Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht and the author of Dutch messengers. A history of science publishing, 1930–1980 (2008), was accompanied by Geert Noorman, the head of NUV (Nederlands Uitgeversverbond – Dutch Publishers Association) and Eelco Ferwerda, publisher digital projects at Amsterdam University Press (AUP).

Questions leading the discussion were: What is a publisher? What is its function in the digital era and how is the Internet affecting the publisher’s value proposition?

Professor Andriesse, the first speaker, stressed that the main incentive for scientists to publish is reputation building and not money-making. Their foremost aim, even though this might seem ideological, is the improvement and enlargement of human knowledge. In this respect publishing is a must: scientists can only deepen their insights through dialogue with fellow scientists scattered over the earth. To ensure the growth of (accurate and valuable) knowledge, scientists let their fellow researchers judge their work on originality and correct reasoning. They then give a (honest) judgment on the value of the research, mostly in a nuanced manner with suggestions for improvements. Of course this system knows its critics, but as Andriesse states, it is the only true way to establish quality: the scientific journal is what it is today because of peer review and the organization thereof. And this is the primary task of the publisher; together with his editorial board and secretariat, the publisher is to ensure the proper functioning and arrangement of the peer review.

Andriesse goes on to consider what the influence of the Internet is on scientific publishing and thus on the peer review process. How does the Internet influence and shape peer review? As Andriesse states, being a publisher is increasingly a question of personality and networking. It is the personal qualities of a publisher that makes his or her name and brand and this will continue to be the case in the digital era. He also states that when it concerns the arrangement of peer review, a lot of discretion is needed. Andriesse ends his talk by discussing two famous Elsevier publisher-scientist combinations: Roosenvelt and Frank (Nuclear Physics) and Akert and Remarque (Brain Research). He concludes by stating that although the shape and the communication of peer review has become digital, this has not accelerated the process significantly. Emerging models like PloS and Biomed are on the rise but they are not really a distraction from all the, as Andriesse states, crap on the Internet. Andriesse clearly states that the Internet can add near to nothing to the scientific journal and its peer review.

Eelco Ferwerda, the second speaker, takes another starting point and discusses two young publishing companies, both Open Access, but each playing a different role. He states that Open Access is a growing phenomenon, where for instance the Dutch funding organization NWO has recently chosen to pursue an open access policy. This rise of Open Access is a direct result of the nature of science and the new possibilities for publishing: computers play a tremendous role in the gathering of information, and re-use should not be prohibited via copyright. Creative Commons and free licenses offer possibilities in this respect, Ferwerda states.

He starts by discussing Hindawi a STM publisher which has since 2007 been completely Open Access. And they make a profit. They make use of a very ‘reductionist’ model: they do not have any direct contact with their editorial boards, everything gets handled by mail. Ferwerda states that the business model of Hindawi is completely focused on growth and profit making and on the development of new journals. By doing market research in Web of Science they search for the best scholars in a certain niche and build up a new journal around them. According to Ferwerda Hindawi thus uses a modern and strictly commercial model with a quantitative and a-personal approach to quality. Open Humanities Press on the other hand follows a different strategy. Founded by academics in 2006, their aim is to remove the cultural barriers that inhibit scientists to make full use of the digital possibilities; their strategy is centered on trust and quality. They seek out the best, well-known scholars to support their product (also e-monographs) and they give a home and a quality stamp to journals set up by academics. By establishing connections with the Library of the University off Michigan and the Public Knowledge Project (with their OJS software) they hope to work more efficiently. They operate on a volunteer basis. As Ferwerda says, they don’t offer money but quality through both their business model and their network. The question is however, as Ferwerda ponders, if this will be a sustainable model in the future. Amsterdam University Press is somewhere in between these models: although they are in many ways a lot like OHP, AUP is a professional publisher that needs to make money. For them Open Access is not so much an enthusiasm as it is a real business model. But as OHP shows, the web has led to a renaissance of scholar-lead publishing which is forcing publishers to rethink their value: they are foremost brand builders, organizers, sellers and distributors in the digital age.

As a final example of new developments in science publishing Ferwerda mentions environments like H-net, a portal for researchers and educators covering all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences. H-net is essentially a discussion network for knowledge exchange. Every sub-field is moderated by a team of scholars and an editorial board. Although not a publisher, H-net is an example of a semi-official form of scientific knowledge exchange. What will this model bring in the future and what will this mean for the publisher? – Ferwerda asks. 

Geert Noorman, the final speaker, brings the focus back to issues of peer review and the Internet. First of all he states that not every article needs an extensive discussion. Peer review also fulfills another function, namely that of ranking research. Being a reviewer is even a form of ranking or reputation building. And doing peer review is important work. And it is still work done by human beings that are fallible, which means mistakes are also still being made. However, as Noorman states, peer review is the only instrument to classify the results of science. It is hard work however, with, as he estimates, between 1-1,5 million articles published yearly. Do we still have enough reviewers (who can and want) to perform this job? Hasn’t peer review become old-fashioned and shouldn’t we replace it by usage statistics? Noorman clearly urges against this notion, citing figures showing that peer review is still very popular. According to these figures only 20% of the people think the current or classical system of peer review is no longer sustainable. 86 % however states they find it very valuable work to do and 91,5 % of the authors says it helped improve their work. When it comes to the digital developments, 73% of the reviewers say digital technologies has made their work easier the last 5 years. What is missing however, says 56 %, is proper information about how to conduct peer review. As to the future of peer review, the research shows processing tools will definitely increase in importance. And this is where, as Noorman states, publishers and universities could play an important role. The Internet could mean a lot to peer review: it builds communities, enlarges communication and it assists peer reviewers in doing their work faster and more efficient and it also enables meta-analysis.

However, as Noorman states, focusing solely on citation scores is a bad thing. Peer review will never become obsolete, although 25% of the researchers mentioned in the previous research think user statisctics might be an alternative to peer review). A thing publishers could focus on is the development of new tools and services that assist with better and faster peer reviewing like CrossCheck, the plagiarism detector by CrossReff.

These kinds of tools will make sure peer review remains alive and kicking in the digital age. Noorman states there should be more attention towards peer review in post-doctoral education, as it is a skill that needs to be trained and it is increasingly part of ones scientific responsibility. Noorman concludes by stating that usage statistics in some cases can be useful but that they miss the discussion element. And scientific discourse will always stay essential..

In the following discussion it becomes even clearer that the participants feel that the review of scientific publications remains essential. However, as Eelco Ferwerda states with pre-print repositories like arXiv, it gets a different function: peer review is more essential for ranking and branding afterwards, and less for direct scholarly communication. Peer review in this sense can be seen as a certificate, it is the end of a discussion, a final qualification: without this qualification you will not be admitted to the scientific annals, it serves as a threshold. With the online comments and the discussion on the preprint version a lot of rubbish also gets sifted out. In the end every article will have to be certified some where, some time. 

After a heated discussion on the need for Open Access (which according to some of the participants is being imposed on scientists by the government, publishers and libraries where others stated that Open Access was initiated by scientists) and the perceived ‘hidden agenda’ of the Dutch governments and its Open Access policy (which according to one participant will be used as an excuse to cut back on scientific funding even further, which was received very skeptical  by the majority of the participants), the concluding remarks focus on the fact that peer review as a process is first of all the property of the scientific community. But to organize it we still need publishers. To make things work better scientists should make clear what their needs are and publishers should keep on showing how they can fulfill these needs and how they can add value to the research process and outcome.

The problem, I felt, of the whole discussion on peer review as reflected on above, is that the speakers most of the time seemed to conflate peer review with (one of) its function(s): the certification of research as being qualitative. What the panelists seemed to essentially agree on was foremost the importance of the certification of scientific research by other scholars (the filter function), for which peer review is just one method. The lack of definitions used to describe peer review during the evening (not one definition was mentioned, if you don’t count ‘classical’) seemed to ignore the fact that not only there are already different levels and manners of doing peer review (from open to semi-open to blind etc.) there are also different methods to perform peer review per field. The difference is also huge between how peer review (often more an editorial process) is conducted in the HSS and in the Sciences. Statements made during the evening like ‘peer review will remain important in the digital age’ thus became quite meaningless with a term and a practice that can have so many meanings and manners. More important to question is what kind of peer review will become more important, and even more, how can we help it, advance it, adjust it or complement it in the digital age with the (alternative) tools and methods at our disposal (which are the more interesting questions concerning peer review I feel).

