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Tuesday November 1st media scholar William Merrin will kick off the third series of Research Seminars at Coventry University on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
Programme: November-December 2011
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November 1st:
William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0′ (Read More)
November 15th:
Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’
November 22th:
Living Books about Life launch (Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and Open Humanities Press) – Talks by Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University), and Janneke Adema (Coventry University).
December 6th:
Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute) – ‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’
December 13th 3:00-5:00 (at Meter Room - 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF)
Round table on ‘Open Art, or What could Open Art mean?‘
Participants: Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists), Ruth Catlow(Furtherfield) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)
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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in November and December (except the final round table, which will be held from 3:00-5:00)
Where: ICE, The Screening Room (except the final round table, which will be held at Meter Room)
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
On his Media Gifts website, cultural and media theorist Gary Hall has been (and is) writing a series of writings on ‘the limits of openness’, which, if you are interested in open media, are definitely worth a read and nicely dovetail the theme of the seminar series.
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/
Programme: January-March 2011
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Tuesday 25th January
Jussi Parikka (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘Zombie Media: Media Archaeology as Circuit Bending’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st February
David Campbell - ‘The new ecology of information: how social media challenges the university’ (read more) Note: in ETG10 (Ellen Terry Building)
Tuesday 8th February
María Mencía (Kingston University) – ‘Open Meaning in Digital Writing’ (read more)
Tuesday 15th February
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the “Friendly Medium”’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st March
Clare Birchall (University of Kent) – ‘”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’ (read more)
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All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
I have been organizing a Research Seminar Series, taking place at Coventry University in this term and the next, on ‘Open Media’. Last Tuesday the first lecture was given by Federica Frabetti from Oxford Brooks University entitled ‘DIGITAL AGAIN? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’. You can find more information about the lectures in the first term at the end of this post.
The series will be podcasted and will be made available via iTunesU and this blog.
Related to the series, let me draw your attention to some other recent material that challenges the concept of openness in a more fundamental way. HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, has for instance been drawing attention to the concept of openness via a few blog posts, including this one, (do also check out the extensive forum comments underneath) and it has been hosting the Storming the Academy event at the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona a few weeks ago. There is also a wiki related to this event where you can find more information.
Furthermore, I came across this fascinating presentation today by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in which she, amongst others, critiques the notion of content as being object-based.
Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media and
Communication invite you to
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
OPEN MEDIA
Digital Media have today become ubiquitous and all pervasive. Our lives and experiences are being mediated non-stop by a host of mobile and web-based devices which offer the possibility of merging, mixing, and mashing-up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we are no longer confined by the boundaries that once governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are all being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can educate themselves via iTunesU, call friends abroad for free via Skype, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter, and fund projects via Kickstarter.
These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing possibilities for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is of course more complicated than that. A lot of (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed by commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Many makers of music mash-ups are being sued for copyright infringement and fears regarding ebook piracy continue to rule the literary world.
The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. But openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who then pays the producers of those products? Does open data pose security risks? And who gets to control the data? Who governs our creative outputs? In what way can we control and keep a check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media, or are these notions being explicitly challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they ever really be truly open? What are the limits of openness? Where does openness end? Or should we perhaps just focus on degrees and aspects of openness? How can we compose a media critique when media – including our critique itself – are constantly in the process of being upgraded, updated, merged, mixed and changed?
This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.
Programme: November-December 2010
Tuesday 9th November
Federica Frabetti (Westminster Institute of Education) – ‘Digital again? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’
Mafalda Stasi (Coventry University) – ‘Transmedia and fan cultures’
Shaun Hides and Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University) – ‘Open Source Education: A radical case for the Arts and Humanities’
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the ”Friendly Medium’
Note: in ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: RCG25 (Richard Crossman Building) 44 Jordan Well Coventry CV1 2,
UK (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
Last week I attended a fascinating roundtable at Kingston University London which focused mainly on the position of electronic literature within the literary and artistic field and within academia more in specific. The roundtable, entitled From the page to the screen to augmented reality: new modes of language-driven mediated research, had as one of its preconceptions the idea that electronic literature is not given the attention and with that the status it deserves, especially within literary criticism. Within electronic literature one can say there is a very broad understanding of language in a multi-modular way. With the use of new technologies in language-mediated practices, new research platforms and research methods are being explored which has led to a rich variety of products. What unites creative practitioners and researchers is their exploration of the word and the abstract character of language and its materiality in different media in an experimental practice. The main question remains: why isn’t this work part of a more mainstream platform?
