1.1 Theoretical Framework
1.1.1 Excavating the Histories of the Book
Over the centuries the printed book has left its mark on culture and society and on the ways in which we perceive the world and structure our thoughts. However the book is also a very historical format in the sense that, as a material form of textual transmission, it has been produced and consumed in specific ways over the course of its existence. The printed book had a specific birth and rise with the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, for example. Meanwhile, the ‘death of the (printed) book’, as a meme, has occurred several times during its more than 500 years existence, mostly in reaction to the development of new media (i.e. newspapers, radio, television, CD-ROMs) that were perceived as being bound to replace the book.[1] Nowadays, with the growing popularity of ebooks, the debate is rife yet again over whether printed books will start to see a future point of decline—or will perhaps disappear entirely—or whether their stronghold on culture and society is so powerful that they will be able to weather yet another storm.[2]
The printed book format has from its early beginnings been of the utmost importance as a specific material form of scholarly communication, especially for the scholarly monograph as a particular physical embodiment of the concept of the book. Since the rise of modern science and scholarship the scholarly monograph, in common with the academic journal, has for the most part been produced, distributed and consumed in printed and bound codex formats. For the majority of scholars the printed book format produced in an academic setting (i.e. published and distributed by an academic publisher) has thus become synonymous with formal scholarly communication. With the development of digital forms of communication, this analogous relationship between print and formal scholarly communication has become increasingly uncertain and the future of the scholarly book is (once again) heavily debated.[3] Whether the monograph of the future will exist in print, digital, hybrid or post-digital print forms, is something that is currently being struggled over by the various constituencies that surround the production, distribution, and consumption of academic books. If we want to explore the potential future(s) of the scholarly monograph in an increasingly digital environment however, it is essential to examine the histories of the book in relationship to the practices and institutions that have accompanied the monograph. We need to analyse the specific contexts out of which the book as a technology co-emerged, simultaneously shaped by and shaping the environments that enabled its becoming.[4] This allows us to take a closer look at how the book form has developed from writing systems such as wax tablets and scrolls, to codices and ebooks—to cite a few of the most obvious examples.[5] It also provides us with an opportunity to explore how the scholarly monograph, as a specific material form of scholarly communication, came to be what it is today. How did it continue to evolve along certain historically structured paths, influencing and shaping scholarly communication at the same time? Even more importantly, and as I will demonstrate in more detail in chapter 2, it allows us to gain an overview of the various discourses that have surrounded the history of the book and how they have developed over the last decades as specific co-existing material configurations of the book. This will help us to reconstruct various different (or conflicting) genealogies of the scholarly book, in order to explore how it came to be the institution that it is today. How did the scholarly book attain the material form we are now so familiar with and in what way did this entail changes in its production systems? How were the cultural perceptions and practices the monograph carries with it and enables, established? Reconstructing the genealogies of the scholarly book in this way, will allow us to investigate how our historical discourses and practices will in the future continue to shape the material becoming of the book—both as object and concept—simultaneously affecting the larger scholarly communication system of which it is a part.
1.1.2 Remediation and Genealogy
Excavating the histories of the book is also important in order to illustrate how ‘new media’ (ebooks, printed books) have historically remediated ‘old media’ (printed books, manuscripts) and to explore the influence of other new media, such as film, television, and digital media, on the development of the printed book as well as the ebook. Remediation, as understood by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, is one of the theoretical frameworks that have been developed to conceptualise some of the continuities between media, and to explain the continuous resurfacing of the old in the new (and vice versa, the adaptation of the old to the new).[6] As media theorists Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska point out, remediation does not emphasise a separation between the past and the present and between new and old media in the form of technological convergence. Rather, Bolter and Grusin critique visions of history as linear and teleological, and favour the idea of history as a contingent genealogy: nonlinear and cyclical (Kember and Zylinska 2012: 8). To expand on this, it is important to stress the political, cultural and economic forces that (re)mediate media and to emphasise—with respect to the constructive power of scholarly practices, for instance—the performative power of our own daily practices in reproducing and remediating the printed monograph in the digital domain. As Bolter and Grusin state: ‘No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media’ (1999: 14–15).
Katherine N. Hayles is an important theorist to have argued for the importance of a more ‘robust notion of materiality’ in media studies, especially in the realm of print and hypertext. Hayles’ campaign for ‘media specific analysis’ (MSA) is very valuable in this context too, where she argues that the meaning of a text is integrally entwined with its materiality or ‘physicality’. Texts are thus embodied entities, and materiality an emergent property, ‘existing in a complex dynamic interplay with content’ (and additionally contingent through the user’s interactions with the work) (Hayles 2004: 67). For Hayles, MSA is then ‘a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium’ (2002: 6). She is sensitive to the influence of what D. F. McKenzie calls the ‘social text’ (1999) on the materiality of the book, in this sense extending her notion of materiality towards ‘the social, cultural, and technological practices that brought it into being’ and the practices it enacts (Hayles 2003: 275–276). Hayles focuses less, however, on the historical discourses and narratives that she herself and her scholarly colleagues have constructed on the meaning, definition, and the future and past of the book, and on the continued performative influence of these discourses on the evolving materiality of the book (and vice versa). As stated above, this reflexive act of being aware of and critical of one’s own practices and contributions to the larger discourse, whilst rethinking and re-performing them, is what I intend to focus on in this thesis, extending from the tradition of feminist re-readings and rewritings of (masculine) discourses (Butler 1993, Grosz 1993, Threadgold 1997).
Foucault’s concepts of archaeology and genealogy are of the utmost importance to this study and provide key reasons as to the relevance of analysing the history of the (scholarly) book. Foucault’s historiographical methodology allows us to explore and understand the emergence and development of book (historical) discourses from within certain contexts and practices, whilst simultaneously highlighting the critical and performative possibilities of (re-)reading these discourses differently. Foucault uses his archaeological method to investigate how a certain object or discourse has originated and sustained itself; how its conditions of existence have been shaped by discourses and institutions and the rise of certain cultural practices; and how this exploration of the past of a certain object or discourse, aides us in understanding its present condition better and enables us to rethink the new in the light of the old. Foucault emphasises the way in which our historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge and thus how our foundational concepts can be seen as the effects and the outcomes of specific formations of power (1969: 5). In his later genealogical strategy, Foucault critiques readings of origin in his search for minor knowledges arising from local discursivities, drawing attention to neglected, alternative and counter histories that have developed in the subconscious of a discourse’s development. As Dreyfus and Rabinow argue, in his archaeological practice, Foucault initially focused more on how a discourse organises itself and the practices and institutions it is directed at, while neglecting the way a discourse is itself embedded in and affected by these practices and institutions. In his genealogical approach, this original focus on an autonomous discourse is subjected to a thorough critique (Dreyfus et al. 1983: xii). Origins are then seen as embedded in political stakes where genealogy investigates the institutions, practices and discourses that come to determine a hegemonic origin against multiple and diffuse points of origin. Foucault’s interest here lies in how truth-claims emerge and how we can read them differently. With his critique of established historical readings or discourses—which thus function as systems of authority and constraint—Foucault wants to focus on the heterogeneity of histories, to emancipate historical knowledges from subjection and to enable them to struggle against a hegemonic unitary discourse (1980a: 83).
This shift in Foucault’s approach from archaeology to genealogy has been characterised as a move in his work from an emphasis on structuralism to poststructuralism (a characterisation Foucault would not use himself, he denied ever having been a structuralist) (Dreyfus et al. 1983: xi–xii). On the other hand it has been emphasised that the narrative of a shift from archaeology to genealogy and structuralism to poststructuralism in Foucault’s thought is too simplistic, and can even be seen as structuralist (and teleological) itself, arguing that the two strategies cannot be so easily contrasted and opposed. Green states, for instance, that the shift from archaeology to genealogy did not really constitute a reversal in Foucault’s basic stance. Elements of post-structuralism and genealogy are already identifiable in Foucault’s supposedly ‘structuralist’, and ‘archaeological’ works (Green 2004). As Foucault once said in an interview: ‘My archaeology owes more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly called’ (1996: 31). Green refers to the works of Davidson (1986), who sees the supposed shift not as a replacement but as an integration of the archaeology in a wider genealogical framework, and Mahon (1992), who sees the relationship between archaeology and genealogy as one of a method and its goal.
