ATG Interviews Matthew Ismail

Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings; Founder, Dost Meditation

By Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com> and Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu>

ATG: You’ve had a varied career in many parts of the world. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

MI: Well, let’s see…I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. My father, Yuksel Mehmet Ismail, was an immigrant from Syria who came to the U.S. in the late 1950s to get a BA. (He spoke Turkish, Cicassian, Arabic, French and English, if that gives you a sense of the cultural environment in which he grew up.) He started in Engineering and finished with a PhD in French and Comparative Literature and taught for many years at Hiram College, in Hiram, Ohio. My brother and I grew up with a father who quoted Montaigne and laughed with delight as he read outrageous passages to us from Rabelais. He also told us wonderful stories about growing up in Damascus. My mother, Judith Walker, was born in Boston and was the daughter of Salvation Army officers. I was actually born in Booth Memorial Hospital, which was run by the Salvation Army. My mother elected not to become a Salvation Army officer, herself, and instead studied French in college and embarked upon a lifelong spiritual quest thereafter (with time out to be the Registrar at Hiram College). It was a pretty interesting home.

Like many kids who respect their parents, I decided that I wanted to be a professor, like my father. After the ups and downs of an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern History (Ohio State), an MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society (Minnesota), and an AM in Modern European Intellectual History (University of Chicago), I decided that I didn’t want to be an academic. I loved reading and writing, doing research — but not academe. So, suddenly I was faced with the need to make a living by means other than being a professor, which is something I had not previously considered. At the suggestion of the library director at Hiram College, I got an MLS in 1994 and spent the next twenty-some years as a collection development librarian. I worked six years in the United Arab Emirates and six years in Egypt at the American University in Cairo. We left Cairo in 2011 when the Mubarak regime collapsed and I was concerned for the wellbeing of my children in the disorder that resulted.

ATG: You’ve recently made quite the transition, from being a librarian at Central Michigan University to living full-time in Mexico and starting your own yoga and meditation center, while still keeping a foot in the library/publishing world. Tell us more about that! How did you get involved with yoga and meditation?

MI: Meditation … I could go on about this all day! But I’ll spare you. I began to meditate in 2015 during a midlife crisis. All I wanted to do was relax. I was struggling with all of the usual midlife crisis questions about how I had botched things so badly in planning my life up to that point. I had always assumed that being a famous (or at least “noted”) historian, writer, scholar, novelist, and speaker would provide the groundwork of a happy and fulfilled life. And yet, here I was, middle aged, divorced, so lost in my books and writing that I had lost touch with living (to paraphrase Nietzsche!), and certainly much more skeptical of the stories I had been telling myself about who I was and what would make a meaningful life.

Meditation, in fact, didn’t just help me to relax — though it did eliminate my insomnia after a couple of months — but gave me a deeper insight into how we structure our lives around stories about who we (and others) are, stories that we pick up from parents, peers, teachers, professors, literature, movies, the media … And how, in meditation, when all of those stories drop away, we are able to rest in a deeper sense of Self that is absolutely free and without limit. We start being able to sit as a patient and skeptical witness to the antics of the conditioned and contingent self, which we no longer mistake as the sum of who we are. We can let go of the baggage of these stories and their associated emotions and get on with living.

At any rate, meditation transformed my life so much that I wanted to teach it. I am a certified iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation teacher and I have been teaching meditation for six or seven years. I did a 200 hour yoga teacher training during the COVID lockdown and I have taught yoga asana, as well, including a chair yoga session at Charleston.

And when I was in a position to do so in 2021, I quit my job in Michigan and moved to Mexico, which I love, and where I live with my beautiful partner, Angelica, who is also a yoga teacher. I have taught meditation in yoga studios in Puerto Escondido and Playa del Carmen in Mexico and am busy establishing a tantric meditation center with another spiritual teacher.

ATG: In addition to Dost Meditation, you are involved with the Charleston Hub in a myriad of ways. Podcasts, the Charleston Briefings, Conference Director, and more. Can you tell our readers about why you decided to stay involved, and what are some of your favorite current projects?

MI: I became involved with the Fiesole Collection Development Retreats when I was working in libraries in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. I went to meetings, as I recall, in Oxford and Fiesole, and it was there that I came into contact with Katina, Leah, and others associated with the Charleston Conference. When I came back to the U.S. in 2011, I began to attend the Charleston Conference, itself. I have always found Charleston to be an atmosphere congenial to new ideas, which matters to me, and I began to examine the process of publishing and the world of scholarly communication with an eye to the future and to transformative technologies. I proposed to Katina a brief book series in 2014, and this resulted in the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals, a series of brief books on topics in scholarly communication — the latest of which is Simon Linacre’s very successful briefing called The Predator Effect: Understanding the Past, Present and Future of Deceptive Academic Journals.

I have also been doing podcasts for a few years now, and I really enjoy sitting down and talking to interesting people on ATG the Podcast. It’s wonderful to talk to entrepreneurs and to people who are thinking differently about scholarly communication. These podcasts are so much more than rehearsing a company’s talking points — people open up and really get into the topics and dig into the future of scholarly communications. I love it! The Charleston Hub is really a wonderful place for someone like me. I truly appreciate the people and the environment …

ATG: You’re also a published author and now a publisher through Dost Publications! Tell us about your books, and how you moved into the publishing world.

