Comments on d i a p s a l m a t a: Thinking Out Loud: "Storming Scholarly Publishing ...

Wow--That would be excellent! Thanks for taking t...

2010-10-26T10:59:53.313-04:00

Wow--That would be excellent! Thanks for taking the time to check it out, and for adding it to your sidetable at Drumbeat (which sounds like an amazing event)!

I'm excited by "unconference" and "festival" models of scholarly exchange and the ways that these creative experiments can and will affect scholarly publishing and peer review.('cause I'm getting sick of going to conference sessions just to watch people read papers, and getting impatient with a scholarly publishing industry that moves slower than a lettermail game of chess.)

Your question---How does changing the material circumstances of textual production change what is produced?---reminds me of some metaphoric ways that I perceive scholarship (after unlearning the "single vision" imposed by the very traditional English lit. Ph.D. program I was subjected to a decade ago): Similar to the way that changing the instrument one uses to compose music fundamentally affects the nature of the melody that results (given the inherent differences in the ways that instruments are configured to generate sound and produce notes), our ideas are configured, influenced and often unknowingly framed by textual technologies and traditions. Thinking outside the boundaries of the book and the page is something that William Blake did over 200 years ago.....his revolutionary experiments inspire me to do the same and to perceive the material circumstances of textual production as a malleable environment or flexible arena in which creative, critical and--most importantly--collaborative work can be done...

By the way, thanks for the imagination and energy that you put into all of your work--I've referred numerous colleagues (some who are eager to embrace today's transitional realities and some who are clinging stubbornly to traditional ideals) to your blog and they are universally impressed...

Have fun in Barcelona!

Hi Jon -- Thanks so much for getting in touch agai...

2010-10-25T22:03:44.270-04:00

Hi Jon -- Thanks so much for getting in touch again! I certainly remember chatting with you at MiT.

I downloaded your New Radial files and like how it heads toward remixing the primary document with critical commentary in a felxible space. Would you mind if I add it to our sidetable? I'm going to have laptops open with lots of different examples of the many and varied forms of digital scholarship for people to play with and talk around. Some of the webby/techie people there might have some neat ideas for further development.

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion here, but ...

2010-10-24T23:18:10.330-04:00

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion here, but I thought I'd offer some of my recent work in response to your brainstorm related to imaginative, collaborative, argumentative mindmapping tools. We met at the last Media in Transition conference and talked briefly about my NewRadial project, which "unofficially" reconceptualizes the image contents of the online William Blake Archive as a radial data visualisation that invites users to map connections, groupings and commentaries onto this shared space.

Currently, the project (which was developed using the java-based Prefuse visualisation toolkit ) is still in an alpha stage (slow, but steady), is open source, and invites customization options for other content applications. My final intention is to produce an open, web-based database that aggregates and visualises critical activity and commentary relating to Blake's illuminated work in a dynamic, graphical workspace. Currently, it's set up to work locally with a single copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, but the customisation and content options are pretty much endless if someone wants to adapt this to other ends.

NewRadial's sourceforge site is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/newradial/
Documentation for users is here:
http://socrates.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/jsaklofske/newradial/
...and developer docs are here:
http://socrates.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/jsaklofske/newradial/devdocs.zip

Let me know if you have any suggestions or criticisms, or find the ideas behind the project useful in any way--I certainly welcome the input!

Thanks for the comments. I've done some more d...

2010-10-15T14:34:04.810-04:00

Thanks for the comments. I've done some more digging and have found lots of Pasteboards/Clipboards to organize clippings on your personal machine, but nothing web-based. Google was testing some kind of CloudBoard thing, which basically turned into a way to copy text between different Google applications (of course). And Delicious and Tumblr are variations of one-click commonplacing; but you'd have to invert the ordering of Delicious (which still documents the site, not the text) and Tumbler is too blog-y.

Mark, your PiratePad thrown-down is a fabulous idea, which I will probably steal. I'm wondering if it can't be used as an historical exercise, as Amanda points out. A way to renew the past by rocketing off a communal, multi-perspectival, radically *present* reading of it.

I love the idea of digital commonplacing. Deliciou...

2010-10-14T10:49:27.924-04:00

I love the idea of digital commonplacing. Delicious already does something like what you describe: highlight the text you want to grab, hit Control-D or click the bookmarklet, and it automatically captures both the URL and the text you've highlighted. If something like that could be combined with something like Zotero, it would be a fantastic tool.

I also second Mark's call for bringing the history of commonplacing (which is one of my current research obsessions) into the conversation. Incidentally, one of the things I've noticed, looking at commonplace books from the 19th century, is how often they were collaborative efforts by families or circles of friends -- either handed down from one generation to the next, or formally dedicated to a particular recipient, or compiled by multiple transcribers, or some combination of all of the above. The collaboration aspect might also be interesting to think about in relation to the digital scholarly publishing environment.

I've been think about many of these issues too...

2010-10-13T18:10:17.008-04:00

I've been think about many of these issues too, arguing that scholarly publishing should be loud, crowded, and out of control. I really like your idea of one-click commonplacing, which I suppose is what Tumblr could be thought of. But there's been little theorization of how this kind of commonplacing could "count"* as scholarly publishing. I don't know enough about earlier traditions of commonplacing to say, but could we learn something from the social apparatuses surrounding early forms of commonplacing that we can use in arguing for its scholarly legitimacy? (Benjamin's Arcades Project comes to mind...)

As for other tools, what about using something like PiratePad for on-site collaborative writing? Throw four or five scholars a material, textual, or digital artifact, and have them collaboratively crowd-write for 10 minutes, creating a "profile" or "abstract" of that artifact.

* Note, all scare quotes are strictly to demarcate double-voiced "discourse."