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.

Book Destruction

Two weeks ago I attended the Book Destruction conference, which took place on the 16^th of April at the Institute of English Studies, part of the University of London. The conference focused on the book as a symbol and as an idea, as well as on its material form, and explored what happens when books are not treated with reverence but with violence or disregard. Subjects discussed were the burning and obliterating of books; cutting and tearing; recycling and remaking; and digitizing and archiving books. Underneath you can find a short summary of my notes on what I deemed the most interesting papers.

Corinna Norrick looked in her paper at book destruction with a political background, more specifically at political children’s book publishing. The 1968 German student protests amongst others focused on a criticism of the educational system. Publishing house Rororo Rotfuchs started publishing a non-authoritarian democratic children’s books series, which aimed at demystifying the ‘good children’s book. Not only did they explore new types of content, but also new formats and new channels of distribution. Norrick shows how the toy or activity books published by Rotfuchs challenged the typical function of books: playfulness and creativity became the main aspects. Children were encouraged to cut up the books, for instance to create clothing for dolls or set up pop-up houses. Destroying books in this way served as a stimulus for the child’s creativity.

Adam Smyth from Birkbeck zoomed in on a specific kind of renaissance remix practice in his paper on cutting up bibles at Little Gidding. Smyth showed several examples of mechanical marginalia, namely scissors that left oxidation traces in folios. What were these destructive instruments doing inside books? Scissors were most likely owned by binders, but we must not forget, according to Smyth, that the act of reading in the Renaissance was often accompanied by the cutting up of books, with both scissor and knives, to create scrapbooks or commonplace books. Cutout pages were again glued in to create new books. Smyth shows how in this way reading and writing was accompanied by a third act: cutting. He explores this act of making books by cutting up books in the Renaissance by looking at the Bibles or harmonies of Little Gidding, which can be seen as radical interventions in the history of the book. Nicholas Ferrar, head of an Anglican religious community, which resided in Little Gidding, and his family created concordances or harmonies by cutting-up bibles. The intention of the bible cut-ups was to ‘harmonize’ the text. The Little Gidding’s harmonies can also be seen as early forms of collage were images were also cut-up and reworked into the narrative, adding pictorial enhancements to the textual re-shuffling. Interesting enough, Smyth explains, it was not the cutting up of texts that was challenging but exactly the use of images, where in 1630 these were seen as akin to Catholicism. This cutting out of pictures, dismantling and reordering them, can be seen as a form of iconoclasm. Boxes of images were kept and also parts of images were used. Interesting enough the actual cutting and pasting was done by Ferrar’s nieces. The effect of the harmonies as a whole is the tension between a striving for completeness vs. the cutting and pulling apart that is part of the collating. The creativity of these harmonies rests on the prior act of cutting parts. Smyth shows how these harmonies are a good example of the illusion of the fixity of print. He sees this development as a response to the printing press: the scrapbooks turned the printed books back into unique pieces. As Smyth explains, there is a lot of novelty and technical sophistication in these harmony productions but they also catch a lot of unease in early readers of these books, who took them to be printed in the ordinary way. The finished book was thus not yet the iconic thing it is today; it was not yet a fully established idea. Cutting up bibles was not a regressive act, only the use of images was seen as controversial. Cutting up the text could also have served as a memory device perhaps, to aid the learning off the text, becoming more familiar with it. Smyth ends by noting how the idea of authorship is very interesting in these works where Ferrar’s nieces did the actual cutting up. So if we talk about authorship we can state that the Little Gidding texts have been reworked by many hands.

Nicola Dale - Cuckoo Song (2004)

Several book artists discussed their work during the conference. Book artist Ross Birrell’s video ‘Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’, in which he cuts in half and grates books on Duchamp, literally framed the conference as they were placed in angles behind the speakers. Birrell discussed several of his works focusing on book destruction. Amongst others he burned the complete works of Kafka, to reflect on the question whether burning Kafka is fairer to Kafka’s original wish.

