Open media seminar series

The programme for the next series of Open Media seminars has now been posted by Janneke Adema.

Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media invite you to 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.

Podcasts of previous Open Media seminars are available here.

For more information see here.
 
Programme: January – March 2012
—————————————————————————————————————————
January 31st:
Tessa J. Houghton (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus) – ‘#blackout: the viral counterpublicity of online protest’ (Read More)
 
February 14th:
Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘How to open an engine: narratives of production and consumption in video game culture’
 
March 6th:
Cornelia Sollfrank (net.artist) – ‘title tbc’
 
March 20th:
Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) – ‘Just Gaming: Digital Games, Remediation, Electracy’
————————————————————————————————————————

When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in January, February and March
Where: ICE, Media and Communications 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 

—————————————————————————————————————————
Digital Media have become ubiquitous. Our experiences are on the verge of being mediated and augmented non-stop via mobile and web-based recording devices which offer the possibility to merge, mix, and mash up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we seem to be no longer confined by the boundaries that have governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are 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 follow an education via iTunesU, call friends abroad via Skype for free, 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 options for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is more complicated. Many (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed via commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Music mash-ups are sued for copyright infringement and fears for ebook piracy rule the literary world.

The concept of openness constitutes a radical critique against the closed-off worlds of what we might call the ‘traditional media’. It urges for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. However, openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who pays the producers? Do open data pose security risks and who gets to control this data? Who governs our creative output? In what way can we control and keep check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media or are these notions explicitly being challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they really be truly open? Where does openness end? Should we rather focus on specific aspects of openness? How can we generate a media critique when media are constantly updated and changed, including our critique itself?

In this lecture series various examples and aspects of openness in media will be explored. Special attention will be paid to the benefits and drawbacks of openness and the kind of possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

Withdrawal of labour from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act

Open access advocate Peter Suber has recently announced he ‘will not referee for a publisher belonging to the Association of American Publishers unless it has publicly disavowed the AAP's position  on the Research Works Act’. The latter, which was introduced in the US Congress on December 16, 2011, would prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research in the US. The Research Works Act would thus in effect countermand the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy along with other similar open access policies in the US. Suber has invited others to join him both in taking such action and in going public with their decision.

To show my support for both open access and this initiative I have therefore decided that, from this point onwards and until further notice, I am not  prepared to publish with, or otherwise give my labour to, presses in favour of the Research Works Act. This applies to the peer-reviewing of journal articles, book proposals, manuscripts and all other forms of scholarly and editorial work. 

This is not a decision I have taken lightly - not least because I have a number of friends who edit journals  published by some of these presses. However, as a long-standing advocate of open access in the humanities it is an issue I feel strongly about, so hopefully they will understand and perhaps even feel encouraged to put pressure on their publishers to either withdraw from the AAP because of its support for this bill, or join MIT and a number of other presses in publically disavowing the AAP’s campaign in favour of the Research Works Act.

A list of the publishers belonging to the AAP is available here.

Among the publishers of critical and cultural theory on this list at the time of writing are:

• Sage (who publish numerous journals in the area including Theory, Culture and Society and New Media and Society)
• Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist Review)
• Stanford University Press
• Fordham University Press
• Harvard University Press
• NYU Press
• Cambridge University Press

Peter Suber has created a regularly updated list of those AAP members who have already publicly disavowed the AAP position on the Research Works Act here. At the time of writing it includes:

• MIT Press
• ITHAKA
• Council on Library and Information Resources
• Penn State University Press
• Rockefeller University Press
• University of California Press

More information on the Research Works Act is available here.

For a take on the subject written from the perspective of a scientist based in the UK, see Mike Taylor’s ‘Academic Publishers Have Become the Enemies of Science’.

Force of binding

If I am interested in the domains of electronic books and publishing, it is because the defamiliarization effect produced by the change in material support from print-on-paper to digital offers us a chance to raise the kind of questions regarding our ideas of the book we should have been raising all along. As I endeavoured to show at length in Digitize This Book, such questions were already present with regard to print and other media.

However, as a result of modernity and the ‘development and spread of the concept of the author, along with mass printing techniques, uniform multiple-copy editions, copyright, established publishing houses, editors’ and so on, they have ‘tended to be taken for granted, overlooked, marginalised, excluded or otherwise repressed’. Consequently, books have taken on the impression of being much more fixed, stable, reliable, permanent, authoritative, standardized and tightly bound than they actually are, or have ever been. For even if a book is produced in a multiple copy print edition, each copy is different, having its own singular life, history, old-age and death -- which is why we can form affective and symbolic attachments to them.

This is not to say we have never been modern, that books have never been tightly fastened or bound; but rather that this force of binding is just what modernity, and the book, is. Or was, perhaps. 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

OHP releases six open access books in critical theory

Open Humanities Press (OHP) and MPublishing are pleased to announce the publication of six open access books in critical theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies. Each title will be freely available as full-text HTML, as well as a paperback edition. The titles are being released on a rolling publication schedule beginning 15 December, 2011 at:

http://openhumanitiespress.org

In a unique collaboration, the books are being jointly released by OHP, an international publishing collective run by scholars, and MPublishing, the library-based publishing enterprise at the University of Michigan.

