OPEN REFLECTIONS

  • New Visions for the Book II: Remix

    Part 3: Remix re-examined See here for part 1 and here for part 2 Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a…

  • New Visions for the Book II: Remix

    Part 2 – Lev Manovich Lev Manovich is a professor of Visual Arts, at the University of California, San Diego, specialized in new media, software and digital culture. Manovich directs the The Software Studies Initiative where he practices cultural analytics. Similar to Navas, he has theorized and applied the concept of remix frequently in his…

  • New Visions for the Book II: Remix

    Part 1 – Eduardo Navas In the first part of New Visions for the Book, I described how the concept of the book is being used as a strategic power tool to argue for a certain knowledge system. I tried to show how within this discourse certain essentialist notions—such as authorship, stability, and authority—still hold…

  • New Visions For The Book – Part I

    A few weeks ago the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University brought together a group of digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds as part of the unique summer institute One Week | One Tool. The aim of One Week | One Tool was to come up with an (open source) digital…

  • The Struggle to Define a Position: What will be the Future of Electronic Literature?

    Last week I attended a fascinating roundtable at Kingston University London which focused mainly on the position of electronic literature within the literary and artistic field and within academia more in specific. The roundtable, entitled From the page to the screen to augmented reality: new modes of language-driven mediated research, had as one of its…

  • 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…

  • 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…