Book artist Nicola Dale looked at the potential of book destruction and the book as an artist’s medium. Important in her work is that she sees her work not as destruction but as a transformation of books. As she reflected on her work ‘Cuckoo Song’, she explains how the work is about shifting knowledge in time and space and how it challenges questions of originality, authorship and repetition. As she states in her website about this work: ‘I read a large amount of British poetry, with the themes of originality, repetition and authorship in mind. I systematically took note of any quotations from the poems which dealt with these themes, and used them to construct an original poem.’ She also describes the making of her work ‘Down’, consisting of thousands of paper feathers made by hand from old maps. The work ‘A secret heliotropism’ is a reflection on Walter Benjamin, and on change in history.

Nicola Dale - A Secret Heliotropism (2006)

Bonnie Mak talked in her paper about how books are being destroyed as part of our continued digitization effort. Digitization also means the translation of material into a computer readable format. It remains unclear how this translation should be read. In the transition from codex to computer, Mak opts for viewing digitized books as palimpsests, erased and overwritten. One exists on top of the other, one is visible through the other. The digital reproduction is based on a relationship with the exemplar, the digitization and its exemplar occupy the same space. The digitization also shows how it imagines a manuscript. Within the digitization the idea of what a manuscript is, is embedded, and thus the digitization shapes the way the manuscript will be received and understood. Thus digitization leads to a reordering of classical texts and to how we understand the world as scholars. According to Mak we should be attentive to how these sources shape the past and the present. Digitized books are similar but different from their exemplars. Digital books can thus be seen as palimpsests of the present and the past. Mak stresses the fact that we should exploit digital resources while remaining critical of them.

Ariana Boussard-Reifel - Between the Lines (2007)

Book sculptures by Robert The

Brooke Palmieri talked about a different form of book destruction namely the disappearance of books within library archives. What happens if a book does not have an online library entrance? Palmieri calls this a silent form of destruction, a form of institutionalized destruction caused by cataloguing problems. The quiet destructiveness that haunts the archive is very much a historical property of the archive. The problem mainly occurs with entries that are hard to classify such as Robert Burtons’ commonplace notebooks: half print, half manuscript, which is a monster to classify. Palmieri shows how decisions made on an institutional level in this way leave their imprints on scholarship. She talks about two kinds of destruction in this manner: duplicates that get destroyed and books that librarians forget to archive. This shows that when a book enters a library it is not at all guaranteed a life of rest. Even more, its nature seems very much malleable. Books get new call numbers, are replaced to different positions in the catalogue. The history of anomalies and distribution of books across libraries shows how librarians are an obstacle to the field, as they abide to cataloguing practices that do not know how to deal with anomalies and in which they keep re-shuffling the entries. Palmieri concludes that cataloguing standards are very much a product of historical circumstances.

Kate Flint, in her plenary talk ‘The aesthetics of book destruction’ reflects back on how a book destroyed can be a beautiful thing. Looking over several examples of book art she explores how these works raise important questions: what is lost when a book is destroyed and what possibilities arrive? What is the relationship between material form and content? Why do images of destroyed book have a certain emotional effect? Flint concludes that we should use the book to think about the future of the book. This includes questions of accessibility, archiving and preservation. These art books and book arts make us aware of a books materiality and the difference between a book and a text and of the reading experience of a book.

Paper sculpture by Cara Barer

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 – Part I

A few weeks ago the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University brought together a group of digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds as part of the unique summer institute One Week | One Tool. The aim of One Week | One Tool was to come up with an (open source) digital tool to aid humanities scholarship. The catch was that this whole process of tool-building could take no longer than a week. The tool the group came up with and, as part of the deal, actually build, is called Anthologize. Anthologize, as the tagline proclaims, ‘use(s) the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.’ The idea is that you can grab content from your own blog or other blogs, order it, determine the layout and publish it, both in print and in different electronic formats.

Next to being a refreshing project and a useful tool, what I found interesting about Anthologize is the (implicit) notion that lies behind it’s conception, namely the idea of what a scholarly book should or can be.

Anthologize it

Let’s take a closer look at a blogpost about Anthologize written by Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media. Cohen is a historian who, in his own words, ‘explores—and tries to influence through theory, software, websites, and his blog—the impact of computing on the humanities.’ In the post he wrote to introduce Anthologize, there are a few interesting preconceptions concerning the book. For instance, he begins his post with stating the following:

“A long-running theme of this blog has been the perceived gulf between new forms of online scholarship—including the genre of the blog itself—and traditional forms such as the book and journal.”

