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Gary Hall and I have submitted a pre-study of the paper we are writing for a special issue of New Formations to the accompanying online symposium Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net, organised by Sas Mays and Nick Thoburn. Our submission is entitled ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art & Academia’. It is open for comments on the symposium’s website, (more specifically, here) together with papers by renowned academics such as Richard Burt, Johanna Drucker, Davin Heckman, Sas Mays, and Nick Thoburn. Underneath the symposium announcement.
Online symposium announcement:
Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net
24 October – 4 November 2011
Organised by Sas Mays (University of Westminster) and Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester)
Website
Description
This online symposium brings together researchers and practitioners who work on the material culture of the book and publishing. The aim is neither to uncritically champion the capacities of digital media, nor to fetishize the printed form. Our concern, rather, is with the interplay and mutation of form, medium, metaphor, and content across printed and digital mediums – between the codex and the net. The symposium will explore a number of themes:
• Diagrammatic writing
• Biopolitics of the book
• The book as resistance
• Materiality of the infinite text
• Textual materialism
• Deliberation in digital reading
• The politics of independent publishing
Organised around six short papers and an online conversation among practitioners of independent publishing, the conference is open to comment and discussion from online readers. In keeping with its theme, Materialities of Text is a hybrid of symposium, online discussion forum, and writing workshop for a special issue of the journal New Formations.
The journal issue will contain some additional articles; we invite interested parties to contact us to discuss ideas or propose papers <s.mays@westminster.ac.uk> and <N.Thoburn@manchester.ac.uk>
Materialities of Text is co-sponsored by Archiving Cultures at The University of Westminster and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
Brian Dettmer
As mentioned before, as part of my remix contribution to Mark Amerika‘s project site accompanying his new volume Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) I will be blogging and tweeting on remixthebook.com during this week. Underneath the blog entry I submitted.
Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed
As part of my research practice I explore the potential of remix theory and remix practices to reexamine the basic notions underlying scholarship and scholarly communication. Many of our preconceptions concerning what merits authorship, authority, originality and so on get constructed within certain dominant discourses on what scholarship is and should be (mostly centered on upkeeping, conserving and repeating print-based notions in the digital realm). Remix practices, I believe, have the power to intervene in these constructions, to disrupt traditional discursive practices, and to both theoretically and performatively create new, experimental practices, based on sharing, openness, process and interaction. However, even in our experimental research practices we often end up repeating the established structures we try to critique, as we as scholars are massively embedded within a knowledge system that demands us to perform in a certain way and to adhere to the scholarly reputation economy. Yet I do believe that even small changes are important, like questioning the system as it is currently set up, and thinking about the values that we deem important in scholarship. A first step is to be aware of the fact that many of our preconceptions towards scholarship are constructions: constructions we can reconsider and change.
My research practice can be seen as my own attempt at reassessing scholarly communication, mostly through examining what the future of the book in scholarly communication can be (or should be) and by exploring what potential role remix practices can play in both scholarship and in the future of the book. The remix I made for remixtebook.com is part of my intervention, as is this blog entry and the tweets I will be sharing with you here. These will be contain some fragments of source material from my remix for remixthebook.com, combined with a selection of links and references I have collected over the years related to remix and scholarship. Finally at the end of the week I hope to be able to live-tweet The culture of Remix, the 2nd International Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture, which takes place in Lisbon on 13-14 October 2011, and promises to showcase some exciting new research on the multiple dimensions of remix.
Video Remix: Rick Silva, Audio: Chad Mossholder, Micro-Cam Footage: Mark McCoin, Voice: Mark Amerika
Remix artist and author Mark Amerika recently launched his new book Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) together with a complimentary website of remixes based on material from remixthebook. From the blurb on the project site:
The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva, has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through their own artistic and theoretical filters.
I was fortunate enough to have been asked to contribute a remix to this project, which can be found online as part of the project website here, including a short artist’s statement.
Underneath you can find the text of my contribution. As part of my contribution I will also be blogging and tweeting on the remixthebook project site during the week of October 9th. So stay tuned for that. Thanks again to Mark Amerika for this opportunity to contribute to his project, and do check out all the amazing other remixes available here, for instance this Isarithm remix by Rick Silva and Woulg:
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CREATIVITY (Capital C) has been hijacked by the artists
Think of the scholar as a medium. Think of the scholar as a postproduction medium. What does it mean to be an avant-garde scholar tuning their instrument so that they can then BECOME something like a meta-medium? Remix theory takes the inherent properties and the possibilities of the new medium (the Internet) as its basics and not the properties of the specific media it incorporates or reflects upon (be they textual or sound- or image-based). In this regard, think of the scholar as a kind of remixological filter. Even THIS is a kind of generative remix performance where the scholar selectively samples from and filters or manipulates the data as a way to open up more creative potential. The power of remix lies in its selectivity, the filter it imposes, where the ‘author’ becomes a ‘remixer’, the remix an object of interaction. The philosophy of the remix is essentially ‘rhizomatic’, the methodology collaborative and processual, focused on the added value of the various media in the communication process. The remix as concept and practice is not new; new are the increased possibilities and the ease to share and recombine media in the digital environment in a collaborative manner. Notions of authority, originality and authenticity get challenged in remix theory, where the remix is a collaborative crowd effort, the reception point is only one part in the process of information and culture transmission and the producer becomes the consumer and vice versa.
One can observe however how over the course of history the media that scholars work with may change but the assortment of potential trajectories scholars follow tend to stay the same. This 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. In reality, the authority of the author is thus not challenged. Does the Internet and its online social networking apparatus open up potentially new trajectories for scholars to “make history”? It already has … but not to the degree it still needs to in order to usher in a dramatic shift in the way we position both the scholar and the scholarly work in contemporary network culture. This 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. There are some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.
Here’s a question: if we are all scholar-mediums, how do we trigger novel states of creativity? Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, 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. Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as we have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities. Remix theory is a strategy to explore its multiplicities.
Scholars always have to develop and reconfigure their SENSE of measure over time. Exactly how DO scholars or hackers or creative remixers develop a sense of measure over time? The remix scholar whose sense of measure enables them to BECOME a postproduction medium sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought is what we would call A CONTEMPORARY THEORIST. By re-claiming creativity for the scholar as their birthright we can begin to open up the neural pathways to prophetic illumination.
