Force of binding

If I am interested in the domains of electronic books and publishing, it is because the defamiliarization effect produced by the change in material support from print-on-paper to digital offers us a chance to raise the kind of questions regarding our ideas of the book we should have been raising all along. As I endeavoured to show at length in Digitize This Book, such questions were already present with regard to print and other media.

However, as a result of modernity and the ‘development and spread of the concept of the author, along with mass printing techniques, uniform multiple-copy editions, copyright, established publishing houses, editors’ and so on, they have ‘tended to be taken for granted, overlooked, marginalised, excluded or otherwise repressed’. Consequently, books have taken on the impression of being much more fixed, stable, reliable, permanent, authoritative, standardized and tightly bound than they actually are, or have ever been. For even if a book is produced in a multiple copy print edition, each copy is different, having its own singular life, history, old-age and death -- which is why we can form affective and symbolic attachments to them.

This is not to say we have never been modern, that books have never been tightly fastened or bound; but rather that this force of binding is just what modernity, and the book, is. Or was, perhaps. 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

OHP releases six open access books in critical theory

Open Humanities Press (OHP) and MPublishing are pleased to announce the publication of six open access books in critical theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies. Each title will be freely available as full-text HTML, as well as a paperback edition. The titles are being released on a rolling publication schedule beginning 15 December, 2011 at:

http://openhumanitiespress.org

In a unique collaboration, the books are being jointly released by OHP, an international publishing collective run by scholars, and MPublishing, the library-based publishing enterprise at the University of Michigan.

'We are tremendously excited with these results' says Sigi Jöttkandt, a co-founder of the collective and lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 'When we first launched OHP as a high-profile open access journal publisher in 2008, we didn’t expect to be publishing open access books so quickly as well.'

The six books are:

* The Democracy of Objects by Levi R. Bryant;
* Immersion Into Noise by Joseph Nechvatal;
* Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, edited by Tom Cohen;
* Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2, edited by Henry Sussman;
* Terror, Theory, and the Humanities, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo and Uppinder Mehan;
* The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies by John Carlos Rowe.

Shana Kimball, Interim Head of MPublishing at the University of Michigan Library, says that the release of these books is a remarkable achievement for OHP and 'strong proof of concept that emerging scholar and library led publishing models can be part of the solution to the problem of access.'

The peer-reviewed books are part of OHP’s Critical Climate Change series (edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook) and the New Metaphysics series (edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour). MPublishing created the structured XML for electronic and print on demand publication, as well as the metadata and cataloging information, and archived the books in the University of Michigan Library for long-term preservation.

'I’ve been very happy with the publishing experience', said John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates Chair in Humanities and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity. 'This is just what digital scholarly publishing needs: fully refereed work that can be compared favorably with the process of evaluation at any major university press.'

According to Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, this publication event marks another milestone in the transformation of scholarly publishing. 'It further establishes that scholars can extend the widely-held value of openness into the publishing realm when libraries give them access to the requisite expertise and mechanisms.'

Contact: Sigi Jöttkandt: sigij@openhumanitiespress.org
Open Humanities Press

Shana Kimball: kimballs@umich.edu
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

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Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org

MPublishing is the primary academic publishing division of the University of Michigan. It creates, promotes, distributes and preserves scholarly, educational and regional materials in digital and print formats. MPublishing focuses on the best application of technology to the world of scholarly publishing. It is committed to improving the copyright climate for scholarship by developing services for areas of publishing growth otherwise under-served within the University community


On liquid, living books: Shakespeare and the Bible

I began this series of posts by suggesting the word ‘book’ should not be applied to an open, decentered, distributed, multi-location, multi-medium, multiple-identity text generated out of a collaborative relationship with a number of different, often anonymous and unknown authors, as without being tied or fastened tightly together -- by the concept of an identifiable human author, for example -- such a text is not a book at all: it is ‘only’ a text or collection of texts.

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To sample Sol Lewitt, we could say that one usually understands the texts of the present by applying the conventions of the past, thus misunderstanding the texts of the present. That, indeed, is one of the problems with a word such as ‘book’. When it is used -- even in the form of e-book, ‘unbound book’, ‘unbook’  or ‘the book to come’ -- it connotes a whole tradition and implies a consequent acceptance of that tradition, thus placing limitations on the writer who would be reluctant to create anything that goes beyond it.

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Then again ‘book’ is perhaps as good a name as any, since books, historically, have always been more or less loosely bound. Take the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving Bible in the world, and the ancestor of all the Christian Bibles we have today. As it currently exists, it is incomplete. Nevertheless, the Codex Sinaiticus still includes all of the New Testament, half of the Old Testament, and two early Christian texts not featured in modern Bibles, all gathered into a single unit for the very first time. So it is the first Bible as we understand it. But more than that, it is also one of the first large books, as to gather together so many texts which had previously existed only as scrolled documents required a fundamental transformation in binding technology that eventually saw the scroll give way to the codex book.

