Practice what you preach. Engaging in Humanities research through critical praxis

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.

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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.’

The importance of being aware of and critiquing these dominant discourses however not only lies in exploring the tension between how these discourses on the one hand reproduce ‘traditional scholars’ and how on the other hand, the PhD and the PhD thesis are supposed to be, as political theorist Angelique Bletsas states in her article ‘The PhD Thesis as ‘Text’’: ‘(…) the foundations of ‘new scholarship’ and as such are integral to the production of new thought and new scholars.’ It is important to be aware that these discourses relating to knowledge production during the PhD process have, as Bletsas argues, certain subjectification effects. She shows how the dissertation is not only about finishing a static text but also about finishing as a person. As she states, the accepted thesis completes the student as a discoursing’ subject’. In other words the PhD student as a discoursing subject is being (re-) produced in these dominant discourses, and with that, a certain kind of scholar, and a certain kind of scholarly communication system also get reproduced.

 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.

To continue my argumentation, just as knowledge is inherently political, doing a PhD or writing a dissertation is, as I claim, a political act. As Angelique Bletsas states, drawing on Michel Foucault, there is ‘no standpoint in the field of knowledge production which is ‘innocent’ or outside of power relations.’ Bletsas describes the tension that you need to be accepted, be formed in a certain way and comply to a certain discourse, before you can critique this discourse. Drawing further on this, for me a resistance against being formed in a certain way thus already starts during the PhD a time when we also start to critically evaluate which values underlying scholarly communication we should cherish. The PhD can be seen as an intervention in the production of knowledge, in which one takes in a position concerning the future of scholarly communication. The traditional PhD dissertation or what is commonly perceived as the ‘natural PhD process’ follows many of the elements of what I would call a traditional and paper-based view of scholarly communication. What I am arguing for here is a critical praxis that explores (and again remains critical of) values based on a politics of sharing and collaborating. One that critiques established notions of authorship and stability and triggers us to rethink institutions which are at the moment still very much part of and reproducing an economics and politics based on vested interests inherited from a print-based situation. We now have the possibility to use digital tools to explore open access, collaboration, remix and processual scholarship, which have the potential to offer an alternative view for scholarly communication.

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.

In my dissertation the possibilities of remix, liquidity and openness will be practically explored in both the research’s conduct and format. By making use of digital platforms and tools, all the research towards the dissertation—notes, chapters, etc.—will be made available online, as it progresses, via multiple outlets. This critical praxis will thus follow the idea of open research, by which anyone can track what has been done (openness), can comment on the research (social), and can add to it (collaborative, remix, liquid), hence arguing for a new future for the book as an emergent and evolving form within scholarly communication. In order to explore the new forms made possible by digital technology and culture, the following outlets will be used: a weblog entitled Open Reflections where ideas, first drafts and short pieces related to the dissertation will be posted. The blog will be used to share research, to build a community, to explore the possibilities of forms of open peer review and community comments and the possibilities of these for the research process. More advanced draft chapters will also be presented in an accompanying blog using the CommentPress plugin, at which state I will also actively invite people to comment.

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.

Open Media Research Seminars – Series 3

Tuesday November 1st media scholar William Merrin will kick off the third series of Research Seminars at Coventry University  on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.

Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!

- OPEN MEDIA -

 

A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

Programme: November-December 2011

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November 1st:

William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0′ (Read More)

November 15th:

Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’

November 22th:

Living Books about Life launch (Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and Open Humanities Press) – Talks by Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University), and Janneke Adema (Coventry University).

December 6th:

Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute) – ‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’

December 13th 3:00-5:00 (at Meter Room - 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF)

Round table on ‘Open Art, or What could Open Art mean?‘
Participants: Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists), Ruth Catlow(Furtherfield) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)

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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in November and December (except the final round table, which will be held from 3:00-5:00)

Where: ICE, The Screening Room (except the final round table, which will be held at Meter Room)

Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT

All seminars are free to attend and open to all

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

How to get to ICE, see:

http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections

New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

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.

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[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/

New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

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]

 

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[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

Open Media Research Seminar Series

In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.

On his Media Gifts website, cultural and media theorist Gary Hall has been (and is) writing a series of writings on ‘the limits of openness’, which, if you are interested in open media, are definitely worth a read and nicely dovetail the theme of the seminar series.

- OPEN MEDIA -

A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/

 

Programme: January-March 2011

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Tuesday 25^th January

Jussi Parikka (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘Zombie Media: Media Archaeology as Circuit Bending’ (read more)

Tuesday 1st February

David Campbell - ‘The new ecology of information: how social media challenges the university’ (read more) Note: in ETG10 (Ellen Terry Building)

Tuesday 8th February

María Mencía (Kingston University) – ‘Open Meaning in Digital Writing’ (read more)

Tuesday 15th February

Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the “Friendly Medium”’ (read more)

Tuesday 1st March

Clare Birchall (University of Kent) – ‘”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’ (read more)

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All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB (unless otherwise stated)

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections

Who Owns Research?

Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question.  Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace Cambridge), engaged in a discussion with the CRASSH Postdoctoral community on copyright and ownership of research. The exchange soon evolved into a wider debate on subjects as diverse as authorship, (Open Access) publishing and business models, peer review, branding and credibility, and deposit mandates and PhD theses. Google Books, Internet control and plagiarism also seeped into the discussion. The atmosphere was open and the crowd in a problem-solving mood. All the more surprising (and fulfilling) considering the fact that the principles of the panelists and the audience could be located on a sliding-scale from more traditional to highly experimental.

Linda Bree described herself as “the one in traditional publishing”, which, according to her, entails giving away forms of control. By default, she explains, the system revolves around the single author doing a substantial research (preferably in the form of a book). This research is then reviewed, published, disseminated and marketed. The researcher gains in this process by gathering career benefits, where the publisher receives a financial gain―which in academic publishing mostly means not going bankrupt. So, Bree explains, we find ourselves in a semi-commercial situation. In this context the publisher is not so much involved content-wise, but s/he does have a big say in the way research gets presented. This is an important aspect of the publisher’s work and is based on the possibility of presenting a work within certain financial limits. Because all of the above mentioned processes cost money, from reviewing to marketing. And they are all essential in the end for the scholar to, as Bree calls it, get a “nice published book” and to achieve the idea of “I wrote this”.

            Although you could say that giving away this amount of control over one’s work costs quite a lot for an author, Bree defends her and CUP’s position by stating that the transference off control to the publisher is a necessary process. The publisher has invested money along the way and needs to attain revenue. And CUP does give some rights to re-use the work (often fee-based). However, the current technological changes in the publishing process have now given individual scholars the possibility to assert more control over their research (through Open Access and electronic publishing). The individual scholar now has much more choices than in the traditional model (which as Bree admits, is in many ways not sufficient anymore). The seminal question an author thus needs to ask himself is what kind of added value traditional publishing gives him (in forms of branding and other benefits) and whether this is worth the loss of control?

Elin Stangeland from DSpace Cambridge explains the special position Cambridge scholars have in the UK, where they (and not their universities) actually hold the copyright to their research. Giving away forms of control can take place in various settings, as an author can also give a publisher a license to publish (as with a Creative Commons license). Other options for a scholar to keep more in-control include publishing your work with an Open Access book or journal publisher (according to Stangeland, half of the journals in the DOAJ are HSS journals) and self archiving. Scholars can also try to retain their rights from a publisher. Often traditional publishers—like CUP—also provide a hybrid option, where the author can opt to make his specific work openly available. DSpace—which can both be used for books and articles—takes care of the storage and dissemination of the researchers work. They also offer services and advice, like the copyright toolbox (developed by SURF and JISC), and provide information on funders’ policies concerning self-archiving requirements. And they are looking ahead, actively thinking about the archiving of research data (and the management hereof), new citation and reward systems for publishing in the digital humanities and developments concerning the social and semantic web.

            Rupert Gatti explained how he—an economist at Trinity College—started Open Book Publishers out of frustration: publishers were not responding quickly enough to the digital developments. Publishers will not sell books they deem to be in un-publishable areas (even though they match their quality criteria) and if they are published, these books are only bought by elite libraries in the west. But the POD revolution and the Internet brought new possibilities to disseminate research. And as Gatti states, dissemination is an important justification of research. Society needs access to research, were the current model prevents dissemination. Open Book publishers takes another route where their publications are completely searchable though Google Books and authors and readers have the freedom to transform and distribute the research. As publishers they have a non-exclusive right to publish (via a CC license). And they don’t give in on the quality aspect: OPB’s books are just as rigorously peer-reviewed as books in the traditional model. OPB is not for profit (and in case they do make a profit they share it 50/50 with their authors) and for a large part counts on the work of volunteers. And they take care of the ‘lap value’, as Gatti calls it, where they publish (affordable) hard and paperback copies of their publications—using the same printer as CUP does, Gatti adds. As Gatti concludes, there are alternatives to the traditional model and they are growing quickly.

 

After shortly describing the development of the Open Humanities Press—an international Open Access publishing collective—Gary Hall focused on one of the more experimental projects the press is undertaking. For next to more traditional forms of publication, OMP wants to experiment—through its Liquid Book Series—with changing the physical conception of the monograph. Liquid books offer open editing and free/libre content on a Read/Write basis and can for instance consist of a collage of different media and texts; snippets, pages, references, podcasts, youtube clips, etc.. This form of publishing directly confronts the idea of the author. Remembering Barthes, Hall explains how by giving a text an author, we at the same time give it a limit. Liquid Books are an experiment with the decentralization of the author. In a way this decentralization is already on its way. With the massive rise of authorship through the online medium the (discourse on the) author has again become more open, decentralized and distributed. With Google as our major spotlight and Internet filter, the performers of different roles (authors, editors, compilers) are not always identifiable. Everyone is potentially an author or an editor online.