The overview of the histories of the book I am providing in this thesis will thus present archaeology and genealogy as related and in many ways complementary concepts and strategies.[7] In this respect this study is archaeologically informed as it is interested in the origins and development of both: the current dominant discourse surrounding the printed book (and more specifically the scholarly monograph) in its transition to the digital environment; and of the book format under the influence of this discourse (and vice versa). It will however be genealogical, too, in the sense that it will pay specific attention to the formations of power that influence and determine both this discourse and the dominant descriptions and analyses of this discourse, and with that the book as object as it has developed and continues to develop in an increasingly digital environment. In this thesis I will thus pay attention to the emergence of scholarly practices and institutions in the Western academic world that influenced the development of specific discourses surrounding the book and the book’s material manifestations. Furthermore, I will also pay close attention to alternative readings of the history of the book and its institutions. How did they emerge and for what reasons? How can we already find these alternative readings ‘within’ the dominant discourses, instead of presenting them as dialectically opposed?[8] In this study I will search for ruptures and discontinuity from within through a transversal discursive reading, emphasising the heterogeneous character of the discourse on the history of the book and how it has been constructed. As part of this ‘re-framing of the discourse’, I will propose a diffractive reading to capture the book’s historical debate as it evolves.[9] This will involve a re-framing of the history of the book and the material formations and practices that have accompanied it (from authorship to openness): by diffractionally reading the oppositional discourses through each other, to emphasise their entanglement and to push them to their limits by juxtaposing them; by laying more emphasis on the humanist tendencies in this discourse, their ongoing influence and the performative attempts to critique them; and finally, by drawing more attention to the performativitity of these material-discursive formations, and our own entanglements as scholars in their becoming.
This will highlight the multiple, mutually entangled, aspects of the discourse in its becoming, as well as leaving space for heterogeneous discursivities within this framework. In chapter 2 of this thesis, on historical book discourses and discursive practices, I will attempt to outline the basic contours of such an alternative vision of the book historical past. In the remainder of this thesis I will then focus my efforts on re-framing the contemporary history of the scholarly book—by rethinking historically constructed humanist concepts such as scholarly (book) authorship (chapter 3), the commodification of the book as object (chapter 4 and 5), and the perceived material stability and fixity inherent to the book (chapter 6).
1.1.3 Performativity and Entanglement
This re-framing of the history of the book will acknowledge and take responsibility for its performativity in bringing about and arguing for both an alternative past and future for the book and scholarly communication. This alternative historiography, which will be developed further in chapter 2, is very different to how the book has traditionally been perceived and historicised. I will show how, traditionally, the book has been understood mostly as a passive object or an active agent, with not enough acknowledgement being given to the entangled nature of agencies and our own involvement as scholars, book historians and media theorists in these entanglements. Within the discourse on book history, oppositional thinking (i.e. in the form of technological determinism vs. cultural constructionism, evolution vs. revolution, localism vs. globalism, bookservatism vs. technofuturism) continues to structure the debate, based as we will see predominantly on representationalist and dualist (technicist and culturalist) perceptions of media. What I want to emphasise instead is media discursive practices as performances. Based on a reading of the later work of Foucault, and its understanding of power and discourse as productive and affirmative (performative), and its insistence on the entangled nature of matter/bodies and discursive structures (dispositif), an attempt will be made at thinking beyond these dualisms. As an extension of this attempt, I will engage with the works of a variety of feminist materialist theorists, most prominently with those of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. New (feminist) materialism can be seen as having an antipathy against oppositional, dialectical thinking and instead emphasises emergent, productive, generative and creative forms of contingent material being/becoming.[10] Important in this respect is that it sees embodied humans or theorists as immersed in processes of materialisation (Coole and Frost 2010: 7–8). These insights will be used to underscore the need to understand the book as a process of becoming, as an entanglement of plural agencies (both human and non-human). The separations—or ‘cuts’ as Barad calls them—that are created out of these entanglements have created inclusions and exclusions, book objects and author subjects, readers and writers.
In this thesis I therefore want to acknowledge the entangled agentic nature of books, scholars, and readers, and of the discursive practices as well as the systems and institutions of material production that surround them. As I will argue more extensively in the next chapter as well as in chapter 6, during the course of their history scholarly books (and we as scholars are involved in this too, through our scholarly book publishing practices) have functioned as specific discursive practices, as ‘apparatuses’ that cut into the real and make distinctions between, for example, objects of study and the subjects that research them (scholars or authors).[11] At the same time these practices produce these subject and object positions—in the way that, for example, the PhD student as a discoursing subject is being (re)produced by the PhD thesis and by the dominant discourses and practices that accompany it.[12] Books are thus performative, they are reality-shaping, not just a mirroring of objective knowledge.
As I will argue in this thesis, not enough responsibility is taken for the cuts that are enacted with and through the book as a specific material-discursive practice. In this sense a re-assessment is needed with respect to the writing of book history or the historiography of the book, where there is a lack of acknowledgement of our own roles as scholars in shaping the object of our study, and vice versa. We are not only shaping the past (i.e. as a form of historical narrativism), but simultaneously the future material becoming of the book and scholarship, not the least because as book scholars we are ourselves book authors and readers. At the same time our historical, approved, and dominant scholarly practices (which include the printed book) are affecting us as scholars and the way we act in and describe the world and our object of study. In this respect not only the book, as described above, but also our discursive practices, can be seen as performative. They have the potential to structure both the material form of the book and its uses—and this relates to the printed book as well as its digital counterpart. As such, they will be of substantial importance in determining what the future of the book will be. Let me again be clear, however, that this is not a one-way process, where the material form of the book and the material practices that surround it are simultaneously—one can even say indiscernibly—influencing the shape and the struggles of the debates they have invoked.
Based on this idea of the performativity of both the book and our discursive practices, I will propose to move beyond the dichotomies that have structured the debate on the history of the book in the past, by focusing on the entanglement of material-discursive (Barad) or material-semiotic (Haraway) practices that shape the form of the scholarly book, as well as the institutions accompanying it.[13] Applying Foucault’s work on discursive formations, practices and power struggles, I want to draw more attention to how our own discursive practices—specifically with respect to the scholarly book—materially produce, rather than merely describe, both the subjects and objects of knowledge practices, and thus partly determine the dynamic and complex nature of the history and becoming of scholarly practices. We need to be aware of how discourse organises social practices and institutions, while our discursive practices are at the same time affected by the practices and institutions in which they, and we, are embedded. Drawing inspiration from—as well as showing the inconsistencies in—among others, the work of Roger Chartier, Adrian Johns, Robert Darnton and Paul Duguid (book theorists who have all tried to de-emphasise in more or less successful ways the oppositional nature of the book-historical debate), and diffractively reading them with Barad’s theories of posthumanist performativity and agential realism, I will view these material-discursive practices as entanglements (2008).
1.2 Methodology: Theoretical
To explore my own entanglement as a scholar in the material-discursive becoming of the book, I will follow a methodology of ‘critical praxis’ in this thesis, which is integral to its theoretical framework and an important part of the performative and interventionist approach that this study is arguing for. Part of the specific situatedness of this particular project resides with the fact that it is (a reflection on and performance of) a PhD thesis. Exactly why this is important with respect to the concept of critical praxis, as well as to the overarching topic of the potential futures of the book that this project wants to address, will be explained below. However, the fact that this chapter describes the theoretical and practical aspects of a methodology of ‘critical praxis’ under two different headings does not mean that I see the theoretical and practical aspects of this thesis as separate or even as separable. They are entangled from the start and I am only making a cut between the two here for the sake of clarity.
1.2.1 Scholarly Conformism
One of the narratives that comes to the fore quite often with a thesis, is that it is advisable to follow the safe route outlined by the rules and regulations of the thesis—relating to its format, content and appearance—and to only explore more experimental forms of research and publication after the degree has been awarded. Media theorist Kathleen Fitzpatrick promotes a different approach. In 2011 she wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled ‘Do “the Risky Thing” in Digital Humanities’. In this piece Fitzpatrick writes about advice given to a graduate student wanting to do a digital project for her final thesis. Instead of doing the safe thing and writing a traditional thesis, Fitzpatrick advised her to ‘do the risky thing’ instead, and to experiment and present her argument in an innovative way. At the same time, however, Fitzpatrick was careful to emphasise to the student the importance of making sure they had someone to cover their back. Fitzpatrick thus used her article in the Chronicle to make a strong plea for mentors and thesis supervisors to support experimental digital work (2011a).