This question was one of the main topics of the keynote speech by Jay David Bolter entitled Elite and popular: digital art and literature in an era of social and locative media. Bolter paid specific attention in his talk to the cultural position of digital literature focusing on two major questions:
- How does digital literature relate to the traditional (academic) literary community or to the traditional art community?
- How does it fit into our culture’s media practices today?
To explore the first question, Bolter recollects one of the oldest debates on digital literary forms, the debate on hypertext in the 80′s and early 90′s. Recalling an 1992 NYT article by Robert Coover as a representative of the hypertext movement, it was thought hypertext could create a revolution in reading and writing. The reaction of the literary community to that claim could be seen as hostile and defensive: hypertext takes from the author the authorial voice. And, as Bolter states, although digital literature has developed and changed in manifold ways—blurring boundaries—the response of the literary community has not changed. Interestingly enough Bolter claims that where the academic community has ignored digital literature, within the art community digital art has had a more welcome incorporation. Although digital artists even so complain that they are not getting the recognition they deserve, the digital art community is much more involved in a dialogue with the wider art community than the digital literature community with the wider literary community. Bolter explains this situation by pointing out that art has from the beginning been opening up to multimedia and has been expanding its domain to that which was available, extending the definition of what constitutes art at the same time. Because of this specific precondition, digital art has had it easier to connect to these evolving conditions.
Screen. Installation by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Joshua Carroll. Video by Michelle Higa
When we look at the dialogue between electronic literature and the literary academy, the latter community has not been of much help. As Bolter states, the literary academic community does not want to concern itself with the questions brought up by experiments with electronic literature because of the specific cultural position literary scholarship has occupied. This cultural position is reflected in the tight relationship between the technology of print and the cultural research practice of literary academics. This is the kind of scholarship that can be defined as print scholarship. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Eisenstein, Bolter recollects that modern textual scholarship came about with the coming of the printing press. Modern textual scholarship is strongly coupled to the notion of fixity, to the notion of a stable text and author and to scholarly precision in the fixity of the text. So the printing press became the necessary tool for the kind of scholarship that developed. And, as Bolter argues, today the literary academy is still very much defined by the kind of practices that are defined by this fixity and stability of texts. This is also visible in digital text editions and digital scholarship which try to emulate the printed text, for instance the Perseus Project. The print methods are adopted in the digital world as scholarly traditions of the classics are being refashioned. And as Bolter points out, digital technology is particularly effective in doing this. The digital technology can even be said to be better than the printing press in preserving, transmitting and fixing by the use of digital technology.
Perseus Project
Before the start of the workshop the participants were send a list of questions to focus on (which you can find here). Bolter breaks these questions down into two streams
1. Questions on the formal/material and questions on the medium
Bolter claims that the literary community is not interested in both these questions where their focus remains on the printed text. However, electronic literature is not so much interested in emulating print literature. This idea of born-digital text re-mediating printed text was a phase common in the very beginning of electronic literary experimentation. Yet, as Bolter states, today electronic literature has evolved. Not even purely verbal digital texts are interested in mirroring printed text anymore. Electronic literature has become much more interested in the mixing of modalities. This has led to the question whether electronic literature is (still) literature or whether it is or has become art. A comparison is currently made between (experimental) electronic literature and the historical avant-garde, especially there where it concerns thinking about digital forms. However, as Bolter argues, seeing electronic literature in the light of this tradition is a phase within the development of digital literature that are we are moving beyond now as well. Nowadays the study of the materiality of the digital is central to the thinking about digital literature (like it is with other media forms). Where in the print era the focus would be on media specific analysis and on the technology of inscription, nowadays the focus is on multi-modality and the mixing of forms rather than on the plurality of forms. As Bolter claims, the literary academic community will not be off much help here either. His recommendation is to turn to the art community, where they have been thinking about the condition of the medium, in a multi-medial way, for many many years and where they have developed a solid body of criticism and theory to help us.