We need new ways of expanding the narrative of the monograph in a ‘remixed’ manner or fashion. The stable form of the text-based version gets challenged by the input of ‘foreign’ elements, be they from other narratives, other voices or other discourses. For the contemporary writer as interdisciplinary media scholar the lyrical conceptual poetic narrative movements come in wildly assorted forms everything from dance to cinema to performance art to the scribbling of pen or pencil on paper. This enables the postproduction scholar to intuitively mirror the neuron activity of the ones who came before, something that feels like a deep interiorization of someone else’s creative rhythm mediumistically syncing with whatever filters one turns on at any given time during the remix performance. These elements are then inserted (or not really ‘inserted’ as they have increasingly been part of the creation process from the start) into the narration in a continual manner, melting together into a new never-ending ever-updateable ‘form’. We can also go beyond these categorizations, where there is the possibility to include all forms of experimentation in one ‘digital humanities project’ or ‘publication’: a web-based wiki-shaped networked narrative.
Will this be the future of digital scholarship in the Humanities? How would a contemporary remixologist divining their own just-in-time context for the compositional playing field of the moment jump-start a renewable tradition made out of all of the “renewable energy sources” (i.e. scholar-mediums) signaling from the past / present / future? All three forms of experimentation still offer the possibility to create or extract a ‘solid form’, a stable published text, whilst at the same time they give an increased insight into knowledge creation, into the process of Humanities scholarship and communication as it grows and forms and gathers strength and form. In this way these experiments form a beautiful bridge between product and process, between the old and the new, between print and digital, holding on to the best of the print past and the possibilities of the digital future. “How can artist-researchers developing new practice-based initiatives in remixology turn the immediate future into a renewable source of ‘energy’ that fuels their unconscious readiness potential?” Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.
This is why remixthebook – which this composition samples from – is our attempt to cross-contaminate Process Theory with Creativity or creative class struggle — and believe us, if you are a contemporary scholar, no matter what your financial situation, you are suffering through creative class struggle. One of the things remixthebook plays with is how scholars use networked and mobile media technology to discover forms of writing that MAY introduce new patterns of meaning. The 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 our 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.
Unless you’re a fatalist, then we should at least consider the aesthetic functions of the scholar as remix performer. It’s important to keep in mind this idea of remix performance as a kind of structured improvisation, because it’s this “always live” PERFORMANCE that enables the remix scholar to ride the wave of intuition. Think of the remixologically inclined performance scholar as a novelty generator, someone who positions their aesthetically fit energy bursts as an intervening sense of measure to be reckoned with. Could we say that the contemporary scholar AS remixologist or provocateur of postproduction art, EMBODIES what it means to FEEL aesthetic? Let’s face it, scholars are always sampling and manipulating other scholars SENSE of measure and this is how they create a formal aesthetic over time. In remix theory the remix is seen as a process, an activity, a verb; it is a process of constantly renewing, building upon and modifying mediated and reworked cultural materials. In this process new creative work is produced: the remix. The remix occurs in a stratified structure, no longer linear but multilayered, hybrid and liquid. The remix is a collage, it combines various elements to build something new. Remixing is part of our digital culture, it is essential to our creativity and one of the main contemporary composing practices
For now we are still in the race but these scholars were the ones who taught us how to haunt the texts that came before us even as these same texts haunted us back. Memory is a form of context shaping, it determines the meaning we attribute to scholarship: we see a repetition of the past in the creation of the new. The mystery and unclear meaning of the texts is in this case what makes it meaningful to the viewer as interpreter, as ‘meaning-searcher’. As a practice-based remixologist filtering the meta-perturbations of Source Material Everywhere the scholar as postproduction medium choreographs an ongoing structural improvisation projected from the deep interior sense mechanisms of other scholar-agents autopoietically postproducing a novel togetherness that reconfigures the world into yet more renewable energy that doubles a source material seducing us into our next remixological becoming. The vacuum of meaning creates potential: it creates a space for interpretation and functions as a reflection of our search for patterns and meaning. It thus offers a meta level in a way, similar to what abstract art does: it is about the search for meaning, about wanting to discover the secret context and inherent patterns in the structure of the text, like in a way abstract art is a reflection on art itself. Patterns are the new real of our society. The visionary scholar always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative becomes a multitude of flux identities and transformations nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows. This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do. Success in this area of practice-based research could lead to the scholar becoming a valuable postproduction medium running
… at full speed, in all directions, into the memory, into the future, into the data of the present, to grasp the unexpected, the luminous, stupefying, connections.
But let’s say that you are a “creative writer” or net scholar or live A/V performer or interdisciplinary “code-smith” who accesses all available source material to cobble together your new work of conceptual sculpture. This triggers the question: Is an object finished when it at the same time constitutes a building block for another object? How would we determine the variance of value for each of these outputs? How would we differentiate the stylistic tendencies of scholars who remixologically inhabit a multitude of multi-media forms of language and how would we measure the value of their work as postproduction mediums? 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.
With academia increasingly being abused by budget cuts whilst at the same time being overtaken by the language of business, profit, and sustainability, new ways are being sought to gain funds to subsidize academic projects and publications. Especially scholarly publishers within the Humanities and Social Sciences (be they not-for-profit or commercial) have become accustomed to the mixing of and the experimenting with business and revenue models. As the specialized scholarly book has developed into a format from which it has become very hard to gain a profit (mainly due to library budget cuts, the main buyers of academic books), in most cases (cross-) subsidizing schemes are now a necessity for publishers.
Joseph Esposito gives a nice overview of the different business models in use in scholarly communication in his blog post What We Talk About When We Talk About Business Models: A Bestiary of Revenue Streams. In this post he zooms in on revenue streams derived by publishers using traditional or ‘user-pays’ publishing, author-pays publishing, institutional sponsoring, marketing services, ‘freemium’ publishing and licensing. And, as he confirms, in many cases content is made available by the aid of a hybrid model, in which revenue streams from the different categories mentioned above get mixed up in various forms and models. In a later post entitled The Membership Business Model for Scholarly Communications, Esposito discusses another business model, one which I want to explore more deeply here, namely the one in which ‘a group of people working in the same area (the area does not have to be academic research) might decide that they have a shared interest in publishing some of their material. They thus pool their resources, appoint individuals to oversee the publications, establish policies, and make the material available to fellow members of the community.’