This sentence is very interesting for various reasons. First of all Cohen talks about the perceived (and thus not real) gulf between online scholarship, such as the blog, and traditional forms such as the book. Furthermore he states that the book and the blog are both forms of scholarship, they are just different genres. Finally, he refers to how discussions surrounding the scholarly book mostly have been conducted by opposing new online forms of scholarship to traditional print scholarship such as the book and the journal.

Further on Cohen explains more in detail what Anthologize has to offer:

“Today marks the launch of this effort: Anthologize, software that converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices.”

In this sentence it becomes clear that both Cohen and the One Tool | One Week people argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the print format, where in their view books can be delivered in various formats (including, but not exclusively, print) suitable to be read on (and by) various devices. Furthermore, they—I would say consciously—push for a broad(er) idea of what a book can consist off: in their vision a (scholarly) book can, besides text, consist of all kinds of multimedia content. Furthermore, it can consist of material that has been previously online available—hence published—such as blogposts. Thus with Anthologize a book becomes a selection of online available material which can be expanded with new texts and/or multimedia content. Finally, it offers the creator of the book the possibility to instantly publish the book her or himself, without the help of publishers or self-publishing platforms.

As I will state, with this tool Cohen and the people from One Week | One Tool argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the idea of the traditional printed scholarly book. Anthologize forms a, perhaps implicit, critique against connotations that are an intrinsic part of the production process of a scholarly book as it is currently common in print publishing: double-blind peer review and quality control and branding by a reputable press. In this way they try to challenge or by-pass the traditional authorities that determine whether a scholarly book is fit to be published.

The New Age of the Supplement

About a decade ago there was another historian that thought about new futures for the book: Robert Darnton. Darnton is a leading expert on eighteenth-century France, a book historian who writes about electronic publishing, and the founder of Gutenberg-e, the electronic monograph series. Currently Darnton is a professor in the History department at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard University Library. In 1999 Darnton wrote the article “The New Age of the Book” published in the New York Review of Books, in which he criticizes the publishing system surrounding the scholarly monograph and opts for a different system based on the electronic publishing of books. In this article Darnton puts forward a concept of the book that again differs from that of Cohen et. al.

In the first paragraph of his article Darnton paraphrases Marshall McLuhan:

“Marshall McLuhan’s future has not happened. The Web, yes; global immersion in television, certainly; media and messages everywhere, of course. But the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction, as McLuhan prophesied in 1962. His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium that we are about to enter. The “Gutenberg galaxy” still exists, and “typographic man” is still reading his way around it.”

Darnton puts the printed book here in direct opposition to the web, and can in this sense be seen as part of the discourse which emphasises the gulf between the online and the book mentioned by Cohen. Darnton casually argues that the world as we know and perceive it is still build on the concept of the printed book. For Darnton a book is foremost distinguishable by its codex format. In his vision the codex is a great technology; it is a format which is great for packaging information, it is superb for storage, and thus for archiving, and remarkably resistant to damage and is therefore good to preserve. Furthermore, it misses some of the tiresome drawbacks one can attribute to electronic publications (such as charging batteries). Most importantly, Darnton states the codex is valuable in that it has been the basic tool for learning for thousands of years.

However, Darnton’s vision for the book is more versatile, as we soon will see. But by equalling the book with the codex here and highlighting the codex’s continued benefits, he seems to be catering to a certain rhetoric in this part of his article, where he refers to the continued fear that electronic publishing will cause people to do away with the traditional book:

“If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book? Will electronic publishing wipe it out?”

By proposing a new future for the book, Darnton paints a picture of two visions of the book (one print and one electronic) that can exist side-by-side. Furthermore the electronic book is in his view something different, a supplement to the traditional book, not a replacement of it.

In this carefully crafted article Darnton goes on to show how this alternative concept, of the electronic book as a supplement, could even be beneficial for the scholarly book. Darnton’s push towards electronic publishing seems to be triggered essentially by two related problems in the field surrounding monograph publishing: the crisis in scholarly publishing, making it increasingly hard to get a monograph published, and the related problem of attaining tenure for young scholars, were tenure is directly coupled to the publishing of a monograph by a reputable press. In this way we could interpret this article—and the concept of the book put forward here by Darnton—foremost as a rhetorical device aimed at solving these problems.

