On Open Books and Fluid Humanities
An exploration of fluidity, liquidity and remix
Presentation for the University of Belgrade – 22 February 2011
Janneke Adema – Coventry University
Structure
• Part 1 – Openness explained
• Part 2 – Openness in Theory and Practice
Modularity
The Selector
The Archive
• Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
Part 1 – Openness Explained
eBook users prefer to read on screen: 48%
read solely on screen, 13% read only paper, while
39% say it depends.
(CIBER’s Superbook project, Rowlands et al., 9 )
Springer’s eBooks survey shows usage figures of eBooks
at between 58% and 80%, but offers no additional
information about screen reading behaviour.
(‘Springer, EBooks, the end-user perspective’ White paper produced by Springer 3)
Part 1 – Openness Explained
www.openhumanitiespress.org
www.oapen.org
Part 1 – Openness Explained
“Openness” defined (?)
Open Source
Open Access
Open Content
Open Data
Open …
Part 1 – Openness Explained
Various definitions of Openness
Open Source Definition:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
The definition of "open access" from the BOAI:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml,
The Open Knowledge Definition:
http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/
Part 1 – Openness Explained
Libre access / Openness to reuse
Invoking what Lawrence Lessig calls a Read/
Write (RW) culture, as opposed to a Read/Only
(RO) culture.
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy (London, 2008) 28-29.
Part 1 – Openness Explained
Fluidity, Liquidity and Remix
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
In the United States, the Copyright Act defines "derivative
work" in 17 U.S.C. § 101:
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more pre-existing
works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization,
fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art
reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which
a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting
of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other
modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of
authorship, is a “derivative work”.
See: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101
Part 2 - Openness in Theory
and Practice
Lev Manovich
‘Helping bits
move around
more easily‘
Changes in Rothko’s
painting’s average
brightness over his
career
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
“This shift is beyond anyone’s control, because
the flow of information demands that
individuals embed themselves within the actual
space of critique, and use constant updating as
a critical tool.”
- Eduardo Navas
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
“The archive, then, legitimates constant updates
allegorically. The database becomes a delivery
device of authority in potentia: when needed,
call upon it to verify the reliability of accessed
material; but until that time, all that is needed
is
to know that such archive exists.”
- Eduardo Navas
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
• For the fluid text
edition of Melvilles’s
Typee, see:
http://rotunda.upress
.virginia.edu/melville/
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
‘The past, too, is a fluid text that we revise as we
desire’.
- John Bryant
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
‘By masking the energies of revision, it reduces
our ability to historicize our reading, and, in
turn,
disempowers the citizen reader from gaining a
fuller experience of the necessary elements of
change that drive a democratic culture.’
- John Bryant, The Fluid Text, 113
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
See: http://liquidpub.org/
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
“authors,” “editors,” “creators,” or “curators”, are
just a means of ‘replacing one locus of power
and authority (the author) with another (the
editor or compiler)’.
- Gary Hall
Part 2 - Openness in Theory and Practice
“Rather, wiki-communication can enable us to
produce a multiplicitous academic and
publishing network, one with a far more
complex, fluid, antagonistic, distributed, and
decentred structure, with a variety of singular
and plural, human and non-human actants and
agents.”
- Gary Hall
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
“A version can never be revised into a different
work because by its nature, revision begins with
an original to which it cannot be unlinked unless
through some form of amnesia we forget the
continuities that link it to its parent. Put another
way, a descendant is always a descendant, and
no amount of material erasure can remove the
chromosomal link.”
John Bryant, The Fluid Text, 85
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
See: http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/?page_id=2
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
‘The archive is never closed. It opens out of the
future.’
- Jacques Derrida
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
‘It is from within these rules that we speak,
since
it is that which gives to what we can
say.’
- Michel Foucault
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
See: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
“All texts are fluid. They only appear to be stable
because the accidents of human action, time
and
economy have conspired to freeze the energy
they represent into fixed packets of language.”
- John Bryant, The Fluid Text, 111
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
“(…) it is important to remember, however, that
the values of stability, monumentality and
authority, are themselves not entirely stable:
they have always been interpreted in terms of
the contemporary technology of handwriting or
printing.”
- Jay David Bolter
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
“The Wikipedia phenomenon displays this
widened range of possibilities in spectacular
fashion. It also means that the notion of a final
document loses much of its meaning because its
finality can only be the result of a consensus,
and not the product of a technology that fixes
the text.”
- Jean-Claude Guédon
Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed
Anthologize: http://anthologize.org/
Janneke Adema:
ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk
www.openreflections.wordpress.com
Twitter/Openreflections