As Esposito states, this membership model is a good example of the above mentioned hybrid model, as it is a mixture of different economic models:
‘At first glance, the membership model appears to be a form of user-pays publishing, as access to content requires a fee. But this model differs from the traditional one in its reciprocal nature: One fee provides access to both content (like the user-pays model) and to the publishing process itself (like the author-pays model). It’s thus very much a community model of publishing, where membership has its privileges.’
It’s the later two aspects described by Esposito that I am most interested in here, namely the concept of community and the idea of member privileges. For the model I want to focus on here, the crowd-funding model—well known from popular platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—can be seen as a combination of the membership model and the Maecenas model I have written about before, but now targeted to the web. In this model the traditional ‘community model of publishing’ is being exported to the web and tried out in new forms and with a new, potentially global, community. At the moment this model is mainly being used in or experimented with in artistic and creative projects, but it has already been tried out extensively in other fields, media and formats too. The idea behind this model is that a community of people with an interest in (the funding of) a certain project, donate a small sum to support the project or to pledge for the project, in return for which they get ‘access’ to the project or gain certain ‘privileges’ (such as special previews, a copy of the final book/record/movie, a dedication in said media, or in some cases even a chance to go out for lunch with the artist).
My current aim is to explore in what way this model might work for academic book publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in specific in combination with an effort towards increasing accessibility and stimulating (Gold) Open Access publishing. However, before I go on to explore the different possibilities such a system might offer, note that I see the current proposal or set of ideas as an urgent necessity, a necessity to look for and experiment with new revenue streams and business models to help the specialized monograph survive, to make its creation and dissemination possible and to safeguard its existence. At the same time I see the ideas and possibilities explained and examined here as the nadir of what academic publishing has become, as an exemplar of the strains academic authors, publishers and their institutions have to go through to get their projects funded and their work published. Projects that society should deem important enough to fund from the outset, work that should be made accessible by default and not only when it is able to make a profit. The idea of crowd-funding a project or a publication in many ways reveals what the modern academic has become, spending increasing amounts of her/his/their ‘research time’ on securing internal or external funding, and on managing the paperwork that comes with that. The crowd-funding model, at least the one that is made popular by platforms like Kickstarter, might push the scholar to an even further extreme, were she/he/they will have to become a performer, playing out an act, juggling expertise, expected research outcomes, and promised deliverables in a snappy marketing video. All in order to persuade an already over-commercialized public to spend money on this specific, unique, and important project—instead of on one of the other hundreds of endangered publications—in a race for the competition of who can make the best promo clip.
An example of how this can become a bit ridiculous, or better said, ‘problematic’, is sketched out by this recent article from The New York Times, that shows how, in order to obtain funding, two biologists ventured into selling t-shirts and trading cards in an effort dubbed by The Times similar to an ‘online bake sale’. The question is, are we headed towards a world in which scholars will increasingly have to become performers to obtain funding, for example by giving talks before paying audiences—which seems to be a growing trend—mimicking super-star scholarly authors such as Žižek? This trend is also visible in the increasingly popular format of the TED talks for instance (although TED does not pay its speakers, it is definitely a marketing device for authors). Will scholars be forced to go the same path literary authors have already gone, making money to finance their projects, publications and livelihoods by giving readings, signing books and selling merchandise? Increasingly it seems that in the present climate, with a lack of commercial interest for profit making, a lack of institutional backing, and a lack of (alternative) patronage systems in place in many of the countries hit by budget cuts, scholars, educators, authors and artists will have to go to drastic measures. Will this be the consequence of a society in which culture and scholarship are no longer seen as a necessity or as a public good? And aren’t we with that, as Žižek noted in a recent talk in London, killing of exactly those ‘traditional western standards and norms and values’ that the current right-wing European governments are at the same time craving to restore and maintain?
On the other hand, although the crowd-funding model showcases the extremes scholars have to go to nowadays to get money, it also offers many real possibilities. Against the gloomy vision sketched above, we should not underestimate the power of the community, and the self-organizing skills of the public sphere, when the commercial powers and the institutions that govern us increasingly abandon the Humanities and Social Sciences. Let’s get together with both our peers and with the wider community out there to discuss what we deem worthy research. Research that merits publication, research that deserves to be spread more widely.
So what is new about this crowd-funding model? As I stated before, it combines a membership model with a sponsorship model. In this way the statement made by Esposito that ‘a society that makes its content available through open access may experience declining interest among its members to continue paying membership dues’, underestimates the ideologies that trigger people, like for instance doing things for a common good, to support a certain charity or a certain goal—like increasing accessibility to scholarly publications. Furthermore the crowd-funding model finds a solution for another problem in the membership model Esposito notices, namely, as he states, ‘what, after all, is the point of being in a community unless it serves to define those who are outside it?’ The crowd-funding model no longer defines a community by giving it privileged access to the outcomes of the project—to the final publication—but to the process itself. It makes the community part of the process in a way. Crowd-funders thus become both member and part of a specific project (whilst attaining certain benefits at the same time). And this can very well go hand in hand with financing an openly available outcome at the same time. As the NYT article states ‘generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue.’
One of the problems noted in the NYT article however is the lack of a review system with crowd-funded projects. With this they mean a lack of a peer review system by experts of course, as a crowd selection system is already part of the crowd-funding process. As the article states, ‘most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process.’ However, peer review can of course take place at several stages during a project (for instance on acquiring funding, during the process of the project, during the publication phase and after the publication). These selection and quality assessment processes can be build into a crowd-funding model. Crowd-funding is just another revenue stream and needs not be without peer review or branding. A journal, publisher or a group of peer scientists can still endorse a project after or even before it has attained crowd-sourced funding. I think the problem these kind of new revenue models target has to do with the fact that projects that do measure up to quality and peer review standards, do not necessary have the funding to carry out these projects or to make the outcomes (openly) available. Competition has become harsh, and as Jean-Claude Guédon has showed us, the present system is mostly catering to let the best of scientific outcomes prevail. However, as Guédon also argues, the issue of excellence should not come to substitute quality thresholds.
