OPEN REFLECTIONS

Tag: Books

  • 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…

  • New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Zeeman and the wane of a print adolescence

    Sometimes when a public figure dies, you suddenly realize what a big part they played in your life and your personal or intellectual development. More than maybe a favored high-school teacher or beloved uncle, it was the literary critic Michaël Zeeman who always inspired my love for books. My parents had a subscription to the dutch…