Next to that we might also start thinking about alternatives to peer review that still fulfill the same basic function as peer review in order to make this process more efficient. In this respect the article ‘On the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing’ by Kathleen Fitzpatrick gives many insights, where she separates the structure of peer review from the purposes it serves (and those purposes we want it to serve and those it actually fulfills).

She distinguishes two functions of peer review: fostering discussion and improving the work, and quality filtering (two functions Ferwerda and Noorman also already touched upon briefly during their presentations). However, the first can also already take place during the research process in an open setting, using user comments on the preprint and focusing more on the communication between scholars. Fitzpatrick goes on to establish the benefits these kind of open peer review systems offer to scholarly communication: 

“Vast amounts of scholars’ time is poured into the peer review process each year; wouldn’t it be better to put that time into open discussions that not only improve the individual texts under review but are also, potentially, productive of new work? Isn’t it possible that scholars would all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place? Would the various credentialing bodies that currently rely on peer review’s gatekeeping function be satisfied if we were to say to them, “no, anonymous reviewers did not determine whether my article was worthy of publication, but if you look at the comments that my article has received, you can see that ten of the top experts in my field had really positive, constructive things to say about it”?”

It is this discussion on how to really improve scholarly communication foremost (which in my opinion comes before quality – not saying that quality establishment is not also of the utmost importance) with the digital possibilities which I felt was missing[*] in especially Andriesse’s and also Noorman’s discussion of this system and which made the evening into a not very exiting all-agreeing praising of systems we now actually have the chance to improve – apparently not during these kind of panel discussions however. 

By the way, Kathleen Fitzpatrick is currently offering her book manuscript, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy for public review via MediaCommons Press.

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[*] Next to a further discussion on the rise of scholarly- and library-led publishing initiatives, which can certainly be seen as threatening the traditional roles of the publisher when it comes to both arranging peer review and to arranging the production and distribution of scientific content.

Digital Scholarship

Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.

So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.

 I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.

Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.

Adieu Copyright – A debate

Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The essay, entitled Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten (Goodbye copyright, farewell cultural conglomerates) was presented to economist Arjo Klamer.  Klamer gave a sparkling speech – setting the tone for the following discussion – by claiming that Smiers and Van Schijndel’s essay was just not radical enough. By referring to well known numbers (10% of the cultural producers claim 90% of the remits) and hopelessly cumbersome and complicated processes of IPR regulations, upholdings and claimings, Klamer wondered why we even have such a system. He went on to systematically explain how property right is closely intermingled with a product, an object one can trade. This proprietary right is the basis of our market thinking. This market can only function through the merits of a state that enforces this proprietary right. Klamer calls this a conspiracy between the market and the state. He explains that in the utopian thinking of Smiers and Van Schijndel, the abolition of copyright serves mainly to break down the power of the large cultural conglomerates that control the cultural market in order to encourage a fairer system of competition. They claim this would be more democratic, will encourage free communication and will be beneficial for our cultural life.

Klamer wants to go even further. He claims that the authors still grasp too much to the idea of music and art as products. Klamer questions the whole idea of cultural products and product oriented thinking. He claims the way we look at these cultural artifacts or expressions as products is a simple metaphor for our ability to buy them. But artistic expressions are no products, they are ‘words’, they only get their ‘meaning’ when they are uttered, they function in a larger context and in this way are dependent on us, the ‘utterers’, the consumers, the potential readers. His starting point is not the product but the metaphor of the conversation [the term discourse to me sounds even better]. Art is a conversation, music is a conversation, science is a conversation. Nobody owns a conversation; it can be compared with friendship [also an inalienable, tangible good]. A conversation is a good people share together in a community, you cannot enforce it (not even the state), you cannot steel it and you cannot free-ride on it; and it is based on the principle of reciprocity [think of the gift economy about which I will write some more in the future].

But money comes into this system too. Klamer calls this the third sphere, the ‘in-between sphere’. Science still functions like this to a large extent. The scientific community works from the common understanding that knowledge is something we all share, science is the conversation we all build upon. Who owns an idea? Even Nobel Prize winners base their ideas on endless conversations with others. IPR does not do right to this conversation and to the quality of the conversation. In science this problem is solved by the providing of services (Klamer gives the example how in the US many artists have a position at the university were they teach and work. There art work is seen as a kind of service to the community in which art is ‘less commercialized’). Klamer’s final statement: leave the state and the market for what they are and let’s acknowledge cultural expressions for their true value, which is much better realized or finalized in the social space, the ‘third space’ in which communal goods reign. This is the sphere we want to contribute to, from which we can get acknowledgement and establish reputation. For the real and true scarce good is attention. This is what distinguishes the one from the other nine, both in science and in art. This is not a fair system and it will never be a fair system. And this unfairness lies not in the power and the influence of the cultural conglomerates, Klamer states, attacking Smiers and Van Schijndel’s premise; the scarcity of attention is a social phenomenon. This scarcity is also exactly what can be liquidated (see for instance how Damien Hirst plays with this notion). This is not to say that the market and the state should rule this world, and in this sense Klamer states the presented essay is still of the utmost importance. Cultural life exists in the third sphere and is realized in (this) community with others, people who feel committed to a bigger interest instead of in the creation of a product for their own profit. Reciprocity, conversation and attention: that is what this sphere is all about. 

After Arjo Klamer finished his speech, Joost Smiers gave a short exposition of the book. He stated that with the abolishment of copyright the market will no longer function as radical around the numbers of one and ten: the public will be much more able to follow their own taste [ignoring the fact I think that the long tail maybe does not exist as recent research has contested]. Smiers does however throw away notions like Creative Commons, stating that they no longer merit the ownership of products and this is an issue he does not want to discuss. He does not believe we should do away with the ownership of cultural goods [on a side note, I feel Smiers is conflating Creative Commons licenses, which are alternative copyright license and thus still centre around the notion of ownership, with the more radical parts of the free culture and free information movement. They are interlinked but not the same!]. Smiers asked the question what will happen to the market once we abolish copyright, how will the market function? He strongly believes entrepreneurial people will be needed in such a new system and this will offer opportunities for those who are active. 

In the first debate Annelys de Vet (graphic designer at the Sandberg Institute) and Nirav Christophe (lector theatrical creation processes and open dramaturgy) engaged with each other and the public. De Vet argued that copyright is a closed manner of handling things; it is a standstill opposed to an open movement. Artists don’t design products, they create processes in a context of processual design in which they are part of a larger whole. Artists don’t quote; they are part of a dialogue or a conversation. Copyright is based on a world of fear where she wants to work and collaborate in a world based on trust. Christophe concurs that theater is foremost a dialogue and thus serves as a good metaphor for the evenings debate. For theatre is always a half-product: as a theater writer your play only comes into existence once it is finished by others. A theatre writer is used to people making adaptations to his texts, making their own interpretations; it makes the texts better. Theatre does not create products, it creates processes. Christophe states that copyright is foremost also a philosophical problem. What is the relationship of the author to his text? Is the text yours? Since Roland Barthes and the death of the author it is no longer maintainable that texts produced by an author are the possession of that author. Only the experience of them being read or uttered, the interaction, makes them come alive. A cultural experience is only created during a certain amount of time in a process that is often created together with others, even together with the public. 

De Vet thus concludes that art should be seen as a dialogue, as a process. The oeuvre of an artist consists of all kinds of different moments, in which the links between these moments create the meaning and this is not linkable back to a product. There is so much pressure on artists nowadays to be original, and so much fear to appropriate, to copy. Yet De Vet encourages this, it will still be different, it will always be used in a different context, it will follow another trajectory. Being unique and signing your work can go hand in hand with the above attitude, they are not each others opposites. Many people are involved in the creation of a design; design is about the creation of a dialogue. Copyright has no relevance in this process, claims De Vet. Christophe concurs and states this is a more realistic view of the modern artist than the romantic 19th century conception of the individual performer. De Vet and Christophe see the economic difficulties of their notions but are up to the challenge of thinking in different ways. 