2. Questions of cultural practice and research.
Again here, Bolter claims, the kind of questions the traditional academic community wants to have answered are not well-related to the development of literary technology. For instance the tools they want to use for research are still very much focused on thinking about text in a print-based way: they focus on lexicography, archiving, philology etc. and not on the new practices that the digital informs. Once more Bolter states, the contemporary art scene and community are the places to look at for interesting dialogue.
Simon Biggs – reRead, Interactive Installation 2009
Bolter goes on to discuss the second question stated at the beginning of his talk: ‘How does digital literature fit into our culture’s media practices today?’ Here he turns to the practices commonly associated with web 2.0 or social media as another possible solution. We are experiencing new forms of digital communication on an enormous scale. These are facets of digital culture that form the popular background for any form of cultural production. As Bolter explains, this plenitude of contemporary media culture is increasingly hard to encompass in a general way. The main reason for this is ‘the loss of centrality’. We don’t really have a center for our culture anymore when it has become so diverse. There are now so many consumers, producers, and modes of production. It is increasingly difficult to claim that there is any form or practice that occupies a centrality. As Bolter clarifies, this is not any different from the situation in the 20th century, but we may have a different sense now of our cultural condition: we are drifting from the print era to a multimedia condition. In the era of print we still had the hope or aspiration of a cultural center. Again this relates to idea that we could fix our culture, that there are certain things that have centrality for our culture. Digital media make us aware of this plenitude perhaps in a way we did not know existed before. We now become aware of the many different forms that are available, non of which comprehend the digital community. We now have more users/producers than with any previous literary form. There are also many new forms that are just beginning to make an impression, like for instance augmented reality technologies, which allow us to write on the world. By writing in a mark-up language we are creating augmented reality experiences that create environments and we overlay these over real spaces. These kind of user created environments add again to this plenitude.
Still from TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
As Bolter repeats, we have so many choices now in terms of media forms and expressions that we cannot claim centrality anymore. What constitutes art in this domain when we have writing forms available to millions of people who do not necessarily participate in art communities? Bolter mentions the example of TXTual Healing created by Paul Notzold which mixes ‘elite’ and ‘popular’. The question is, is this art? Is it literature? Does it matter? Is that still a question we need to ask? Bolter argues for an expanded notion of digital writing, one that is not interested in connecting to any literary or artistic community but one that sees digital writing as a new media practice that loosens itself from these stamps,
For his concluding remarks Bolter focuses on the future of literature. The strong institutional inertia can enable literary forms in print to develop continuously. One consequence of this is that literature will be one of the limited types of writing that remains committed to print where so much more writing is connected to new media. This will be detrimental to literature’s status as it necessarily marginalizes itself if it stays committed to this medium. And if literature self stays anchored to print so the literary academy will also stay anchored in a kind of research that remains committed to print. Should digital literature set out a dialogue with the academic community to set out a new path and cultural practice? Bolter argues for another strategy: digital literature should set up a dialogue with the arts community and should focus on popular writing practices. It should relinquish the role of ‘the avant-garde of literature’ and it should find itself committed to other forms of dialogue with more popular forms of writing.
rr ii, by Joerg Piringer is a visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R.
What interested me the most in the debate that followed after Bolter’s keynote is how much it is akin to the debate surrounding the digital monograph in the Humanities (and to the debate surrounding the Digital Humanities more in general) in the sense that it very much focused on the issue of what defines electronic literature, the power struggles that revolve around this process of defining, and the question what kind of strategical position electronic literature should uptake.
Another similarity I found whilst listening to the discussions between the electronic text practitioners and researchers, with respect to the discourse surrounding the digital monograph is that also in the field of electronic literature the discussion can be stripped down and analyzed on three different levels: a medial level, an institutional level and a political economy level. In the following I shall try to summarize my notion of what the roundtable discussion was about along these three lines.