The possibilities of electronic publishing however lead further than just saving the current print publishing model and the reputation system that is build upon it from extinction. And this is where Darnton carefully sets out his famous vision of the book as a pyramid build up of different layers of diverse data which can expand on and supplement the printed book in an online environment. The function of this electronic book is not so much to be read however, but to serve as an archive, a database, a search engine and a social text were people can interact with the text and with each other. In the final paragraph of his article Darnton sums up his strategy concerning the use of his book concept perfectly:

“Far from being utopian, the electronic monograph could meet the needs of the scholarly community at the points where its problems converge. It could provide a tool for prying problems apart and opening up a new space for the extension of learning.”

Although perhaps in practice Darnton’s vision of the book as pyramid model and Cohen’s et.al. Anthologize model seem to lie not that far apart, there are some clear differences between both visions. In Darnton’s view for instance, putting something on the web does not make something into a book. Here he gives the example of a dissertation:

“Certainly, we can dump unlimited numbers of dissertations onto the Web. Several programs exist for providing this service—and it is a genuine service: it makes research available to readers. But as a rule, this kind of publication provides mainly information, not fully developed scholarship, at least not in most of the humanities and social sciences. Anyone who has read raw dissertations knows what I mean: with few exceptions, they are not books. A world of difference separates them. To become a book, a dissertation must usually be reorganized, trimmed here and expanded there, adapted to the needs of a lay reader, and rewritten from top to bottom, preferably with the help of an experienced editor.”

As Darnton states above, professional editing stays a necessity, electronic publishing is still something that needs to be done by a publisher, who provides a certain amount of authority and adds value to the publication and thus turns it into a full-fledged scholarly book.

Books as Power Tools

In both Darnton’s and Cohen’s articles the concept of the book is part of a larger strategy. Darnton wants to take away the fear concerning electronic publishing by focussing on the remarkable assets and staying power of the printed book. Cohen wants to create a tool that makes it easier for people to publish their own digital book without necessarily loosing the quality offered by professional publishers. Darnton wants to experiment with the new features online publications offer but without loosing the quality control and authority invested upon these online works by professional publishers. Cohen introduces a tool that can serve as an alternative to professional publishing. Darnton wants to heal the scholarly communication system made up of publishers and tenure committees by introducing electronic publishing. Cohen wants to subvert this same system by proposing a system that forms an alternative to the vested authority and quality provisions offered by publishers. But at the same time he doesn’t really touch upon other vested notions surrounding the book such as authorship and the stability of the text, and neither does Darnton, nor do they actively challenge the format of the book as the one being most suitable for (humanities) scholarship. Darnton’s and Cohen’s strategic concepts are also very time-bound. Darnton made a plea for electronic publishing and electronic books when the publishing industry only just began adapting to the online environment. Cohen’s et. al. Anthologize is developed in a time were electronic publishing is a must and Anthologize is one of the many tools that are being developed to encourage online humanities scholarship. Both their concepts of the book are very much part of these specific struggles. And it is not unlikely that Darnton’s vision concerning the book in the last ten years has become more like that of Cohen.

What I wanted to show by conflating these two viewpoints is that there is no such thing as a ‘book’ or an essential definition of the book. The book is a contested concept. As history has shown us a book can be a scroll as well as a codex, a paperback, a PDF or a collection of blogposts. The book is what we make of it. A book consists of possibilities; a book is becoming. As I have tried to show above, definitions and essentialist notions concerning what a book is (or should be, or was) can be seen as rhetorical devices used to argue for a specific knowledge and communication system. Visions concerning the book are being used as a means to control, shape, structure and think these systems. Consciously or unconsciously, the way we define the book, the way we work with and create the book, says a lot about the knowledge system we prefer or would like to have.

