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One of the most interesting sessions on the last day of The Unbound Book conference, was the session on Future Publishing Industries. According to the program the session focused on the affordances and political economies of the publishing industry and libraries. Underneath a small summary of three of the papers presented on the panel and of the discussion afterwards.
James Bridle is a London-based publisher and an all-round creative person, who is involved in all kinds of book-shaped experiments. He finds himself in between and on the border of books, technologies of social reading, and literature. He, amongst others, devised the first book of Twitter, where he printed out his tweets in the form of a book. Bridle begins his talk by stating that there is a certain weight of expectation that people have concerning the physicality of the book. The physicality is what reveals the weight and cultural value given by people to a material object. What is it exactly that is so important about books, Bridle asks. Books exist in time. They exist through time. They are advertisements for themselves; you are immersed within the space of the reading process itself. You spend time with books and go on journeys. In this way books become the souvenir of their own experience. They are both a gift and the locus of more conversations around the book. The problem is, Bridle explains, that we have mistaken the temporality of the book for the physicality of the book. What we really care about is not about how books smell or feel in our hands. Ebooks create a cognitive difference because they don’t give the temporal qualities of the book: they are transient, they go away, and there is no way to enact temporal activities within them. This is starting to change though. Underlining, dog-earring, seeing your process as you go through the book; these instances of knowing where you are and of feeling that you are inside a book, in the space of a book, are being recreated online.
An important aspect of interaction with a book, Bridle states, is through making notes. Through note making we are in many ways doing something far more interesting with books. And we are encouraging people to have these interesting behaviors. However there are also weird behaviors around the book that we don’t talk about. For instance book guilt and the obsession of having to finish a book. Book fear, when you are unable to write in a book or book-ear. This is something that we can change however, Bridle states. We can now encode the totality of the reading experience. We can capture and engage with an archive. This is social reading, Bridle explains, something that provides a lasting and shareable experience. You can either keep them for yourself or share your thoughts. Bridle set up Open Bookmarks, to encourage certain behaviors, and to encourage best practices. Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers, according to Bridle, this is the direction publishing will be going into. Music wants to be recorded and almost all music is recorded. This is starting to happen with books too: books are subliming; they are going up in the air. But we need to keep our experiences intact and this is what publishers need to be involved in. Because this is where literature is going, and this is where the reader’s experience is going.
Nicholas Spice is the publisher of the London Review of Books, a literary magazine, tabloid, with an improved newsprint which appears twice a month. It has about 100.000 readers worldwide. They publish long-form essays on books and what comes out of these books. Spice explains how digital publishing has changed things much for the LRB, it for instance drastically changed the economics of distribution. The traditional distribution chain has been very inefficient, Spice explains. For literary books/magazines it has always been very hard to create readerships, as adverts and reviews are very hard to arrange. Bookselling is a very inefficient way of getting books to the public. High quality literature in the 1980s still had the same reach as it had in the 18th century. The old system was thus immensely inefficient. The change, according to Spice, has to do with the fact that at the LRB they don’t have to print and distribute anymore in order to reach the audience. People come to find them and find them naturally through search engines (instead of they finding them). The content sells itself; it has become an advert for itself. Also the form has hanged. Online the form has disaggregated; people don’t have to read the whole magazine anymore. This has changed the way people engage with the magazine. The output produced by the LRB has become both more and less ephemeral. Everything has now come to the surface; the whole history of the LRB is now online. The average time spend on the website is two minutes and that is quite good. But it is two hours on average with the physical form. The question is, can the LRB survive and flourish in this way? We are attracting very many new readers, Spice states. But the nature of the things and the mode of engagement with the reader have changed. New forms of creativity and literary production are coming up. One of them is the handling of critique and evaluation by the reader, instead of by critics themselves. Will the LRB be welcomed in this world in the long term? The difficulty is that it is an exclusive medium, not an inclusive one. It is the magazine to be in because it knows what to keep out. Editors and staff are sifting out everything. Complexity, difficulty, and things that take time and rarely succeed: that is the LRB. And it takes time: the editing, the writing, and the reading. Even the letters to the editors are heavily edited.
The LRB is very continuous with the main trust of intellectual endeavor since the start of civilization. It has taken years of practice to create objects of intense complexity and interest to the people who want these. Spice does not want to defend this tradition, but this has been what our civilization has been about: the philosophy of the book as being of supreme importance to us. We overestimate, romanticize, and fetishize certain things: the openness of form over completed things, fragmentation over linearity, the draft over what is finished, the spontaneous over what is considered. You can already find these tendencies back in the romantic age: the overvaluation of the social over the solitude. There is a fetishization of real-time over artificial time, Spice states. What happens spontaneously is supposed to be better than long form and contemplation. Is that adding value to the thing itself, Spice asks? Do these things add value to the text, the richness of the text? Is the real conflation to be found between information and the information chain and what we do with that information? What we make out of it to create value is necessarily slow. And the LRB is inherently dedicated to that tradition. Two main questions remain for Spice: can the LRB survive in that world? And, will this new environment be capable of breaking down the tradition of creating works against real-time?