My thesis can in many ways be seen as an expansion of Fitzpatrick’s argument. However, although I applaud her insistence on the importance of acquiring supervisory support when doing digital research, I will draw more attention to the responsibility and agency of PhD students themselves to, in Fitzpatrick’s words, ‘defend their experimental work’, and their ‘deviation from the road ordinarily travelled’. I will do so by looking at the reasoning that lies at the basis of critical scholarly work that embraces the digital, and I will apply this to formulate both a theoretical and practical methodology for my own digital doctoral project. I will outline below a theoretical argumentation as to how the choices we make during the course of our PhDs and the way we conduct our research, says a lot about the scholarly communication system we want and envision, and is incremental in shaping it. Drawing on Foucault and insights from cultural studies and critical literacy theory—both fields that actively incorporate elements of praxis and political action—I will argue that during the course of our PhDs, and in the process of creating a thesis, we are very much structured to produce a certain kind of knowledge and with that a certain kind of social identity. Developing critical and digital literacy through developing what I will call a ‘critical praxis’ can prevent us from simply repeating established practices, without critically analysing the assumptions upon which they are based. To enable us to remain critical of power structures and relations that shape knowledge, I will argue for the importance of PhD students to experiment with different forms of knowledge production as part of their research process. The practices we develop and embrace whilst doing work on our thesis have the capacity to transform the way we conduct scholarly communication. Through them, I will argue, we can struggle for and enable the kind of politics and ethics we feel our systems should embody and we can start to produce knowledge differently.
1.2.2 Developing a Critical Praxis
Producing a thesis in an experimental form—from using multimedia to enhance the text’s argument, to more advanced forms such as hypertextual or multi-format theses—or even using blogs and social media to develop further the argument of a print-on-paper thesis online, can be an important aspect of acquiring digital and critical literacy. For example, reflecting on studying for a PhD, historian Tanya Roth writes: ‘As digital tools and processes continue to offer larger benefits for [such] projects, it is increasingly important to make sure grad students understand what’s out there and how these resources and ideas can help them with their own research’ (2010). As Roth makes clear, this is not an either-or-situation where what are perceived as traditional skills, such as how to write a research paper, also need to be part of the curriculum.
One of the reasons it is important when studying for a PhD to develop digital and critical literacy—which, I will argue, can be seen as a simultaneous process—is that it helps to develop and perhaps expand one’s research skills. More importantly, it presents an opportunity to rethink and analyse critically certain traditional skills and research practices that have become normalised or have become the dominant standard, both within humanities research and within the process of writing and conducting a humanities thesis. One could argue that the coming of a new medium offers us a gap, a moment within which—through our explorations of the new medium—dominant structures and practices become visible and we become aware of them more clearly. The discourse, institutions and practices that have come to surround our printed forms of communication and that we have grown accustomed to, have not only fortified certain politics and ethics that we need to be critical about, these politics and ethics are also being transported into the digital where our practices and institutions are being reproduced online.[14]
From that perspective, by using these new critical skills and tools we have the possibility to start performing our practices differently. By actively and critically trying out new (digital) tools and methodologies to see how they might fit the specific research project and/or argument that is being pursued, by performing the thesis in an experimental or alternative way and, as part of this, taking the digital as our object of research, graduate students may be able to develop what I call a critical praxis. Praxis here relates to the process of bringing ideas, ideologies or theories into practice. It refers to how theory is embodied in our practices. Critical praxis, then, refers to the awareness of, and critical reflection on, the way our ideas come to be embodied in our practices, making it possible to transform them. Being similar as a theoretical method to Foucault’s genealogy, critical praxis can be seen as a practical application of the same critical procedure and investigation. It refers to the institutional embeddedness of PhD students and the transformational agency of their practices. Praxis in this sense forces a link between practice and the political, where through self-critique we are able to reconstitute and reproduce ourselves and our social systems and relationships.
My exposition of the process of developing a critical praxis during the course of one’s PhD, draws on theories of critical, digital, and media literacy. The insights of critical pedagogue Henry Giroux are essential here. Following Giroux, cultural processes and power relations are seen as integrally connected in the shaping of our (educational) institutions. This takes place through the production of social identities, where certain values and knowledge systems help construct the production, reception and transformation of a particular kind of identity. For instance, structures and practices underlying knowledge production in a field enable a specific value system to emerge that (re)produces a specific kind of social identity, namely that of the PhD student and ultimately of the academic scholar. Importantly, however, for Giroux, a cultural politics and critical pedagogy ‘can be appropriated in order to teach students to be critical of dominant forms of authority, both within and outside of schools, that sanction what counts as theory, legitimate knowledge, put particular subject positions in place, and make specific claims on public memory’ (2000). Developing a literacy that expands ‘beyond the culture of the book’ is in this respect essential, Giroux claims. Not just to learn new skills and knowledge, but to be able to use these to both critically examine and analyse various (multimedia) texts and to produce these texts and technologies differently. Giroux thus sees literacy foremost as a critical discourse, as a precondition for agency and self-representation. Educators McLeod and Vasinda draw further on this when they argue that a critical literacy involving multiple media demands of us to expand the concept of text, where text can also include socio-cultural conditions and relationships (2008: 272). Hence developing critical praxis can be seen as a method to critically analyse the socio-cultural conditions and relationships that constitute academia and, on that basis, produce the PhD thesis (and by extension the PhD student), and ultimately the scholarly field and system in which it functions, differently.
That said, I do not envision that any critical praxis, including the particular kinds outlined here, can be used as a ‘normative method’ or a route map towards conducting a PhD in the digital age. The ‘reflection on the self’ as a social identity (as embedded within and entangled with the various material-discursive formations that co-constitute it) that my understanding of critical praxis envisions is in this respect highly situated and contextual. For this I draw on cultural studies scholar Handel Wright and the form of auto-ethnography he applies in his article ‘Cultural Studies as Practice’. For Wright, ‘doing cultural studies’ means most importantly an ‘intervention in institutional, socio-political and cultural arrangements, events and directions.’ He sees cultural studies as a form of ‘social justice praxis’, one that warns against theoreticism and that blurs the boundaries between the academy and the community. In his description of what ‘social justice praxis’ means or what it should do he chooses not to use a model-based, more prescriptive method, but follows a more modest approach, one in which he adopts Gregory Jay’s (2005) strategy of ‘taking multiculturalism personally’ to ‘taking cultural studies personally’, in order to advocate and explicate cultural studies praxis (Wright 2003: 809).
The examples of critical praxis that I mention here should thus not be seen as authoritative models of what a critical praxis should be, but only as illustrations and descriptions of what it could be within the context of a Humanities thesis. In this specific case the university, the process of studying for the PhD itself, and the thesis become the subject on which the critical praxis focuses. This is very much consistent with the stress Wright places on the importance of addressing one’s own practices and institutions as sites of critical praxis: ‘In addition, I want to reiterate that the university itself must not be overlooked as a site of praxis, a site where issues of difference, representation and social justice, and even what constitutes legitimate academic work are being contested’ (2003: 808).
1.2.3 The (Re)Production of the PhD Student
As stated above, critical praxis offers us an opportunity to actively rethink traditional skills and established research practices, and with that what is still perceived as the conventional or natural process of doing a PhD in the Humanities: creating a single-authored, static, print-based argument in long-form, which should ideally be of publishable standard. This perceived natural process of doing a PhD—which of course is anything but—can be seen as a product of certain dominant discourses that function to shape how a graduate student is to author a dissertation. As such, this established convention provides a road map to becoming a scholar in which the thesis serves as a model as to how to conduct research, and ultimately how to produce a scholarly monograph. Game Studies scholar Anastasia Salter reflects on this state of affairs, remarking that ‘the traditional dissertation as product reflects the dominance of the book: it creates a monograph that sits in a database. The processes of the Humanities are to some extent self-perpetuating: write essays as an undergraduate, conference papers as a graduate student, a dissertation as a doctoral student, and books and journal articles as a professor’ (2010).
The importance of being aware of and critiquing such dominant discourses, however, lies not only in exploring the tension between how the PhD and the PhD thesis reproduce ‘traditional scholars’, while they are at the same time supposed to be ‘the foundations of ‘new scholarship’, and as such are integral to the production of new thought and new scholars’, as political theorist Angelique Bletsas argues (2011: 9). It is important to be aware that these discourses relating to knowledge production during the PhD process also have, as Bletsas puts it, certain ‘subjectification effects’. She shows how the thesis is not only about finishing a static text but also about finishing as a person: as she puts it, the accepted thesis completes the student as a discoursing ‘subject’. In other words, the PhD student as a discoursing subject is being (re)produced in and by these dominant discourses; and with that, a certain kind of scholar, and a certain kind of scholarly communication system are also reproduced.