However, although I claim that there is no essential definition of the book, this doesn’t mean that in the discourse surrounding the book essentialist notions don’t play a major role. All the same, they should be seen as part of the struggle for, to put it bluntly, a remainder of the status quo, a return to the past or a turn towards another possible future of scholarly communication. Definitions of the book are power tools, books can be seen as discursive weapons to defend a virtual future both for the book and for knowledge. This becomes clear amongst others by the way definitions or essentialist notions surrounding the book often take the form of dialectical oppositions. One of the most common examples is when the book gets contrasted with the ebook. The ebook is opposed to the book as something different, were it connotes a knowledge system based on or turning toward the Internet and digital media. The need for such a distinction is quite strange if we think about it. There is no such thing as an e-song for instance, or an e-album. If we take it closer to home, there is also no such thing as an e-article (although there is an e-journal). The use of the word ebook is part of a struggle, it is a strategical tool used both by proponents and critics of ebooks to connote that here something different is happening. We can broaden this allegory to other fields were the struggle for a new system is felt the most. Think about the digital humanities and electronic literature (again: no digital biology). These dialectical stances are used to defend another notion of the humanities and another notion of literature. Interestingly enough one could argue that once these ‘other’ positions become more mainstream and accepted the additive e- mostly seems to disappear.

Essential Bookfuturism

Another use of this dialectical essentialism can be found in the term bookfuturism. Bookfuturism is a term invented by Joanne McNeill—an American science and technology writer—for a Twitter list following book aficionados. The term also shows similarities with the blog Bookfutures, written by Chris Meade, director of if:book London, a think thank for the future of the book. The term Bookfuturism was picked up and given theoretical grounding by Tim Carmody, self-proclaimed bookfuturist, Wired Gadget Lab editor and writer for various blogs on book technology and media. Carmody started a group blog called Bookfuturism and wrote “A Bookfuturist Manifesto” for The Atlantic. As Carmody explains, Bookfuturism plays with two dialectial oppositions: bookservatism and technofuturism. Carmody describes them as follows:

“Now, even bookservatives acknowledge that things are changing. But they fear that these changes will result in catastrophe, for some part or whole of the culture they love. Because of that, they would prefer that book tech and book culture stop, slow down, or go back. (…) On the other side of the aisle are technofuturists. They’re winning most of the arguments these days when it comes to e-books, so their rhetoric isn’t as wild. Technofuturists are technological triumphalists, or at least quasi-utopian optimists. These are the folks who believe that technology can solve our political, educational, and cultural problems. At an extreme, they don’t care about books at all: they’re just relics of a happily closing age of paper, and we should embrace the future in the form of multimedia and the networked web.”

As Carmody rightfully proclaims however, there is no such thing as a bookservatist or a technofuturist, these are simply stances people can uptake to argue for something:

“Almost nobody is a pure bookservative or technofuturist. Rather, these are rhetorical positions that anyone can take up, from moment to moment and case to case. Moreover, each is dependent on the other, because each imagines their opponent as the other. They are easy caricatures. But sometimes we ARE caricatures.”

Bookfuturists, in Carmody’s vision, refuse both positions. He sees it as a way of thinking about the book that is critical to both positions. Again here the book becomes a rhetorical device, a metaphor to think about new technology and its impact on knowledge:

“We’re usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We’re tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren’t destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech.”

Although, as I have argued above, there is no essential definition of the book—only positions—that does not mean it is not interesting to analyse the different positions people take up and the different characteristics or essential notions they assign to the book to argue for a certain knowledge system. For although the book has been a contested concept for ages (as the history of the book has shown), the specific (dialectical) positions we take in when it comes to the book at this moment, say a lot about the particular issues we are struggling with at the dawning of the digital age. How do we create a knowledge system that might in the future no longer be build upon the book (exclusively) anymore and which will perhaps mean a definitive shift away from the previously cited Gutenberg Galaxy and Typographic man?

To explore what these essential notions are that get attributed to the book by specific groups these days—for instance the stability of the printed book vs. the limitless networked book—is crucial, as it says a lot about not only the book but about our age as well. The struggle for the book is a struggle to keep up with technological change and a reaction against these upheavals. However, the discourse surrounding the book at the same time structures the way we use and adopt new technology. Media transform but they are also invented at the same time.