Simon Worthington is one of the founders of Mute, which he started up 17 years ago together with Pauline van Mourik Broekman. Mute is published as a magazine (biannually). As Worthington states, they have always been experimenters in their long history of publishing. Worthington describes the present situation in the publishing world as a slow motion train rack. All these massively disruptive things are going on: the competition market, capitalism, the supposed long-tail and the long-tail of labor… Because of this situation, Mute has always been changing their publishing models. They are both a journal and a critical group in that area, always with a small public and in that sense always in a crisis. Mute started up with the web, in 1994. Their approach has always been free to share; they put all their stuff up online to support interaction with their readers. Their model is based on subscriptions and/or on buying print objects. In 2005 they moved into POD. This was an important change for the value chain and for how things move along, the quality of POD has improved and if needed they print in small runs and they can print internationally, without shipping costs, made possible by companies like Lightning Source.
They also work as a technologist group, making tools. At the moment for instance they are working on a project on e-conversion systems. They have been working in the open source community for a very long time. Their main problem has always been how to sustain a project. They have been trying to find ways to recompense themselves. POD did help a bit with distribution and costs in this respect, Worthington claims. If you have a commitment to free and open, the people at Mute look upon epublishing as the way to go. Looking at the tools that are there however, they decided that they do not all fit to their purposes, so they decided to make their own tools.
Worthington goes on to reflect upon the perceived anxiety about technology and its disruptivity on reading and on the fear of losing the book. He thinks this is a misplaced anxiety. These anxieties are better seen as the effects of global capitalism: that is why bookshops are closing. The return on profit is not high enough within retailing. The larger publishing industry has been a succession of buy-outs towards the creation of a global supply chain. Only the last few years ebooks have become a real thing. What is the trend now? It is a global supply chain. These kinds of pressures have been destroying the small bookshops and independent publishing.
Mute is a small publication, via ebooks and html5 they create things the reader wants to buy. But according to Worthington the future will be controlled by the Apples and Amazons of this world. It will be a vertical model, a capitalist control market. The securing of that market and the holding on to walled gardens is another example of the train-rack. In this situation you don’t know who your customers are anymore and they charge you 30% for controlling the market. These forces are much stronger than the changes in our reading habits etc.
Coming back to smaller publications, Worthington asks how they can be run. They are all nodes in a network of critical and cultural writers. The Eurozine conference reflected on the same issues, how to create a relationship with your audience that isn’t just about reading but about creating something like sustainability. This is very hard to do in a situation where in the UK the top ten publishers control 70% of the market. Donations and things like flat rates wont work they just don’t have the reach. Flat rates and state taxation will never happen and the market does not really welcome smaller publications. It is a hard nut to crack. For Mute, Worthington concludes, at the moment it is the combination of ebooks, html5 presentations and experiments with social reading that do it. But the situation stays precarious.
Questions
How will we be able to sustain the educational and quality aspect of publishing with so much trash and information around?
Simon: The web is dominated by brands. In that way the web mirrors the world we live in very closely. If that is publishing it seems to continue online
Nicholas: Cultural leaders will decide what is quality together. A large circulation of the LRB is always bums on seats and the internet makes that process more intensive.
James: We are going towards an editorship of crowds. Not that we are moving away from experts, but books have always been about recommendations to your friends and now they are just moving to the web. Access and filtering is something publishers have always done and it will increase this role online.
Simon: We need the disruption of the web: why does the meme exist? you need to break these things apart. In the UK the fixed book price disappeared and this has made the book industry and the retail industry collapse with the rise if the amazons etc. Localized variety will be destroyed by global apps and amazons.
How can we promote a culture of solitude? How do you envision that, what could be a next step?
Nicholas: We shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating two sorts of benefit and value. One of the best things of new media is the way it has facilitated contact between people, not only in virtual space but also in physical space, for instance with the LRB bookshop. This was impossible in the old system; you could not reach the people economically. But this is a benefit that has to do with social organization; it has nothing to do with the content and the value of the content and the things that are discussed. I think here solitude is very important. People can write books together but obviously they don’t do it. You cannot produce interesting thoughts quickly; you need to think them out. More than simple blogosphere blatter, we are talking about solitude and time. The evidence is not very strong that the content and value of what is being said is very high.
James: There is a huge conflation here with the social aspect. A blog doesn’t involve comments explicitly. Like everything it can be written solitary too, it is a tool. In the way we build these tools, it is very important to look at the way we use them. Open Bookmarks was also designed to read solitary. I want to see a shift in our emphasis on what these technologies can do to the reader. We can use these tools to create new experiences, almost all on the reader’s side. They can be valuable for them on the solitary side though; we should not force the social in them.