Alan O’Shea argued as far back as 1998 for the importance of cultural studies theorists to pay attention to their own institutional practices and pedagogies and the way knowledge is produced and disseminated therein, something he felt had been lacking up to then. O’Shea warns against the ‘tendencies towards self-reproduction’ in higher education, effects which are not pre-given but outcomes of specific struggles. As O’Shea points out, similar to Bletsas argument, ‘the practices in which we engage constitute us as particular kinds of subjects and exclude other kinds. The more routinised our practices, the more powerfully this closure works’ (1998: 515). O’Shea however warns not to overemphasize the extent of this closure, focusing on the many-sided complexity of the regimes of value underlying our educational institutions, where different regimes co-exist and overlap and people move between them. He conceptualises these regimes as ‘a field of contestations’, where we are always already positioned within certain institutions and practices: ‘The cultural critic is always-already positioned within institutions. To speak publicly at all you do not have to belong to a state institution, but you do have to operate within one set or another of ‘institutionalized’ codes and practices, with historically determinate modes of production, distribution and consumption’ (O’Shea 1998: 518).
1.2.4 Critical Praxis as Self-Assertion
Drawing further on O’Shea and Bletsas, I will argue in this thesis that to change our institutions from within we should start by critically examining our own position and practices and how these are reproduced. At a time when digital projects are still perceived within the humanities as ‘risky’, developing a form of digital or multimedia literacy (including the related skills) in experimenting with these kind of digital projects or practices, can be positioned as a process that goes hand in hand with developing critical literacy in general. It provides graduate students with a means and an opportunity to critically rethink, through critical praxis, some of the dominant discourses and established notions—including their connected ethics and politics—concerning how to conduct a thesis, and with that, ultimately, how to write a scholarly monograph.
Let me emphasise I am not claiming that critical praxis can only be achieved or learned through experimenting with digital projects, methods and tools. Rather, I am arguing that at this specific moment these tools and methods can be employed to trigger critique and rethink some of our established notions concerning scholarship and scholarly communication—including authorship, peer review, copyright, and the political economy surrounding scholarly publishing. What is more, this critical praxis should be applied just as much to digital methods and to how research is being carried out within the digital humanities, especially insofar as digital projects reproduce notions and values from the dominant, established discourses. Not all digital projects are inherently and necessary critical, experimental or even ‘risky’; they just have the potential to be so. Furthermore, I argue that acquiring digital literacy means acquiring various kinds of literacies, including ‘traditional’ print literacy. Media theorists Kellner and Share highlight the importance of developing forms of ‘multiple literacies’ as a response to dominant forms of literacy as they are socially constructed in educational and cultural practices and discourses. Multiple literacies, in the sense of media literacy, computer literacy, multimedia literacy and digital literacy, also include books, reading, and print literacy (Kellner and Share 2005: 370).
As Bletsas points out, drawing on Foucault, there is ‘no standpoint in the field of knowledge production which is ‘innocent’ or outside of power relations’ (2011: 10). Bletsas describes the tension that you need to be formed by and comply with a certain discourse, before you can critique this discourse. Just as knowledge is inherently political, so I would claim that doing a PhD or writing a thesis is also a political act. The process of resisting being formed in a certain way is, for me, something that already starts during the period of studying for a PhD, this being a time when we begin to evaluate critically which of the values that get reproduced in scholarly communication we should cherish. The PhD can therefore be seen as an intervention in the production of knowledge, in which one adopts a position concerning the future of scholarly communication and tries to perform it differently.
In order to maintain this position of the ‘interventionist potential’ of the PhD process, I will not theorise the closure of the dominant discourses within academia and the subjectification effects they have on social identities in an ‘overemphasized way’, as O’Shea puts it. Rather, I draw on Foucault’s later work in which he advances that the subject has to develop agency within subordinating systems. In Foucault’s words ‘individuals are the vehicles of power’, they reproduce power in a positive, productive way. However, they also have the ability to reproduce power in a different, creative way. Foucault scholar Eric Paras sums up these changes in Foucault’s work as follows: ‘The individual, no longer seen as the pure product of mechanisms of domination, appears as the complex result of an interaction between outside coercion and techniques of the self’ (2006: 94–95). Drawing upon the later Foucault, performing the PhD and one’s social identity as a student and scholar can be seen as no longer being a matter of self-defence but rather of self-assertion. As Paras states, becoming a subject is in Foucault’s later thought less ‘an affirmation of an identity than a propagation of a creative force’ (2006: 132). It is a creative effort rather than a defensive one. In this sense, Paras emphasises the potential in the later Foucault for the subject to reflect upon its own practices and to choose among and modify them following techniques of the self, those specific practices that enable subjects to constitute themselves both within and through systems of power.
If we envision critical praxis as both a critical project and a creative, transforming and transformative one, part of this creative impulse lies in the potential to, as cultural studies scholar Ted Striphas calls it, ‘perform scholarly communication differently—that is, without simply succumbing, in Judith Butler’s words, to “the compulsion to repeat”’ (Striphas 2011). He argues that the norms of scholarly communication that we perform today through a ‘routine set of practices’ were forged under historically specific circumstances—circumstances that might not apply in their entirety today. This triggers us to ask new questions about these practices and to start performing them differently, much more creatively and expansively (expanding our repertoire), Striphas adds, than we currently do, with the ultimate goal to ‘enhance the quality of our research and our ability to share it’ (2011).
Applying this to the course of a PhD means that, instead of envisioning doctoral students as being completely produced by the practices they reproduce and the knowledge systems that enforce them, we can see these practices and institutions not as constituting, but as shaping these students. However, this is not to underestimate the power these shaping practices and systems have. As we saw O’Shea argue above, the more repetitive they become, the more thorough and self-perpetuating this shaping-process also becomes (1998). Nonetheless, as students, and as academics, we have the potential to act creatively within these frameworks, to struggle for a more ethical and progressive knowledge system, performing scholarly communication differently. That being said, we should remember O’Shea’s critique of the idea of these (dominant) systems being monolithical. There is a complex power struggle taking place within academia for certain kinds of knowledges and knowledge systems. This struggle can be seen to revolve around having or obtaining the power to create the possibilities to transform the structures that will enable specific values to be produced. The digital, for instance, has the potential to promote a more progressive knowledge system based on values of sharing, openness to otherness, and collaboration; a system that struggles against institutional inertia and conservatism, and the perseverance of neoliberal market values in education. The kind of knowledge that can emerge from a more progressive system of this kind, I will argue, might be hard to realise if we keep reproducing our humanist and essentialist print-based practices within a digital environment, as these practices might not be able to promote these values to the fullest in an online setting. It is this struggle over the future of our scholarly communication system that I want to focus on in this thesis.
1.2.5 Re-envisioning our Research Practices
The natural PhD process together with the traditional PhD thesis, follows many of the elements of a paper-based and humanist view of scholarly communication, increasingly inhibiting potentially progressive practices and knowledges—such as I will outline in this thesis—to come to the fore. Consequently, what I am arguing for is a critical praxis that explores—and at the same time remains critical of—alternative practices and structures that promote values based on a politics of sharing, collaboration, (radical) openness and experimentation.
In order to establish where the importance of experimental digital work for humanities scholarship lies, we need to explore how we can use digital tools and technologies in a critical way to potentially enhance and improve our scholarship and our communication systems. Through the digital we have the opportunity to critically investigate the value of our established institutions and practices and, vice versa, critique gives us the potential means to analyse and transform the digital to make it adhere to a more progressive and open ethics and value system, one that remains critical of itself. In this respect, experimenting with open and online theses can be seen as the beginning of an exploration of what digital scholarship could look like. It is important to stress however, as cultural and media theorist Gary Hall has argued extensively, that in our experiments with the digital our ethics and politics should not be fixed from the start (2008). We need to leave room to explore our ethics and politics as part of our experiments or as part of the process of conducting a thesis.