Still from Still Standing by Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis
The discussion on the medium focused mostly on how to redefine reading in a digital environment. Where are readers now and what are readers? The new generation seems to be lost on print literature. A whole new generation emerges that no longer reads in the traditional sense. Bolter reposed this statement by stating that text still has a strong position within education. This has lead to a situation in which many students don’t now how to read digital literature. A new reading logic needs to be developed, or a new logic of reading with which you start from scratch with every new project. This reading logic is also more than with print-based text very much connected to the body. We read a digital text differently because we interact with it. we loose something of its signification but we also gain things between the signification of the text and its manipulation. Digital text focuses more on play and esthetics. For instance in the work Still Standing, by and Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis, the meaning of the text lies in the body’s interaction with text in space. But perhaps the problem is not (only) with the reader but also with the writer. Interaction design is not a strong feature in most digital literature pieces. When a complicated use-interface is used, this is a problem of the writer and not of the reader. Finally the discussion centered on the problem of defining electronic literature where it is very much coupled to the idea of print, where for centuries literature was actually oral. There is actually a difference between textuality and literature.
Still from Birds Singing other Birds Songs, by Maria Mencia.jpg
In the discussion on how to define electronic literature within an institutional setting the statement was made that if electronic literature does not establish a connection with print, it will never get established as literature. This connection with art that Bolter proposes, turns it into a separate category. Maybe we should focus on a third space in which connections are sought both with the art world as well as with the literary aristocracy. This third space within an institutional setting could focus on digital culture where it can connect to broader forms of digital textuality. In this way electronic literature does not necessarily have to loose its ‘literaryness’. This third space is not about creating a new field but about re-conceptualizing the idea of electronic literature and asking different questions. This third space could also rise above the division made within the traditional academic community between theory and practice and the institution’s suspicion of practitioners. It could focus on interdisciplinarity and practical experimentation. The problem also has to do with the institutional difference between Art and Humanities departments. As a researcher-practitioner, are you in Arts or in the Humanities? It is about creating a new space within the institution. For now digital literature is hidden away in different spots within the university, from the literary department to the department of media or computer science.
As Scott Rettberg explains, the choice for the term electronic literature was a strategic choice, instead of going for a definition like a ‘language-based digital art form’ in which the idea of text as a specific material (like clay/paint etc.) would have been lost. As Rettberg states, digital textuality/electronic literature was a successful institutional strategy to frame it. Not that it is not digital art or that it is a fundamentally different thing, but we should have a lens that borrows something from the literary tradition.
Another part of the debate on the institutional context focused on how to establish quality criteria for electronic literature. How does a research-practice fit within the academic framework? What constitutes peer review for a performative piece, an installation, for electronic literature, and how do you get that recognized within an institutional framework? How can we create new peer review structures? How do you both fulfill academic ánd artistic criteria? How do we create interesting opportunities for practitioners to create work together, collaborative, and to learn techniques and strategies within an institutional setting? How do we create a new methodology?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz demo video by Joerg Piringer
The discussion on the position of electronic literature within the publishing industry and the wider realm of scholarly communication focused on the usual topics, from the debate of how to position oneself in the spectrum of closed and open models, to issues of copyright, governance and ownership of material. It also focused on the ubiquity and lack of transparency of various new media of publishing like Facebook. Are these the places were electronic literature should focus on, is that were they should be publishing? But what about the control over people’s data? Should we claim back these spaces as public spaces, or should we subvert these big company owned environments?
The discussion delved deeper into issues of openness and accessibility. Electronic text practitioners that work within a university setting have the opportunity to make their work openly available because they already have a salary, which in a way gives them the opportunity to be experimental. The problem is however that the present publishing system obliges you to give away your copyright. Within the Electronic Literature Organization however, they use a Creative Commons License [see update underneath]. The problem is that you can’t just put your work on the web, you need to think about copyright issues. This problem becomes more urgent when we think about developing economic structures for creative-practitioners outside of (or on partly within) academia. The culture of free can be detrimental for practitioners outside of the university. What kind of value does free put on your work? On the other hand you could argue that the economic value of art does not only lie in a consumable product (this is a very 19th century economic model), it lies in many things, amongst others in the process of creation and the context in which it is produced and exhibited. Also new models are being set up which recognize this problem and which try to find a solution. Still, the models are most likely going to change. As an electronic writer you need to become a strategic producer within this new framework.