Bob Stein: These are all beautiful statements on all of the best things of print culture (akin to Sven Birkert). I don’t want to fight against that and I don’t design things that force people in a certain direction. It is however another thing altogether to want to figure out what the affordances of these new technologies are all about. For me the age of the individual is coming to an end, the way we are judged etc like this. Will these technologies lead to new societies? I want tot put it in the context of how deep the shift will be from print culture to digital culture
Nicholas: I think it would be wonderful that the individual would be less important, but I am more of a pessimist. I don’t see factual evidence of that changing and of the evidence of technology on changing people that much.
Simon: We need to look at the context of the whole media spectrum: it is about different ideas being in circulation. These experiments need to be run. You want to see what happens when more people write and explore ideas.
The ghost of the author is all around you. Shouldn’t we be cautious of sucking authors into the entertainment industry?
Nicholas: Authors are already part of an entertainment industry. The interesting thing is how the egos of authors will deal with the dispersion of their reputation. As Freud said, we write because of fame, money, and the love of women. The question is, how to get your thrills in the digital age?
James: Authors as performers is something that is not comfortable for me. Yes they have always doing this to some extent. I think we should provide authors with tools that support them. Writing is not such a solitary attitude; authors exist as parts of much larger networks and discussions. The world is what I am writing about so I am in the world when I am writing about it. The writer is also of the network. We are building these huge dichotomies of the web as social and the offline world as non-social and this is not helpful.
We have been discussing the social mob and the solitary individual. But what about the small team or group? If you take out the global industries, what the world looks like is small bands of groups of experts (publishers etc.) and small groups or experts of creators. They are still constrained groups, but not as large as society as large. There are expert bands on the one hand and technology bands on the other. Can we ask ourselves, can there be a way in the future for small expert groups to benefit from small groups of technologists? Blogging experts might also learn something from traditional experts. Can we combine expertise of all sorts on the one hand, and the social networked public knowledge on the other hand?
Simon: Small pockets and groups and the way they connect is very traditional and very physical sometimes. New tools need to be made, and some new kinds of practices need to come in place to let these groups know about each other.
Geert Lovink: We need to disassociate the book from the romanticized solitary author.
Two weeks ago I attended the Book Destruction conference, which took place on the 16th of April at the Institute of English Studies, part of the University of London. The conference focused on the book as a symbol and as an idea, as well as on its material form, and explored what happens when books are not treated with reverence but with violence or disregard. Subjects discussed were the burning and obliterating of books; cutting and tearing; recycling and remaking; and digitizing and archiving books. Underneath you can find a short summary of my notes on what I deemed the most interesting papers.
Corinna Norrick looked in her paper at book destruction with a political background, more specifically at political children’s book publishing. The 1968 German student protests amongst others focused on a criticism of the educational system. Publishing house Rororo Rotfuchs started publishing a non-authoritarian democratic children’s books series, which aimed at demystifying the ‘good children’s book. Not only did they explore new types of content, but also new formats and new channels of distribution. Norrick shows how the toy or activity books published by Rotfuchs challenged the typical function of books: playfulness and creativity became the main aspects. Children were encouraged to cut up the books, for instance to create clothing for dolls or set up pop-up houses. Destroying books in this way served as a stimulus for the child’s creativity.
Adam Smyth from Birkbeck zoomed in on a specific kind of renaissance remix practice in his paper on cutting up bibles at Little Gidding. Smyth showed several examples of mechanical marginalia, namely scissors that left oxidation traces in folios. What were these destructive instruments doing inside books? Scissors were most likely owned by binders, but we must not forget, according to Smyth, that the act of reading in the Renaissance was often accompanied by the cutting up of books, with both scissor and knives, to create scrapbooks or commonplace books. Cutout pages were again glued in to create new books. Smyth shows how in this way reading and writing was accompanied by a third act: cutting. He explores this act of making books by cutting up books in the Renaissance by looking at the Bibles or harmonies of Little Gidding, which can be seen as radical interventions in the history of the book. Nicholas Ferrar, head of an Anglican religious community, which resided in Little Gidding, and his family created concordances or harmonies by cutting-up bibles. The intention of the bible cut-ups was to ‘harmonize’ the text. The Little Gidding’s harmonies can also be seen as early forms of collage were images were also cut-up and reworked into the narrative, adding pictorial enhancements to the textual re-shuffling. Interesting enough, Smyth explains, it was not the cutting up of texts that was challenging but exactly the use of images, where in 1630 these were seen as akin to Catholicism. This cutting out of pictures, dismantling and reordering them, can be seen as a form of iconoclasm. Boxes of images were kept and also parts of images were used. Interesting enough the actual cutting and pasting was done by Ferrar’s nieces. The effect of the harmonies as a whole is the tension between a striving for completeness vs. the cutting and pulling apart that is part of the collating. The creativity of
these harmonies rests on the prior act of cutting parts. Smyth shows how these harmonies are a good example of the illusion of the fixity of print. He sees this development as a response to the printing press: the scrapbooks turned the printed books back into unique pieces. As Smyth explains, there is a lot of novelty and technical sophistication in these harmony productions but they also catch a lot of unease in early readers of these books, who took them to be printed in the ordinary way. The finished book was thus not yet the iconic thing it is today; it was not yet a fully established idea. Cutting up bibles was not a regressive act, only the use of images was seen as controversial. Cutting up the text could also have served as a memory device perhaps, to aid the learning off the text, becoming more familiar with it. Smyth ends by noting how the idea of authorship is very interesting in these works where Ferrar’s nieces did the actual cutting up. So if we talk about authorship we can state that the Little Gidding texts have been reworked by many hands.
