quickly integrated the full function of Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets. Prior to this adoption, most production scheduling was handled by Microsoft Excel files shared on a PSU server space, leading to versioning problems and clunky access points. The Google Suite erased those issues, but brought new challenges of document ownership transfer, overwhelming numbers of documents, and difficulties in shared organization of files. To combat these problems, digital content managers in 2012 proposed adoption of Trello, a cloud-based and free project management software. Rolled out over the summer of 2013, the smooth operation of the press quickly became reliant on Trello’s kanban-board structure. Based on a standardized template board, project managers and Publisher construct a new board for each project after its author contract is signed, customizing it for the new project’s timeline and intricacies.

While book project managers are responsible for the life cycle of a book from contract signing to post-publication publicity, department managers — another group of second-year graduate students — are responsible for the quality of work in the more traditional division of labor. These managers work with project managers and team members on specific parts of the book’s life cycle, ensuring professional-level quality in the books. These redundant layers of management serve as a backstop against shoddy work and also against the problem of relying too heavily on one person to carry the burden of an entire project. Managers are often taking the four-credit Publishing Studio course, therefore ensuring more time in their course schedule to devote to Ooligan work; but they are also taking other courses, and often working off-campus jobs, raising families, doing internships, and simply living messy human lives. Ooligan’s structure allows students the space to be developing humans, sometimes needing a day or two off, while also ensuring that the work can continue. If a student does need to take time off from school for any reason, the book and author do not suffer in the long run.

Ooligan is an experiential learning practicum where metacognitive reflection loops the practicum’s applied learning into academic coursework [Kayes et al. 2005] and where academic coursework contextualizes the use of digital tools by providing theoretical and cultural frameworks for understanding their situatedness in commercial and other systems. Students present weekly project updates at press-wide meetings, teach domain-specific lessons, write midterms and final papers, and gather exemplary work they've made in digital portfolios. These academic outputs are one form of value at Ooligan; another is the hands-on contribution Ooligan Press books make to Pacific Northwest culture. Ooligan’s mission recognizes “the importance of comprehensive representation and diversity, particularly within the publishing industry, and [is] committed to building a literary community that includes traditionally underserved voices.” Ooligan encourages submission of “works originating from, or focusing on, the experiences that come from these people and communities within the Pacific Northwest.”

Students can, and usually do, take Ooligan coursework each term — WR574 Publishing Studio for four credits or WR575 Publishing Lab for one credit — including some summer-term coursework. This allows students to engage long-term with the books being published at Ooligan and also allows for two years of technical and problem-solving skills development. Students report that this long-term, in-depth involvement with book projects is one of the biggest benefits of PSU’s program: they iterate skills and build mastery that could not be developed over the course of one term in a more traditional classroom-project setting.

Since the press operates within the structure of a classroom but also outside of it, it has developed its current structure organically to deal with the unique challenges of running a business within a classroom. For example, the first Ooligan cohort had eight students; all students worked collaboratively on all aspects of the book production process, mostly in dedicated classroom face-to-face settings. Over time as the number of involved students increased, the organizational structure evolved to one that emulates that of the wider publishing industry, with departments structured around the main divisions of labor: editorial, design, marketing and sales.

As Ooligan grew in number of students and number of titles published, this structure evolved, with a switch to a project-based approach rolled out in 2011. The reasons for this shift were two-fold. One, students were given a broader understanding of the full process that a book goes through inside a publishing house, which came from curricular needs. The publishing program aims to give students a broad understanding of all aspects of the publishing process, and faculty found that students tended to silo their work and their exposure to areas where they felt most comfortable. To increase exposure to new and emerging fields in publishing — like digital content production and marketing — required students to work with an entire book rather than a department. Gradually their work would encompass all aspects of book production, thereby making their understanding of the process deeper and broader.

The second reason for a shift to project-based teams was as an effort to overcome the biggest hurdle at Ooligan: institutional memory. As one cohort of managers graduates from the program, the next one steps in over the summer term and takes full control of their project or department. The Publisher trains new managers to:

While the work of the press is diffuse, spread among many teams, the need for a central organizing figure in the form of the Publisher became apparent. The Publisher serves as the instructor of record for Publishing Studio and Publishing Lab (plus one other graduate-level course per term) and the administrator of business matters relating to outside vendors, internal stakeholders, and community outreach. She also serves as the mentor to every student working within the press.

The work of Ooligan Press happens both in the classroom and outside of it. Twice a week for two hours, the class meets in various formats. The first hour (of the weekly four) is spent at the Ooligan Executive meeting, where all students working at the press meet and hear reports from managers and the Publisher about production schedules, weekly assignments, and departmental progress. Then for hour two, each project team meets to get new assignments, discuss work-in-progress, and troubleshoot. The work is collaborative, but also individual, with more advanced students taking on more responsibility and often serving as mentors and one-on-one collaborators to incoming students unfamiliar with the work or process. Managers grade their individual team members according to an established rubric.

The success or failure of a book heightens the stakes for student work in a real, tangible way. When a book is successful, a student can claim as much reward and pride in it as the author themselves. When Blue Thread by Ruth Tenzer Feldman won the Oregon Book Award for young adult literature in 2012, a dozen students and faculty were in the auditorium and erupted in cheers when the winner was announced. The same scene played itself out again in 2017 when Eliot Treichel’s A Series of Small Maneuvers won the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice award. Students who have worked on a title can find their names published in the back of every Ooligan book on an Ooligan Credits page, cementing themselves in the book and author’s life long after they have graduated.