Furthermore, as I will argue next, it might prove essential to deconstruct these notions that we have attributed to the book to see what we actually value about them and how we can either adopt them or transform them concerning our needs and the possibility offered by digital technology. Some of the deepest essential notions that seem to stick with the book (and have been part of the discourse on the book since its conception), even in the digital age, have to do with authorship, stability and, especially in scholarly communication: authority. Fresh insights and experimental practices might be a necessity to bring these notions up to the next level and to expose and confront them to new possibilities and alternative futures. Futures in which the book is never just a book.

Do not ask me to remain the same

Nicola Dale - Browser (2008)

Definitions are intrinsically time-bound. Imagine the fundamental question of ‘What is a book’. To ask this question at this moment in time means we have to take into account the present transformation or remediation of the book. Definitions concerning the nature of the book need to bare in mind its past as well as its potential future. Any definition is for this reason a highly contextual one. The concept of the book has always been flexible as books are constantly evolving, as is our perception of them. Books have survived various medial changes and they (or we) have always found a way to adapt to their new carriers: from scroll to codex and from paperback to e-book. Rather than to pin-down a static definition of the book, we are better of seeing (the concept of) the book as an unfolding process.

I would like to take a look at a few theorists who, since the coming of the Internet and digital media, have tried to problematize and re-think the definition(s) of the book that were in use before the digital era. To determine whether there exists a common denominator to define the book, and if so, what it is, these theorists have focused on a few aspects of the book. By looking at its specific materiality, and at the way the book’s carrier differs from and influences its content (text), and by comparing the book with other media, they collectively guide the conversation of what a book is and should be, further into the future.

On if:book, the group blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, some interesting posts on the concept of the book have appeared over the last few years, written by the institute’s staff. Dan Visel, in a post entitled What we talk about when we talk about books (2006), explains how there actually are two main discourses surrounding the book: one that focuses on the physical form of the book (the book as a specific reading-device) and one that focuses on the content of the book. He explains how these discourses have eventually led to some confusion in the digital world were an e-book for many people could mean both the content itself, as well as its carrier (more commonly known as an e-reader). In his post Visel examines how the so-called limited character of the printed book is being challenged by the potentially evolving content of the online edition. He wonders where we draw the boundaries with so-called networked books. Are the texts it connects to via hyperlinking part of the book? Are the readers’ comments part of the book?

Kevin Kelly, Internet dinosaur and one of the founders of Internet-magazine Wired, states in his essay Scan this book! (2006) that a book can hold essentially everything. In his ideal future of the book, the book becomes a kind of synecdoche of the ‘universal library’. As Kelly states, the universal library will consist of ‘the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.’ In this world of networked books, no book will be an island (as they are in the print world). Each book will be integrated and connected by means of links and tags. Books transform into one universal book. As Kelly writes: ‘in a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.’

Interestingly enough, in Kelly’s view this universal book will incorporate all media, textual media as well as for instance sound and visual media. The writers on the if:book blog wonder however if we, when we use such a broad concept of the book, will not turn it into a meaningless term. Will the book in the end still be a useful concept to use in the online world?

As Roger Sperberg states, in an if:book post entitled What is a book? (2006), a book is foremost something you read, distinguishing it from media that we watch or listen to. He feels that some way or another ‘text’ should remain on the foreground, where text involves a certain amount of what he calls ‘commitment’ from the reader:

‘But if “book” no longer means the intellect is permitted to come to the foreground in this way, if text and how it requires this is diminished to insignificance, then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and what we have then will perhaps be entertaining and educational and absorbing, but it will not be a book, whatever label attaches to it.’

Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies

Sperberg wonders at what point, with all theses multimedia additions in the online world, we still recognize a ‘book’ as a book. What is the essence of a book? Sperberg feels we should be able to distinguish some salient features or expectations of the book. Visel agrees where he states in his previously mentioned post that we should be looking at similarities and relationships between the objects we commonly denote as books. But both Visel as well as Sperberg admit that this remains a non bullet-proof approach. Sperberg finally throws it on intuition (‘we will know a book as we see it’) and Visel concludes there will probably be multiple futures of the book.

