OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Lectures and Conferences

  • Business is boring

    Business is boring

     Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows,…

  • Krisis re-emerges from the ashes

    I never burned books. Not as a ritual after graduation; not as a Dadaistic attempt to enstage some kind of surreal happening; not as a way to cleanse my soul from feelings of materialistic belongings. No. Books are holy to me. I would probably not even be able to burn a book (though I could…

  • The Universal Library Revisited

    For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.   First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus…

  • Einmal ist Keinmal

     Memory comes when memory’s old I am never the first to know    –        Fever Ray  – Last Tuesday I attended the excellent lecture series The Old Brand New, in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The speakers that evening were the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Their talks were reflections on the evening’s…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 2

    The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.   The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 1

      Last week, on the 19th and 20th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in…

  • Ancient texts in new worlds

    I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.   The colophon states amongst others:   Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black     Codex…

  • Open Your Mind

    In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our…

  • Highlights of APE 2009 – Day 2

    On the second and final day of APE, Sebastian Mislej of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, talked about videolectures.net, a website streaming online video lectures that can be viewed for free. All the content on videolectures.net is scientifically approved (it has been peer reviewed) so in its entirety it forms a complete scientific repository…

  • Highlights from APE 2009 – Day 1

    The first day of the APE conference in Berlin, which, as mentioned before, focused on the impact of publishing in the digital age, started with a keynote by Georg Winkler from the European University Association (EUA), entitled Universities in the 21st century. Winkler started off by asking the question of what makes an university unique,…

  • Highlights from APE 2009 – Preconference Day

    From the 19th to the 21st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website:   “APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open…

  • Lesesucht

    Two weeks ago I went to a conference organized by Stichting Lezen, the Dutch organization for reading promotion. The conference was entitled Reading and watching and focused on the differences between the written word and the image: what does the written word have that images don’t? The keynote speaker was Hungarian writer György Konrád, who…