Nicola Dale - Cuckoo Song (2004)
Several book artists discussed their work during the conference. Book artist Ross Birrell’s video ‘Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’, in which he cuts in half and grates books on Duchamp, literally framed the conference as they were placed in angles behind the speakers. Birrell discussed several of his works focusing on book destruction. Amongst others he burned the complete works of Kafka, to reflect on the question whether burning Kafka is fairer to Kafka’s original wish.
Book artist Nicola Dale looked at the potential of book destruction and the book as an artist’s medium. Important in her work is that she sees her work not as destruction but as a transformation of books. As she reflected on her work ‘Cuckoo Song’, she explains how the work is about shifting knowledge in time and space and how it challenges questions of originality, authorship and repetition. As she states in her website about this work: ‘I read a large amount of British poetry, with the themes of originality, repetition and authorship in mind. I systematically took note of any quotations from the poems which dealt with these themes, and used them to construct an original poem.’ She also describes the making of her work ‘Down’, consisting of thousands of paper feathers made by hand from old maps. The work ‘A secret heliotropism’ is a reflection on Walter Benjamin, and on change in history.
Nicola Dale - A Secret Heliotropism (2006)
Bonnie Mak talked in her paper about how books are being destroyed as part of our continued digitization effort. Digitization also means the translation of material into a computer readable format. It remains unclear how this translation should be read. In the transition from codex to computer, Mak opts for viewing digitized books as palimpsests, erased and overwritten. One exists on top of the other, one is visible through the other. The digital reproduction is based on a relationship with the exemplar, the digitization and its exemplar occupy the same space. The digitization also shows how it imagines a manuscript. Within the digitization the idea of what a manuscript is, is embedded, and thus the digitization shapes the way the manuscript will be received and understood. Thus digitization leads to a reordering of classical texts and to how we understand the world as scholars. According to Mak we should be attentive to how these sources shape the past and the present. Digitized books are similar but different from their exemplars. Digital books can thus be seen as palimpsests of the present and the past. Mak stresses the fact that we should exploit digital resources while remaining critical of them.
Ariana Boussard-Reifel - Between the Lines (2007)
Book sculptures by Robert The
Brooke Palmieri talked about a different form of book destruction namely the disappearance of books within library archives. What happens if a book does not have an online library entrance? Palmieri calls this a silent form of destruction, a form of institutionalized destruction caused by cataloguing problems. The quiet destructiveness that haunts the archive is very much a historical property of the archive. The problem mainly occurs with entries that are hard to classify such as Robert Burtons’ commonplace notebooks: half print, half manuscript, which is a monster to classify. Palmieri shows how decisions made on an institutional level in this way leave their imprints on scholarship. She talks about two kinds of destruction in this manner: duplicates that get destroyed and books that librarians forget to archive. This shows that when a book enters a library it is not at all guaranteed a life of rest. Even more, its nature seems very much malleable. Books get new call numbers, are replaced to different positions in the catalogue. The history of anomalies and distribution of books across libraries shows how librarians are an obstacle to the field, as they abide to cataloguing practices that do not know how to deal with anomalies and in which they keep re-shuffling the entries. Palmieri concludes that cataloguing standards are very much a product of historical circumstances.
Kate Flint, in her plenary talk ‘The aesthetics of book destruction’ reflects back on how a book destroyed can be a beautiful thing. Looking over several examples of book art she explores how these works raise important questions: what is lost when a book is destroyed and what possibilities arrive? What is the relationship between material form and content? Why do images of destroyed book have a certain emotional effect? Flint concludes that we should use the book to think about the future of the book. This includes questions of accessibility, archiving and preservation. These art books and book arts make us aware of a books materiality and the difference between a book and a text and of the reading experience of a book.