Questions from the audience phrased the fear of plagiarism: what if one copies or steals my work? What if I get ‘screwed over’? As we know from the debate between Habermas and Foucault, conversations are not always open and honest. This is a way to idealist stance. De Vet  replied that no system is perfect, in a 1 to10 system people are ‘screwed over’ too. She wants to keep a positive stance based on trust.  Media sociologist Jaap van Ginneken replied by stating that under the current copyright system Walt Disney steals everything and then patents it again as its own. Even the Lion King is an adaptation of a Japanese story. So big business seems very efficient in screwing you over too. Joost Smiers remarked that for wrongful appropriation (for instance by a fascist regime) you have alternative laws, you do not need copyright for that. Next to that a system of shaming will probably develop. Other mechanisms will thus develop to maintain the system

In the second debate we met Hans Abbing, emeritus professor in art sociology and Jan-Willem Sligting, programmer at Paradiso and musician. Sligting remarked that copyright is such a different concept where it covers multiple domains, from law to philosophy and economy. Referring to Thomas More and Utopia, he states that a world without copyright will unfortunately just be that: an utopia. But Abbing dives into this make believe world, stating the time is ripe: copyright is increasingly contested online and the current economic crisis urges for the need of equal playing fields. First of all it will improve the situation of artists, where their incomes while become more equal. But most of all the consumer will benefit. There will be more space for diversity and niches. But Abbing also doubts this fantasy. Diversity is not inherently connected to copyright. A society can only handle a certain amount of diversity: you cannot know the details of everything. We need to trust on others, on selection, our attention span is always crooked. The consumer wants selection and we shouldn’t trust too much on the premise of ‘small is beautiful’. And what about that level playing field? How does this relate to different regions on a world scale? We also need big corporations. We should just as well fear social monopolies. Don’t underestimate the power of funders for instance.

Klamer still emphasizes the benefits of contributing to something that is bigger than you. In science and religion the financing is done by way of gifts (gift economy), which according to him is a very valuable system as we are reimbursed for our services. According to Abbing however, gifts only work in small societies on a personal level. Gifts on the Internet will never have a real shape, this will not work according to him. 

Sligting however mentions initiatives like Fabchannel and SellaBand which have business models which are centered on the community. Abbing states that there are a lot of experiments going on but that they need to be based on reciprocity, people will not just donate something, and they want to feel connected to a cause. Simple commercial artifacts (t-shirts, stickers) already help a lot.

Arjo Klamer remarks that science is also totally based on reciprocity: services for reputation. There is however a fierce strive for recognition in this field. This situation is very similar to the independent arts; Klamer claims that such a reciprocal model will be very well applicable to this sector too. Using copyright in this realm is abnormal, it does not work like that in other cultures and it should thus not be norm giving. We need to be more creative with how we establish value. Think about the potential of deluxe editions.

Comments from the crowd focused on the elitism of the debate: not all art is equal, the 1/10 rule is there for a reason, simply because not all works are good. We also need to discuss quality in this context. With a final statement Joost Smiers ended the debate, using the scientific metaphor of the paradigm shift: if a model no longer works we need another one. A world without copyright is not imaginary. We need to break through this dominance to establish a more normal and competitive market in which more people will earn more money. Smiers’ goal is to support this notion with hard figures. It is not an utopia. Smiers wants to create alternative business models and will keep developing them in the future. 

My feeling about the evening was that from a theoretical point of view it hopelessly complicated matters and on a practical level didn’t offer any solutions. Although the debate an sich was very interesting, I think the attack on the big conglomerates by Smiers and Van Schijndel should not be the primary goal of the abolishment of copyright. I feel the fierce attacks on the state and the market that were uttered during the evening (notwithstanding the fact that their powers and reach might actually be too large) unnecessarily complicated the issue, and made it more disputed than it already is. Compare the debate between Lawrence Lessig and Kevin Kelly in which Kelly compared Web 2.0 with socialism (I agree with Lessig in this matter).

Even if we accept the notion of art as a process and dialogue, this does not mean we have to do away with the big companies and commercialization. Making money with their work, in what way they deem fit is still a free choice of creative producers, and commercialization of an experience economy, more akin to the processual and fluxual nature of the current art procedure, is already well on its way. This is why I applaud initiatives like Fabchannel, SellaBand and also Creative Commons, who, on an alternative note, try to create new business models based on sharing, community and reciprocity. Without loosing the option to liquidize these created values. This criticism connects to that of the confused public, which during the evening continually begged for practical solutions and did not receive any. The debate remained too theoretical on many levels, without offering truly new potentials. And doing away with initiatives like Creative Commons, that in a very practical manner try to do something refreshing with the whole IPR problem, to me seems just stupid. The total lack of references to new business models by Smiers and Van Schijndel was also very disappointing. Maybe the practical solutions can be found in their book, however, it is not available Open Access on the net and unfortunately, after this evening, I felt neither compelled nor convinced to buy the book. Felt kind of like a lost chance….

Culture is Data

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for e-culture, Virtueel Platform.

Manovich used the intriguing title Activating the archive or data dandy meets data mining, in which he referenced Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink who previously described the fetish of data collection by individuals and institutions. Manovich’s talk centered on the massive digitization efforts of existing cultural assets by institutions all over the world, from ARTstor to Google Books and BBC motion gallery (and even China’s CCTV). As Manovich argues, no human being will ever be able to keep track of all this data. However increasingly measures are taken in which the digital preservation of cultural assets is turning into an obligatory act (hence the fetish reference). Moreover this institutionalized digitization is accompanied since, let’s say 2005, by the rise of huge amounts of user generated content. As Manovich mentions, the number of images uploaded every week to Flickr is likely to be larger than all objects contained in all art museums of the world. This development sees a parallel expansion of the professional cultural universe. This rapid growth of a professional universe can mainly be seen in newly globalized countries foremost due to the growth of software tools which made for the instant availability of cultural news. Everyone now has access to the same ideas, information and tools: there are no more centers and provinces. Manovich even argues that the students, cultural professionals and governments in newly globalized countries are often more ready to embrace the latest ideas than their equivalents in the “old centers” of the world.

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

All in all this has lead to an explosive growth of cultural production. This has again lead to some intriguing questions and problems: “What does it mean to be a (video) artist today and what does it mean to do cultural criticism in such a world of superabundance? Before cultural theorists and historians generated theories and concepts about relative small data sets. But how can you track “global digital cultures” with billions of cultural objects? As Manovich argues, we need some new methods to track these developments in our cultural imagination. We need a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts – including cultural production, sharing and consumption. As Manovich explains, to analyze large cultural data sets of cultural information we can apply tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big data. We can create interactive visualizations and dynamic maps of large cultural data sets to find new patterns – and to generate new theoretical questions. Traditional boundaries disappear as visualization can be seen as esthetic statements about the world, so as forms of art (see for instance Stefanie Posavec’s literary organism). Forms of cultural data mining are already starting to rise up as we are slowly shifting from a world of new media into a world of “more media”. In this respect Manovich states ‘culture has become data’. This data (including media content and people’s creative and social activity around this content, i.e. social media) can be and will be mined and visualized.

Manovich explains his new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’ as the use of data mining and interactive visualizations of large sets of cultural data in the humanities context. Manovich introduced the idea of cultural analytics first in 2005 and you can find more information about this method at softwarestudies.com.

Manovich argues that if you have an interesting idea today, you can be sure someone has the same idea somewhere else. Thus it makes no more sense to experience and study these single events. We need to start studying trends and patterns in culture instead of individual projects of ideas and concepts. We need to look at these projects in a larger context of global cultural production.

But how do you put this in practice? We need to represent and work with individual cultural objects and then work to larger and larger datasets. The key differences between existing work in culture visualization and Manovich’s approach, lies in the fact that most research projects now are driven by the existing data. Manovich wants to create techniques which can be used for much larger data sets. In contrast his methodology uses the computational analysis to generate new metadata. In this way one now creates the metadata around the objects, not the patterns inside. Manovich proposes to appropriate software from hard sciences and use them to look at work of arts and cultural works.

He gives examples of a few research projects he has worked on focusing on modern art. You can for example use software to analyze large datatsets of paintings. In this way a computer can ‘see’ whether a painting is realist or modernist (by measuring grayscale, particles, forms etc). Along these lines you can analyze the development of visual culture over time. By means of image processing you can describe the paintings qualitatively in terms of numbers. We can now make new distinctions on the basis of these outcomes; a trend line. In this way one generates new questions. As Manovich states, this method is not about answering old questions. Instead it offers new visions concerning the development of modernism from realism to modernism.

Manovich did a similar project which analyzed 165 paintings by Mark Rothko using a visual super computer to extract computational data. These are all examples of easier and sometimes more productive ways to look at culture. We can get a lot of data from these methods, Manovich says. Also, born digital media is highly interactive, and it is easy to record user interaction and user statistics. We can now use these techniques to ask different questions. This could be very interesting for, for instance, reception theory; we can now analyze the actual patterns of interaction with culture.

Manovich also expanded his analysis to movies, analyzing the variance in shot lengths in movies showing a “development over time”. The average shot length of feature films between 1900-2008 gives some interesting insides into the differences in cultural history in different countries, comparing France, the Soviet Union, the US etc. (in which the Russians proved most extreme or avant-garde prone with Vertov at the one extreme and Tarkovksi at the other…).