The idea of crowd-sourcing funding for academic endeavors has already led to a few experimental platforms, of which the most promising might be the Italian Open Genius project, set up by Andrea Gaggioli. Open Genius, in adopting crowd-funding to scholarship, specifically focuses on the quality evaluation element. As Gaggioli and his colleague Riva write in a Science article here, ‘to assist (non-specialist) investors in deciding the awarding of contributions (and to audit thereafter), a peer-review procedure could be used. (…) Fraud could be prevented by implementing a reputation system (…) and by indicating the scientific track record of the proponent.’ As it states on its website, Open Genius is a not-for-profit initiative set up by the scientific community. It also lists it motives for using crowd-funding on its website and states it wants ‘to increase the resources for research, to reduce the gap between science and the public, to enhance transparency in funding allocation and use, and to inform donors about the results of their investments.’ The idea behind Open Genius is again that crowd-funding is seen as an additional revenue stream, where it looks to partner with similar academic, philanthropic or government funding initiatives. Their ideological background is also clear from their choice for open-source software and platforms. Ironically however, although the thinking behind this project seems solid, it hasn’t actually commenced yet, as it lacks the funds needed to start accepting proposals.
Where Open Genius is mostly focusing on funding whole (academic) projects, there are already some crowd-sourcing experiments up-and-running that focus more specifically on the funding of (literary) book publications. One of them is the Unbound Books platform, which works similar to Kickstarter but at the same time takes on a more traditional publishers role, as Unbound’s cofounder John Mitchinson states in an interview with Fast Company here: ‘we’re managing the back end in a way that Kickstarter doesn’t,” (…) “They’re a pure fundraising platform” (…)”We’re printing and distributing and finding the market for the books”. This publisher’s involvement has however led to forms of critique, as it is not a ‘pure’ crowd-sourcing project. Also, as is stated in this article by Bobbie Johnson, the problem with the Unbound Books model is that they got the underlying idea of ‘community’ wrong that seems to be essential when it comes to crowd-funding: the idea of ‘by the community and for the community’. As Johnson states: ‘It’s really about communities choosing their own destinies. As with crowdsourcing before it, there needs to be a real sense of involvement and authenticity if projects are to be about more than just doing things inexpensively.’
This idea of keeping traditional publishing functions alive whilst at the same time focusing more on the idea of community seems to be much better implemented in the Cursor platform set up by Richard Nash especially for book communities. The first community set up with Cursor is Red Lemonade. In an interview with Richard Nash by Digital Book World’s Rich Fahle, Nash states that Cursor is set up as a platform for publisher to also become membership organizations. Getting fans, writers and other interested parties to become members and comment upon each other’s work is the basis of the platform. The community then becomes the sole source of books to publish. In this way Nash’s project is more about ‘social publishing’, about the relationships between writers and readers. As Nash further states in this article in Publishers Weekly, ‘Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities’, a kind of ecosystem offering different publishing services.
These are all valuable insights and lessons to learn when thinking about applying a crowd-funding model to academic book publishing. One benefit of applying this model to academia is that the academic world already has a strong communal background in the form of disciplines and networks and formal and informal ties between publishers, authors, libraries, and journals (amongst others). And perhaps even more than in literary publishing, the writers of scholarly works are also the readers of these scholarly works. Furthermore, an elaborate communication and marketing network to keep up and strengthen the bonds between these communities is already in place in the form of mailing lists, blogs, (social) research platforms etc. And many of these digital platforms are from the outset already integrally connected to the rest of the web and the wider community of interest. Finally, as already mentioned above, the community ideology and the idea of sustaining and making accessible publications and research outcomes for the wider community fits in very well with Open Access principles and open source ideologies as they are at play within scholarly communication.
So, what could such a crowd-funding model for academic books look like? Underneath a very initial draft model.
First of all, as mentioned before, peer review and branding can very much be part of this model, as publishers or (groups of) authors can pre-select projects, endorse projects, or can conduct various forms of open and/or closed peer review as part of the project or publication process at different stages of its development. Also, crowd-funding can apply to already (traditionally) published and peer reviewed books, for instance to assist in making them openly accessible. A few different scenarios:
– A book can be funded from its initial idea (more of a project fund in a way). Scholars can submit a proposal (a draft chapter, a promo video) plus a reward scheme for those who pledge a certain amount of money. For instance, funders could pledge 15 euro and receive a free paperback of the book (where students could get the same for only 10 euro). There could also be schemes for libraries, where they receive a print copy after pledging a certain sum.
– Secondly, there could be an option to fund an Open Access edition of an already existing print book or of a book that will soon be available in print. At the moment projects like OAPEN.nl are looking into getting Open Access editions funded by government or funding institutions, by separating the costs of the Open Access edition from the costs of the printed edition. Another option, next to or instead of this institutional funding, could be to get the Open Access edition funded via crowd-sourcing.
– Thirdly, the publication of a dissertation could be funded via crowd-sourcing platforms. Dissertations, although in most cases highly peer reviewed, are hard to get published at the moment due to their often highly specialized nature and the lack of build-up prestige of their authors (early-career scholars).
– Fourth, if you fund a book you can get access to the way it develops. Following the idea of increased transparency or openness, crowd-funding could mean gaining access (for the funder or for the wider community) to the notes, updates, initial findings etc of the research project as it develops. This will draw the community closer towards a project and will also make them the initial pool of commentators (or even reviewers) of the document-in-development. Both authors and readers gain to profit from such a model, close to the ideas surrounding ‘social publishing’ as promoted by Nash.
A motion towards Open Access can be part of all these models, as an online version can be made available free for all—under a CC-license for instance—as a first requirement or outcome of all of these models. The community on which these models can be based, will first of all be made up of scholars in a certain field, but can be extended to students, libraries, other scholars in adjacent fields, the general public, companies (supporting publications as a charity cause for instance) etc. And again, different communities, and different projects, can exist on one platform.