Paper sculpture by Cara Barer
Roman Ondák, Poems (1996)
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
As Hall has shown, the use of wikis to experiment with new ways of writing and collaborating offers a lot of potential for collaborative and distributive research and publishing practices. However, I feel they are only one possible step towards liquid publications and cannot as yet be perceived as real liquid publications. Wikis are envisaged and structured in such a way that authorship and clear attribution/responsibility as well as version control remain an essential part of their functioning. The structure behind a wiki is still based on an identifiable author and on a version history (another archive), which lets you check all changes and modifications, if needed. In reality, the authority of the author is thus not challenged, nor does it really come to terms with the element of continual updating that wikis evoke.
A good visual and material example of the problems this creates is a work published by James Bridle, affiliated with the Institute for the Future of The book. Bridle published the complete history of (every edit to) the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War, which came down to a 12-volume publication. What this ‘conceptual art project’ shows is on the one hand the incredible potential we now have in the digital age to indeed archive almost everything, on the other hand it shows the futility and the impossibility of trying to preserve in a static form (both material and digital) the flows of information generated on the Internet.[1] Another problem evoked by wikis as potential liquid publications, is that they mostly work with moderators. As the Iraq entry shows, not all entries are allowed to stay, although they are archived. Although in principle wikis have the potential to work in a distributed way, in practice hierarchies of moderators with different levels of authorities structure many of them.[2]
The impossibility of fluidity and stability
The critique of the different theoretical and practical explorations of fluid publications and of more process-oriented research offered here, serves to show the strength, the reach and the impact notions of stability, authorship, and authority (echoing the rhetoric of printed publications) still have within the digital environment. The critique of these notions thus does not serve as a condemnation of these experiments. On the contrary, I encourage these explorations of questioning the above mentioned strongly for all the reasons I have also exposed here. It serves to show how even in our explorations of the new medium, it is very hard to let go of the kind of essentialist notions that we have inherited from the rhetoric of print publications. On the other hand my interest in these experiments and in the concept of fluidity—which, as I shall explain next, I believe to be an impossibility—serves another goal: to deconstruct the idea that stability is actually possible (or has ever been possible in the past).
Alicia Martin
In the same way as true liquidity is a (practical) utopia, it is just as much a construct or an ideal type as stability is. However, I would argue for a wider acknowledgment of the fact that our creation of stability and of stable knowledge objects (as printed books are often perceived) is a construct brought about by the needs of (established) power structures and by customary ways of doing things, in other words, of ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to (such as authorship, stability and authority). The construction of what we perceive as stable knowledge objects serves certain goals, mostly having to do with establishing authority, preservation (archiving), reputation building (stability as threshold) and commercialization (the stable object as a (reproducible) product). As Bryant argues, “all texts are fluid. They only appear to be stable because the accidents of human action, time and economy have conspired to freeze the energy they represent into fixed packets of language.”[3] Any stability we create where it concerns texts can thus be seen as a (historical and contextual) consensus. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique notions based on a print knowledge system—such as stability, authorship and authority—where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. The Internet and digital media have created a situation where there is no longer a certain (writing) technology that favors stability over liquidity. In Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (2001), Jay David Bolter calls stability (as well as authority) a value. As he argues, it is a consensus, or a value, as well as the product of a certain writing technology: “(…) it is important to remember, however, that the values of stability, monumentality and authority, are themselves not entirely stable: they have always been interpreted in terms of the contemporary technology of handwriting or printing.”[4] Jean-Claude Guédon argues in his article ‘What Can Technology Teach Us About Texts? (and Texts About Technology?)’, that developments like Wikipedia serve to deconstruct the idea of a final document, where the validity of a document is now marked by only a temporal stability. As he states, “the Wikipedia phenomenon displays this widened range of possibilities in spectacular fashion. It also means that the notion of a final document loses much of its meaning because its finality can only be the result of a consensus, and not the product of a technology that fixes the text.”[5]
Roman Ondak
This acknowledgment of the constructivist nature of stability urges us to conduct a closer analysis of the structures underlying our knowledge and communication system and how they are presently set-up. Just like stability, fluidity is an ideal type, just like openness, it is a rhetorical stance. Within an information environment it can be seen as a paradox; although information might flow, knowledge inherently needs some form of objectification or stability to be called knowledge. True liquidity is thus an impossibility, fluid knowledge is an impossibility, and, at least in my definition of the term, fluid texts are an impossibility. We can only ever achieve quasi-liquidity. This impossibility to achieve real liquidity should however not be seen as a failure, as it still has rhetorical power. As rhetoric it helps us deconstruct the structures of our object-oriented knowledge systems and it enables us to experiment with a way of thinking and practicing that (performatively) challenges these preconceptions and helps us to think and create them differently.