These kind of tools would also be able to ‘go around’ the canon. Where in normal science the focus is mostly on the canon, now we can do art history about larger contexts. But unfortunately it is mostly the canon that has been digitized. We should thus expand the canon in our digitization efforts, argues Manovich. But we can not archive everything…Therefore Manovich states we should archive equal amounts of ‘important’ canonical art and ‘random art’ to balance, in his words, ‘the important stuff wit the non important stuff’.

The critique of the audience focused mainly on the problem of how one can quantify qualitative issues? For Manovich seems to propose a shift from qualitative to quantitative analysis. As Manovich replied, quite pragmatically: it is going to happen anyway, it is what social scientists are doing. With these techniques we can do more than with a simple manually descriptive qualitative analysis. For computers can analyze things we cannot: they can find similarities and differences in similar and likely objects. And in a way the question stays ‘how do we see?’ The brain is also a kind of computer, Manovich says. Do we analyze that different from a computer?

But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.

You can find an interview with Lev Manovich held by Virtueel Platform here and an article explaining cultural analytics here.

Business is boring

 Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows, it is all about creating networks in the online environment, based around the value you create. This value is again based on your previous actions and doings (focusing on integrity and trust) and the selections you make and present to your networks, which again creates more value.

 Aslander states he is fascinated by value. We should focus more on value and not on profit. Aslander has not asked any money for his services for years, as he believes people can only decide what he is worth after he has delivered his services. As he states, he does not work for people he works with people.

 Martijn Aslander on bookhacking op InCTformatie 2009 from henkjan on Vimeo.
Filmed by Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat, via Marketingfacts.

At Lifehacking.nl he started with disseminating books free online. These books generated a lot more print sales than expected, based on the idea that if people like a book, people buy the book, they don’t print it. The added value also lies in the fact that this model gives you the opportunity to connect on a closer level with your customer base. Unlike bookshops, in the online environment you know who your customers are. Lifehacking.nl simply asked for an email address before any download and 70% of the people actually filled in an email address. This of course created a huge marketing potential. You can for instance send an email to your customer base, Aslander states, when you have a new free book to download. In this way the free book does not have to be a threat to the print sales. You can even make more money by giving the book away for free.

 

The trick is creating some noise around your free content. People start blogging about it and its fame is spread. This of course in combination with the power of selection: you create a trusted base, a network around the content you provide. As Aslander states, this is the basis of the network and information society; you create a network which again creates network effects. Through your network you are able to move (other) networks of people. This means, according to Aslander, that we should no longer look from the old business paradigms to profit and value. The new online paradigm is about engagement, it is about listening to the people. Communicate with your network, ask them for suggestions, engage them. Aslander has created, as he calls it (referring to his great example Seth Godin) a tribe around himself. Things start spreading from there: you create value and movement and you create a relationship with your customers, within your network. You build profiles around the people in your network. Thus an ecosystem rises up not based on money and profit but on value and network effects. Aslander remarks that Web 2.0 is about a radical change, it is about new ways of working together and engaging with your customers: it is (again) about creating value and listening to your customers. As he says: ‘I deliver value and then I just see what happens.’ In the online environment an IOU is worth more than money. Aslander thus thinks and works foremost from an idea of access and not from an idea of possession.

 

These ideas are maybe not new and not even as innovative as Aslander might present them, I like the way he is trying to promote them to make people enthusiastic about thinking ‘out of the box’ and thinking from the idea of free as a basis and a reality in today’s online networked culture. And then see what you can do from that position and where it can bring you. That I find inspiring. You can find more passionate thoughts from Aslander on his website.

You can find an older interview with Martijn Aslander in which he also summarises his views on book publishing below.

 

Krisis re-emerges from the ashes

I never burned books. Not as a ritual after graduation; not as a Dadaistic attempt to enstage some kind of surreal happening; not as a way to cleanse my soul from feelings of materialistic belongings. No. Books are holy to me. I would probably not even be able to burn a book (though I could kill an animal…).

Friday evening I attended a book burning. Alas, a metaphysical one. The Dutch philosophy journal Krisis celebrated its final paper edition and the launch of its online archive. This celebration took place at cultural hotspot and debate center De Balie in Amsterdam, where the cream of Dutch philosophy gathered to commemorate the passing of the old and the rise of the new, the transformation of Krisis from a print journal to an online, open-access journal for contemporary philosophy.

 

Eight speakers from Belgium and the Netherlands, both renowned (philosophy) professors as well as PhD and undergraduate students, where asked to give a short ten minute reflection on the occasion and on the evening’s theme of book burning, which, as the invitation states, ‘is a symbol of the bonfire of our journal’s digitalization, but will be elaborated in different directions: censorship, (in)tolerance, privacy, virtuality, digital utopia and iconoclasm’.

 

The people selected to deliver a small speech were Ellen Algera, Jos Biemans, René Boomkens, Maarten Doorman, Heleen Pott, Casper Thomas, Rosa van Toledo, Georgi Verbeeck en Frank van Vree.

And what a selection it was! Whoever thought philosophy was dull and boring would have changed his or her mind completely after Friday’s event. The talks delivered, each from a very different viewpoint, were both fresh and provocative, and at the same time personal and contemplative.

 

 

Georgi Verbeeck showed, using the example of the Library of the University of Leuven, how book burning can sometimes have a positive effect. The strive of the aforementioned library to overcome its multiple burnings and other misdealings, lead to a certain reputation and a will to emerge. In this struggle, the library came out as a winner.

 

Ellen Algera gave an elegy for the (burned) book using Heidegger’s concept of being “ready-to-hand” and applying it to the use of books. The digital offers all kinds of benefits to the book, from a worldwide public to the possibility of multimedia, interactivity and the wisdom of crowds. However, Algera emphasized what gets lost in an online environment; the possibility to make annotations (or the possibility to internalize the books or the thoughts therein by means of annotating); the tactility of the book; its boundedness. To Algera books are not merely information carriers but objects of thought that portray a sense of meaning in certain contexts or practices. For her the merit of book burning lies exactly here: it is a metaphor for detaching oneself from the text.

 

Maarten Doorman reflected, on request, on the burning of the library of Don Quijote, whose books (according to his housekeeper) were the main reason for his insanity. Doorman stated that the current practice of superabundant book production has led to an overflow of books. This profusion has, in a way, the same destructive force as a book burning where it leads to massive information overload (and accompanied insanity). Krisis going online can thus be seen as a sort of cleansing ritual.

 

Jos Biemans talked about the fire from within, quite literally even, for he explained the process of iron gall ink corrosion, which is for instance threatening the music scores of Bach’s Matthäus passion which are kept at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

 

 

Next Rosa van Toledo tackled the night’s theme as a physical process: the transformation of one substance into another. Seen in this light, a book burning can be a synonym for the way we handle knowledge. Words are being used or processed; they are carried from a certain medium to the mind and are internalized into the body (incorporation). Our body burns knowledge, forms a knowledge metabolism, internal combustion. In the mass media, Van Toledo argues, our bodies or our senses are approached in a fragmented manner (we hear, see, and touch seldom in one integrated experience). For Van Toledo however the interconnection of our senses is essential for the digestion of knowledge. She finds this total conjunction of sensory experiences in the theatre, in which the body is the medium. Recalling Antonin Artaud she there re-finds this total self-awareness of the body as a unity now capable of full knowledge absorption.

 

Frank van Vree gave a plea for the acknowledgement of digital utopianism as a new (contemporary) form of ideology. He draws on H.G. Wells 1938’s writings on the world brain, in which Well’s foresees a future world encyclopedia which will contain a complete planetary memory of all mankind. Van Vree sees this utopian thinking strongly reflected in the digital culture, where the digital is presented as a new way of thinking, a new world, in which information can be free, the medium democratizes and the digital revolution will free knowledge and information from its industrialization and profit making middle men. It will offer an open domain, a virtual transcendence of identity. Van Vree traces this digital utopianism back to the 1990’s but stated that after

 

 

15 years it is still going strong. The apparent ideology in this kind of thinking lies in the fact that one can argue that the Internet did not really change that much and for a large part is still a continuation of the ‘traditional non virtual life’. And this traditional ideology and thinking is the one the digital utopia wants to burn down and is building its own pyres for.

 

Casper Thomas discussed the discrepancy between the virtual and the real when it comes to our personal data. We hold certain schizophrenic ideas: personally we build up walls between ourselves and our environment, whilst online we share every minor detail.