Let me reiterate here that print-based communication is evenly capable of promoting more experimental and ethical forms of scholarly communication. Print is not the problem here, nor is digital the solution. What I am referring to when I write about ‘print-based forms of communication’, is the way print has been commodified and essentialised: through a discourse that prefers to see print as linear, bound and fixed (a work with an author); and through a system of material production within publishing and academia—which includes our institutions and practices of scholarly communication—that today certainly prefers quantifiable objects as auditable performance indicators. Even more, it is this ‘print-complex’, with its power structures and stakeholders, that is being increasingly supplanted in a digital environment while the book is being rethought as an object and commercial product within digital publishing. I also do not want to claim that the potential of the digital for collaboration and open forms of publishing will be a guaranteed outcome of ‘digital innovation’. Experimenting with new forms of communication is hard work, involving more than only the overcoming of technological barriers, where it entails a critical redesign of scholarship.
I therefore want to break down digital promises and utopias in this thesis while at the same time examining those aspects that might actually be exciting, experimental and perhaps more ethical in digital scholarship. I thus want to analyse digital publishing projects that explore what a new digital ethics and politics might entail, in an ongoing manner. In this respect I concur with Johanna Drucker, when she argues that: ‘we can’t rely on a purely technological salvation, building houses on the shifting sands of innovative digital platforms, with all the attendant myths and misconceptions. Which aspects of digital publishing are actually promising, useful, and/or usefully innovative for the near and long term?’ (2014b).
A critical praxis can trigger us to rethink institutions and practices that are at the moment still very much part of, and reproducing, an economics and politics based on a power structure that has been inherited from a print-based situation. Striphas similarly states that we need to move beyond the blind copying of print writing practices into digital environments, arguing instead for experimentation with the form, content and process of scholarly publication. There is no compelling reason, he claims, why we need to conform to paper-centric conventions in the online world when we can also explore and make better use of the interactive features the web offers to rethink the paper-based distribution and assessment methods we are repeating in the digital realm (Striphas 2010). However, a critical praxis not only serves to critique established notions of how to write a thesis within the humanities, to provide just one example. As an affirmative practice it also has the potential to develop new (digital) research practices and to experiment with new forms of politics and ethics as part of that—including, in this specific case, practices that experiment with sharing, openness, liquidity, and remix, as well as internally critiquing these as part of the research’s continuous development. Let me make clear however that with my emphasis on affirmative politics and practices throughout this thesis, I want to focus on the potential of power as a form of empowerment (potentia), where negative, reactionary politics can be operationalized into affirmative alternative practices. As Rosi Braidotti has argued, this does not mean a distancing from critique nor I would argue should it be perceived as an opposition between critique and praxis (2010).
Thinking back to the beginning of this section, and Fitzpatrick’s comment that doing a digital project in the humanities is still seen as a risky thing, we can say that this specific research project will encounter both tension and paradox. The paradox lies in the fact that to become an academic within the present system, we in many ways still have to adhere to the present structures, resulting in the tension described by Bletsas: how to conform to the rules, regulations and practices that one at the same time tries to critique and transform? However, following O’Shea and Striphas, as well as the later Foucault, I maintain that we are able to transform these practices from within our established structures. Nonetheless, as in any struggle focused on changing a system from within, compromises have to be made to deal with the tension between outside coercion and techniques of the self. That being said, I hope that the example of this thesis will show that by developing a critical praxis during the process of conducting a PhD, early career scholars can then continue to develop this further as their careers progress. As part of this process we will have the potential to actively and affirmatively produce and promote alternative communicative norms, politics and practices, which will aid us in the struggle to critique and transform the established academic power systems. It is worth emphasising once again, however, that the examples I have mentioned here—including my own thesis—should not be seen as normative models. Nonetheless, I hope they might inspire other students and scholars to develop their own form(s) of critical praxis to aid them to produce themselves and their institutional practices differently.
1.3 Methodology: Practical
1.3.1 A Digital, Open, and Collaborative Research Practice
To perform the critical praxis described above, I will endeavour to engage with some of the key concepts and practices that constitute its conceptual framework: these include (radical) openness, remix and liquidity, with an overarching focus on experimentation. In the remainder of this thesis these key terms will be explored in order to critique and examine the main forms of humanist and print-based binding that, I argue, have worked to turn the book into a fixed and stable object of scholarly communication. These forms of binding include practices of authorship, which have been incremental in gathering a work together; specific material formations, such as publishing and scholarly communication systems, set up to promote the commercial object formation of the book; and the specific (print) materiality of the book, with what is presumed to be its inherently bound nature. The concepts of openness, remix and liquidity, together with some of their current implementations will also be heavily scrutinised as part of this thesis. Nonetheless, for all this, I still want to emphasise their potential as forms and practices of critique and resistance to the object formation of the book, as part of the specific performance of this thesis.
Within humanities’ fields, scholars are increasingly experimenting with ways of conducting their research in a more open way, following the idea of open research or open notebook science. This involves publishing one’s research as it evolves (including in some cases as drafts and raw data) on blogs, personal websites and wikis, or on platforms such as Academia.edu or Researchgate—to name just a few examples—instead of only publishing the research results formally in scholarly journals, edited collections and monographs. Examples of scholars who are experimenting with open, online publishing, for instance, and who can be seen as developing or practicing forms of critical praxis, are Ted Striphas, who posts his working papers online on his Differences and Repetitions wiki, and Gary Hall, who is making the research for his new book Media Gifts freely available online on his website as it evolves. Meanwhile, Kathleen Fitzpatrick put the draft version of her book Planned Obsolescence online for open review using the CommentPress WordPress plugin, which allows readers to comment on paragraphs of the text in the margins. Examples of (ex-)PhD students involved in open research are librarian Heather Morrison, who posted the chapters of her thesis as they evolved online, and the English scholar Alex Gil, who has put his work for his thesis online on elotroalex.com, also using the CommentPress plugin.[15]
The focus in the above examples on openness, open research and open access—as in the conduct of my own thesis—not only functions as a means of experimenting with new practices of producing and distributing knowledge; it can also be seen as acting as a direct critique of the material conditions under which humanities research is currently being produced. Striphas, who perceives cultural studies as a set of writing practices, has scrutinised the way these practices are currently set up and function by exploring the politics and economics of academic publishing. As I pointed out above, the choices we as scholars make, or, as Striphas emphasises, the choices that are made for us when we publish our research results, are very important. Striphas underlines both the systemic power relations at play as well as our own responsibilities in repeating these practices or, alternatively, choosing different options. We need to have better access to the ‘instruments of the production of cultural studies’, i.e. the publishing system, and to the content that gets produced, by exploring and taking control of ‘the conditions under which scholarship in cultural studies can—and increasingly cannot—circulate’ (Striphas 2010). Striphas thus emphasises our roles as scholars within this publishing system, which serves as a good example of critical praxis in action, and how we can, in his words, ‘perform our writing practices differently, to appropriate and reengineer the publishing system so as to better suit our needs’ (2010).
In this respect, this PhD thesis can be seen as an experiment in developing a digital, open research practice through the exploration of the possibilities of remix, liquidity and openness in the thesis’s production and format. By positioning the medium of the book as a major site of struggle over the future of scholarly knowledge production within the humanities, I argue for the importance of experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and performing the academic monograph. In particular, I argue for the importance of experiments that go beyond simply ‘iteratively reproducing’ established practices of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption. Starting with the long-form argument that is the PhD thesis itself, I aim to actively critique, in form, practice and content, the established print-based notions, politics, and practices within the field of the humanities, in a performative way.
Following the examples mentioned above, then, the research for my thesis—which includes notes, drafts, whole chapters etc., and all in different forms and shapes—has been made available online, as it has progressed, via multiple digital platforms and social media outlets. This idea of providing different versions of the text which will be available on various platforms, and then remixing and gathering them together again in several other forms and outputs—of which this PhD thesis is one—raises questions about the bound and objectified nature of the PhD thesis, the book and of scholarly research. Will such a dispersed, versioned, multimodal and collaborative project still be perceived as a thesis, or only certain instantiations of it? Can it be a finished thesis-object if it continues to develop even after this particular thesis instantiation has been submitted? For instance, versions of this thesis have appeared previously as blog posts, conference presentations, lectures, tweets, published articles in peer-reviewed journals, and as experimental digital works. In this respect my practice—and this kind of practice is not uncommon now in humanities scholarship—relates to the production of what Marjorie Perloff has called differential texts, which she defines as ‘texts that exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one’ (2006). In this specific case my differential practice is also designed to draw attention to the processual and collaborative nature of research in its various settings and through its multiple institutions of informal and formal communication, from social media and conferences, to mailing lists and journals. Instead of having just a single linear long-form argument, this project has been designed in such a way that the majority of the multiple distributed versions of the text can be traversed, read, re-written and re-performed in multiple ways. The idea of versioning is also an attempt on my part to critique the idea of individual authorship, as many of these texts have been co-authored, commented upon, reviewed and/or annotated in various settings by different (groups of) people and are thus necessarily the results of (reworkings of) inherently collaborative work. This is of particular importance when we take into account that a thesis is supposed to consist of all original work written by the thesis’s author. Nonetheless, it could of course be argued that I am still the one gathering this de-assembled work together again, citing the work of other authors to ensure credit is given where it is due, and rewriting these versions and structuring them anew for this specific instantiation, the submitted PhD thesis: thus making it a new and ‘original’ piece of work.