The Electronic Literature Organization hosts many beautiful works on their website. You can find some stunning collections here, here, and here.
Update 02-08-2010:
Davin Heckman from the Electronic Literature Organization was kind enough to provide me with some additional information about the ELD and its copyright license by mail. Underneath a digest of his email.
The ELD does not publish any works except the brief, descriptive entries themselves. As the ELD Handbook states:”Basically, if you write them, you are free to publish it elsewhere as you wish. In addition, the work published here is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/>. In a nutshell, this means that others will be free to use your work for non-commercial purposes as long they provide appropriate attribution and do not alter it (unless, of course, you give them permission to do so).”
The ELO provides the umbrella for the ELD and ELC. Basically, the ELC and ELD are two separate projects. The ELC is a peer-reviewed venue for publishing works of electronic literature, to give artists a venue for publication, to give new readers an interesting way “in” to the field. The ELD is much more open in terms of what we can index. There is, however, an editorial process in place to make sure that the entries themselves meet certain criteria that might make them suitable for use in scholarly projects. The ELD is more of a bibliographic project, geared towards providing a user-built guide to the field as a whole.
‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger
Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions.
In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck when we hit the Cyberpunk definition which gave information an inherent entelechy towards freedom, making it in a way into an active agent.
But maybe we shouldn’t interpret the cyberpunk aphorism of ‘information wants to be free’ in such a way. For as we established before, information in itself is not active. Information needs an agent. If we again look closer at the DIKW definition, we find that knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, it is thus deterministic. Information has (or can have) use and meaning, but only becomes knowledge when it is ‘made active’, when it is put to use, involving an action/actor. Again, in other words to make it clearer: information without action might have meaning and may be useful, only when it is put to use can it become knowledge. As the definition says: the intent of knowledge is to be useful, information does not have this intent, it only has the potential.
Information needs an action/actor to combine information into knowledge: to give it meaning in context.
Now as we look at it in this way, the cyberpunk definition of information should be free or wants to be free, can be interpreted as in order to be able to become knowledge. And this is the possibility the web offers increasingly.
Now this potentiality of information entails two things:
- - It entails an actor, who acts upon the information, collecting and combining it in such a manner and applying it to the appropriate context so that it can become knowledge. Since it is the actor (or actors in this respect, for of course in many occasions it is groups of people working together turning information into knowledge) who is responsible for the creation of this knowledge, it is in a way his or her interpretation, combination and contextualization of the information. This explains why people have moral rights or even claim copyright or intellectual ownership over their active creation of knowledge out of information (if they publish it that is, there is no such thing as copyright on thoughts, unfortunately one thinks sometimes…).
- It also entails a movement, a dynamic, as already expressed in the Cyberpunk definition. Not a dynamic inherent in information however, but a dynamic from information towards knowledge (a force in between information and knowledge in a way). It is the potentiality itself that creates the dynamic, the need towards. As the Cyberpunk movement argues, the digital age and the coming of the Internet, which has freed information from its mostly physical and print based constraints, has enlarged this potentiality of information enormously, making the dynamic or movement seem in a way more urgent, or more logical. In this way one can say that it is the digital age that makes information want to be free.
As a final remark, what is interesting in even more recent developments is that the actor can now also be a computer: with the rise of the semantic web the computer can turn/turns information into knowledge or at least into networked information, conceptualizing and contextualizing it and thus combining it in a useful manner. Maybe this means information and communication technologies as well as social media are adding a new layer to the DIKW hierarchy: Connectionism, or connected, interlinked information. As Kevin Kelly says when speaking about social media: ‘we are connecting everything to everything’, and: ‘when connected into a swarm, small thoughts become smart.’