 

Heleen Pott’s speech on Fahrenheit 451 revisited, mentions the positive aspects of the digitization of books: books are bad for the environment, publishers are making books increasingly expensive, books are heavy, it takes time and effort to read a book (in comparison to reading the online summary or watching the movie). She mentions the book Fahrenheit 451 from Ray Bradbury and the fact that book burnings can be seen as a way to create new jobs and a sense of togetherness or belonging. Her plea goes out to start with putting Darwin’s Origin of species on the pyres.

 

 

René Boomkens lecture was entitled (in a rough translation) ‘The article as a smoldering clod of paper’. He sees a symbolic book burning taking place in academia were the sell out of the scholarly monograph is on the rise. Boomkens mentions the fact that never before so many books were bought and read. Even though for years critics of new media have feared the loss of reading abilities and even of the ability to think in a linear and logical way (because of the so-called fragmenting nature of the image culture), books are still going strong. The university does not endorse this development however, for it has started a symbolic book burning. Books no longer count as real output in the academic business. There is an increased pressure to produce more journal articles and books are no longer seen as relevant publications by many a university bureaucrat. An assassination of the book is taking place; the book is becoming a subversive item, a monograph writer a rebel who scorns academic output quota. Boomkens states that university magistrates have began to fear the book because of its costly time to produce, (let alone its time to be read) and its blasphemic ability to develop more than one thought during an argumentation. But this is what philosophers do; they write slow, complex, and time-consuming books. And in this way books offer a radically other epistemological approach than for instance the new media. The special merit of the book lies exactly in its complexity and layeredness. And as Boomkens concludes, this subversive medium that is the book should be heralded for this.

 

            A final note on Krisis’ business model as an Open Access journal. It seems they have partly embraced the Maecenas model. Next to a subsidy from the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds and some revenue from (hopefully) some future subsidizers and advertisements, they are hoping to gain some financial support from yes…, you! You can help them out by becoming a friend of Krisis (can’t find a link to that at the moment) and get updates and newsletters and the likes and maybe contribute with a little money to support their ‘fairly-paid editorial assistant and a professional copy editor’.

Donations are welcome here.

The Universal Library Revisited

For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.

 

First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus content of more than a 100 colleges that already had channels on YouTube has been brought together on one page. The obvious benefit of this aggregation is of course the increased search function this platform offers, where these university lectures were much harder to find in the popular mass (mess?) of the general YouTube site content.

 

In the directory you can find which universities participate. Strange enough these are almost exclusively US universities as far as I can see (and an Indian), where are Europe’s finest for example? What about incorporating Fora.tv, that also has a channel on YouTube? Or the European Graduate School (EGS) channel? Or authors@google? Of course we need to take into account that the platform only launched a few days ago, but let’s look at some features that could be improved or that still need to be thought over.

 

What about the possibility of searching by genre or subject? Sites like videolectures.net do offer this very convenient service. Another question concerning these kind of meta portals or aggregators of quality online video content, is what to include. It seems that YouTube EDU only includes content from universities. In an ideal situation, should we have a platform that distinguishes between university lectures (graduate and undergraduate?), lectures given at conferences and symposia, and lectures for the general public? Should we develop some sort of quality standards for online lectures or video content? For now the only quality criteria seem to be most viewed, most subscribed, latest addition or highest rated, all user generated quality measurements, next to the occasional editorial picks or favorites. Of course their is the brand name and reputation of the different universities and of the scholars given the lectures, but these for now seem to be the only filter functions, which to my feeling are still rather arbitrary.

 

But still, it is a step in the right direction and as far as YouTube EDU is concerned I am definitely watching the lecture underneath.

 

 

This feeling of randomness is also brought about by the growing amount of platforms for quality content. Via Techcrunch, I learned about Academic Earth, also newly launched, which collects content from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton, and thus also functions as an aggregation platform. Here you can search by subject, by instructor and by university, and it has a playlist section which features thematic collections of lectures selected by their editors. Another bonus point is that the interface lay out is very soothing and calm. As far as content is concerned, I do not want to be too morbid, but this 26 courses lecture series on Death (with short summaries of every lecture – very nice!) actually looks very interesting.

 

A final newly launched resource I would like to focus on is the World Digital Library (WDL), which will be launched on April the 21st by the UNESCO, Library of Congress and 32 partners. You can see the prototype here. From the project website:

 

“The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”

 

 

You can see a website demonstration here. Some additional information from the press release:

 

“The WDL will function in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and will include content in a great many other languages. Browse and search features will facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site. Descriptions of each item and videos with expert curators speaking about selected items will provide context for users, and are intended to spark curiosity and encourage both students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries.”

 

Next to a European library (Europeana), we now have the opportunity to find, search and explore the hidden treasures of digitized library and archive collections from cultural institutions from all over the world. What a wonder, what a great potential knowledge base! I for one am very curious about the site. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed they have a more fortunate launch than Europeana.

 

Einmal ist Keinmal

 Memory comes when memory’s old
I am never the first to know   

–        Fever Ray  –

Last Tuesday I attended the excellent lecture series The Old Brand New, in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The speakers that evening were the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Their talks were reflections on the evening’s topic, New Virtuosity, and on the overarching theme of the series, looking at the term new, in the light of the old and the relationship between the original and the representation. These problems of originality, of the absolute new and the idea of referentiality and remix are themes I have written about before. What I would like to do now, in this post, is to combine the thoughts that came forward during the lectures of these two artists, with some theories and concepts I have recounted recently, thinking about ideas of the static and the fluid, memory and modernity, ownership and collectivity, repetition and representation, actor and participant, reality and virtuality and virtuosity and geniality.

 

I would like to present a virtual conversation between the ideas and works of Tuymans and Charmatz, as developed and presented last Tuesday, and the thoughts of thinkers and writers as diverse as Paolo Virno, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, Guy Debord, Jacques Attali, Aleida Assmann and Margaret Atwood.

 

What interests me the most in this hypothetical discourse is what our relationship will or can be to the image, to the work of art, to information and knowledge and thus to content in a more general manner, in the present digital age. Taking into account our relationship towards these representations or constructs as narratives in language in our growing stance of/as prosumers (active participants) in an age in which the old and the new are constantly recontextualised in a flow of continual remix or refluctuation, forming a radical (virtual) potentiality posited towards the future, creating a sort of meta-referentiality in which the old and the new almost seem to fall or collapse into each other, or maybe don’t matter anymore… then all becomes movement, everything is stream.

 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to the beginning. The theme of last Tuesday’s gathering was New Virtuosity. From the flyer:

 

“Nowadays the concept of virtuosity has moved away from notions such as excellence and distinction and seems to have become synonymous with craftsmanship and mere technical prowess. What is the status and place of a notion as virtuosity in an epoch in which the borderline between mastery and ordinary ability has dramatically shifted?”

 

Luc Tuymans started his talk by stating that the concept of a New Virtuosity is grounded in ideas of timing and position. Virtuosity offers a more versatile understanding of reality using understatement. As he says, there seems to be a discrepancy between memory and oblivion. Thus, an image needs to be shown in all its layers. This kind of fragmentation can then be seen as a way of dealing with the larger context as a whole. The image has become an object of desire, it has become interchangeable and interactive.

 

As Tuymans goes on to talk about the meaning of the image, he touches on the aspect of remediality, of the appropriation of the image, or the concept and context of the image, in other media. His talk focused mainly on his new exhibition ‘Against the day’ in Brussels, and the paintings that will be exhibited there. Starting with Jan van Eyck, he shows how the painting has broken away from mere mimesis. Images have become constructions, as Tuymans also shows in the painting Map (2008) which has been completely created digitally, in a way becoming a non-existent entity. Tuymans sees in the repetition of images a further moving away from the mimetic; he creates huge site-specific wall paintings derived from his own paintings (Cathedral), making works that do no longer refer to reality as such but only to the image as a concept.

 

This connects strongly to the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, who, as Charles W. Haxthausen states in his article on Benjamin and Carl Einstein, argues that the aura of a work is located in the image, not in any unique physical object. For Walter Benjamin, the reproduction of a work of art, meaning to lift it from its constraints of tradition, is a way of renewing it, by offering it a new context, actualizing it in the present.

 

Tuymans also discusses the role of memory when it comes to interpreting a work of art. In a painting showing towering dust clouds, the observer is confronted with the remembrance of and imagery surrounding 9/11. The same applies to a painting depicting ballroom dancing, in which one can reminisce back to times of crisis. In this way, Tuyman remarks, observation of and interaction with a work of art can be seen as a regressive form of conservatism. The imagery (in its collective re-medialised re-membrance) itself gives the context, its form is simultaneously a veil and a projection, states Tuymans.