It’s hard to say whether such a model might actually work, as much depends on, as said before, the willingness of a specific community to support projects and on the right model or platform. And again, although this might be just another revenue stream in that increasingly popular ‘hybrid model’ used to get publications funded, as long as it is working towards getting important and valuable research results out there, it is a shot worth taking.
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.
Last month I attended The Unbound Book conference, a three day gathering of experts on books, publishing and reading, to collaboratively explore the future of the book and the transformation of reading, publishing and learning. Belated I wrote out my notes on some of the most striking lectures, a mere add-on to the amazing documentation that already accompanies the conference, which can all be found on the conference website. Video recordings of all the sessions were made, and all the talks were also live-blogged by students of the MA in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Their reports of the talks can be found here.
Henry Warwick, assistant professor in Communication Theory and Digital Media at Ryerson University, in Toronto, Ontario is an artist, composer and scientist. He talked about the growing ethical disconnect in academic publishing. Research has become unaffordable and access to knowledge has become problematic. This is all the more ironic in an age where the entire library of congress can be stored on 14 TB. A new community ideal of sharing texts can be found on websites such as Aaaaarg.org and on Avaxsearch.com, where you can basically search for everything. Aaaaarg also contains discussions and is in general more ‘refined’ as it focuses on theory texts. Their refinement is what cuts them out of normal piracy. However, Aaaaarg has moved location a few times already after take down notices and its sustainability is very fragile. The problem, Warwick states, is that the web is no longer resilient or rhizomatic, it is terribly precarious. Look for instance at Egypt where the government managed to shut down the web. Another development is that increasingly the web will become tiered, where you will have to pay to access certain content. Warwick proposes the Alexandria project, where the books available on Aaaaarg and similar sites will be stored on USB-sticks or hard drives. A hard drive is very subversive in this respect. It cannot be taken down and it has the potential to distribute the files to various offline and online locations. Challenges to this project are abundant too, due to proprietary file formats, the treat of DRM on hard drives, and the possibility of the development of draconic legal issues.
Alan Liu, Chair and Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused on the question of what defines a book. As he states, books on iTunes are not books, although they use the metaphor of the bookshelf. Many observers are skeptical about ebooks being books. Maybe we need to deconstruct and reconstruct ebooks to create new paradigms. The standard positive thesis is that printed books are books. There are, as Liu states, certain epistemological and cultural connotations underlying the book. According to Liu, a book is:
“A long form of attention intended for the permanent, standard and authoritative i.e. socially repeatable and valued communication of human thought and experience (usually through narrative, argumentative or other programmatic organizations of bound-together yet discrete textual, graphic, and haptic elements”
What has changed now are the cultural significances of the book in this time. Features that are emphasized now are long form of attention, permanent, standard, authoritative. Book historian Elisabeth Eisenstein wrote about the standardization and fixity of the book. Even people who are skeptical of these attributes still see them as attributes of the book.
Liu draws our attention to the focus on materiality within new book historical studies. Materiality is seen as historically situated and highly irregular. He paraphrases Peter Stallybrash on the navigation of the bible, a non-linear, hyper-referenced book. The codex and printed books were books of discontinuity. This is also the basis of Adrian Johns’ critique of Elisabeth Eisenstein: the printed book was very irregular. The physical book is thus no more long, standard or authorative as any other online form. The rhetoric focuses on the end of the book: the book is dying, it is heading towards a postmodern heath death into entropy: atomic bites. Reading is at risk, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The death of the bookstore is near. Books are becoming shorter; Liu calls this the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking book, mirroring a recent trend in online publishing. In a way we are going back to broadsides. On a microscale this is visible in for instance the WordPress plugin Commentpress, where books have become paragraph-sized, with their own crowd-sourced comments.
Liu states that he is not a skeptic where it concerns the future of the book in the digital age. That is, as long as we keep a clear idea of what a book might be. Books are seen as expressive and determinate. But this is a mix of reality and ideology. Media are not just expressive, or longue durée. Long durée socially are traditions, institutions etc. We construct an image of durable media forms. And the wish becomes reality: the book has become iconic for the identity of people as endurance. It is part of our cultural identity: the wish to endure in time and to extend in space. This is why the book and long forms of attention are important. Today we need long forms of attention to serve as images of collective consciousness.
Liu discusses several online book projects related to this idea, including William Gibson’s Agrippa book project. This is not a book, Liu states, as a material longue durée; it is a reality that the long-lasting representation of the book revolves around the book as a long swirl of public discourse, without the actual book actually existing. The book is a long-form of attention that we as a culture crave and which we need to find in the future. The book is a discourse; it is the whole discussion that evolves around it in a culture. The book is thus not a thing (physical book/ebook) but a long form of shared attention.
The session entitled The unbound book was introduced by Geert Lovink. He stated that this session would not look into the question of morals or into what we have lost or gained—the question of ethics—but that it will look beyond good and evil at the process of the unbinding of the book itself. The unbinding of the book as we witness it right now is very much part of the explosion of the amount of information and the related need to search and visualize this enormous amount of information.
The first speaker of this session was the Dutch/German media theorist Florian Cramer. Cramer started his talk off with David Stairs’ 1983 artist book entitled Boundless, an all-round spiral-bound book, hence an unopenable book. This book is emblematic for Cramer for the dialectics between the bound and the unbound book. Binding can be seen as the lowest common denominator of what a book is. Even if something is unbound it still has the negative reference to being bound. There is a distinction between being unbound and being boundless. There is both a spatial and a temporal dimension to this discussion. Binding keeps texts together over time. There are also examples of unstable books however. How does this relate to the subject of this session, asks Cramer? He states that in the introduction to this session the book is presented in a similar way, as one would describe the web. Within 5 years this hyperlinked, networked book will have disappeared because you won’t be able to read the social linkage around it anymore. Also, this description of the book as linked, interactive, and networked, is exactly the same as the one used 20 years ago by The Voyager Company to describe the interactive electronic book. Everything just has a strong sense of nostalgia to it according to Cramer. 