The discussion that followed focused for a large part on the differences between the traditional subscription and the new Open Access models. Worries about the sustainability of Open Access models and their quality assurance were systematically taken away by the panelists. As all panelists confirmed and agreed upon, there is no such thing as one sustainable model for publishing books. In the future there is likely to be a mix of eclectic models with various revenue sources. Where it comes to quality standards, Gatti for one emphasized that the thorough peer review methods of OBP confirm to the highest standards (comparable to those of CUP for instance). Bree however emphasized that for young authors—publishing their first book—the brand of a publisher also plays an important role. She clearly advised young authors to think about this when making their choice on where to publish. Gatti replied by stating that the more open availability of Open Access publications (and in OBP’s case the lower pricing of their print books) is also an important aspect of the marketing and dissemination of publications.

In this respect it is again about the added value of the publisher and about which addition you value the most. And as this seminar showed, with the increased possibilities for authors to publish their research online, publishing is now more than ever about making choices. What the right choice is in this respect, especially concerning the ownership of research, is up to the researcher. Perhaps now more than ever, s/he is in control about how and where to publish.

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?”

Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As Wikipedia states, Ubu is non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. All the same – by forming an amazing resource and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however: ‘should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.’

Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and pop music the Piratebay and other download sites (or p2p networks) like Mininova are being sued and charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to documentaries.

This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 Sebastian Lütgert from Berlin/New York was sued by the “Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur” for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his website textz.com, an underground archive for Literature. According to this Indymedia interview with Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about 700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states ‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction, Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik usw’.

The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “Das kann man sowieso [when referring to the still available Adorno texts]. Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”

But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems to be the paradox of many – not quite legal and/or copyright protected – resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However, multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little ‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their educational and not-for-profit value.

Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘information wants to be free’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “Und vor allem sind die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht, kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation, dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird. A: Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu “besitzen”? Oder Eigentümer davon zu sein? S: Es ist *unmöglich*. “Geistiges” Irgendwas verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich “geistiges” Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”

What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.

The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.

This is one of the reasons the Open Access movement for scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just started.

This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the content if asked. Following the copyleft movement, what has in a way thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the worst case, but not be stopped.

Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this). Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about textbook piracy (since this is of course the area where individual consumers – students – do directly buy the material) and websites like Scribd, this mostly has to do with the fact that these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform (or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns and much media coverage.

All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert, their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from individual customers.

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

As Adrian Johns states in his article Piracy as a business force, ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Andersson states, the idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Although Andersson states this kind of activism is mostly occasional, it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much an issue on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an interview with Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:

“The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.”

Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still accessible via The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In the case of textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays from for instance David Lynch.

The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of copyright texts), still active today, are Monoskop/Burundi and AAAARG.ORG. These kinds of platforms all seem to disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce, Baudrillard, etc.etc.

Monoskop is, as they state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a ‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found here, Burundi originated in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature (in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It dissolved in June 2005 although the Monoskop research wiki on media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.

As is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles artist Sean Dockray. In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.’ To be able to access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need to register, after which you will be able to browse the library. From this library, you can download resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their feed (RSS/XML) and like Monoskop, AAAARG.org also maintains a Twitter account on which updates are posted. The most interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site. You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the texts. See for instance their elaborate discussion lists. The AAAARG community thus serves both as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).

Via mercurunionhall, I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG’s article index organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to mercurunionhall.

Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself – typed out versions of books – Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution: scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer, taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’ websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however, Monoskop links to Sharebee, keeping the actual text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.

Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the last is the Discourse Notebook Archive, which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here you can find lectures from Badiou, Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video) and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental philosophy.

Society of Control is a website maintained by Stephan Dillemuth, an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an overview of his work and scientific research. According to this interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website, the Society of Control is, as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted to research into truth and meaning.’

Society of Control has a library section which contains works from some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno, Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function. Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech and information and making information accessible to all:

“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They will be removed at the copyright holder’s request within a reasonable period of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any copyrights.”

Important in this respect is that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his site with the viewers, and not with himself: “Anyone reading or looking at copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim any participation or liability in such actions.”

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance and Multitude of blogs are maintained by the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul. The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts), focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book publishing sites so that tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the host on possible copyright infringement: ‘None of the PDFs are my own productions. I’ve collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing.’ The same goes for pdflibrary (which seems to be from the same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes: ‘None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are collected from different places in the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and tagging.’

Our student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs, including Inishark (amongst others Badiou, Zizek and Derrida), Revelation (a lot of history and bible study), Museum of accidents (many resources relating to again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and Makeworlds (initiated from the make world festival 2001). Mariborchan is mainly a Zizek resource site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio (lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing platforms.

What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes. Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.

This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.

Update 25 November 2005: Another interesting resource site came to my attention recently: Bedeutung, a philosophical and artistic initiative consisting of three projects: Bedeutung Magazine, Bedeutung Collective and Bedeutung Blog, hosts a library section which links to freely downloadable online e-books, articles, audio recordings and videos.