'We are tremendously excited with these results' says Sigi Jöttkandt, a co-founder of the collective and lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 'When we first launched OHP as a high-profile open access journal publisher in 2008, we didn’t expect to be publishing open access books so quickly as well.'

The six books are:

* The Democracy of Objects by Levi R. Bryant;
* Immersion Into Noise by Joseph Nechvatal;
* Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, edited by Tom Cohen;
* Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Sussman;
* Terror, Theory, and the Humanities, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo and Uppinder Mehan;
* The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies by John Carlos Rowe.

Shana Kimball, Interim Head of MPublishing at the University of Michigan Library, says that the release of these books is a remarkable achievement for OHP and 'strong proof of concept that emerging scholar and library led publishing models can be part of the solution to the problem of access.'

The peer-reviewed books are part of OHP’s Critical Climate Change series (edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook) and the New Metaphysics series (edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour). MPublishing created the structured XML for electronic and print on demand publication, as well as the metadata and cataloging information, and archived the books in the University of Michigan Library for long-term preservation.

'I’ve been very happy with the publishing experience', said John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates Chair in Humanities and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity. 'This is just what digital scholarly publishing needs: fully refereed work that can be compared favorably with the process of evaluation at any major university press.'

According to Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, this publication event marks another milestone in the transformation of scholarly publishing. 'It further establishes that scholars can extend the widely-held value of openness into the publishing realm when libraries give them access to the requisite expertise and mechanisms.'

Contact: Sigi Jöttkandt: sigij@openhumanitiespress.org
Open Humanities Press

Shana Kimball: kimballs@umich.edu
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

###

Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org

MPublishing is the primary academic publishing division of the University of Michigan. It creates, promotes, distributes and preserves scholarly, educational and regional materials in digital and print formats. MPublishing focuses on the best application of technology to the world of scholarly publishing. It is committed to improving the copyright climate for scholarship by developing services for areas of publishing growth otherwise under-served within the University community


On liquid, living books: Shakespeare and the Bible

I began this series of posts by suggesting the word ‘book’ should not be applied to an open, decentered, distributed, multi-location, multi-medium, multiple-identity text generated out of a collaborative relationship with a number of different, often anonymous and unknown authors, as without being tied or fastened tightly together -- by the concept of an identifiable human author, for example -- such a text is not a book at all: it is ‘only’ a text or collection of texts.

•   

To sample Sol Lewitt, we could say that one usually understands the texts of the present by applying the conventions of the past, thus misunderstanding the texts of the present. That, indeed, is one of the problems with a word such as ‘book’. When it is used -- even in the form of e-book, ‘unbound book’, ‘unbook’  or ‘the book to come’ -- it connotes a whole tradition and implies a consequent acceptance of that tradition, thus placing limitations on the writer who would be reluctant to create anything that goes beyond it.

•   

Then again ‘book’ is perhaps as good a name as any, since books, historically, have always been more or less loosely bound. Take the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving Bible in the world, and the ancestor of all the Christian Bibles we have today. As it currently exists, it is incomplete. Nevertheless, the Codex Sinaiticus still includes all of the New Testament, half of the Old Testament, and two early Christian texts not featured in modern Bibles, all gathered into a single unit for the very first time. So it is the first Bible as we understand it. But more than that, it is also one of the first large books, as to gather together so many texts which had previously existed only as scrolled documents required a fundamental transformation in binding technology that eventually saw the scroll give way to the codex book.

Just as interesting however is the fact that the Codex is also history’s most altered biblical manuscript, containing approximately 30 corrections per page, roughly 23,000 in all. And these are not just minor corrections. For instance, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is not described as being the son of God. That was a revision added to the text later. In the original version, Jesus becomes divine only after he has been baptised by John the Baptist. Nor is Jesus resurrected in the Codex Sinaiticus. Mark’s Gospel ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. The resurrection only takes place in competing versions of the story that are to be found in other manuscripts. Nor does the Codex contain the stoning of the adulterous woman – ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’; or Jesus’s words on the cross – ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.

So the Bible -- often dubbed ‘the Book of Books’ -- cannot be read as that most fixed, standard, permanent and reliable of texts, the unaltered word of God. On the contrary, the text of the Bible was already seen as being collaborative, multi-authored, fluid, evolving, emergent when the Codex was created in 350 AD.

•   

Another example is provided by Shakespeare’s First Folio. As Adrian Johns has shown, this volume includes more than six hundred typefaces, along with numerous discrepancies regarding its spelling, punctuation, divisions and page configurations.  Indeed, the Royal Shakespeare Company recently opened its newly renovated theatres in Stratford with productions of Macbeth and Cardenio, a previously unperformed work by Shakespeare. Yet Cardenio, a missing 1612 tragedy by Shakespeare and Fletcher, may contain hardly anything by Shakespeare at all, while Thomas Middleton is now thought to have been heavily involved in the writing of Macbeth. In fact, Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure are all also to be found in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s collected works of Thomas Middleton.

•   

We could thus say that books have always been liquid and living to some extent: digital technology and the internet has simply helped to make us more aware of the fact.  

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)