In 1995 there was a work called Book Unbound by John Cayley, based on Apple HyperCards. These can’t be played anymore. There was also a boom of multimedia books created for CD-ROM. Hardly any of that is still physically readable today. This early discourse surrounding electronic literature had its own discussions, but paradoxically, although it started already in the 1990s it has completely stagnated and still evolves around the same works and the same discussions. Why did it not expand? Are we back to square one and are we back to the time before the web came about, back to discussions on hypertext? Cramer asserted that the future of this kind of writing is not the book but the network. The form of the book remained rather conventional. Especially if you look at the change other media went through. For the book not much has changed the last 20 years. According to Cramer an electronic book culture has emerged but it is much different from what is described in the conference programme
It has come abound in the iTunes model (Amazon’s Kindle ebook store) vs. p2p network sharing (aaaaarg). Cramer compares it with the development of music. Music files haven’t become interactive, what has changed is that they are now being massively shared, what is shared however are simple audio files. What is being swapped on aaaarg are plain vanilla PDF and text files. Electronic books have moved from the codex to the computer file, which can be seen as a hybrid of the codex and the scroll. Developing a book as a software exploitation of it self is very expensive and it needs to be updated. It just does not scale. Epub and PDF works because it is not multimedia and linear.
No definition of the book is set in stone, Cramer remarks. However, the rise of the WWW as an ephemeral and unstable medium has reciprocally helped to make the book into a more stable entity. Also, unstable formats such as telephone books, maps and the news, were amongst the first to migrate to the web. Contemporary visual arts saw a similar development in the 90s: those who worked with unstable analog media firstly moved to the web and became the first web-artists. The current generation however sees a massive boom of printed artists books and zines, as a reaction to the commodification of commercialized social media. As Johanna Drucker has shown, amongst artists there has always been a profound realization for the book as a whole. For instance looks at some of the most (media) experimental books that you can imagine, such as Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Drucker states that in these kinds of experiments the binding becomes even more important. In order to remain artist books instead of book objects, a connection needs to remain with the form of the book. According to Cramer, Drucker’s notion of the book as a fixed and stable arrangement coincides perfectly with the technical definition of an epub. There is always a notion of linear order in an epub file. Ebooks are first of all offline media according to the print standard. They are read-only documents, no input files. And annotations are saved separately from the file.
Ebooks are the textual siblings of mp3 files. Ebooks as we know them today are more restricted in their media use and media design than print books. You can for instance not port visual poetry to an ereader. Cramer states that this is a paradoxical development, where media richness is becoming the domain of print. Artist books are becoming a main- stream genre of graphic design. Print is becoming a boutique niche of materiality. All print books in the era of electronic publishing strive to be coffee table books, rare and erratic objects. Art schools are creating boutique collectibles as print books become like vinyl. On the other hand electronic books, Cramer claims, are the equivalent of the paperback book. They are anti-auratic. If ebooks become the cheap paperbacks of our time there is still an element of unbinding; not in a multimedia sense but in how mp3 has unbound record collections, not in the way that was envisioned in the hypertext discourse. As Cramer concludes, ebooks have led to books becoming transitory formats. Textz.com and aaaarg have led to books becoming like a collection and a database, like a portable library that you can bring with you.
In the same session Bob Stein, founder of the Voyager Company and director of The Institute for the Future of the Book, looked into the phenomenon of social reading. He starts off with quickly answering the questions asked to the session speakers in the introduction by Geert Lovink: do we herald the death of the individual author with the rise of collaborative writing? Stein’s answer: yes. Is a book is still a book once it gets connected to other information? Stein’s answer: yes. What role do editorial and technical standards continue to play? Stein’s answer: not much. Stein continues with examples of the expanded books he developed with the Voyager Company: Jurrassic Park, Annotated Alice and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. Stein remarks he often gets questions on why they call it the Institute for the Future of the Book when clearly they are talking about other things than just books? Because we don’t have the words yet for what is coming next. Until that moment Stein will just keep changing the history of the book. He briefly goes through his own history within the publishing industry and how his conception of the book changed during that time. When Stein worked for Encyclopedia Britannica, the idea of what a book is kept haunting him. Conceptually the change for him came when he stopped thinking of the physical nature of the book and started thinking on how it was being used. In 1981 books were the only medium in which users were completely in control of how the medium is used (speed, time etc.). The user is completely in control of the way he reads the content; the encyclopedia was a user-driven media were other media were producer-driven. In the end though all of these media became user-driven. Today we can read a movie actively like we read a book.
Around 1996 Stein quit publishing to start thinking around the idea that we need to redefine what a book is and he set up The Institute for the Future of the Book. Stein sat around with a bunch of young people to think about new things such as experiments with Networked Books (McKenzie Wark). They challenged the hierarchy of print—with the author on top and the reader below—flattening it by putting reader comments right next to the text instead of below it. Commentpress was developed out of this. They also experimented with asynchronous reading groups.
These developments led to Stein seeing a book as a place. A place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate. According to Stein reading will increasingly take place in the browser, not in mobile apps or in proprietary non-browser based readers, which would be way too complicated. HTML5 offers many possibilities to create beautiful interactive books. That is why Stein devised the online platform for social reading called Social Book. With a group of colleagues he build an eco-system for publishing that sees books as places were people gather. Stein explains how Social Book distinguishes 4 flavors of social reading. Firstly having a conversation with people in the margin of a book. Secondly it means having access to all the comments other people made. Social also means extracting an experts comments, it is a guide through a book. Fourthly it offers interaction with the author(s). Social thus means being able to engage with authors asynchronously or in real time inside the book.
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 2 – The archive
One of the suggestions made in discussions on remix to cope with the problem of authorship in the digital age, is to shift the focus from the author to the selector, the moderator or the curator. In cases where authorship is hard to establish or even absent, the archive can function as a similar tool to establish authority. These two solutions to the issues of authorship, authority and originality have been examined by Eduardo Navas, artist, curator, and remix theorist.