Re-assembling the different versions in this PhD thesis provides me with the means to challenge the reliance on the long-form linear argument that much work in the humanities adheres to. It serves as a way to make clear, as part of the performance of my argument, that the specific way and order in which the argument (or, better, the multiple arguments) has unfolded in this thesis is not the only manner in which it can be narrated. The different shapes that the previous versions of this thesis and its reasoning have taken on, framed and embedded as they are within other debates, shows the modularity and remixability of the different strands of the argument in different contexts.
1.3.2 A Differential Thesis
What, then, are the main versions in which this thesis has up to now been made available? Furthermore, how will it be appearing in future instantiations, and for what reasons? First of all, various social media outlets have been used to reach out to a wider readership and to connect with a peer community of sharing and collaboration. This includes an academic blog, Open Reflections (www.openreflections.wordpress.com), where first drafts and short pieces related to the thesis have been posted in the form of blogposts. This blog also functions as a personal website where talks, papers, and online preprint and postprint versions of some of the articles that have been presented and published in the course of this ongoing research have been collated and made openly available. Open Reflections builds upon an existing readership (I have been blogging since 2008), and aims to connect with a community of scholars and otherwise interested people, by making extended connections via Twitter (a micro-blogging community) and Zotero (an online open source reference system enabling people to collect and share references and resources), two outlets heavily used by scholars and a wider public interested in the digital. These tools have been used not only to share my ongoing research in a more direct way with others, but also as a means for me to evade and critique the formal publication system, which at the moment is not offering enough opportunities to showcase work-in-progress or to support the further development and improvement of scholarly writing. (Its function seems instead to be based more on selection and branding than on an ethics of care and further development.) A blog also offers the opportunity for research to be shared for free, open access, not behind a pay-wall or otherwise restricted by DRM or a strict copyright regime (my blog has been licensed CC-BY).[16] As a specific publishing platform, blogs offer the potential to explore work in progress and to perform theory in a multimodal way, making easy use of, and incorporating, images, videos, podcasts and hyperlinks—simple mechanisms of networked scholarship that are however still not universally incorporated in many forms of formal publishing. At the same time, it offers possibilities for debate, and is set up to receive feedback and responses to one’s shared and ongoing research—via its commenting, hyperlinking and trackback features—in a more direct way than the majority of formal scholarly communication currently does.
The blog thus serves as a platform to publish various iterations of my in-progress thesis in networked and multimodal ways in a (relatively) collaborative and interactive setting. However, the blog format remains rather restricted when it comes to direct collaboration with, and reuse of, the research for my thesis. For this reason, as soon as the thesis reaches a stage in which it is ready to be formally submitted (i.e. when there is a certain volume of text and a coherent narrative, none of which would entail that the text is actually ‘finished’, ‘stable’ or ‘fixed’), a variety of other platforms and tools will be used to explore these more interactive functions. First of all, I will be making use of the CommentPress WordPress plugin mentioned earlier, which was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. This plugin enables users to leave comments alongside the text, next to each paragraph, and has previously been used by McKenzie Wark for his book Gamer Theory (2007), and by Fitzpatrick for the open review of her book Planned Obsolescence (2011b). By placing the comments alongside the text (instead of at the bottom of the text which is more common in regular blogs and websites) an attempt is made to subvert the implied hierarchy of ‘text first, comments second’. As the CommentPress ‘About’ page states:
In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. Several readers remarked that it was no longer solely the author speaking, but the book as a whole (author and reader, in concert).[17]
This CommentPress version of the thesis will also be hyperlinked and will include images and (where possible) multimedia. The CommentPress plugin will be used to experiment with peer feedback and open review in a slightly different setting than a normal blog, one that is designed more directly for commentary and collaboration, emphasising the collaborative nature of the research once more.
However, even when using this plugin the hierarchy between the main text and the comments, between the author and the commenters, still remains intact—although perhaps in a less emphasised way. To explore the potential of providing direct read/write access to the text, wiki software will be used to publish yet another instantiation of the thesis. The wiki, which functions via a logic of open editing, will then serve as a space where the authorial ‘moderating function’ still at work in the blog and CommentPress plugin will be further decentred. Wikis provide readers with an opportunity to become writers too, following the idea of open writing and editing upon which wiki software is based. Wikis thus enable the possibility to both write, edit, comment upon, update, remix, categorise, tag, reuse, translate, data-mine, annotate, copy and paste the material, in a collaborative manner. This means that the possibilities offered by this environment, in combination with the way it can be interacted with, might provide another opportunity to challenge and critique the authority of the text’s initial author (or set of authors). My intention is to use the wiki to explore what it means to no longer fully rely on authorship as the main form of authority. I say this, because it can be argued that in a wiki environment the author can no longer be (solely) held responsible for the text or the research, given that the text will have no final ‘authorial approved’ version in a wiki; that it can (in principle) be further commented upon, and can be updated, remixed and re-used indefinitely by the public at large. There is a specific problem related to publishing books in wikis, however (which I will discuss in more depth in both chapter 3 and chapter 6). This is that the authority of the book form tends to overshadow the multi-authorial nature of wiki software. The more ‘definite’ or ‘final’ a text seems (which can be due to language, length, format, style of writing, genre, design, etc.), the harder it becomes for people to engage with it. This lack of interaction with ‘book-like’ wikis is one of the main challenges this aspect of my project aims to explore and will have to encounter.
The wiki and the CommentPress plugin will not offer enough flexibility and functionality to explore more multimodal and non-linear forms of publishing however. Therefore, yet another version of the thesis will be published using a ‘hypermedia’ platform or software (enabling non-linear publishing) such as Sophie or Scalar. Sophie has again been developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, as a kind of extension of the CommentPress plugin: ‘While there is still much work to be done, the ultimate goal of the Sophie project is to make a tool that handles all the social network interactions (and more) that CommentPress does but within a far more fluid and easy-to-use composition/reading space where media can mix freely’.[18] On the Sophie 2.0 website this open source software, which can be used to create a kind of expanded and annotated collaborative book, is described as follows: ‘Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. The program emerged from the desire to create an easy-to-use application that would allow users to combine text, images, video, and sound not only quickly and simply but with precision and sophistication.’ In this respect, ‘Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people, institutions, and publishers. In so doing, Sophie redefines the notion of a “book” or academic paper to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and real time conversation’.[19] Sophie 2.1, built in Java, was released in 2011, but since then no further releases have been issued. It seems further development of the project has stalled. However, it remains a viable hypermedia-publishing platform for this thesis.