Practice what you preach. Engaging in Humanities research through critical praxis
January 30, 2012 in Ebooks, Information and knowledge, Lectures and Conferences, Open Access, Open Education, Remix | Tags: Alex Gil, Anastasia Salter, Angelique Bletsas, Blogs, Books, Commentpress, critical praxis, Delicious, digital, Digital Humanities, dissertation, Ebooks, Foucault, Gary Hall, Hacking the Academy, HASTAC, HASTAC V, Heather Morrisson, Humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Monograph, Open Access, open notebook science, open research, PhD, Print, Remix, scholar, Scholarly Communication, Social Media, Sophie, Tanya Roth, Ted Striphas, Twitter, wikis, Zotero | 1 comment
I finally managed to add hyperlinks to the paper I presented at the HASTAC V conference in Ann Arbor last December. Please find it underneath accompanied by my Prezi presentation.
This lecture will present a new experimental approach to conducting and performing a PhD dissertation within the (digital) humanities. It describes an experiment in developing a digital, open and collaborative research practice, by exploring the possibility of remix, liquidity and openness in the dissertation’s conduct and format.
On September 25, 2011, Media Studies scholar and Digital Humanist Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled ‘Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities’. In this piece Fitzpatrick reflects upon advise she had previously given to a grad student who wanted to do a digital project for her final dissertation. Instead of doing the save thing and writing a traditional dissertation, Fitzpatrick advised her to ‘do the risky thing’, to experiment and present her argument in an innovative way. However, she made sure to add that the student should have someone to cover their back, making a plea for mentors and dissertation supervisors to support digital, experimental dissertation work. The paper that I am presenting here today can in many ways be seen as an expansion of Fitzpatrick’s argument. However, although it applauds her insistence on supervisory support in doing digital research, it wants to draw more attention to the responsibility of PhD students themselves to, as Fitzpatrick states, ‘defend their experimental work’, and their ‘deviation from the road ordinarily travelled’. It will do so first of all by offering a theoretical argumentation on how the choices we make during the PhD and the way we conduct it says a lot about the scholarly communication system we want and envision. Secondly it will do so by focusing on a practical case study of a PhD dissertation that can be seen as an experiment in developing a digital, open and collaborative research practice, by exploring the possibility of remix, liquidity and openness in the dissertation’s conduct and format.
Doing a dissertation in an experimental form—for instance by using multimedia to enhance the dissertation’s argument—or even by using research blogs or social media to develop the thesis’ argument further online, can be an important aspect in gaining, as I will argue, both digital and critical literacy. For example, in her blog post entitled ‘Hacking the Dissertation Process’, historian Tanya Roth writes, reflecting on the PhD process: ‘As digital tools and processes continue to offer larger benefits for [such] projects, it is increasingly important to make sure grad students understand what’s out there and how these resources and ideas can help them with their own research.’ As Roth also states, this is not an either-or-situation where ‘traditional skills’, like how to write a research paper, also need to be part of the curriculum. Nevertheless, by actively ‘trying out’ new (digital) tools and methodologies to see how they fit the specific research project and/or argument that is being pursued, and by performing the dissertation in an alternative way, graduate students will be able to develop what I will call a ‘critical praxis’. To elaborate on this, one of the reasons why during the PhD it is important to develop both digital and critical literacy—which as I will argue can be seen as a simultaneous process—is that it not only helps one to develop and perhaps even expand one’s research skills. Most importantly, it offers a possibility to actively rethink ‘traditional skills’ and with that what is still perceived as the ‘natural’ process of doing a PhD in the Humanities: creating a single-authored, static, print-based argumentation in long-form, which should preferably have the potential to be published as a research monograph. This ‘natural process’ of doing a PhD can be seen as a reflection of dominant discourses that shape how a graduate student is supposed to write or author a dissertation. This provides a road map to becoming a scholar, where the dissertation serves as a model of how to conduct research and ultimately of how to produce a scholarly monograph. Game Studies scholar Anastasia Salter reflects on this argument very clearly in her contribution to the crowd-sourced volume ‘Hacking the Academy’ where she states that ‘The traditional dissertation as product reflects the dominance of the book: it creates a monograph that sits in a database. The processes of the Humanities are to some extent self-perpetuating: write essays as an undergraduate, conference papers as a graduate student, a dissertation as a doctoral student, and books and journal articles as a professor.’
