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Gary Hall and I have submitted a pre-study of the paper we are writing for a special issue of New Formations to the accompanying online symposium Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net, organised by Sas Mays and Nick Thoburn. Our submission is entitled ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art & Academia’. It is open for comments on the symposium’s website, (more specifically, here) together with papers by renowned academics such as Richard Burt, Johanna Drucker, Davin Heckman, Sas Mays, and Nick Thoburn. Underneath the symposium announcement.
Online symposium announcement:
Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net
24 October – 4 November 2011
Organised by Sas Mays (University of Westminster) and Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester)
Website
Description
This online symposium brings together researchers and practitioners who work on the material culture of the book and publishing. The aim is neither to uncritically champion the capacities of digital media, nor to fetishize the printed form. Our concern, rather, is with the interplay and mutation of form, medium, metaphor, and content across printed and digital mediums – between the codex and the net. The symposium will explore a number of themes:
• Diagrammatic writing
• Biopolitics of the book
• The book as resistance
• Materiality of the infinite text
• Textual materialism
• Deliberation in digital reading
• The politics of independent publishing
Organised around six short papers and an online conversation among practitioners of independent publishing, the conference is open to comment and discussion from online readers. In keeping with its theme, Materialities of Text is a hybrid of symposium, online discussion forum, and writing workshop for a special issue of the journal New Formations.
The journal issue will contain some additional articles; we invite interested parties to contact us to discuss ideas or propose papers <s.mays@westminster.ac.uk> and <N.Thoburn@manchester.ac.uk>
Materialities of Text is co-sponsored by Archiving Cultures at The University of Westminster and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
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.
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.
Last week I was in Berlin where I listened to some amazing talks on the future of publishing and scholarly communication delivered at the APE conference 2010. Underneath you will find a selection of what I felt to be the most interesting bits.
One of the key speakers during this year’s event was Stefan Gradmann from the IBI in Berlin. He gave several talks on Open Access and the future of the document. In his first talk, which focused on the birth of Open Access from the spirit of the serials crisis, Gradmann made a distinction between an exploitation based publication economy and a dissemination based publication economy. Interestingly enough, Gradmann places both Green ánd Gold Open Access publishing together with Closed Access publishing, underneath the paradigm of the exploitation based economy. One of the key questions he focused on was whether scholarly publications should be seen as a public good or whether they can (also) be marketable products.
According to Gradmann, one of the stigma’s that has haunted OA from its initial beginning, is the fact that for a long time (and still) it has been seen as a model that would cost less and would tackle the problems brought up by the Serials Crisis and its accompanying price increases. This publication economy fatally prominently assisted at the birth of OA and at the same time at the stigma of OA of being of a second class and low quality level.
As Gradmann states, the closed access model led to an absurd scenario in the digital publishing environment, where the exploitation rights end up in the hands of the publishers and are again bought by librarians at a cost which earns the publishers a revenue that has increasingly become disproportionate with the cost of handling and production. The consequences are that this closed publishing scenario has thus led to a very expansive outsourcing model. Next tot that, this model is only effective as long as scientific communication is seen as a commercial good that can be merchandised. The exploitation model is thus sustainable under three conditions only, where it must be operated expansively, it must be constantly pushed further and it must abide to the laws of free exchange. This has led to the problem which Gradmann denotes as ‘scarcifying’.
Gradmann also claims that, where Green Open Access still operates under the fundamental principles of the traditional publication economy and thus under the exploitation economy, it is fundamentally parasitic on that system and for that reason probably cannot be made sustainable. Interestingly enough Gradmann claims that Gold Open Access publishing, with its diversified strategies of refinancing based on author pays, subsidies and value added services, is not much more than a redirection of financial streams within the same exploitation paradigm and for that reason has not been very successful up till now.