Just as interesting however is the fact that the Codex is also history’s most altered biblical manuscript, containing approximately 30 corrections per page, roughly 23,000 in all. And these are not just minor corrections. For instance, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is not described as being the son of God. That was a revision added to the text later. In the original version, Jesus becomes divine only after he has been baptised by John the Baptist. Nor is Jesus resurrected in the Codex Sinaiticus. Mark’s Gospel ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. The resurrection only takes place in competing versions of the story that are to be found in other manuscripts. Nor does the Codex contain the stoning of the adulterous woman – ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’; or Jesus’s words on the cross – ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.

So the Bible -- often dubbed ‘the Book of Books’ -- cannot be read as that most fixed, standard, permanent and reliable of texts, the unaltered word of God. On the contrary, the text of the Bible was already seen as being collaborative, multi-authored, fluid, evolving, emergent when the Codex was created in 350 AD.

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Another example is provided by Shakespeare’s First Folio. As Adrian Johns has shown, this volume includes more than six hundred typefaces, along with numerous discrepancies regarding its spelling, punctuation, divisions and page configurations.  Indeed, the Royal Shakespeare Company recently opened its newly renovated theatres in Stratford with productions of Macbeth and Cardenio, a previously unperformed work by Shakespeare. Yet Cardenio, a missing 1612 tragedy by Shakespeare and Fletcher, may contain hardly anything by Shakespeare at all, while Thomas Middleton is now thought to have been heavily involved in the writing of Macbeth. In fact, Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure are all also to be found in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s collected works of Thomas Middleton.

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We could thus say that books have always been liquid and living to some extent: digital technology and the internet has simply helped to make us more aware of the fact.  

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Open access bridges the 'two cultures'

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in the Living Books About Life series. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, the books represent an important step in bridging the humanities and the sciences through open access.

Living Books About Life is a series of books on the topic of ‘life’. Produced by an international network of humanities writers and academics, including Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder), Anna Munster (University of New South Wales), Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University), Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia), Monika Bakke (University of Poznan), Timothy Lenoir (Duke University),  Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla) and Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art), the books repackage science-related research content on topics as diverse as air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles.  On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

‘Producing twenty one “living books about life” from start to finish in just seven months, this series represents an exciting new model for publishing’, said the project leader, Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University and one of the co-founders of OHP. ‘Living books is an example of a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech approach to publishing high-quality books that can be easily and freely shared on an open access basis with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals’.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

Aside from its goal of promoting a greater public understanding of recent scientific advances, the series has already had an impact on the scholars taking part. As Erica Fudge, co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there.’

The books are called ‘living’ because they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as clustering open access science research – together with interactive maps and audio-visual material from YouTube and Vimeo – the series aims to rethink ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, and e-book readers such as Kindle and iPad.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said, ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing.  It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’
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Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections:  Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Website: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.


Just think of me as a postproduction of presence

Since we are talking about distributed and multiple publishing networks, the question that needs to be raised at this point concerns the agency of both publishers and authors. Who is it that is experimenting with this new economy exactly?

I am aware I have been saying ‘I’ a lot here -- as if, despite everything, I am still operating according to the model whereby the work of a writer or theorist such as myself is regarded as being conceived, created, and indeed signed by a unique, centered, stable and individualized human author, and presented for the attention of a reading audience who, even for Derrida, can ‘interrogate, contradict, attack, or simply deconstruct’ its logic, but who ‘cannot and must not change it’, as he puts it elsewhere in Paper Machine. Yet actually the series of projects I have been referring to as work-in-progress arises out of a collaborative relationship with a number of different groups. They include those currently acting under the names of Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press and the Open Media Group.

Mark Amerika should be included in this list, as the first version of this text was written as a contribution to his remixthebook project. It is a remix of his ‘Sentences on Remixology 1.0’, which is itself a remix of Sol Lewitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’. So when I say ‘I’ here, this also means at least all of the above.

It means even more than that, though, since some of the collaborative projects we are involved with and which feature in the Media Gifts book are also open to being anonymously written. Remixing Amerika remixing, this time, Alfred North Whitehead, it is what might be thought of as stimulating ‘the production of novel togetherness’. In this sense it is not possible to say exactly who, or what, ‘we’ are.

(Even the original title of this series of posts and its topic were generated at least in part by others: Mark Amerika, and also the organisers of The Unbound Book conference, which was held at Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May, 2011, and where version 1.0 of this material was first presented.)

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‘What does it mean to go out of oneself?’ Am ‘I’ unbound?  Out of bounds? Is all this unbound?

I am channelling Mark Amerika again, but we should think of any contemporary writer or theorist such as myself as a medium, sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought. In fact if you pay close attention to what I am doing in this performance you will see I am mutating myself – this pseudo-autobiographical self I am performatively constructing here - into a kind of postproduction processual medium. Just think of me as a postproduction of presence.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)