To deal with the constantly changing now, Navas turns to history as a source of authority, to give legitimacy to fluidity retrospectively by means of the archive. The ability to search the archive gives the remix both its reliability as well as its market value, Navas argues. By recording information, it becomes meta-information, information that is, as Navas states, static, it is available when needed and always in the same form. And this recorded state, this staticity of information retrospectively, is what makes theory and philosophical thinking possible, as Navas claims, “the archive, then, legitimates constant updates allegorically. The database becomes a delivery device of authority in potentia: when needed, call upon it to verify the reliability of accessed material; but until that time, all that is needed is to know that such archive exists.[1]
Navas is, however, also ambivalent about the archive as a search engine, where he argues that in many ways it is a truly egalitarian space—able to answer as he states ‘all questions’—but one that is easily commercialized too. What does it mean when Google harvests the data we collect and our databases are predominantly build up on social media sites? As Navas states, in this respect we are also witnessing an increasing rise of information flow control.
The problem with the archive as a legitimation device for that what it keeps, as a tool to provide the necessary critical distance as Navas argues, is that the archive an sich does not provide any legitimation but is build upon the authority and the commands that constitute the archive. This is what Derrida calls the politics of the archive. What is kept and preserved is connected to power structures, the power of those who decide what to collect (and on what grounds) and the power to interpret the archive and its content when called upon for legitimatory claims later on. The question of authority does not so much lie with the archive, but with who has access to the archive and with who gets to constitute it. At the same time, although it has no real legitimatory power of its own, the archive is used as an objectified extension of the power structures that control it. Furthermore, as Derrida also shows, archiving is an act of externalization, of trying to create stable abstracts.[2] A critique of the archive can be that instead of functioning as a legitimation device, its focus is foremost on objectification, commercialization and consummation, where knowledge streams are turned into knowledge objects, where we order knowledge into consumable bits. As Navas already states, the search engine, based upon the growing digital archive we are collectively building, is Google’s bread and butter. For instance, by initializing large projects like Google Book Search, Google on the one hand aims to make the world’s archive digitally available—digitize the “world’s knowledge” or at least, the part Google finds appropriate to digitize, mostly works in American and British libraries (and thus mostly English language works)—which in Google’s terms means making them freely searchable. And Google partners with many libraries worldwide to make this service available. However, most of the time only snippets of poorly digitized information are freely available and for the full-text functionality, or more contextualized information, books can be acquired via for instance Google’s Ebooks programme (formerly Google Editions). This makes all the more clear how within this environment, search is fully embedded within a commercial framework.
The interpretation of the archive is a fluctuating one, the stability it seems to offer a fraud. As Derrida describes, the digital offers new and different ways of archiving, and thus also a different vision on that what it constitutes and archives (both from a producer as well as from a consumer perspective).[3] Furthermore, the archiving possibilities also determine the structure of the content that will be archived as it is becoming. The archive thus produces just as much as it records the event. The archive produces information, it produces knowledge, and it decides how we determine what knowledge will be. And the way the archive is constructed is very much a consideration under institutional and practical constraints. What, for instance, made Library of Congress decide to preserve and archive all public Twitter Feeds starting from its inception in 2006? And why only Twitter and not other similar social media sites? The relationship of the archive to science is a mutual one, as they determine each other. A new paradigm also asks for and creates a new vision of the archive. This is why, as Derrida states, ‘the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.’[4] The archive does not stabilize or guarantee any concept. Foucault acknowledges this ‘fluidity of the archive’ where he sees the archive as a general system of both the formation and transformation of statements. But the archive also structures knowledge and our way of perceiving the world, as we operate and see the world from within the archive. As Foucault states: ‘it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say.’[5] The archive can thus be seen as governing us and this again goes directly against the idea of critical distance Navas wants to achieve with his idea of the archive, as we can never be ‘outside’ the archive. Let me reiterate that the above critique is not focused on doing away with the archive or on the creation of (Open Access) archives, which play an essential role in amongst others the making accessible of scholarly research, preserving it, adding metadata and making it harvestable. It is focused mainly on being aware of the structures at play behind the archive and on putting question marks at both the perceived stability of the archive, as well as at its authority and legitimacy.
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
Practice what you preach. Engaging in Humanities research through critical praxis
January 30, 2012 in Ebooks, Information and knowledge, Lectures and Conferences, Open Access, Open Education, Remix | Tags: Alex Gil, Anastasia Salter, Angelique Bletsas, Blogs, Books, Commentpress, critical praxis, Delicious, digital, Digital Humanities, dissertation, Ebooks, Foucault, Gary Hall, Hacking the Academy, HASTAC, HASTAC V, Heather Morrisson, Humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Monograph, Open Access, open notebook science, open research, PhD, Print, Remix, scholar, Scholarly Communication, Social Media, Sophie, Tanya Roth, Ted Striphas, Twitter, wikis, Zotero | 1 comment
I finally managed to add hyperlinks to the paper I presented at the HASTAC V conference in Ann Arbor last December. Please find it underneath accompanied by my Prezi presentation.
This lecture will present a new experimental approach to conducting and performing a PhD dissertation within the (digital) humanities. It describes an experiment in developing a digital, open and collaborative research practice, by exploring the possibility of remix, liquidity and openness in the dissertation’s conduct and format.
On September 25, 2011, Media Studies scholar and Digital Humanist Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled ‘Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities’. In this piece Fitzpatrick reflects upon advise she had previously given to a grad student who wanted to do a digital project for her final dissertation. Instead of doing the save thing and writing a traditional dissertation, Fitzpatrick advised her to ‘do the risky thing’, to experiment and present her argument in an innovative way. However, she made sure to add that the student should have someone to cover their back, making a plea for mentors and dissertation supervisors to support digital, experimental dissertation work. The paper that I am presenting here today can in many ways be seen as an expansion of Fitzpatrick’s argument. However, although it applauds her insistence on supervisory support in doing digital research, it wants to draw more attention to the responsibility of PhD students themselves to, as Fitzpatrick states, ‘defend their experimental work’, and their ‘deviation from the road ordinarily travelled’. It will do so first of all by offering a theoretical argumentation on how the choices we make during the PhD and the way we conduct it says a lot about the scholarly communication system we want and envision. Secondly it will do so by focusing on a practical case study of a PhD dissertation that can be seen as an experiment in developing a digital, open and collaborative research practice, by exploring the possibility of remix, liquidity and openness in the dissertation’s conduct and format.
