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.

Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed

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.

Remixthebook

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.

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/

Post Literacy

The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and analyze) written words. Media literacy, the equally broad term used to expand the concept of literacy, is mostly used to describe the capability to analyze, decode and criticize the manifold messages incorporated in the different (digital) media. Media literacy has with the growing popularity of online communication, again become a much debated topic and an interest of educational reformers. Post literacy, as a concept, incorporates media literacy but pushes the idea even further, to a future where text no longer is perceived as the dominant medium. According to postliteracy.org, post literacy focuses on the other (medial) means of communicating messages, exploring ‘visual, interactive, computational and textual literacies’. As they state, to be able to decipher the (often hidden) messages in multimedia communication, polymodal literacy is needed. This creation of a polymodal literacy is a necessity in today’s society, where the advance of the Internet has lead to an enormous rise in the use of multi(-digital-)media communication, transcending the explicit focus on text inherited from the print era. As postliteracy.org states on its website:

“Postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.”

Exploring the concept of post literacy in a very practical manner, postliteracy.org is using steganography and online deciphering software to post multimedia puzzles with hidden messages for you to solve (as a means to further develop your post literacy level), as you can see here.

As Doug Johnson states, the interest in multimedia and the concept of post literacy has grown due to the increased use of small and portable video and movie playing devices, further pushing the dominant textual media into a supporting role. This demise of the power of textual media reminds us of a foregone past, showing similarities with preliterate (oral) societies in which, as Wikipedia states, people have ‘not yet discovered how to read and write’, the difference being that ‘a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication.’ As Walter Ong describes in Orality and Literacy, in the transformation from a preliterate to a literate society, the capability to write and read had to be acquired, in a similar fashion as one learns to use a tool. According to Ong this fundamental transformation also meant a shift in the way we think and structure thoughts. Mike Ridley is very much interested in this change in how we think, triggered by the use of different media, and in the influence this media use has on the way our brain functions (some even state that the way we process information in today’s information overloaded society has lead to our brains looking ever more like those of schizophrenics, giving rise to ponderings about a new schizophrenic society and schizophrenic ways of thinking). But Ridley wants to stress not the negative connotations surrounding post literacy, which focus on the decline of textual communication and reading, where he wants to emphasize the inherent strengths of both orality and literacy, to see what the potential of a post literate society could be.

As Dough Johnson remarks, the increased use of media other than textual (especially in an online environment) combined with the fact that we, as recent studies have shown, read differently online, might mean we are heading towards a post literate society faster than we think. Although Johnson states that he does still see a role for textual media and communication, in his definition of a post literate society, people choose to use the other media as their main means of communication, they have a preference for them or, as he states ‘The post literate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.’

This development described by Johnson and others can be seen as closely connected to the research that is being conducted on new ways of data visualization, in which graphic or figurative representations of large amounts of data are used to get an overview of and deeper insight into complex and huge information compounds and objects, constructing a way of dealing with information overload and representing it in a non-textual manner. As Wikipedia states, the primary goal of data visualizations is ‘to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means’. The necessity of these kinds of tools or representations in a way illustrates the short-fall of textual communication in the online environment (in some occasions). Where information is ever more superfluous and the need to grasp large amounts of data (especially in science) ever more important, other media might be more convenient.

Doug Johnson looks at the way the move towards post literacy is influencing books and the way we use them (online), noting the rise of comics and graphic novels, (or think for instance of the popularity of Manga and role-playing games which increasingly use complex narrative structures in a non-textual manner). He then goes on to denote what the coming of a post literate net-generation means for the future (post literate) library. One of the most important point Johnson makes is that we need to get away from and look critically at our bias towards print, which is prejudicing our literacy skills when compared with our other media knowledge and apprehension. He sees the ‘return’ to a post literate society as a natural development towards a more multisensory way of communication:

“But I would argue that post literacy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.”

John Connell responds to Johnson in a post in which he emphasizes the continuing importance of text, even in an online environment. Although he agrees with Johnson concerning the lack of attention for other forms of literacy, he does state that ‘the debate should not be about print but about the utility, beauty, strength and continued resilience of text in its multifarious contexts, whether on paper or on any other medium.’ This is actually a very interesting point that he makes, to take a closer look at and investigate how text ‘mixes’ with other media, and how it is perceived and consumed in the context of other (digital) media. How does the interaction between text and other media change the way we analyze and interpret the message inherent in this multimedia format, which then in a way transcends the mere textual medium?

Mike Ridley perhaps captures the full meaning of post literacy best (agreeing more with Johnson than with Connell where it comes to the dominance of text) in his definition, in which he says that ‘post literacy is the phrase used to capture the possibility of rich human communication that exceeds (and hence replaces) visible language (writing and reading) as the dominant means of the understanding and exchange of ideas.” Ridley introduces here an important aspect I feel has been missing in the above discussion, focusing mainly on post literacy and the consumer side of multimedia communication. For as I believe, to be able to communicate in a post-textual manner, the producers of these new forms of online communication also need to become post literate.