The open source authoring and publishing platform Scalar, released in beta in 2013, offers another option. Tara McPherson, one of the people behind Scalar and the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, the group of people and institutions who have set up the Scalar project, describes it as follows: ‘Scalar allows scholars to create with relative ease long-form, multimedia projects that incorporate a variety of digital materials while also connecting to digital archives, utilizing built-in visualizations, exploring nonlinearity, supporting customization, and more’ (2014: 183). Software and platforms such as Sophie or Scalar thus offer more possibilities for users to explore the content and argument of the thesis in a different way, i.e. one that is not necessarily print and/or text based, as they have been specifically set up as experimental publishing structures, as networked and collaborative reading and writing spaces. As McPherson emphasises, Scalar has been devised to investigate new publication practices and wants to be an experimental space for publishing (2010). Furthermore, the specific design decisions behind Scalar are important in this context too, as they resonate strongly with the thinking that accompanies this thesis. Especially since Scalar has been designed to understand publishing technology and its ‘entanglement with culture’ as well as with ourselves as scholars, better:
Thus, it [Scalar] mediates a whole set of binaries: between close and distant reading, user and author, interface and backend, micro and macro, theory and practice, archive and interpretation, text and image, database and narrative, and human and machine. Scalar takes seriously feminist methodologies ranging from the cut to theories of alliance, intersectionality, and articulation not only in support of scholars undertaking individual projects but also in our very design principles. As authors work with the platform, they enter into a flow of becoming through the creation of a database on the fly and through an engagement with the otherness of the machine. Scalar respects machinic agency but does not cede everything to it. (McPherson 2014: 185)
Scalar might thus be another potential platform on which to publish this thesis in one of its multiple versions and to explore the possibility to create, edit, and read in a collaborative setting and to make mashups and remixes including text, video, sound, illustrations, images and spoken word, for example. These remixes will be based on the text, argument and narrative as it exists in that specific version of the thesis. However, as an extension of the wiki, and using the same read/write possibilities, the aim is to actively attract collaborators to work directly in and with the text (as one does in a collaborative writing environment), instead of making a remix that is actually a copy of the text.[20] Every remix will thus be a further instantiation of the text of the thesis and will be a further remix of the previous remixes, where the participants will be remixing each others work. Although the work of the contributing remixers will be acknowledged and credited, in this specific setting it will be hard to obtain who did what exactly. This situation is however not inherently different from the way a scholarly monograph reaches its readers, where it is not always that easy to find out who were exactly involved in the creation of a publication, and what it was they contributed exactly: from the peer reviewers to the typesetters to the company who printed the print-on-demand version. These can all be seen as collaborators on a publication; however, not everyone is always acknowledged; nor is it always clear what the specific collaborators contributed to the final publication.
By emphasising once again that this remixed version of my thesis is a collaborative work, as all scholarly work inherently is (not the least because it builds on the work of others), the aim is to challenge some of the preconceptions that we continue to validate in our publishing practices. With the hypermedia version I aim to complicate (single) authorship, attribution, and the authority of both the author and the work. It questions the linearity of the work, as well as its fixity and stability. I will also explore the possibility of traversing fields, by inviting interdisciplinary artists, scholars and practitioners to provide a remix, in this way practically examining how we can diminish the distinctions still made between art and research, theory and practice, and text and multimedia, while experimenting with different visions on the materiality and future of the book. Will people be able to ‘read’ this material in another way? What does this mean for knowledge communication? Finally, this multimedia version also asks questions about the agency of software and platforms and about the different ways in which the various multimodal remixed iterations of the thesis will be received: this is where the concept of versioning plays an important role.
1.3.3 Versioning
Versioning, as it has come to be used within academic research and publishing, refers to the frequent updating, rewriting or modification of academic material that has been published in a formal or informal way. As a practice it has been adopted from software development, where it is used to distinguish the various instalments of a piece of software. The difference is of course that these are not separate editions of the software, but involve a constant rewriting of the same piece of code. Versioning is a common feature of many web-based publication forms, from blogs to wikis, based on the potential to quickly revise and save a piece of written material. With versioning comes version management and control, which can be seen as an important (inbuilt) aspect of versioning, where the various platforms and pieces of software that allow for updating most of the time also enable the tracking and archiving of the various modifications that are made to a work. This can be important in collaborative settings such as wikis, as it makes it easier to establish who is responsible for a specific edit and provides the possibility of comparing various versions with one another.
Although adopted from software development, versioning has been around for a long time and can even be seen as an essential aspect of scholarly communication. Discussions on mailing lists, working papers, conference presentations, preprints and postprints, online first versions, versions of record, corrected or updated versions, revised editions: all of these can be regarded as different renditions of an academic publication in progress; but there are many more. Media theorist Lev Manovich, for instance, published different iterations of his monograph Software Takes Command (2013) online on his website as the book developed. As he argues with respect to this practice: ‘One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with new “features” and “big fixes” added periodically. I plan to take advantage of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and making changes and corrections to the text’ (Manovich 2008). Bringing out different versions of our research as it emerges also enables us to make material available for others to share much sooner, without the associated time-lags formal publishing brings with it, not to mention the pay-walls and copyright restrictions. However, although within the humanities it is fairly common for certain versions (i.e. the blog post, the conference presentation) to be clearly presented, communicated and published as such during different points in a research work’s development, only the so-perceived final version as published by a press or publisher is held to be the version of record, authored by a specific author or set of authors as an original piece of work (even though versions often emerge in and out of highly collaborative settings). Instead of primarily emphasising the end result as part of such an object-centered approach, could a focus on the various renditions of an academic work also involve a shift in our attention towards the collaborative and more processual nature of research? And might this lead us to start paying more attention to the performativity of our practices: that it matters where we bring out our various versions (what platforms we use, or which publishers), how we do so (open or closed, and with which license), and the different formats our versions appear in (print, html, video, PDF, podcast, epub). Will it help us to look more closely, for instance, at how different platforms and formats influence the way we produce a specific version and how it is further used and intra-acted with? Could versioning also involve more recognition being given to the various groups of people that are involved in research creation and dissemination, as well as to the various materialities, technologies and media that we use to represent and perform our research, from paper to software? Would a focus on the continuous evolving nature of research make us more aware of the various cuts we can and do (and need!) to make in our work, and for what reasons? And might this involve us making more informed and meaningful decisions about which cuts we want to make, what kind of version we would like to bring out and with what intention (to communicate, collaborate, share, gift, attribute, credit, improve, brand, etc.)?
We can thus see how versionings might better mirror the scholarly workflow research goes through. However, experimenting with different versions (including using different formats, platforms and media) also offers us an opportunity to reflect critically on the way this workflow is currently (teleologically and hierarchically) set up, institutionalised, and commercialised, and how we might generate and communicate our work differently. It encourages us to ask questions about the role of publishers and about what the publishing function exactly entails, as well as about the authority of a text and who does (and does not) get to have a role in establishing this authority. What currently counts as a formal version and for what reason? Collectively, as researchers, we have tried to organise our research and writing around fixed and authorative texts, consistent and stable from copy to copy, based on the technology of the printing press. Could we arrange our research differently around the processes of writing in a digital environment? As Fitzpatrick suggests: ‘What if we were freed—by a necessary change in the ways that we “credit” ongoing and in-process work—to shift our attention away from publication as the moment of singularity in which a text transforms from nothing into something, and instead focus on the many important stages in our work’s coming-into-being?’ (2011b: 70).
Rethinking this organisation will also have to involve taking a critical look at the way versioning is currently set up on web-based platforms and services (and is also increasingly being conceived in academic publishing). This involves an investigation of version management and control (including the archiving of previous versions and author edits), which can be seen as an essential aspect of versioning. In other words, not only will we need to think about what constitutes a version, at what point and for what reason, we also need to think about the way in which we deal with these versions and conceptualise versioning. For example, versioning mainly seems to refer to the continuous updating of one single text, post, page, or topic (i.e. it assumes an original and a final version). What happens, though, if the updates and changes are ongoing and content is brought in from elsewhere? Perhaps remix might be a more interesting trope to explore here. The question is, if these updates are ongoing and collaborative, is it really necessary to keep all the different versions, and for how long? What is the use of versioning (or better said version control) in highly collaborative environments and wikis? The way we keep insisting on version control might be perceived as another sign of our fear of letting go of stability and fixity. Furthermore, it could be argued that we are again reinstalling print-based and humanist mechanisms here, where each version becomes a clearly recognizable fixed and stable unit with a single author and clear authority. This might entail that versioning becomes a new way of objectifying scholarship as part of its processual becoming, similar to current publishing business models based on selling various book formats, from hardcover to paperback and epub. It might similarly provide an opportunity to market, brand and sell research in a continuous way, like we do with new editions of books. Can we in some way balance our need for both fixity and process? As I will argue in this thesis, doing so will involve us in an in-depth exploration of when, and at what points, fixity is needed and for what reasons. In this respect it is important that we are ‘thinking about how ideas move and develop from one form of writing to the next, and about the ways that those stages are represented, connected, preserved, and “counted” within new digital modes of publishing’, as Fitzpatrick has argued (2011b: 70–71).
