Ant Spider Bee relaunches as PressForward pilot partner

Welcome back! We are pleased to relaunch Ant Spider Bee this Spring as an affiliated project of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) at LMU Munich and, thanks to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as a PressForward pilot partner. PressForward is a web content aggregation and publication tool developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. By enabling the more efficient collection of diverse materials from around the Web, PressForward helps us work toward our mission: to engage academics and practitioners in the exploration, discussion, and reflection on digital practices, methodologies, and applications in environmental humanities work.

In partnering with the RCC and RRCHNM on the PressForward project, we look forward to helping our readers discover new content and to make its curation more collaborative. We would like to thank Sean Takats, Stephanie Westcott, and Lisa Rhody of RRCHNM, and Rob Emmett, Martin Spenger, and Iris Trautmann of the RCC for writing Ant Spider Bee into their proposal and for assisting with the plugin’s implementation. We plan to take collaboration to the next level this summer when we invite RCC alumni and current fellows and students to help us nominate and contextualize posts. As we pilot PressForward with Ant Spider Bee we will also explore ways to integrate it into the Drupal environment of the Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org), the Rachel Carson Center’s open access digital archive and publication platform. The Portal publishes peer-reviewed born-digital articles and exhibitions and curates a variety of scholarly and popular materials on the relationship between nature and society. Alongside the usual navigation tools, it lets users find spatially, temporally, and thematically related results via map, timeline, and keyword explorer. Together with the Environment & Society Portal and PressForward, Ant Spider Bee hopes to contribute a new dimension to this discovery process.

We hope you will enjoy Ant Spider Bee’s new look, varied contributions, and new category “The Ant” with posts aggregated with PressForward and curated by our team. Have an idea for a guest post or a feed we should follow? We look forward to hearing from you at editors@antspiderbee.net.