Margreet Riphagen is the Institute of Network Culture’s project manager and the editor of the Theory on Demand book series. Here she explains TOD project’s background and how it operates as action-oriented research – and also proof the exploding possibilities for publishing today.
Can you explain the ‘On Demand’ part of the Theory On Demand project?
We decided…
The Free Culture Research Conference last month 8-10 October (2010) devoted one of its panels to the notion that governments should explicitly release public materials – data, photographs, film – to the public domain. The moderator was Mathias Schindler from Wikimedia Germany, a self-described ‘content liberator.’ Wikimedia, he explained, focuses on putting works by government into public domain from…
Here’s my long-due report on Geert Lovink’s keynote speech at the Free Culture Research Conference that took place in Berlin 8-10 October (2010). You can also read more on the conference website.
As Lovink described it in his keynote, the debate about ‘free’ and ‘open’ is undergoing a necessary shift. You could say that the framework was once…
It’s always a pleasure to hear publishers hash out their anxieties about the future. You get passionate, articulate types – fanatic bibliophilia often attracts peoples to the business to begin with – who pounce on issues with impressive granularity. Gather a bunch of publishers and writers to rant about the Internet in particular, and you get a good show.
So…
This month on -empyre-, a forum that facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media, you’ll find a collaborative discussion unfolding about seismic shifts shaking up the publishing industry. Conversations so far have spanned the mutating definition of the book, printing for multiple screens, e-book piracy, alternative print economies, FLOSS designs, and the book…
Google has “quietly” decided to pay humanities researchers $50,000 a year to dig into all the rich metadata accruing from its 12 million and counting library. Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading” analyzes literary trends from statistical data rather than close reading of texts, is among the humanity researchers going after the funds, and he’s well positioned for it.
Here’s…
De Balie’s Electrosmog festival this week argues that in the age of hypermobility, staying put can be a tactic of sustainability in itself. The festival self-consciously explores the ways we might reduce our carbon footprint by substituting technology for physical presence. Implementing a ‘no fly’ rule, the festival links panelists and performers around the world via live internet stream…
How many books can a person to read in a lifetime? In her keynote address at Swansea University’s Computational Turn workshop, Katherine Hayles surmised that if we read a book a day till we’re 85, it would amount to something like 25,000 books, though realistically the average bibliophile consumes only around 1000-2000 in her life. And so the capacities…
One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics, others obscure anarchic tomes and legal texts – presented in a simple, sleek alphabetized index of .pdfs.
The idea from…
You Me and Everyone We Know is a Curator was a one-day conference on December 19 about curatorial standards in the digital age. The clunky title, a nod to Miranda July’s similarly named feature film, gets to the core questions of the day: if bloggers are archivists, journalists are designers, and everyone’s a photographer – in short everyone’s already…