 

 

 

As Aleida Assmann shows in her article Transformations between history and memory. (Part I: What Does It Mean for a Community to Have a Memory?), memory increasingly comes to us through images and movies. It is the image that triggers a constructed collective memory:

 

“Participation in social memory is always varied because it is based on lived experience and linked to autobiographical memory, which is irreducibly specific in its position, perspective and experiential quality. The memory of the Holocaust, for instance, will vary vastly among survivors depending on the fact whether they endured the torments of the concentration camps, hid in secret places, or managed to escape into exile. For the second and third generation of the survivors, however, as well as for the members of other nations, this memory will become more and more homogeneous as it is reconstructed by historians and accessed through the shared representations of public narratives, images, and films.”

 

In this respect one could say that in Tuymans work, memory as a form of context shaping, determines the meaning we attribute to art: we see a repetition of the past in the creation of the new. As Haxthausen shows in his aforementioned article, in which he juxtaposes Benjamin and Einstein and tries to find their communalities, for Einstein this repetition gives an illusion of the immortality of things, where he feels that everything is truly in a constant flux. The question for Carl Einstein was basically how to break free from these constraints of the past to create something radically new, something which Rimbaud says faut être absolument moderne.

But for Benjamin reproduction strips away this veil (which reminds me of Nietzsche’s conception of art as a veil, art as a Dionysian illusion); Benjamin states reproduction frees art from the constraints of tradition and makes it remixable and malleable, it gives it movement. The new medium gives the viewer the chance to contextualize the art, to project his/her subjectivity on the art, to actualize it; the viewer makes it new.

 

 

A GOOD PAINTING IS NEVER FINISHED

 

Going back to the work of Luc Tuymans, the influence of the context of the past, in Einstein’s fashion, can be seen more clearly, as Tuymans shows, in the painting depicting Condoleezza Rice, which shows a vivid depiction of determinacy, but can also be seen as a representation of African American slavery and emancipation.

This contextualization of memory can be seen maybe most confrontingly in Tuymans painting Gas chamber. Now it is the title that gives the context, that triggers our memory of the past, more than the image an sich. Without the title we would just see an empty room. In a way, Tuyman says, this painting represents the irrepresentable and it shows how painting is really a conceptual form of art. Again, without the title, it would just be mimesis, a depiction of an empty room. Tuymans says it is a tricked space, disguised as a chamber. This shows again the polylevel of images (Tuymans calls this a sort of subdued virtuosity). A painting is not mobile, but is in its multi-layeredness confronted with mobility.

 

Benjamin concurs with this idea that when one releases the image of its aura through reproduction, the image becomes a mere concept, mirroring Tuymans idea of painting as a conceptual art, no longer mimetic. This concept, as Haxthausen states, is for Benjamin external to the work, it is waiting for actualization. Tuymans does exactly this, using either another medium (wall painting) or recontextualizing the image through language (adding a title).

 

 

In Wonderland the title gives a Disneyland reference. As Tuymans states, in this painting the utopic is instrumentalized. We are eluting content from fantasy, creating context out of virtuality. Tuymans also draws a parallel with another context: Hitler was a big Disney fan; he used to love to draw dwarfs. As Tuymans states, we have entered an imagery that consists of non existent (virtual) spaces. Reality is produced as raw material. Painting increasingly reflects an animated world without anima.

But the relationship with the past and the effect of memory can also be seen in the creation of a work: painting is custom, says Tuymans; it is a style, it is a remembrance of ones own style, but it is also a movement: nothing is completely still, style knows a development too. In painting one can see an element of deconstruction of the image, one refers to the past and memorizes/internalizes history in ones style.

The spectator or viewer eventually terminates the image (in numerous ways): this has the ultimate consequence that “a good painting is never finished”, according to Tuymans.

 

Tuymans plays with the difference between the power of the image and the influence of the spectator, in a way playing with the same tension Haxthausen distinguishes between Benjamin en Einstein, but he, like Benjamin, does let the consumer play a crucial role when stating that the work of art is never finished, the view of the spectator and the loss of the aura of the image through reproduction make for this combination of the static and the flux. I think that this duality between Einstein and Benjamin, as Haxthausen has brought forward, can be seen in Tuymans work, where he plays with the notion that on the one hand the image carries inside itself the context of the (image of) past and our recollection of that past and in this way works in a very deterministic, conservative, inescapable way. It is the context of the tradition of the image, of the memory, of the original context and meaning of the image that is bestowed back on us, this subjectivity of the image itself. This resists actualization and recontextualization. This is what Tuymans plays with in his work, this relationship between voluntary constructed memory and recontextualisation and the image that comes up in front of our eyes involuntary (Hitler/gas chamber/ the desire of the image).

 

 

But on the other hand, Tuymans also is very much aware of how the technological possibilities now give us the opportunity to distill the image from its tradition and to use it in our creation of a new reality/imagery, a new constructed memory and the role the medium and the viewer play in this. For Einstein (the forms of) art/the image are active, they shape our views and memories, our world and our society. For Benjamin the focus lies more on how we determine art, how we give it meaning and context through our remembrance and remedialisation, we make art/the image passive and never ending through our context giving.

 

Tuymans also mentions Robert Barry, an artist who creates non-material works of art. Tuymans talks about art as a vide (plural emptiness), quoting Barry who states an empty space = a room where you are free to think what you are going to do. A work of art can then be thought of as an empty space, where it becomes a field of potential action and of potential thought.

 

In a sense culture has thus turned towards a representation of the unrepresentable: of the concept, of imageries, of memories and the constructs we create around them. Where, as Benjamin states, the technology of reproduction detached the object from the domains of its tradition, it detached it from its uniqueness, making it also into an object that can be construed in different contexts.

 

THE BODY AS A MUSEUM, THE MUSEUM AS A BODY

 

Boris Charmatz wants to create a museum for modern dance, a Musée de danse contemporaine. In his book Entretenir – À propos d’une danse contemporaine, cowritten with Isabelle Launay, he speaks of dancing as a form of entretenir: as a form of upkeep, keeping up the conversation with the past. Dance can be seen as a reenactment, the performance as a reconstruction: you perform the dance again and again, whilst at the same time holding an immediate view on history. Charmatz describes the struggle between the new and the old in dance as a tension between renewal and remembrance. In the 80’s being modern was an absolute must: artists needed to make their own brand. Reproduction was a taboo; you needed to create your own style. In the 90’s this changed, says Charmatz: making something new did no longer seem to be the best way forward. There was a strong tendency to consider ones own culture.

Charmatz describes how in dance there are basically two options: one reenacts a dance, so one performs the same dance time and again over history using new dancers, or one can create a new work or production. Create something new or reflect on the old.

 

Charmatz tried to reflect on this theme of the old and the new in his work on jeunesse, in which he tried to create a tension in movements between the virtuosity of the young body and the growing distance to that when growing older. The dance then becomes a description of time, we are looking back and are reenacting time within our body, as he states, reconfiguring and reenacting the past.

 

Charmatz also plays with memory, with bodily memory and the memory of sensations. With Odile Duboc he created a dance in which he, as he says, dived deep into a memory of sensations, an improvised memory that is, making the body work with different materials (wood, stone) and surfaces, and then taking these things away. The newness of this lies in the connection of the things we experienced (in the past) with our memories of them in the present.

 

Another way of confronting the past is to work on what you still do not know but can re-member. Charmatz mentions an exercise in which he was asked to improvise Nijinsky’s dance Afternoon of a faun. Charmatz explains how this requires you to make an archeology on yourself, a need to scan your memory (things came back slowly he said and formed a memory context/construct: Mallarmé, Debussy, faun, nymph, myth, obscenity, animality). In this way he states that the improvisation became a performance of things we didn’t know beforehand, but could reconstruct.

 

This (re)working of memory and remembrance is also a theme that plays an important role in the work of Benjamin, as Haxthausen shows. When it comes to the aura of a work, Benjamin (building on Proust) distinguishes between two kinds of memory:

-         Involuntary: spontaneous memories, like in Tuymans work depicting dust clouds; involuntary passive association and memory, remembrance.

-         Conscious, willed acts of remembrance; constructed memory: like Charmatz’ dance of Nijinsky or his improvised dance based on material remembrance.