But when a hurdle is encountered or a mistake made, the real-world, human consequences are also felt at a deeper level. A project manager in 2017, after discovering a major omission in an already printed book, reacted with tears — and then a plan to address the omission — in a private meeting with then-Publisher Gaterud, and then a tearful confession to the press at the weekly meeting. A student in 2018, after leading the press to acquire a book that she had first heard informally pitched at a writer’s conference, told Gaterud that she’d never been prouder of herself in an educational setting. The stakes are real and the reactions are as well, something prospective students understand as much as graduates. Fifty percent of recent graduates cite the opportunity for hands-on experience at Ooligan Press to be the deciding factor in attending PSU, far more than location (16%), career prospects (15%), and even cost (6%).

Publishing is a process such that each book can be conceptualized as a “startup” [Sattersten 2011] and those entrepreneurial competencies of tolerance of ambiguity, flexibility, and curiosity are all essential in real-world publishing. How to equip students with these entrepreneurial competencies? Experiential learning, like the student work at Ooligan Press, is a prominent approach in entrepreneurship education in the U.S. [Cooper et al. 2004] [Pittaway and Cope 2007] and helps to develop self-regulated learning, where students are proactive in seeking information and mastering skills necessary to tackle a particular problem [Zimmerman 1990].

Overwork and passion for that work are material contexts for the students and the three full-time book publishing faculty who co-authored this article. “Office hours” bleed into weekends, evenings, phone calls during our commutes to accommodate our students’ overstuffed work schedules. In thinking about the sustainability of a not-for-profit press and of ourselves, we invoke DH work on capacity, care and codework by [Bethany Nowviskie 2015, Fiona Barnett 2014, Lauren Klein 2015], and the many women in our networks whose overwork “for love” greases the DH gears. We book pub faculty collectively decided upon the necessity of making our “invisible” faculty labor infrastructurally visible and supported. In 2018, we revised the curriculum to require all students to take a research methods class; previously, training in research methods was conducted under the auspices of advising, which meant extensive office hours and emails outside of coursework. In 2020, we revised the curriculum again to permit students to repeat the research class because students were requesting independent studies to seek additional mentoring and time for research; Portland State does not pay faculty to offer independent studies.

The book publishing program can offer graduate assistantships to only a small portion of the incoming class, which in turn impacts how many of our students take extra jobs and loans to earn their degrees. Personal financial risk is another “messy” condition that can’t be neatly excised from questions of labor, affect, and even embodiment: these bodies and minds can become depleted, particularly in the second year when management responsibilities at the press compound the pressures of a full course load and extra-academic jobs that pay the bills.

It’s unconventional in DH scholarship to valorize post-graduate employability, but at our R-2 where students typically fund their own degrees, it’s a vital context. We consider it ethical to insist, in a moment of pervasive and debilitating student debt, that employability is a relevant dimension of the training our program provides.

But employability is just one piece of the picture. The applied work of making books refines intellectual inquiry and research. Original research using data, thematic coding, and cultural studies features in 46 student essays published open access using the BePress tool via the Portland State University PDXScholar repository. At time of writing, more than 10,000 copies of student research have been downloaded. This itself is a significant contribution to book publishing studies and digital humanities.

A sample of recent essay titles:

Book publishing master’s candidates aren’t just classmates; they’re also colleagues running and managing a business in an industry that runs on relationships and sells objects that are very expensive to fix if something goes wrong. Printed books cannot be easily changed, adapted, or modified once they have been solidified into a print object. A second edition might come out once the print run has been exhausted (this has happened only once in Ooligan’s nineteen-year history); otherwise, the print object is a fixed thing. Print’s fixity adds pressure and risk to the process. If the design of the cover is off by half an inch, then the entire print run includes covers that don’t line up with the spine. If there is a major editorial oversight in a chapter, that oversight appears in every copy of the print run. It’s a real-world scenario in which the stakes are high in economic, social, and symbolic terms. This fixed, one-shot opportunity to get the final product right affectively influences all those involved in the press in a way that would be difficult to replicate without Ooligan’s real-world uncertainties, and the pressure of knowing that Ooligan must remain budget-neutral in order to survive.

The love of books first brings students together in the graduate program; loyalty, trust, understanding, and mutual dependence prompts the students to tattoo their bodies with the Ooligan Press logo, start new presses and freelance agencies together, engage in a myriad of personal and extracurricular activities together, and put in extra time and effort (particularly for press managers) to develop a sense of community and deep relationships. 98% of our graduates stay connected to the book publishing program via our mailing list and through our Facebook group (a private group is not limited exclusively to alumni). In an alumni survey, 70% of respondents said they felt connected to the graduate program in book publishing, in contrast to only 12% who felt connected to the English department in which book publishing is housed and 30% who felt connected to PSU as a whole. This sense of community, facilitated largely by Ooligan Press, contributes to why 91% of book publishing alumni feel that the graduate degree was a good investment of their time and money [Survey 2015].

Ooligan Press gives book publishing master’s program students digital humanities lab experience that trains them ethically, technically and emotionally in time-pressured and constrained real-world settings. Publishing books that the public buys is an extra-academic context in which to measure technical skills and rising confidence. Steven Lubar, the public humanist at Brown University asks: “How do the humanities change when we take engaged public scholarship seriously?” Rather than a plea for the more conservative, less socially engaged work Erwin Steinberg called for in his 1974 article “Applied Humanities”, we think “applied humanities” is a term that modifies “digital humanities” in a useful way, by suggesting that humanities work is always situated in particular communities who are served–or not–by that work.

There are two salient aspects of Ooligan Press as a digital humanities lab that this essay has contextualized. The first is Ooligan as a not-for-profit business that sustains experiential learning and extends digital humanities pedagogical approaches beyond R-1s. The second is feminism, and an ethic of care that makes space for student autonomy and press ownership.