Open Books and Fluid Humanities
The scholarly monograph is in the process of being reinvented. Experiments with the format, structure and content of the book-length treatise are currently being undertaken in a variety of guises from liquid books to wiki-monographs and blog-anthologies.[6] In the humanities the scholarly book plays a substantial role in an intricate web of knowledge communication, quality control and reputation management. It traverses power structures and ideological struggles and still comes out as the preferred means of communication amongst humanities scholars. Increasingly however the monograph has become a tool in a specific battle for a new knowledge and communication system within academia. The concept of the traditional ‘printed book’ is increasingly being used as a strategic weapon in maintaining a status quo in knowledge production and communication based on values as stability, authority and quality. On the other hand the concept of what I will call ‘the open book’ is used to urge for a knowledge system that is based on sharing, connectedness and liquidity.
Alicia Martin
What do these experiments and their critique mean for the idea of the book, openness and the humanities? Remix and fluidity can be seen as new ways to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book as a stable object (which it has never been), as a strategy to explore its multiplicities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge. It will enable us to argue for and pay more attention to otherness, difference and another knowledge system based more upon fluidity. Experiments with new way of conducting and publishing monographs in an open manner, like for instance via liquid books or wiki monographs, might be a first step away from an object-oriented approach focused on a finalized product, towards a publishing system based more on constant, collaborative and simultaneous knowledge production.
[1] See: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/
[2] On a related note, the perceived openness of wikis is further challenged by the fact that it does not include those things that are automatically excluded, such as for instance spam. However, the question remains, who decides what is categorized as spam?
[3] John Bryant, The Fluid Text, 111
[4] Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (2001), 16.
[5] Jean-Claude Guédon, ‘What Can Technology Teach Us About Texts? (and Texts About Technology?)’, in: Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (2009), 62.
[6] For an example of the last see Anthologize: http://anthologize.org/
Part 1 – Fluid environments and liquid publications
The ease with which nowadays continual updates can be made has brought into question not only the stability of documents but at the same time the need for and the efficiency of stable objects. Wikipedia is one of the often-cited examples of how the speed of improving factual errors and the efficiency of real-time updating in a collaborative setting can win out on the perceived benefits of stable material knowledge objects. Experiments with liquid texts and with fluid books conceived in collaborative environments not only stress the benefits and potential of ‘processual scholarship’, they also challenge the essentialist notions underlying the perceived stability of scholarly works.[1]
Textual scholar John Bryant extensively theorizes the concept of fluidity in his book The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (2002). Bryant argues that stability is a myth and that all works are fluid texts. In The Fluid Text Bryant theorizes (and puts to practice) a way of editing and doing textual scholarship that is based not on a final authoritative text, but which focuses on revisions. For many readers, critics and scholars, the idea of textual scholarship is to do away with the ‘otherness’ that surrounds a work and to establish an authoritative or definitive text. This urge for stability is part of a desire for as Bryant calls it ‘authenticity, authority, exactitude, singularity, fixity in the midst of the inherent indeterminacy of language.’[2] Bryant on the other hand argues for the recognition of a multiplicity of texts or rather for what he calls the fluid text. Texts are fluid because the versions flow from one to another. For this he uses the metaphor of a work as energy that flows from version to version.
In Bryant’s vision this idea of a multiplicity of texts extends from different material manifestations (drafts, proofs, editions) of a certain work into what is called the social text (translations and adaptations). This also logically leads to a vision of “multiple authorship”, where Bryant wants to give a place to what he calls ‘the collaborators’ of or on a text, to include those readers who also materially alter texts. For Bryant, with his emphasis on the revisions of a text, and the differences between versions, it is essential to focus on the different intentionalities of both authors and collaborators. The digital environment offers the perfect possibility to show the different versions and intentionalities of a work, to create a fluid text edition. Bryant established such an edition—both in a print and an online edition—for Melville’s Typee, showing how book format and screen in combination can be used to effectively present such a fluid textual work.[3]
For Bryant this specific choice of a textual presentation focusing on revision is a moral and ethical choice. For, as he argues, understanding the fluidity of language inherently lets us better understand social change. Furthermore, the constructionist intentions to pin a text down fail to acknowledge that, as Bryant states, ‘the past, too, is a fluid text that we revise as we desire’.[4] Finally, it encourages a new kind of critical thinking, one that is based on amongst others, difference, otherness, variation and change. And this is where the fixation of a fluid text to achieve easy retrieval, unified reading experiences, and established discourses, looses out to a discourse which focuses on the energies that drive text from version to version. In Bryants words: ‘by masking the energies of revision, it reduces our ability to historicize our reading, and, in turn, disempowers the citizen reader from gaining a fuller experience of the necessary elements of change that drive a democratic culture.’[5]
Another example of a practical experiment that focuses on the benefits of fluidity for scholarly communication is the Liquid Publications (or LiquidPub) project.[6] This project, as described by Casati, Giunchiglia, and Marchese, tries to bring into practice the idea of modularity. Focusing mainly on textbooks, the aim of the project is to enable teachers to create and compose a customized and evolving book out of modular pre-composed content. This book will then be a ‘multi-author’ collection of materials on a given topic that can include different types of documents.