What Gradmann proposes is a model in which there is a sedimentation process of knowledge beyond which scientific information can appropriately be merchandised as a commercial good, and before this state is reached the business model should be Not-For-Profit. As long as it needs to float freely, selling access to that information is not a good idea. The problem is that as long as the scientific community confers the free and efficient circulation of communication streams to external service providers, there will be a contradiction between the exploitation and the dissemination model. Gradmann proposes for the intermediate period a model in which a product can be made freely available in a dissemination paradigm with value added services build on top of that. Gradmann lists a variety of these possible services having to do with quality assurance, marketing, interaction and social dynamics, natural language processing and semantic web technology and services based on semantic extraction and aggregation. As he states however, all these services take Open Access and Open Technology as a prerequisite, we need an Open framework to base these services on, as we also need technological standards to build upon. What these changes will mean for the different stakeholders in the publishing value chain is still unclear according to Gradmann.
In his second talk Gradmann focused on the future of the document in scholarly communication. He asked the fundamental question: what lies beyond the document? Gradmann talked about the evolution, digital emulation and erosion of the printed document continuum. As he sees it, the scholarly publication has been transmitted from the Gutenberg galaxy into the Turing Galaxy on into the semantic web. In the Gutenberg Galaxy we still work via the linear document continuum (or the traditional publishing value chain). This linear circular continuum has evolved into a network paradigm, where all the activities in the chain are connected to one another. Gradmann sees the current phase not as the end but as an intermediate stage in which we are seeing the first signs of a process happening which will be really disruptive. In the web based scholarly working continuum we are moving far beyond the concept of the document into the realm of document disintegration. This movement started with the advance of web documents, consisting of multiple linked pages and linear documents in HTML. This process has been accelerated with the evolution of the semantic web. RDF triples, which are in a way nothing more than small statements, can be dynamically re-aggregated into variable intellectual entities, which can be processable by machines. As Gradmann states, these RDF-triple sets can be the equivalent of what we now publish as ‘documents’. He wonders then what it would mean to build a publishing chain around triples and what it would mean to ‘read’ these documents.
Before we reach this stage however some big problems still need to be resolved, having to do with scalability, integrity and preservation. What actually constitutes the identity of these documents, and what constitutes the document’s boundaries? Where do these aggregations start and where do they end? How will this paradigm shift affect science and scholarship? As an example of this development Gradmann mentions the OpenCalais network in which unstructured documents are broken down into named entities, facts, and much more (it also offers automatic tagging). We are currently in the starting phase of the document notion and we do not yet know what comes afterwards. As Gradmann states, anyone pretending to know can not be taken entirely serious. Yet we should not be frightened, where semantic publishing (which Gradmann defines as new modes of RDF based content aggregation and generation) may have quite some strategic potential, also for instance for the Humanities.
The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and analyze) written words. Media literacy, the equally broad term used to expand the concept of literacy, is mostly used to describe the capability to analyze, decode and criticize the manifold messages incorporated in the different (digital) media. Media literacy has with the growing popularity of online communication, again become a much debated topic and an interest of educational reformers. Post literacy, as a concept, incorporates media literacy but pushes the idea even further, to a future where text no longer is perceived as the dominant medium. According to postliteracy.org, post literacy focuses on the other (medial) means of communicating messages, exploring ‘visual, interactive, computational and textual literacies’. As they state, to be able to decipher the (often hidden) messages in multimedia communication, polymodal literacy is needed. This creation of a polymodal literacy is a necessity in today’s society, where the advance of the Internet has lead to an enormous rise in the use of multi(-digital-)media communication, transcending the explicit focus on text inherited from the print era. As postliteracy.org states on its website:
“Postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.”
Exploring the concept of post literacy in a very practical manner, postliteracy.org is using steganography and online deciphering software to post multimedia puzzles with hidden messages for you to solve (as a means to further develop your post literacy level), as you can see here.
As Doug Johnson states, the interest in multimedia and the concept of post literacy has grown due to the increased use of small and portable video and movie playing devices, further pushing the dominant textual media into a supporting role. This demise of the power of textual media reminds us of a foregone past, showing similarities with preliterate (oral) societies in which, as Wikipedia states, people have ‘not yet discovered how to read and write’, the difference being that ‘a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication.’ As Walter Ong describes in Orality and Literacy, in the transformation from a preliterate to a literate society, the capability to write and read had to be acquired, in a similar fashion as one learns to use a tool. According to Ong this fundamental transformation also meant a shift in the way we think and structure thoughts. Mike Ridley is very much interested in this change in how we think, triggered by the use of different media, and in the influence this media use has on the way our brain functions (some even state that the way we process information in today’s information overloaded society has lead to our brains looking ever more like those of schizophrenics, giving rise to ponderings about a new schizophrenic society and schizophrenic ways of thinking). But Ridley wants to stress not the negative connotations surrounding post literacy, which focus on the decline of textual communication and reading, where he wants to emphasize the inherent strengths of both orality and literacy, to see what the potential of a post literate society could be.
