OPEN REFLECTIONS

Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part II)

One of the most interesting sessions on the last day of The Unbound Book conference, was the session on Future Publishing Industries. According to the program the session focused on the affordances and political economies of the publishing industry and libraries. Underneath a small summary of three of the papers presented on the panel and…
Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part I)

Last month I attended The Unbound Book conference, a three day gathering of experts on books, publishing and reading, to collaboratively explore the future of the book and the transformation of reading, publishing and learning. Belated I wrote out my notes on some of the most striking lectures, a mere add-on to the amazing documentation…
Book Destruction

Two weeks ago I attended the Book Destruction conference, which took place on the 16th of April at the Institute of English Studies, part of the University of London. The conference focused on the book as a symbol and as an idea, as well as on its material form, and explored what happens when books…
Full circle with Open Access Monographs

After a previous guest post where he developed an interesting forecast related to academic publishing, Ronald Snijder is back with his thoughts on Open Access monographs. You can reach him at r.snijder@aup.nl Full circle with Open Access Monographs When I look at publishing academic books in Open Access, the story surrounding it tends to…
New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed As Hall has shown, the use of wikis to experiment with new ways of writing and collaborating offers a lot of potential for collaborative and distributive research and publishing practices. However, I feel they are only one possible step towards liquid publications and cannot as yet be perceived as real…
New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

Part 2 – The archive One of the suggestions made in discussions on remix to cope with the problem of authorship in the digital age, is to shift the focus from the author to the selector, the moderator or the curator. In cases where authorship is hard to establish or even absent, the archive can…
New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

Part 1 – Fluid environments and liquid publications The ease with which nowadays continual updates can be made has brought into question not only the stability of documents but at the same time the need for and the efficiency of stable objects. Wikipedia is one of the often-cited examples of how the speed of improving…
The academic publisher in 2020

My friend and colleague Ronald Snijder has written a very interesting forecast related to academic publishing. He asked me to publish it here, which I am happy to do. I would also like to draw your attention to the very interesting article Ronald wrote, entitled ‘The profits of free books: an experiment to measure the…
Open Media Research Seminar Series

In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here. On his…
Why Humanities?

This has been lying around for a while, and only now did I have the time to properly go through my notes for this excellent conference, which was held at the 5th of November at Birkbeck. The Why Humanities? conference gathered together some of the key figures in the UK Humanities to discuss ‘the value…
Remix Panel Discussion at CoDE

I am running a bit behind on my conference and symposium notes, but here are a few of my observations based on the screening of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’, by Brett Gaylor, at CoDE a few weeks ago. I wrote about RIP before here and here. The screening was followed by an interesting panel discussion…
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…