• Print will survive

    Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech:  “To…

  • If you love literature, help keep it alive!

    Via Tranversalinflections and Loewak I heard about the possible decline and fall of Salt Publishing, the poetry, short story and literary criticism publisher set up by Australian poet John Kinsella (who also launched Salt Magazine) in the 90’s. The financial crisis hit them hard, and they were on the edge off going overboard. In a…

  • Book/Body

    Anne Frances Wysocki already created the webtext or new media piece A Bookling Monument in 2002. Still, it amazed me. The manner in which Wysocki tries to grapple the similarities between the way we view and envision the body and the book, combining this with a visual presentation of her text (which is an exploration…

  • Homo Ludens

    “While I make my work public, the fear comes over me that many will consider it an insufficiently documented improvisation, in spite of all the labor that went into it. It is the fate of anyone who wants to deal with cultural topics, that he is compelled to make incursions into all sorts of provinces…

  • Culture is Data

    Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for…

  • Monographic Experiments

    For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and…

  • RiP, Maecenas and Event

    Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained…

  • Remix online for free

    Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.   Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before…

  • 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,…

  • Knowledge Remix in the Humanities and Social Sciences
    Knowledge Remix in the Humanities and Social Sciences

    “Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.” – A Digital Humanities Manifesto As I am at the moment researching new forms of scholarly communication in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the context of remix theory,…

  • 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…