Where in Kelly’s utopian future the (printed) book will in the end give way to the screen as the dominant medium or device for reading, the viewpoints of Robert Darnton—the renowned book historian—are  more inline with Visel’s, where Darnton foresees a hybrid future for the book. In his seminal article The New Age of the Book (1999) he gives a more practice-based outlook on the book, based on the way books are actually being used at the moment. From these usages he distills a future scenario in which printed books and e-books will continue to exist side-by-side. E-books will become an extension of printed books, an add-on. The book as a reading device is just way too good a format to store and communicate information, Darnton explains. It is a very usable format. Furthermore, reading from screens remains an inferior experience, not to say a real hassle for many people. As Darnton concludes, ‘in short, the old-fashioned codex, printed on folded and gathered sheets of paper, is not about to disappear into cyberspace’.

Darnton’s concept of the book is a hybrid one, one that expands from paper into the digital realm. The digital is a supplement or (in some cases) the paper edition is an abstract. The electronic part is particularly useful for certain publics (especially scholars) and certain purposes (scanning, referencing, searching for information). But Darnton does not believe people will in the end read whole books online. Furthermore, he introduces the importance of the cultural practices and institutional and political economy surrounding the book in academia. In a culture in which the printed book plays such an important role in reputation structures, he wonders whether electronic monographs will essentially be acknowledged as books in these communities.

Nicola Dale - The world as I see it (2007)

The approach to the book of literary critic Katherine Hayles—a specialist in the field of electronic literature—is again a different one. Her focus lies not on the way readers’ usage of books determines its future shape, but on the way the specific materiality of a text influences its meaning, and with that our interpretation of the text. As Hayles claims in her article Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality (2003), one of the main problems with trying to define the book as it is being ‘translated’ into a digital format (which she sees as a re-interpretation of the book) is that, as she states, ‘our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been generally recognized as such.’

In Hayles’ vision of the book as it is transforming she agrees with Visel and Sperberg, where in analyzing this process we should think of correspondences (and as Hayles also adds, of dissimilarities!) instead of ontologies. For Hayles it seems however more interesting to look at the processes of the translation of texts from print to the online than looking at the book and e-book as specific objects. We should try to find out what the differences in materiality are between print and electronic textuality and how this specific materiality influences the way we perceive a text. In Hayles’ vision the format of the book and its content are intrinsically connected, and in this way she pulls together and incorporates the two separate discourses surrounding the book mentioned earlier by Visel. Text is not dematerialized and is dependant on its carrier.

 

Hayles argues that when we claim the digital is immaterial, we bring along our print-centered notions. Thes kind of notions can be found in both the work of Kelly, as well as in the work of someone who in many ways can be seen as Kelly’s opponent, Sven Birkerts. Birkerts is a literary critic and author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), a work very critical of electronic media and online reading. Both in Birkerts’ as well as in Kelly’s view digital text can be seen as missing a specific materiality. With Kelly this immateriality of text and its translation into binary code leads him to perceive all online media as one digital muddle, giving it the potential to mix and recombine with other dematerialized media into ‘a single liquid fabric’. In Birkerts’ opinion on the other hand this immateriality is a big loss. In The Gutenberg Elegies he states that ‘nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page is a thing. The configuration of impulses on a screen is not (…)’ For Birkerts it is very important that the materiality of print fixes the word, where the fleeing and weightless character of online text is detrimental to the autonomy of the word and eventually, as Birkerts concludes, it will be detrimental to the autonomy of the self.

But as Hayles tries to argue, we cannot perceive of a text as an ‘immaterial construction independent from its carrier.’ Books undergo a transformation when they enter the digital domain, an aspect too easily neglected by for instance Kelly. Text is not simply digital bits; in its digital counterpart it also has a specific form or materiality. As Hayles writes, electronic textuality ‘cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.’ In her view of the specificity of digital texts, text becomes a distributed phenomenon. She sees a text as an embodied entity, which in the virtual world can be embodied in various reading devices.

Hayles seems to push the discussion on the book to a higher level where in her view we can not determine or distract what a book is from (looking at) its materiality. We can only look at the way the book’s physicality influences the way we perceive a text. We can only look at a book’s content and how this is influenced by its materiality, in which this materiality can, as Hayles sees it, extend beyond the individual object. A text’s materiality is an interaction between the specific format the text is molded in and the specific meaning or content of the text. As Hayles concludes, in this discourse ‘texts would routinely be discussed both in terms of their conceptual content and their physical embodiments.’