One way to think about the idea of a post-literate-writer (a contradiction in terminus) or a post textual content producer, is to reflect upon ideas that transcend the concept of media, focusing rather on (the development towards) a single medium or on the disappearance of media as such. As Kiene Brillenburg Wurth states in her article Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry (referring to Friedrich Kittler), the Internet is leading to ‘the end of medial compartmentalization’. She cites Kittler saying:

“(…) If the optical fibre network reduces all formerly separate data flows to one standardized digital series of numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers nothing is impossible. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, memory, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself.”

This closely resembles Mark Amerika’s idea of ‘the artist as the medium’, through which the different communication streams flow, as he states ‘the artist is the medium or instrument, and the networked space of flows play this instrument to facilitate the development of creative compositions’ (Meta/Data,19). 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.

As Brillenburg states, with the coming of digital art, the idea (or the myth) of separate and sustainable media with their own specifics or ‘essence’ is destroyed. She refers to the 19^th century connotation of a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which one tried to connect the different media. However, as she states, the Gesamtkunstwerk has been ‘evolving into the kind of aural-visual-verbal computer games and multi-sensory interactive art works that have now grown so familiar to us.’ Brillenburg thinks the idea or concept of multimedia is no longer sufficient to describe the new forms of digital media communication that are taking place online, and she proposes to use the term intermediality instead, which can incorporate better the different ways in which media ‘contaminate’ each other, as a way to describe the ‘in-between’ of media. As she describes it:

“Intermediality projects not simply a ‘together-art’ or any other continuation of nineteenth-century Gesamtkunst, but a criss-crossing between and mutual infusion of different medial modalities. Words become like colours, colours like words, texts like buildings and spaces, sounds are spatially heard – such contaminations date back not so much to Wagner’s utopian view of the arts united, but to those avant-garde experiments that questioned the respective identities and conditions of possibility of the different art forms.”

For me this summarizes quite clearly how the move towards a post literate society is not only about being able to analyze and interpret polymodal ways of communicating, but also about being able to produce these forms of communication in a good (and comprehensible) way. Not only can we be seen moving towards a society in which the consumption of media is increasingly becoming post literate, the digital media producer, artist, or even scholar, is also increasingly working in a mixed medial manner. Like Mark Amerika remarks when he states that he lets the media flow through him (or her) this means the online content producer will be using media less and less as separate entities. Although these post literate characteristics of mixing media are mostly seen in visual arts, we are also increasingly seeing multimedial (or intermedial) writers, poets (the focus of Brillenburg’s analysis) and even scholars, who are less biased towards text, using different media in a natural and even unconscious way (emphasizing the flow) like for instance Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) or Mark Amerika have been doing in their scholarly and/or artistic works. It might be interesting to reflect upon what the influence of these ways of post literate thinking and (more important perhaps) of post textual doing, might be on the production and consumption of scholarly books. What kind of consequences might these developments have for the way scholars operate in a digital environment, using new digital media to communicate their research? It would be equally interesting to think about what a post literate (or post-textual) humanities field would look like, a form of humanities scholarship in which text would no longer be the dominant choice for transferring or communication research. Maybe the experiments Lev Manovich has been doing with digital humanities and data visualization, and his emphasis on a new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’, are a good example of what a post literate, post textual or polymodal humanities might start off from.

Monographic Experiments

For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and reward systems in the aforementioned scholarly field. But also the fixity of the text and the easy practicality of the codex format are factors that have to be taken into consideration when thinking about the benefits of the printed book. How can we make a smooth shift, how can we ensure an easy transition for the monograph from print to digital, without loosing these obvious advantages?

There are quite some experiments going on online in the field (or rather the discipline) of ‘Digital Humanities’. When it comes to adapting the academic book to the web I distinguish three forms of adaptations (each link leads to an example):

- Web texts

- Wiki-monographs

- Networked books

 These are very broad categories of course but let me explain the logic behind these divisions. The first focuses mainly on experiments with the format, using the possibilities of new digital media tools to present the text in a multi-medial, modal, in different ways approachable manner. The second is an example of new ways of collaboration and internal cooperation of Humanities scholars online. The third example shows how connections can also be made with the community at large, with the wider network of scholars, students and otherwise interested readers. It offers an outreach to a wider community.

 All three are also examples of  ‘remix practice’ or of remix culture:

-         mixing of media

-         mixing of ‘authored texts’ within a formal communication context

-         mixing of ‘user generated content’ within an informal communication

          context

All three different categorization can be seen as 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. 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 three 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?

 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. Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.