Thus I will argue that at this specific time—a time in which digital projects are still within the Humanities being perceived as ‘risky’— at this specific time developing a form of digital literacy can be seen as a process that goes hand in hand with developing critical literacy, as it offers students the possibility and the ability to critically rethink through critical praxis the dominant discourses and established notions concerning how to conduct a dissertation, and with that, ultimately, how to write a scholarly monograph. And as I will show at the end of this paper with the example or case study of my own dissertation—which I am currently producing—it offers the possibility to try out and explore alternative forms of scholarly communication that have the potential to contribute to a Humanities research practice that is more open, collaborative and processual. By exploring and promoting counter-hegemonic discourses we can show that there is no natural or presumed way to doing a PhD (or to finishing one), nor is there to writing a scholarly monograph.
Let me emphasise here however that I do not claim that this form of critical praxis can only be achieved or learned by experimenting with digital projects, methods and tools. I am only arguing that at this specific moment these tools and methods tend to trigger critique and rethinking of established notions concerning scholarship and scholarly communication. Even more, I would like to add that this critical praxis applies and should apply just as much to digital methods and to being critical of the way research is being done within the Digital Humanities. Especially insofar as digital projects reproduce notions and values from the dominant discourses that can be seen as merely reproducing vested interests. Not all digital projects are inherently and necessary critical and experimental or even ‘risky’, they just have the potential to be so.
I will end my argumentation with a case study, my dissertation on The Future of the Scholarly Monograph and the Culture of Remix, currently in process. By positioning the book as a major site of struggle within the Humanities over some of the new, digital forms and systems of communication rapidly affecting academia—such as Open Access publishing, open peer review, and liquid books—this project argues for the importance of experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and performing the monograph. And just as important, practically engaging with that by starting with the PhD dissertation itself. My research critically analyses the discourse surrounding the future of the scholarly book in the Humanities in the digital age, which can be perceived as a power struggle for another scholarly communication system. My research will at the same time be a theoretical and practical intervention into this debate. It will be an experiment in developing a digital, open, and collaborative research practice, with which I hope to actively challenge and critique the established notions and practices within the field of the Humanities, both in form, practice and content.
Within the Humanities, increasingly scholars experiment with conducting their research in a more open, processual way, following the idea of open research or open notebook science. For instance Book and Cultural Studies scholar Ted Striphas develops new thoughts and arguments on his blog whilst posting his working paper online in a wiki. Media theorist Gary Hall is making the research for his new book Media Gifts freely available online on his website as it evolves. There are however only few doctoral students that I am aware of that are fully putting their work online as an experiment in ‘open research’. One example is communication theorist and librarian Heather Morrison, who posts her dissertation chapters as they evolve online and English student Alex Gil, who is putting his work towards his dissertation online using the CommentPress wordpress plugin.
Various social and archiving media will be used which are connected to the blog, such as Zotero, Twitter and Delicious. This will give an overview of resources used and texts read, and it will also provide an archive of notes, musings and different ideas related to the research as it develops, exploring a notion of research that is less focussed on the final end-product and more on the process of constantly developing, and updating research and on resource building.
When the research has developed from an initial draft-phase—incorporating comments and advise from the blog—into a more mature form, it will be published on a multimedia platform, such as Sophie, offering the possibility to create, edit and read, in a collaborative setting, and of making mashups and remixes of, amongst others, text, video, sound, illustrations, images and spoken word, to explore what it means to communicate research in an other than textual format, and to have different medial versions of the research. At this point I will invite scholars and artists to actively remix the content related to the dissertation. This intervention not only challenges the idea of single authorship (giving more appreciation to the collaborative nature of research) it also explores the possibility of traversing fields, combining research with artistic practice, trying practically to explore how we can abolish (or diminish) the distinctions still made between both.
Finally a wiki will be used where the authorial ‘moderating function’ still at work in the blog and the multimedia platform will be left behind. This is where I want to explore what it means to let go of authorship as a form of authority, both to examine what kind of alternative forms of authority (could) emerge and to critique our established notions of authority. In the wiki environment the author can no longer (solely) be held responsible or judged for the text or research. In the wiki the text will know no final version, it can be further commented upon and it can be updated, remixed and re-used (in principle) indefinitely.