OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Information and knowledge

  • Do not ask me to remain the same

    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…

  • Who Owns Research?

    Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question.  Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace…

  • Governance in Times of Change

    Last week I attended the International Conference – Digital publishing and its governance: between knowledge and power, which was held from April 28th-30th in Paris. The conference was organized by Sens Public with support from INHA-Invisu, tge-ADONIS, CNRS and DARIAH. The conference focused on how digitally induced practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences are…

  • APE 2010: The Semantic Desktop and the Article of the Future

    During the second and third day of the APE conference three presentations were given which focused on services that would aid the information worker through the information overload. They were all based on filtering out the essential information through web based services and interfaces centered on the (scholarly) user of these information resources. Andreas Dengel…

  • 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…

  • Historical Sensationalism. On the Morality of History

    Yesterday evening, Marita Mathijsen, one of the leading Dutch literary historians, gave the 38th Huizinga-lecture at the St. Pieterskerk in Leiden. An elaborate version of this lecture has been published in a print edition, and a summary of the lecture is available at NRC Handelsblad (both in Dutch). Underneath my rendering and translation of her…

  • Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

    Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

    As Ihle shows in her film, since the unification in 1990 of North and South Yemen, the country has been politically unstable. Poetry fulfills a very important function in the barren rural landscape, where illiteracy reigns and where television and radio (let alone the Internet) have not yet gained (much to any) ground. This is…

  • Society of the Query – Part 2: Gugerli, Fuller, Manovich, Ludovico, Bruno and Van ’t Hof

    Part 1 of my notes on the Society of the Query conference can be found here. David Gugerli a historian specialized in the philosophy of science gave a lecture on the history of databases and of data management as a signifying practice. In a Deleuzian fashion, he states, knowledge operates in distributed networks. The world…

  • Society of the Query – Part 1: Lovink, Boutang, Pasquinelli and Numerico

    Last month the Institute of Network Cultures organized a two day conference entitled Society of the Query. Below you can find a wrap-up of the notes I took during the conference. More elaborate blog entries focusing on each of the lectures separately can be found here and you can also take a look at the…

  • Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

    Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht…

  • Proust, Squid and Wolf

    I just finished reading Proust and the Squid, the fascinating book by Maryanne Wolf about how we developed and acquired a ‘reading brain’. Although sometimes a little dense in its use of linguistic terminology, it is a very nice read and highly recommended if you are interested in the way we developed one of the…

  • 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…