As Dough Johnson remarks, the increased use of media other than textual (especially in an online environment) combined with the fact that we, as recent studies have shown, read differently online, might mean we are heading towards a post literate society faster than we think. Although Johnson states that he does still see a role for textual media and communication, in his definition of a post literate society, people choose to use the other media as their main means of communication, they have a preference for them or, as he states ‘The post literate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.’
This development described by Johnson and others can be seen as closely connected to the research that is being conducted on new ways of data visualization, in which graphic or figurative representations of large amounts of data are used to get an overview of and deeper insight into complex and huge information compounds and objects, constructing a way of dealing with information overload and representing it in a non-textual manner. As Wikipedia states, the primary goal of data visualizations is ‘to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means’. The necessity of these kinds of tools or representations in a way illustrates the short-fall of textual communication in the online environment (in some occasions). Where information is ever more superfluous and the need to grasp large amounts of data (especially in science) ever more important, other media might be more convenient.
Doug Johnson looks at the way the move towards post literacy is influencing books and the way we use them (online), noting the rise of comics and graphic novels, (or think for instance of the popularity of Manga and role-playing games which increasingly use complex narrative structures in a non-textual manner). He then goes on to denote what the coming of a post literate net-generation means for the future (post literate) library. One of the most important point Johnson makes is that we need to get away from and look critically at our bias towards print, which is prejudicing our literacy skills when compared with our other media knowledge and apprehension. He sees the ‘return’ to a post literate society as a natural development towards a more multisensory way of communication:
“But I would argue that post literacy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.”
John Connell responds to Johnson in a post in which he emphasizes the continuing importance of text, even in an online environment. Although he agrees with Johnson concerning the lack of attention for other forms of literacy, he does state that ‘the debate should not be about print but about the utility, beauty, strength and continued resilience of text in its multifarious contexts, whether on paper or on any other medium.’ This is actually a very interesting point that he makes, to take a closer look at and investigate how text ‘mixes’ with other media, and how it is perceived and consumed in the context of other (digital) media. How does the interaction between text and other media change the way we analyze and interpret the message inherent in this multimedia format, which then in a way transcends the mere textual medium?
Mike Ridley perhaps captures the full meaning of post literacy best (agreeing more with Johnson than with Connell where it comes to the dominance of text) in his definition, in which he says that ‘post literacy is the phrase used to capture the possibility of rich human communication that exceeds (and hence replaces) visible language (writing and reading) as the dominant means of the understanding and exchange of ideas.” Ridley introduces here an important aspect I feel has been missing in the above discussion, focusing mainly on post literacy and the consumer side of multimedia communication. For as I believe, to be able to communicate in a post-textual manner, the producers of these new forms of online communication also need to become post literate.
One way to think about the idea of a post-literate-writer (a contradiction in terminus) or a post textual content producer, is to reflect upon ideas that transcend the concept of media, focusing rather on (the development towards) a single medium or on the disappearance of media as such. As Kiene Brillenburg Wurth states in her article Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry (referring to Friedrich Kittler), the Internet is leading to ‘the end of medial compartmentalization’. She cites Kittler saying:
“(…) If the optical fibre network reduces all formerly separate data flows to one standardized digital series of numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers nothing is impossible. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, memory, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself.”
This closely resembles Mark Amerika’s idea of ‘the artist as the medium’, through which the different communication streams flow, as he states ‘the artist is the medium or instrument, and the networked space of flows play this instrument to facilitate the development of creative compositions’ (Meta/Data,19). This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do.