The Liquid Publications project tries to cope with the issues of authority and authorship in a liquid environment by making a distinction between versions and editions. Editions are solidifications of the Liquid Book, with stable and constant content, which can be referred to, preserved, and which can be made commercially available. Furthermore they create different roles for authors, from editors to collaborators, accompanied by an elaborate rights structure for authors, with the possibility to give away certain rights to their modular pieces whilst holding on to others. In this respect the liquid publications project is a very pragmatic project, catering to the needs and demands of authors (mainly for the recognition of their moral rights) while at the same time trying to benefit from and create efficiencies and modularity within a fluid environment. In this way they offer authors the choice of different ways to distribute content, from totally open to partially open to completely closed books.
Media theorist Gary Hall also experiments with liquid books, nonetheless he provides a different vision on liquidity and on the potential of liquid publications. In his article ‘Fluid notes on liquid books’, he describes his experiment with publishing a “liquid book” together with Clare Birchall as part of the Culture Machine Liquid Books series of Open Humanities Press. The liquid book series is open on a read/write basis and functions via a logic of ‘open, decentralized and distributed editing’.[7] With this project Hall distinctively wants to question the idea of authorship by going beyond concepts of “authors,” “editors,” “creators,” or “curators”, which as he states are just a means of ‘replacing one locus of power and authority (the author) with another (the editor or compiler)’.[8] Hall’s argument is that if we no longer look at the author (or compiler/moderator/selector) for authority, the authority comes to lie with the text, which means we need to take on a more ‘rigorous’ responsibility with regards to assessing their importance and quality.[9]
Hall goes on to analyze what the consequences are when the identity and authority of the work itself becomes debatable. What authority does a work have if it can be changed and updated all the time? Hall, like Bryant, asks the question what constitutes a work in the digital age when a work no longer has any clear-cut boundaries. What does this mean for our whole system of knowledge, which is build upon these kind of knowledge objects for its functioning?
Hall sees a lot of potential to experiment with wikis and similar kinds of environments as they offer a potential to question and critically engage with these issues of authorship, work and stability, as different platforms raise different questions that we need to take into consideration when designing projects for different media. Wikis have the potential to offer increased accessibility and they induce participation also from contributors from the periphery. In this way they can be extremely pluralistic, challenging existing states of affairs:
“Rather, wiki-communication can enable us to produce a multiplicitous academic and publishing network, one with a far more complex, fluid, antagonistic, distributed, and decentred structure, with a variety of singular and plural, human and non-human actants and agents.”[10]
[1] As Adrian Johns has argued in The Nature of the Book, the perceived stability of the book brought about by the print medium, more than a technological determinant, can be seen as an actively constructed socio-institutional form of consensus. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, 3
[2] Bryant, The Fluid Text, 2
[3] For the fluid text edition of Melvilles’s Typee, see: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/melville/
[4] Bryant, The Fluid Text, 174
[5] Bryant, The Fluid Text, 113
[6] See: http://liquidpub.org/
[7] Hall, ‘Fluid notes on liquid books’, 40
[8] Ibidem
[9] Ibidem
[10] Hall, ‘Fluid notes on liquid books’, 43
Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question. Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace Cambridge), engaged in a discussion with the CRASSH Postdoctoral community on copyright and ownership of research. The exchange soon evolved into a wider debate on subjects as diverse as authorship, (Open Access) publishing and business models, peer review, branding and credibility, and deposit mandates and PhD theses. Google Books, Internet control and plagiarism also seeped into the discussion. The atmosphere was open and the crowd in a problem-solving mood. All the more surprising (and fulfilling) considering the fact that the principles of the panelists and the audience could be located on a sliding-scale from more traditional to highly experimental.
Linda Bree described herself as “the one in traditional publishing”, which, according to her, entails giving away forms of control. By default, she explains, the system revolves around the single author doing a substantial research (preferably in the form of a book). This research is then reviewed, published, disseminated and marketed. The researcher gains in this process by gathering career benefits, where the publisher receives a financial gain―which in academic publishing mostly means not going bankrupt. So, Bree explains, we find ourselves in a semi-commercial situation. In this context the publisher is not so much involved content-wise, but s/he does have a big say in the way research gets presented. This is an important aspect of the publisher’s work and is based on the possibility of presenting a work within certain financial limits. Because all of the above mentioned processes cost money, from reviewing to marketing. And they are all essential in the end for the scholar to, as Bree calls it, get a “nice published book” and to achieve the idea of “I wrote this”.
