|
Performing the Scholarly Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture

Notes Chapter 1

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 [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 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 [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 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 [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 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 [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 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 [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:

6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 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)

7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 [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).

8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 [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).

9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 [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.

10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 [9] A more in depth discussion of this diffractive reading will be provided at the end of chapter 2.

11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 [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).

12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 [11] Here I am referring to apparatus in the Foucauldian sense (dispositif) as well as to apparatuses/cuts in the Baradian/Bohrian sense.

13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 [12] See the next section on methodology.

14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 [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).

15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 [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).

16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 [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/

17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 [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/

18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 [17] See: http://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/about-commentpress/

19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 [18] Ibidem

20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 [19] See: http://www.sophieproject.org/

21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 [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/

Page 8

Source: https://www.openreflections.org/?page_id=47