As Brillenburg states, with the coming of digital art, the idea (or the myth) of separate and sustainable media with their own specifics or ‘essence’ is destroyed. She refers to the 19th century connotation of a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which one tried to connect the different media. However, as she states, the Gesamtkunstwerk has been ‘evolving into the kind of aural-visual-verbal computer games and multi-sensory interactive art works that have now grown so familiar to us.’ Brillenburg thinks the idea or concept of multimedia is no longer sufficient to describe the new forms of digital media communication that are taking place online, and she proposes to use the term intermediality instead, which can incorporate better the different ways in which media ‘contaminate’ each other, as a way to describe the ‘in-between’ of media. As she describes it:
“Intermediality projects not simply a ‘together-art’ or any other continuation of nineteenth-century Gesamtkunst, but a criss-crossing between and mutual infusion of different medial modalities. Words become like colours, colours like words, texts like buildings and spaces, sounds are spatially heard – such contaminations date back not so much to Wagner’s utopian view of the arts united, but to those avant-garde experiments that questioned the respective identities and conditions of possibility of the different art forms.”
For me this summarizes quite clearly how the move towards a post literate society is not only about being able to analyze and interpret polymodal ways of communicating, but also about being able to produce these forms of communication in a good (and comprehensible) way. Not only can we be seen moving towards a society in which the consumption of media is increasingly becoming post literate, the digital media producer, artist, or even scholar, is also increasingly working in a mixed medial manner. Like Mark Amerika remarks when he states that he lets the media flow through him (or her) this means the online content producer will be using media less and less as separate entities. Although these post literate characteristics of mixing media are mostly seen in visual arts, we are also increasingly seeing multimedial (or intermedial) writers, poets (the focus of Brillenburg’s analysis) and even scholars, who are less biased towards text, using different media in a natural and even unconscious way (emphasizing the flow) like for instance Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) or Mark Amerika have been doing in their scholarly and/or artistic works. It might be interesting to reflect upon what the influence of these ways of post literate thinking and (more important perhaps) of post textual doing, might be on the production and consumption of scholarly books. What kind of consequences might these developments have for the way scholars operate in a digital environment, using new digital media to communicate their research? It would be equally interesting to think about what a post literate (or post-textual) humanities field would look like, a form of humanities scholarship in which text would no longer be the dominant choice for transferring or communication research. Maybe the experiments Lev Manovich has been doing with digital humanities and data visualization, and his emphasis on a new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’, are a good example of what a post literate, post textual or polymodal humanities might start off from.
As a follow up on my post on the Reading and Watching conference a few weeks ago, I recently came about this very nice post by Michael Bhaskar over at The Digitalist. In his post Bhaskar talks about a blog post from ReadWriteWeb in which a trend amongst the new YouTube generation is discussed. Instead of using the search function from Google, they are typing questions directly into YouTube. It seems that the new generation is increasingly preferring the video based search results from YouTube to Google’s text based results. Bhaskar goes on to reflect on the developement from a text based culture to an image based culture and the inevitable loss this will mean to the mental and social capabilities of the human species as a whole, as Bhaskar sees reflected in the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.
Bhaskar states his worries as follows:
“But this is something we should be thinking a about. While in many ways we live in, and have always lived in, an illiterate culture (and I mean this in a non-pejorative sense), think say of the non text entertainment industries stacked against the text based, this further evolution of a non-text culture presents a profound shift. If people are largely not reading then the very biology of human thought will change, and not for the better. As a species we will be less able to empathise, less able to imagine and less able to articulate and formulate complex thoughts.”
This seems to concur with the visions of Adriana Bus and Raymond Mar, who both state that reading (fiction) is essential for the development of mental conceptions and social and personal development.
However, I do not think Bhaskar’s vision of a future evolution away from a text based culture and a text based Internet will come about so soon, as text itself and the way we are reading is also changing. As I wrote in my post about Text comparison and digital creativity, David Crystal and Adriaan van der Weel both discussed the inherent properties of the different media. It is important in this respect that, as Van der Weel states, texts are changing under the influence of the digital media (medial transformativity) and are also adapting themselves to the digital environment. As David Chrystal remarks, Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC) deploys properties of both writing and speech. So it is very well possible that text will evolve and hybrids will exist in a new online world filled with remixed mediality. And this will probably involve the growth of all kinds of new elaborate mental conceptions and abilities, better suited to these new conditions.
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