MI: I published a historical biography of Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, a famous Victorian and Edwardian Egyptologist in the British Museum, called Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo. I did a huge amount of research and writing for this book between 2001 and 2009, reading at home in my study and making research trips to the British Museum, British Library, and Oxford University. The writing of this book was a labor of love, since there was no academic reason to write it (tenure or promotion), and my goal was to write a scholarly work that was also a joy to read. I finally published the book with a traditional publisher in 2011, when eBooks were beginning to make a huge impact on scholarly publishing. The publisher, however, refused to create an eBook because they said there was no market for scholarly eBooks. Instead, the print book was priced at $65.00 (beyond what most individuals would ever pay) and I was expected to be the primary marketer to institutional buyers. I wasn’t particularly happy with this arrangement!

So, after a decade of having no eBook and doing all of the marketing myself, I decided that I would obtain the rights back from the original publisher and establish my own publishing venture, Dost Publishing. I have published a revised edition of Wallis Budge, including a Kindle version, and am considering what else I might publish under that imprint.

I have to say, publishing a book with a traditional publisher and then learning a lot about the transformation of scholarly publishing in my work with Charleston has opened my eyes to the virtues of both traditional publishers and publishing mavericks. I decided to become an independent publisher because I have my own ideas about what I want to achieve, and I didn’t want to spend any more time trying to drag others along for the ride …

ATG: What is your favorite thing about living in Mexico?

MI: Mexico is a wonderful place. Beautiful climate, spectacular places on the Pacific coast, fascinating archaeological and architectural history, fantastic food, easy going and polite people, a culture very different from the U.S. It may be just south of the border, but it is very much a part of Latin America and the culture is very cool and relaxed (for the most part!). I live pretty much as a Mexican these days, in Oaxaca, though I am still trying to learn Spanish, and learning every day all sorts of things about the people and culture. Oaxaca is an important foodie stop in Mexico and the cuisine is definitely a fabulous attribute of the city. A tlayuda and a Bohemia Clara is a pretty decent Friday night meal at Los Combinados! Sometimes my brother sends me some money for a birthday and Angelica and I eat at restaurants we couldn’t otherwise afford — and this is also pretty great.

My favorite places in Mexico are Puerto Escondido and Mexico City, which are very different places, of course. Mexico City is a world city — you walk around Colonia Roma or the Zocolo and feel as if you were in Europe. Very cosmopolitan. Puerto is a surfing town on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, and it attracts a very casual, adventurous, curious brand of world and Mexican traveler. I would love to live in Puerto, but its popularity makes it prohibitively expensive for a dropout like me …

ATG: What future do you see for librarians and publishers in a world of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT?

MI: To the extent that I am qualified to answer this … The greatest strength of AIs, at the moment, is in addressing structured and routine tasks. Things that are repetitive and rule-based and thus amenable to the strengths of a machine powered by a computer.

Frankly, I think that in libraries there are too many people doing routine work that can be effectively automated through various AIs — and too many peoples’ eyes are opening to this fact too late. The notion that teaching information literacy was going to be the raison d’etre of libraries in the age of open access and outsourced collections will not, I suspect, prove to be the savior people were hoping for. I’ve talked to a variety of clever entrepreneurs on the podcast who will continue to find innovative ways to support faculty and student research in this networked age — innovative technologies such as iris.ai, TooWrite or Yewno that are online and very well integrated into the workflows of the present-day faculty or student researcher. There are libraries such as the University of Michigan or Arizona State that are making pretty significant changes to remain relevant, but there are also many libraries in which people are just complaining about change and wishing it weren’t happening. I’m afraid that nimble and innovative entrepreneurs are going to eat the lunch of those libraries that complain and won’t change.

As for publishers … It seems to me that AI isn’t the immediate problem for them since they will restructure and integrate AI much more readily than will academe. The obsession with open access among librarians and some very vocal researchers and funders has, I believe, left the publishing sector rather vulnerable. As publishers have worked hard to comply with the demand that they be open — and they also strive to remain profitable by publishing as many articles as possible to collect APCs — there has developed a culture of fraud and misconduct among unethical actors such as predatory publishers, paper mills, and authors looking for a shortcut to tenure or promotion. Since there has also emerged a widespread belief in Western culture that there is no such thing as truth, only overtly or covertly expressed political allegiance (“Everything’s political!”) science, itself, has come to be widely regarded as little more than a vehicle to provide a ride for the author’s ideology. This is a recipe for scientific disaster.

The reproducibility crisis — the fact that many (most?) published research findings cannot be reproduced by another researcher — simply deepens the feeling that peer review isn’t working properly to vet new research and that publishers are not sufficiently careful about the integrity of what they are publishing.

It seems to me that the most crucial issue for scholarly publishing today is not open access, but preserving — or perhaps rediscovering — the integrity of published scientific research in an environment in which many are losing their trust in both science and published research results. If many readers only believe what reinforces their ideology and publishers acquiesce in this state of affairs, then publishers will become little more than partisan enablers, more like ideological newsletters that update the faithful with “approved” research results than publishers of challenging and objective scientific research. It’s hard to buck broad cultural trends, but publishers, it seems to me, need to stiffen their backs and get back to basics …