Although you could say that giving away this amount of control over one’s work costs quite a lot for an author, Bree defends her and CUP’s position by stating that the transference off control to the publisher is a necessary process. The publisher has invested money along the way and needs to attain revenue. And CUP does give some rights to re-use the work (often fee-based). However, the current technological changes in the publishing process have now given individual scholars the possibility to assert more control over their research (through Open Access and electronic publishing). The individual scholar now has much more choices than in the traditional model (which as Bree admits, is in many ways not sufficient anymore). The seminal question an author thus needs to ask himself is what kind of added value traditional publishing gives him (in forms of branding and other benefits) and whether this is worth the loss of control?
Elin Stangeland from DSpace Cambridge explains the special position Cambridge scholars have in the UK, where they (and not their universities) actually hold the copyright to their research. Giving away forms of control can take place in various settings, as an author can also give a publisher a license to publish (as with a Creative Commons license). Other options for a scholar to keep more in-control include publishing your work with an Open Access book or journal publisher (according to Stangeland, half of the journals in the DOAJ are HSS journals) and self archiving. Scholars can also try to retain their rights from a publisher. Often traditional publishers—like CUP—also provide a hybrid option, where the author can opt to make his specific work openly available. DSpace—which can both be used for books and articles—takes care of the storage and dissemination of the researchers work. They also offer services and advice, like the copyright toolbox (developed by SURF and JISC), and provide information on funders’ policies concerning self-archiving requirements. And they are looking ahead, actively thinking about the archiving of research data (and the management hereof), new citation and reward systems for publishing in the digital humanities and developments concerning the social and semantic web.
Rupert Gatti explained how he—an economist at Trinity College—started Open Book Publishers out of frustration: publishers were not responding quickly enough to the digital developments. Publishers will not sell books they deem to be in un-publishable areas (even though they match their quality criteria) and if they are published, these books are only bought by elite libraries in the west. But the POD revolution and the Internet brought new possibilities to disseminate research. And as Gatti states, dissemination is an important justification of research. Society needs access to research, were the current model prevents dissemination. Open Book publishers takes another route where their publications are completely searchable though Google Books and authors and readers have the freedom to transform and distribute the research. As publishers they have a non-exclusive right to publish (via a CC license). And they don’t give in on the quality aspect: OPB’s books are just as rigorously peer-reviewed as books in the traditional model. OPB is not for profit (and in case they do make a profit they share it 50/50 with their authors) and for a large part counts on the work of volunteers. And they take care of the ‘lap value’, as Gatti calls it, where they publish (affordable) hard and paperback copies of their publications—using the same printer as CUP does, Gatti adds. As Gatti concludes, there are alternatives to the traditional model and they are growing quickly.
After shortly describing the development of the Open Humanities Press—an international Open Access publishing collective—Gary Hall focused on one of the more experimental projects the press is undertaking. For next to more traditional forms of publication, OMP wants to experiment—through its Liquid Book Series—with changing the physical conception of the monograph. Liquid books offer open editing and free/libre content on a Read/Write basis and can for instance consist of a collage of different media and texts; snippets, pages, references, podcasts, youtube clips, etc.. This form of publishing directly confronts the idea of the author. Remembering Barthes, Hall explains how by giving a text an author, we at the same time give it a limit. Liquid Books are an experiment with the decentralization of the author. In a way this decentralization is already on its way. With the massive rise of authorship through the online medium the (discourse on the) author has again become more open, decentralized and distributed. With Google as our major spotlight and Internet filter, the performers of different roles (authors, editors, compilers) are not always identifiable. Everyone is potentially an author or an editor online.
The discussion that followed focused for a large part on the differences between the traditional subscription and the new Open Access models. Worries about the sustainability of Open Access models and their quality assurance were systematically taken away by the panelists. As all panelists confirmed and agreed upon, there is no such thing as one sustainable model for publishing books. In the future there is likely to be a mix of eclectic models with various revenue sources. Where it comes to quality standards, Gatti for one emphasized that the thorough peer review methods of OBP confirm to the highest standards (comparable to those of CUP for instance). Bree however emphasized that for young authors—publishing their first book—the brand of a publisher also plays an important role. She clearly advised young authors to think about this when making their choice on where to publish. Gatti replied by stating that the more open availability of Open Access publications (and in OBP’s case the lower pricing of their print books) is also an important aspect of the marketing and dissemination of publications.
In this respect it is again about the added value of the publisher and about which addition you value the most. And as this seminar showed, with the increased possibilities for authors to publish their research online, publishing is now more than ever about making choices. What the right choice is in this respect, especially concerning the ownership of research, is up to the researcher. Perhaps now more than ever, s/he is in control about how and where to publish.
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