 

The first kind is what Benjamin then sees as aura. But as Tuymans also shows in his work, aura lies not in the reproduction or the medium, but in the image itself, in our memory connected to a specific image. But also in language (the title Gas chamber).

 

Aleida Assmann also states, like Benjamin and Proust, that memory “takes into account the ambivalence of the past both as a conscious choice and as an unconscious burden, tracking the voluntary and involuntary paths of memory.” 

Assmann discusses Susan Sontag who states there is no such thing as collective memory; all memory is individual. She states that experiential memories are embodied and thus personal and non-transferable. We can see this in Charmatz’ work in which the memory of the body plays an important role, indeed necessarily individual and non-reproducible and shaped by its own specific context and history. As Assmann states, however, Sontag forgets that individual memory has two important dimensions that transcend this individuality, namely our interaction with others and our interaction with external signs and symbols. We cannot transfer our embodied memories but we can share them, she states. This is done by the means of language or representation in an image, through which the individual’s memories become part of a collective.

 

Assmann quotes Margaret Atwood who stresses that collective national memory is always designed for a purpose and specific use:

 

“The past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those who are alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it.”

 

Thus, with the remixing of images that constitute the memories of individuals of the past we construct our own new memories and contexts.

 

As Charmatz states, history can thus be taken quite literally as a way to produce new works; this wide approach in dance to history in the 90’s can be seen as an approach to make new works about our own fantasies of history, based on our own preconceptions as viewers and producers. In this way we can reconsider/reframe/reproduce history. Charmatz identifies many frontiers between the old and the new; fixation and movement, patrimonium and creation, visual art and the life arts… In his Musée de danse contemporaine, he wants to create a space that talks about these divisions between the fixed/static and movement, to create a new platform for dance.

It would be a musée précaire. For Charmatz such a museum is not only a fixed frame but it could be something in which you engage yourself to create a/the museum. The museum is a space that opens up what an (idea of) a museum is. It will be an experimental project to think about an utopian/new space for the dance. It could consist of objects/pieces/movements and is no longer fixed to a certain medium. Conceptual art, literature, digital art could all be a complete part of it without excluding each other.

In this museum, Charmatz envisions that the divisions between producer and consumer would disappear. He wonders how the museum could facilitate that the dance be enacted or performed by the participants/visitors themselves. The people inside should also produce the art that is inside in a collaborative effort. As Charmatz explains, this is a way to think movement: movements of the museum itself, movements of the visitors, movements of the dance. The museum becomes a mental space, a taxonomy of potentiality.  

 

 

Benjamin also involves the viewer in his theory of art: he/she plays an important role in the perception of the image: the perspective of the viewer changes over time and thus the personal memory. In different times an image of clouds conjures up different remembrances (see Tuymans).

With a change in perspective in the modern image reproducing age, the consumer becomes a participant in the art. He/she finishes (or never finishes, Tuymans) the work of art. By incorporating the role of the viewer into the work of art, making him/her an integral part of its concept, we create a work that is never finished, that is fluid, flexible and reinterpretable, without a static meaning.

 

In Charmatz’ thinking about dance as a concept, a potential space, the lines between producer and consumer seem to shift. Jacques Attali displays a similar view on music in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music. From the outline of his book by Theodore Gracyk:

 

“This new activity is NOT undertaken for its exchange or use value. It is undertaken solely for the pleasure of the person who does it (its “producer”). Such activity involves a radical rejection of the specialized roles (composer, performer, audience) that dominated all previous music. The activity is entirely localized, made by a small community for that community. There is no clear distinction between consumption and production.”

 

Charmatz summarizes that his museum would necessarily encompass three kinds of spaces: the mental space, as described above; the architectural space (nomadic), stating the physical present; and the body space. The first museum in dance is your own body: the site where you remember the movements you learned. The body becomes the main space of the museum: it encompasses contexts of education, history, the social, gender and most importantly, the (potential) of movements. Body as a site of work.

Body as potential of activity.

Reinvent.

Rethink.

 

VIRTUOSITY COMMODIFIED

 

Charmatz went on to discuss virtuosity, the ability to do movements, in which they become virtues or daily movements, referring to the work of Paolo Virno. He states that new virtuosity is centered, or should be centered, not on the things you are able to do but on the broader potential of action you have, the potential rethinking of history, of opening up your body, of thinking about movements rather than performing them. Virtuosity also entails a breaking free of these skills, to enlarge your own potentiality. You can only become free whilst (re)considering your own skills.

 

Paolo Virno develops some very interesting thoughts in his book A Grammar of the multitude. For an analysis of contemporary forms of life, on performance, virtuosity, repetition and the culture industry. He states that a performance is an activity that finds its own fulfillment in itself. It does not objectify itself into an end product. He also states that the performance requires the presence of others: the performance only exists in the presence of an audience. Interestingly enough this seems to blur the lines between for instance dance and painting, as seen through the eyes of Tuymans and Charmatz, where both artists state that their works depend on the viewers, on the consumers, who ensure through their participation, their view, their gaze, their interpretation, that the image/dance is never finished. In this sense the difference between live art and visual art, between painting and dance, is no longer a difference as such.

They too would probably agree that art and knowledge, being never finished through the interaction with others, cannot be objectified. Virno, however, states that as a result of the post-Fordist culture industry this objectification into a product has occurred and this is where the problem with the exploitation of static works of art and knowledge (through for instance copyright) lies, where this objectification seems to go against the whole conceptual principles and underlying values of culture, art and knowledge, at least if we follow the definitions we are talking about here.

 

Virno states that when the performance is recorded, when it is fixed, it is no longer virtuosity, it is potentiality objectified and thus the end of movement. Using a Marxist perspective, Virno argues how intellectual labor is objectified in the culture industry. But intellectual labor is a product without an end product:

 

“The second type of intellectual labor (activities in which “product is not separable from the act of producing”) includes, according to Marx, all those whose labor turns into a virtuosic performance: pianists, butlers, dancers, teachers, orators, medical doctors, priests, etc.”

 

Virno sees verbal language as the ultimate potential virtuosity,  since it doesn’t have a necessary end-product. He refers to the Frankfurt School, where the stream of thought was that capitalism has serialized and apprehended the spiritual production. Virno also refers to Guy Debord, who states that “spectacle” is human communication which has become a commodity. Debord says that the spectacle enables communication through verbal language. With the commodification of human communication and the growing importance of human communication in all sectors of our daily life, this has become a concern. But the problem again lies, says Virno referring to Debord, with the fact that communication is a potentiality; it knows no end product:

 

“Unlike money, which measures the result of a productive process, one which has been concluded, spectacle concerns, instead, the productive process in fieri, in its unfolding, in its potential. The spectacle, according to Debord, reveals what women and men can do.”

Jacques Attali shows likewise in Noise how commodification (first the labor of creation (composition) is assigned monetary value, then so is interpretation (performance), normalizes, harmonizes music, making it in a way static and stripping it of its potentiality:

 

“The use-value of spectacle involves parallel developments of music. As music develops as a commodity and as harmonic developments display rational progress, music makes us believe in social cohesion. In short, “representation leads to exchange and harmony.”

 

But it seems that in the digital age art, culture and knowledge increasingly have the potential, by means of the possibilities offered by the online environment, to be freed from this static objectification, this fixation in a solid shape, which the commodity necessarily needed to be in order to sell/make a profit. Where Virno states that repetition of the image has turned it into a commodity, in the digital age the ease of repetition and its representation in multiple remixes en recontextualisations, actually might offer a de-commodification of the cultural object. Repetition does no longer need to entail static objects.

In remix representation is no longer representation/mimicry of the world of the social system, but representation of repetition, creation as reflection upon the past, and in this sense creation of the new. The boundaries between representation (actor/active/new) and repetition (mechanical/commodity/static/passive) seem to disappear in the digital age.

Just as Charmatz states that art and literature and music have all become part of the museum of dance, so conceptual art, not only as thinking, but also in its material form, in its interaction with memory, its connecting of the creator and the participant in the act of thinking about potential creation, has also become a part of the philosophical and theoretical discourse. In this way everything has become remix and fluidity, referentiality on thoughts and things together. The world of (virtual) things and the world of thoughts are coming closer.

Highlights from APM – Day 2

The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.

 

The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.

Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.

In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.

 

Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:

 

1. Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
2. Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
3. International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.

 

Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of  at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.

These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.

Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.

 

The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.

 

Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.

 

Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.

De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:

 

 

 

-         University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.

-         University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.

-         University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.

-         University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

 

University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.

 

In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.

When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.

SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi  publishing agency.

Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.