One of the versions of this thesis will be the version that will be submitted to fulfil the requirement towards the PhD: a single-authored written piece of original work in long-format. In other words, it will take the form of a traditional argument bound and made available in both a print and digital (PDF) format. This will most likely be regarded as ‘the final or original version’. However, as I want to point out by versioning my work in the ways I have outlined above, this ‘bound’ version is not necessarily the most important, interesting or valuable version of the thesis, nor is it in any way the final version. Not only are the different versions of the thesis connected to each other, they are also connected to the other works they reference. The intention of this research project is to create different versions and instantiations of the thesis argument, which will exist on different platforms. These then come to function as nodes in a multi-format, interlinked network of texts, notes, draft, references and remixes, where no part is necessarily more or less important than the other parts, nor will one text form the end-point or final version of the dissertation project. The reason I am focusing on a variety of versions as part of this thesis (the blog, the conference paper, the hypermedia version, the wiki version, the remixed version), all types of publishing which are currently being experimented with in scholarly communication, is to emphasise that different cuts are possible in the publishing process; cuts that perform various functions for the scholar, the research, and for the platforms that carry them. These different ways of versioning, re-cutting and remixing the material, thus provide us with an opportunity to examine different software and technologies and to shape them at the same time; to develop a form of critical praxis and to explore what other kinds of publishing are possible. However, they also enable us to extend our notions of the book, and of the way we can gather our research together and re-envision it in different ways.
My choices for the specific versions outlined above are based on exploring those platforms, technologies and pieces of software that favour interaction, experimentation, multimodality, openness and interdisciplinarity, as these are the features of scholarly communication that I would like to highlight and promote. I wish to do so because these features have the potential to help us to reimagine the bound nature of the monograph and to explore versionings as a spatial and temporal critique of the book as a bound object; to examine various different incisions that can be made in our scholarship as part of the informal and formal publishing and communication of our research that goes beyond the final research commodity. The practical part of the dissertation will thus constitute an experiment with collaboration, remix, versioning and the mixing of media, and with non-linear ways of writing and reading. It is designed to explore what the differences are between these various material incarnations of the thesis. These differences are shaped by the specific affordances of the software and platforms in intra-action with our scholarly practices. However, the discourses surrounding these technologies have similarly influenced the design, use and consumption of these technologies, as well as the shaping of us as scholars. What does all this mean for the way the research will be communicated, written and read? How will the different versions of this project be received and what possibilities and limitations does this offer to think and act beyond the printed book? How will this thesis eventually be published as a book, as a monograph, as an additional version of this thesis? (Or will the thesis become a version of the monograph?) If this monograph is formally published, how will it relate to the other nodes and versions, and will this lead to copyright problems and branding issues, for instance? Most probably the monograph will then become ‘the version of record’, the final object, as this is still the customary and approved cut in scholarly communication, having to do with matters of reputation and reward. The question remains, however, whether the thesis-project as a whole will be acknowledged as a ‘scholarly monograph’, within an institutional context. Will it be a book, or something else? (An archive?) As I will argue in this thesis, it is our responsibility as scholars, as part of our critical praxis, to engage with these questions and to make responsible decisions as to how, where, when, and in what form we publish our research.
[1] For one overview of ‘the death of the book’ through the ages, see Leah Price’s article ‘Dead Again’ (2012). See also the first chapter of Alessandro Ludovico’s book Post-Digital-Print, titled ‘The Death of Paper (which never happened)’, which looks at the history of threats to the printed medium (2012).
[2] Whether media ever die or continue to live on as residue or in the subconscious archives of our society (from where they get historicised and/or re-appropriated) is the question Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka approach through their concept of zombie media: ‘Zombie media is concerned with media that is not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts and adaptations’ (2012: 429),
[3] Technological change and the development of new media (i.e. the coming of photography, film, digital media) have over the history of the book triggered debates about the book’s future, and about the possible demise of its printed form. With respect to the scholarly book and scholarly communication, the situation has not been significantly different. The development of ebooks has triggered many possible futures for the scholarly book—from pyramidical structures (Darnton 1999) to universal libraries (Kelly 2006)—but at the same time it has also shown cultural, economic, political and practical constraints to these utopian visions due to, among others, the interests surrounding the economics of printing and distribution and the constructive power of print-based scholarly practices (Borgman 2007: 160).
[4] The scholarly book was an important component of the manuscript tradition. Nonetheless, the history of the scholarly book in its modern form (i.e. as it is related to forms of modern science and scholarship) for the most part overlaps with the rise and history of print publishing. Even so, the manuscript book continued to play an important role in early-modern scholarly communication—let alone in forms of oral communication (McKitterick 2000: 25–26).
[5] For most people the book as material form and concept coincides with the codex format (i.e. sheets of paper bound or fastened together at one side). As book historian Roger Chartier writes regarding the importance of the codex format as a metaphor for our understanding of the world:
At the same time, the end of the codex will signify the loss of acts and representations indissolubly linked to the book as we now know it. In the form that it has acquired in Western Europe since the beginning of the Christian era, the book has been one of the most powerful metaphors used for conceiving of the cosmos, nature, history, and the human body. If the object that has furnished the matrix of this repertory of images (poetic, philosophical, scientific) should disappear, the references and the procedures that organize the ‘readability’ of the physical world, equated with a book in codex form, would be profoundly upset as well. (1994: 90–91)
[6] More recently Grusin has focused on processes of premediation, where the future is increasingly already pre-mediated and constructed through (online, social) media, which remediate future media practices and technologies (2010).
[7] In ‘Two Lectures’, Foucault gives a definition of both the archaeological and the genealogical method, which emphasises their integration and complementarities: ‘If we were to characterise it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play’ (1980b: 85).
[8] See, for instance, the alternative genealogy of openness discussed in chapter 5, which aims to break down binaries between open and closed and open and secret, as well as the perception that the discourse on openness is not heterogeneous and critical enough.
[9] A more in depth discussion of this diffractive reading will be provided at the end of chapter 2.
[10] In the recent anthologies on New Materialisms (Alaimo and Hekman 2008) and Material Feminisms (Coole and Frost 2010), the emphasis is on seeing new materialism as a distancing, and even a denouncing of the linguistic turn in postmodern philosophy and the lack of attention to the material in social constructivist theories. Here new materialism is presented as a material turn, as a returned attention to matter and bodies, in an almost linear, causal way (this is also the basis of the critique of new materialism put forward by Sarah Ahmed (2008) and Dennis Bruining (2013)). I want to make clear that I do not agree with this positioning of new materialism in opposition to linguistic or postmodern movements (creating a new form of oppositional thinking). Instead, I would like to emphasise the diversity of postmodern thought in combination with a continuous tradition of attention to the material (Foucault, Haraway). Hence, I tend to side with the more nuanced reading Dolphijn and Van der Tuin give as part of their description of new materialism as a form of diffractive re-reading of these linguistic and materialist traditions, without abandoning them straight away. In this respect new materialism is not ‘new’ but a continuity of thought, a re-evaluation of these traditions where it ‘allows for the study of the two dimensions in their entanglement’ (Van der Tuin 2011, 2008, Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012: 91).
[11] Here I am referring to apparatus in the Foucauldian sense (dispositif) as well as to apparatuses/cuts in the Baradian/Bohrian sense.
[12] See the next section on methodology.
[13] Here matter and discourse/semiosis are no longer seen as oppositional and dualistic but as monistic productive entities. Haraway for one insists on the join between materiality and semiosis, were she states that ‘both are discourses of productivities and efficiencies’ (1988: 137).
[14] As Christine Borgman argues, although digital publications have fewer material constraints, their form remains relatively stable or continuous to the printed book. In Borgman’s vision this is not a rejection of technology but a reflection of the constructive power of scholarly practices. Even though, as she states, the existing forms might not necessarily serve scholars well or best, new genres that take advantage of the fluid and mobile nature of the medium are only slow to emerge. Hence today’s online books look identical to print books in many respects (Borgman 2007: 160).
[15] See: http://wiki.diffandrep.org/; http://www.garyhall.info/open-book/; http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence; http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/open-thesis-draft-introduction-march-2011/; and http://www.elotroalex.com/atelier/
[16] This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of Creative Commons licenses offered besides the CC-0 public domain waiver license (see: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). CC-BY is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[17] See: http://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/about-commentpress/
[18] Ibidem
[19] See: http://www.sophieproject.org/
[20] This is what Mark Amerika’s remixthebook project—about which more in chapter 6—has for example endeavored, as the remixes made as part of this project are new, separate versions of the source text, they are not remixing the source text itself directly. See: http://www.remixthebook.com/