            From this short review of different attempts to describe the ever-changing phenomenon of the book, it seems there are various (perhaps even inexhaustible) ways to analyze this increasingly distributed phenomenon. We can look at the similarities and dissimilarities of the different shapes the book shifts into, and we can compare these with the appearances of other media; we can look at the way we ‘recognize’ a book, both in its more intuitive sense as well as the in the way we acknowledge something as a book within certain cultural discourses; we can look at the way a book is used, or we can look at its utopian or dystopian potential as a theoretical concept extracted from its format; and, we can focus on its specific materiality or on a combination of a particular device and its content. All approaches, from looking at the medium to looking at its usage and the discourses surrounding it, seem to add some flavor to the discussion. Perhaps we can only get closer to the transforming book by accepting and stimulating such a plurality of viewpoints. Just like the book itself, the discussion on the book will keep on expanding further into the digital future.

Zeeman and the wane of a print adolescence

Sometimes when a public figure dies, you suddenly realize what a big part they played in your life and your personal or intellectual development. More than maybe a favored high-school teacher or beloved uncle, it was the literary critic Michaël Zeeman who always inspired my love for books. My parents had a subscription to the dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, for which he wrote, and the part I always read was the book section entitled Cicero. After a quick glimpse at the front page I always went straight on to Cicero, which, if I remember correctly, always appeared on Friday, so I mostly read it over the weekend. Later on I would snatch it from restaurants and bars where I used to work to read it during my break. Zeeman’s reviews were a kind of ‘filter’ for me, he was a trusted connoisseur who introduced writers and books to me, and more importantly, taught me which ones to read and which ones to discard. He was also the presenter of a famous Dutch television show called ‘Zeeman met boeken’ (Zeeman with books), but I can’t really remember watching that regularly, it was mostly his writings that compelled me.

Michaël Zeeman died yesterday of a brain tumor and after reading the numerous obituaries on the web I learned many things I never knew about him. Basically I found out I knew absolutely nothing about him, which I now feel is kind of strange. For one he used to work at De Tille, the bookshop in Leeuwarden (where I was born and where I grew up) and the only place we (being my family) ever bought books. So the chance is very big I might even have met him at one time or another…

 

 

That was of course long before I started reading his reviews and essays on literature, art, philosophy and what have you. The strange thing though is that over the years this trusted authority, who used to be my ‘old-medium-newspaper’ filter, kind of in the way radio used to be my music filter, has now been replaced by the manifold cultural reviewers, literary critics, bloggers and essayists of the online environment. Now my selection mechanism has broadened to an international conspiracy of old and new media experts, available with their views and opinions on demand at the touch of a single button. So it kind of felt, with the death of Zeeman, that part of me has disappeared too, also due to the fact that since a couple of years I rarely read print newspapers anymore.

But I will definitely miss him and his reviews and in a way I will regret never having to wait until Friday anymore to find out what to read…

Print will survive

Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech: 

“To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. …

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.” 

After his inbox flooded with messages, Eggers send out a bulk email response proclaiming a foreseeable future in which print and books will still play a large role. In order to make that happen, publishers (his own McSweeney’s on front) need to focus on finding a good niche to compete with the digital and this niche, according to Eggers, lies in creating a high quality product with an emphasis on design and experiences that are not duplicatable on the web. From the email:

“Pretty soon, on the McSweeney’s website— www.mcsweeneys.net— we’ll be showing some of our work on this upcoming issue, which will be in newspaper form. The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper
model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive. We’re convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space— if you really truly give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web— then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat.

It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”

I think his arguments also hold for academic books in the long run. Where printed monographs are also slowly but increasingly moving to the web, their printed version might still have some endurance. One of the models now proposed to sustain Open Access book publishing in the Humanities focuses mostly on an online, free Open Access edition and a paid for print edition, consisting of cheaply and in short (even single digits) print run produced POD books. The remit in this model lies predominantly in the sales from these POD books (for those people who still prefer to read from print) or added services on top of the online edition. It might however also be interesting to look into a market of deluxe editions of certain (probably only the best selling monographs and classics) books that people still want to ‘posses’ and pay for because they are beautifully designed or just nice to look at. Different readers, different markets; and just look at vinyl…