 

 

Highlights from APM – Day 1

 

Last week, on the 19^th and 20^th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in scholarly communication, where the scholars, publishers, policy makers, middlemen and librarians all have their separate gatherings and meetings. APE and APM are independent and international conferences about all aspects of academic publishing, to foster knowledge exchange and dialogue between the different stakeholders in scholarly communication. The APM, held in Florence, specifically focused on the diversities and particularities of the Mediterranean region with its many languages and its focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and monographs. Culture, tradition, books and manuscripts are still very important in the Mediterranean region, as the opening speaker Augusto Marinelli (the rector of the University of Florence) remarks. However, electronic experiments and digitization projects are also inceasingly undertaken. These innovations are however taking place in the context of the current financial crisis, which is hitting hard on the Italian publishing and library industry, says Mauro Guerrini, from the Italian Library Association (AIB – Associazione Italiana Biblioteche). He states that where in a knowledge economy knowledge is the key to innovation and development, decreasing (library) resources and cutbacks in science and scholarly communication might be detrimental to the overall economic development.

 

One of the possible solutions to this impasse might lie in what Maria Cristina Pedicchio (President of the Technology District in Molecular Medicine and Professor of Algebra at the University of Trieste) calls private-public partnerships in research. Referring to the knowledge triangle from the Lisbon Strategy; research, education and innovation should lead to growth and jobs, as was the expected scenario. Public private partnerships could be a powerful tool for innovation in this respect. When knowledge and research are the key issues for economic and social development and governements do not invest in them, they will fall even further. We need to invest in research and human capital in order to stay competitive says Pedicchio. Part of the EU strategy is focused on clusterpolicies to develop innovative clusters. But there is no single model, we need different clusters operating in different models. The specific local aspects also play a large role. Pedicchio says that in order to obtain open innovation, we need open clusters. Innovation can only be created in visible dynamic environments, not in isolated organisations. For this to come about we need the support of the triple helix: academic research, private sectors and public administrations. Innovation depends on the interaction between strong academic research (universities), dynamic entrepreneurship and the availability of risk capital (private sector) as well as public administration.

 

Pedicchio goes on to discuss different kinds of cluster experiments in various European countries. From these experiments she concludes we need a multidisciplinary cultural approach. Pedicchio shows that these kind of collaborations can lead to the development of cultural open spaces which can foster and enhance research and innovation and can attract human resources, companies and financing.

 

The prerequisites for these kind of open collaborations, says Pedicchio, are the possibility of international and intersectional mobility, the availabilty of knowledge by means of open access policies for the dissemination of science and frontier knowledge, the investment in young people, and the dissemination of knowledge to society at large. We need to make national clusters but at the same time we need to try to integrate them. National policies need to be involved in this process, as locality is a physical request for clusters; they need to be local, physically based adhering to regional policies. This means a constant changing and adaption between European policies and national policies.

 

 The second keynote, delivered by Andrea Bozzi (Director of the Institute for Computational Linguistics) focused on the scholarly editing of old manuscripts in digital library collections by means of computational tools. Bozzi explained the connection between computer science and the tradition of text transmission, focussing especially on texts that are transmitted by manuscripts. As Bozzi explained, we can now make a model for digital philology, developing integrated tools for scholarly editing. This can lead to a new kind of historical publication which can be enriched and which adds new value to the publication which hitherto has been static. Bozzi asked what the dimension of these integrated tools can be for a new kind of library and its users. He mentioned several digital tools for scholarly editing, such as an integrated open source environment for images and/or texts, image enhancement (within this environment), text indexing and concordance (by means of free web services), collaborative textual criticism, stemmatology and NLP tools (lemmatization, morphological analysis, treebank construction, comparison, meaning extraction, etc.). These are all new tools for studying manuscript archives in a collaborative way. They need to be combined with scholarly editing criteria. An example of a digital annotation tool is the Pinakes Text-architecture, which is a web based relational database application (Pinakes was the first library catalogue system, developed in the Library of Alexandria by the Greek poet Callimachus of Cyrene). From the website:

“Pinakes is a non-commercial tool the aim of which is to offer a renewed historiographic approach to the classification of the scientific heritage. Thanks to the integration of different types of objects, such as instruments, manuscripts, texts, iconography a.o., Pinakes aims at transforming the traditional approach to the primary sources of the history of science into a sort of archeology of scientific knowledge.”

 

As Bozzi stated, it is a highly flexible system and can find its application in for example Greek papyrology, egyptology, Roman philology and general philology. It can also be applied to different languages and documents. As an example of what Pinakes can do as a tool for the textual criticism of Medieval manuscripts, Bozzi showed how it can for example link to collated sources. In this way one can make an analysis of the variants in the collated source. Differences and variants can be retrieved in the critical apparatus, which is a very important aspect of historical linguistics. Framing tools can remember the encoding and record the variants in the critical apparatus: in this way you have enriched the text by using these specific tools. This technique could also be applied to old print books says Bozzi, where one could find different editions and detect the differences between them.

 

 

In the future Bozzi wants to focus on the integration with other NLP tools and on the application of the system to cuneiform texts on tablets. Most importantly he wants to develop a way to export the edited texts, critical apparatuses, annotations and indexes, to a print publication under agreement with publising houses via POD.

Pinakles can become a specialized scholarly editing tool and an integrated web-based platform within the electronic publishing roadmap of Interedition (an interoperable, supranational infrastructure for digital editions). Bozzi reflected on what the role of libraries can be in building this infrastructure and which role publishers could play. For one, libraries also need to receive tools to offer them to their users. In this respect Bozzi argued that it is very important that we have standards for these kind of research infrastrucutres, also for primary sources.

The ultimate goal should be a digital infrastructure for the Humanities: we need to enrich the European research by cooperation and in this respect the setting of standards is fundamental, as Bozzi concludes.

 

 From the afternoon session on the Mediterranean region and its diversities I would like to focus on Andrea Angiolini’s (Società editrice il Mulino, Italy) lecture on The Darwin Project, a publishing infrastructure and working space for monographs & textbooks. As Angiolini argues, the differences between HSS and STM are fading out. This means new challenges for the publisher and new needs for our scholars and students. Angiolini clarifies that Mulino is a very traditional publisher, who believes that physical books are still the best thing to publish especially when it comes to reading them. In this respect Mulino is quite slow in the whole digital process. As Angiolini says, they would like to stay in between scholars, librarians and the market. However, something is gradually changing in Italy, both in the university and in the market. HSS research is increasingly moving from monographs to both monographs and journals and from a generalist approach to a more specialized one. There is also a visible shift from Italian to mixed language communication and from a less formal career and texts evaluation process to a more formalized one.

As the bookstores are buying less and acquisition budgets for libraries are decreasing, the break-even point for publishers is moving further away. This, combined with a research style that is increasingly being conducted online, has led Mulino, in order to stay effective (to reach a public, to service the scholar and the market) to move to the online domain and develop the Darwin (Digital Archive for Web Integrated Networks) project. Darwin is an integrated system for the online publication of digital editions. It can be seen as an infrastructure aimed at adding value to printed books. In this resepect Angiolini says it wants to meet the needs and demands of the users, based on standards.

 

Within the Darwin project, monographs will be published both in print and in digital editions. Abstracts and DOI will be added at the chapter level and all the books will be fully quotable. New is that texts are based on docbook and not on PDF, where docbook is a better format for searchability etc. It is a richer format that can do anything the paper can. Some more functions include opening and collapsing comments within the text. You can also interact with the text and annotate it and make the note public or private. You can search different parts of the publication and highlight certain parts (semantic search). In this respect Angiolini argues that Darwin is not only designed for reading and searching but also for studying and collaborating while doing research.You can make it into a workspace, with public or private note taking and public or private bookmarks. The project will be online in autumn 2009.

 

It will be an open project claims Angiolini, adoptable to different texts and formats, and different access models (though it will be based on and start off as a subscription model). As Angiolini states, if we want to publish research and be effective at the same time, we must take a mixed way, otherwise soon monographs will no longer exist. We are moving from contents to contents plus editorial services. This produces a new publishers profile.This change is almost mandatory if publishers want to be part of the solution and not of the problem in the digital age.

After Angiolini’s lecture a remark was made from the public, whether Angiolini thinks people would annotate (on) a propriatory platform? How to combine Darwin with other platforms and will Darwin be compatible with other publishers websites and will it let scholars mix their notes? Wouldn’t users rather use Zotero, or other browser based environments? Angiolini replied by stating that Darwin is still an experiment and that he does not know how scholars will exactly go about and use it.

 

Highlights from day 2 of APM will follow soon.