Category: Free Knowledge

  • Open Media Research Seminar Series

    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…

  • The Public Domain and Digital Natives

    Two weeks ago I visited the wonderful city of Turin to attend the International Conference University and Cyberspace. Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age, the closing conference of The COMMUNIA Thematic Network. As they state on their website, COMMUNIA aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion…

  • More Cultural Studies = Less Uptake

    Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print  (2009) recently published an interesting article in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on the inconsistencies in the current journal publishing system, focusing specifically on the situation within the field of Cultural Studies. In his article, entitled Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing, Striphas gives…

  • APE 2010: Open Access and Thinking Beyond the Document

    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…

  • Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

    “But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be…

  • Ebooks Galore!

    This month it’s again time for the World Ebook fair! The fourth annual World Ebook Fair, this year from 7/04/09 to 8/04/09 will offer Open Access to their sponsors ebook collections consisting of more than 2 million books. During this month these ebooks will be online available for free (otherwise a membership of $8.95 per…

  • The Concept of Bible

    Some small stuff from around the world or the web or the world that is the web that deserves some attention here in this and future posts to be. First of all the oldest bible (ok maybe no small stuff), the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized and has concurrently been made accessible online. As the…

  • Encore! More Free Playing

    The story around Free continues (talking about a nice marketing strategy). A review from Malcolm Gladwell (yes, the Blink and Tipping Point guy) in The New Yorker elicited a response from Anderson on his blog, causing another Internet aficionado, Seth Godin, to again take sides (Anderson’s side that is). Seems like a dinosaur fight (though…

  • The Land of Free

    Looking forward to reading Free, the long awaited book by WIRED main man and digital prophet Chris Anderson, author of the book with the already institutionalized title ‘The Long Tail’. In The Long Tail Anderson argued that the Internet will offer a new future (and bright business opportunities) for all those precious backlist titles and…

  • Where Open Philosophy meets Open Music

    Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU…

  • Fair Use?

    I have been browsing through my old bookmarks and data sources lately and found some interesting things I would like to draw your attention too. First thing is the video underneath on fair use of online video resources from the Center for Social Media at American University. Now what is fair use again? In the…

  • Adieu Copyright – A debate

    Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The…