Doing a dissertation in an experimental form—for instance by using multimedia to enhance the dissertation’s argument—or even by using research blogs or social media to develop the thesis’ argument further online, can be an important aspect in gaining, as I will argue, both digital and critical literacy. For example, in her blog post entitled ‘Hacking the Dissertation Process’, historian Tanya Roth writes, reflecting on the PhD process: ‘As digital tools and processes continue to offer larger benefits for [such] projects, it is increasingly important to make sure grad students understand what’s out there and how these resources and ideas can help them with their own research.’ As Roth also states, this is not an either-or-situation where ‘traditional skills’, like how to write a research paper, also need to be part of the curriculum. Nevertheless, by actively ‘trying out’ new (digital) tools and methodologies to see how they fit the specific research project and/or argument that is being pursued, and by performing the dissertation in an alternative way, graduate students will be able to develop what I will call a ‘critical praxis’. To elaborate on this, one of the reasons why during the PhD it is important to develop both digital and critical literacy—which as I will argue can be seen as a simultaneous process—is that it not only helps one to develop and perhaps even expand one’s research skills. Most importantly, it offers a possibility to actively rethink ‘traditional skills’ and with that what is still perceived as the ‘natural’ process of doing a PhD in the Humanities: creating a single-authored, static, print-based argumentation in long-form, which should preferably have the potential to be published as a research monograph. This ‘natural process’ of doing a PhD can be seen as a reflection of dominant discourses that shape how a graduate student is supposed to write or author a dissertation. This provides a road map to becoming a scholar, where the dissertation serves as a model of how to conduct research and ultimately of how to produce a scholarly monograph. Game Studies scholar Anastasia Salter reflects on this argument very clearly in her contribution to the crowd-sourced volume ‘Hacking the Academy’ where she states that ‘The traditional dissertation as product reflects the dominance of the book: it creates a monograph that sits in a database. The processes of the Humanities are to some extent self-perpetuating: write essays as an undergraduate, conference papers as a graduate student, a dissertation as a doctoral student, and books and journal articles as a professor.’
Thus I will argue that at this specific time—a time in which digital projects are still within the Humanities being perceived as ‘risky’— at this specific time developing a form of digital literacy can be seen as a process that goes hand in hand with developing critical literacy, as it offers students the possibility and the ability to critically rethink through critical praxis the dominant discourses and established notions concerning how to conduct a dissertation, and with that, ultimately, how to write a scholarly monograph. And as I will show at the end of this paper with the example or case study of my own dissertation—which I am currently producing—it offers the possibility to try out and explore alternative forms of scholarly communication that have the potential to contribute to a Humanities research practice that is more open, collaborative and processual. By exploring and promoting counter-hegemonic discourses we can show that there is no natural or presumed way to doing a PhD (or to finishing one), nor is there to writing a scholarly monograph.
Let me emphasise here however that I do not claim that this form of critical praxis can only be achieved or learned by experimenting with digital projects, methods and tools. I am only arguing that at this specific moment these tools and methods tend to trigger critique and rethinking of established notions concerning scholarship and scholarly communication. Even more, I would like to add that this critical praxis applies and should apply just as much to digital methods and to being critical of the way research is being done within the Digital Humanities. Especially insofar as digital projects reproduce notions and values from the dominant discourses that can be seen as merely reproducing vested interests. Not all digital projects are inherently and necessary critical and experimental or even ‘risky’, they just have the potential to be so.
I will end my argumentation with a case study, my dissertation on The Future of the Scholarly Monograph and the Culture of Remix, currently in process. By positioning the book as a major site of struggle within the Humanities over some of the new, digital forms and systems of communication rapidly affecting academia—such as Open Access publishing, open peer review, and liquid books—this project argues for the importance of experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and performing the monograph. And just as important, practically engaging with that by starting with the PhD dissertation itself. My research critically analyses the discourse surrounding the future of the scholarly book in the Humanities in the digital age, which can be perceived as a power struggle for another scholarly communication system. My research will at the same time be a theoretical and practical intervention into this debate. It will be an experiment in developing a digital, open, and collaborative research practice, with which I hope to actively challenge and critique the established notions and practices within the field of the Humanities, both in form, practice and content.
Within the Humanities, increasingly scholars experiment with conducting their research in a more open, processual way, following the idea of open research or open notebook science. For instance Book and Cultural Studies scholar Ted Striphas develops new thoughts and arguments on his blog whilst posting his working paper online in a wiki. Media theorist Gary Hall is making the research for his new book Media Gifts freely available online on his website as it evolves. There are however only few doctoral students that I am aware of that are fully putting their work online as an experiment in ‘open research’. One example is communication theorist and librarian Heather Morrison, who posts her dissertation chapters as they evolve online and English student Alex Gil, who is putting his work towards his dissertation online using the CommentPress wordpress plugin.
Various social and archiving media will be used which are connected to the blog, such as Zotero, Twitter and Delicious. This will give an overview of resources used and texts read, and it will also provide an archive of notes, musings and different ideas related to the research as it develops, exploring a notion of research that is less focussed on the final end-product and more on the process of constantly developing, and updating research and on resource building.
When the research has developed from an initial draft-phase—incorporating comments and advise from the blog—into a more mature form, it will be published on a multimedia platform, such as Sophie, offering the possibility to create, edit and read, in a collaborative setting, and of making mashups and remixes of, amongst others, text, video, sound, illustrations, images and spoken word, to explore what it means to communicate research in an other than textual format, and to have different medial versions of the research. At this point I will invite scholars and artists to actively remix the content related to the dissertation. This intervention not only challenges the idea of single authorship (giving more appreciation to the collaborative nature of research) it also explores the possibility of traversing fields, combining research with artistic practice, trying practically to explore how we can abolish (or diminish) the distinctions still made between both.
Finally a wiki will be used where the authorial ‘moderating function’ still at work in the blog and the multimedia platform will be left behind. This is where I want to explore what it means to let go of authorship as a form of authority, both to examine what kind of alternative forms of authority (could) emerge and to critique our established notions of authority. In the wiki environment the author can no longer (solely) be held responsible or judged for the text or research. In the wiki the text will know no final version, it can be further commented upon and it can be updated, remixed and re-used (in principle) indefinitely.