Comment by postoccupant: Vote for UniverCity!

I've proposed a workshop to the Future Architecture platform, organised by the Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. The idea is that the ideas arising from the UniverCity forum can be worked through in discussion about the possibility of a future form of architectural visualisation not tied down to images of completed buildings. Renderings of unpredictability, of occupation, of diverse public knowledges. Vote online: and browse the other projects too.

Comment by postoccupant: Just been invited by Clare Melhuish from UCL Urban Laboratory to participate in a symposium this November. Title: 'Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future.' We'll be looking at UCL East and the University of Gothenburg in the context of University developments in urban contexts. The forum will feed into this.

Comment by postoccupant: UniverCity on Twitter #univercity @postoccupant

Comment by postoccupant: Just posting here to share this content about academia and Twitter... some good links to further discussion of digital academia...

'Digital platforms, from Twitter and personal blogs to e-journals and iterative monographs, are creating new ways to publish and new publishing opportunities. In this new model of academic publishing, Twitter interactions exist on the same spectrum of activity as peer-review and scholarly editing. But more importantly, new models for scholarly publication are creating new ways to engage in public scholarship beyond traditional publication, fundamentally blurring the boundaries between publication, conversation, and community.'

http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/beyond-academic-twitter/

Comment by postoccupant: Postoccupant took part in a workshop organised by UCL Urban Lab and Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, exploring the impact of University development projects in Newham (London) and Gothenburg (Sweden). 2 days of discussion, and a great series of presentations on subjects as diverse as activist histories of East London, the agonistic politics of university expansion here and overseas, territorial complexity and public space, workshopping architecture for communities in Bangladesh and London, and the V and A's approach to community engagement. Many more, and the conversations ranged far and wide.<br /> See the post on UniverCity here... http://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=209

Comment by hedgesprite: It is so refreshing to read a researcher - outside of dance academe - acknowledging the critical (in both sense) importance of gut instincts in guiding research enquiry. Somatic practice teaches that the gut - being the first organ to form in utero and thus a primitive 'nervous’ system - remains our first and more responsive ‘sense’, before conscious, prefrontal neural processing (e.g. see Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's Sensing Feeling Action (1993) or Linda Hartley's Wisdom of the Body Moving (1995)).

While academe is becoming more aware of or preoccupied with dissolving mind-body binary, and the validity of embodied and practice-based enquiry, having the bravery to pursue research that is guided by these things FIRST, with logocentric critical discourse only following subsequently is really important, but seems to be practised less than it is proposed.

Comment by Jessifer: This closing section has a lot of wonderful bits in it. I think the artfulness of this piece earns you the ability to make a stronger claim in the closing section. Even if it is an impressionistic one. It could even be in the parenthetical describing this last bit of music. I kind of love the parentheticals that offer a bit more substantive commentary on the choice. They feel like productive tangents that brush against the text in a useful way.

Comment by Jessifer: So lovely.

Comment by Jessifer: I like that this sentence theoretically explains the movement from the "I" to the "we." I wonder if you could call that out more directly with a line like. "We (Peter, Karen, and Katherine) draw our stories together here in order to..."

Comment by Jessifer: The writing here is so lovely and precise.

Comment by Jessifer: There's a stylistic inconsistency in how each of these sections is presented. I feel like tidying the formatting so that each of these biographical sections has a similar form (and parallel structure) would help keep the reader from veering too far. Honestly, though, I'm loving the mash-up of forms, media, voices. That is working really really well. Just needs a bit more polish as you continue revising.

Comment by Jessifer: I find myself wanting this to be the lead-off sentence of the piece. It sets the stage in a way that helps the rest flow from this claim, rather than around it.

Comment by actualham: suggest edit: change to "hopeful."

Comment by ndsteinmetz: YES!!! This should be the goal in its entirety. I'm so glad to hear you say "promote a more civil discussion". Too often civil discussions are avoided and, many times in education, not even offered. How are we to sustain a successful democracy without civil discussions being present and offered regularly? How are we to train up successful, contributing citizens without offering civil discussion opportunities with regularity? It can't happen and won't happen, my hope is Hypothes.is can help achieve this!

Comment by ndsteinmetz: You're right, however, a culture of civility and inquiry can very easily overpower trolls if it's built correctly. A strong community can withstand many attacks if it's genuineness and civility remain strong!

Comment by ndsteinmetz: I share this worry with you! I believe this infringes on the realm of censorship. How can one post something on the web and opt out of web annotation? Seems to be a double standard...I want the public to hear this but I don't want to hear their thoughts. Certainly limits the ability to speak truth to power.

Comment by BMBOD: Wow what a question. I can't wait to see what other people have to say. It seems like it would be easy to come up with ways that are not civil, or trustworthy, online discourse - but to frame this as which conditions are created is far more powerful.

As I mentioned in an earlier annotation, I think much of this has to do with shifting personal epistemology through the process of discourse with "authorities" and authors, the societal weighting of evidence and supportive information, and the interaction among participants and text at various levels. But there is a whole lot there that can go wrong. I love all of the occasions I've had to interact with others via hypothes.is thus far, but it does strike me that they have been primarily among peers with similar perspectives, epistemology, ideals, and academic background as myself. And perhaps that is a good place to start- modeling constructive and supportive behaviors in certain communities of practice?

Edit to add: I think the social expectation that comes with using hypothes.is the way I have (through annotation flash mobs and annotatathons) is important. Having annotated this article as separate from a flash mob type event I find myself constantly checking back for new annotations, commentary, and responses. Web annotation for me has become inherently a cooperative and collaborative practice.

Comment by BMBOD: something we should always ask ourselves, and ask ourselves repeatedly

Comment by actualham: Yes, this is part of the paradoxical way that open works, as Martin Weller has argued. This is the crux of all of the challenge for me right now.

Comment by ndsteinmetz: Completely agree here! It is in listening to each other that we progress. Without listening to their readers, authors are simply writing what it is they want, think, need, and feel. Without listening to authors, the readers are necessarily even reading for understanding. It seems cyclical but important to note, I wonder what would happen if we listened to each other more often, especially in the case of web text truly bringing about the "net-working" RK described.

Comment by actualham: YES, I agree with this.

Comment by jeremydean: There’s also a growing culture of people on Twitter hacking the microblogging platform as an annotation tool. They call them Screenshorts, Tweets that use screenshots of highlighted text to ground commentary. To me it’s just web annotation 1.0. But they’re just trying to be good English students, right?

From a pedagogical and rhetorical perspective, at least, an annotated Trump speech is more effective than a random comment out there in the ether of the net. Similarly, a close read of the Clinton emails I believe would reveal there’s not much of a story there. But as a culture, we are not engaging with politics in that way, and we would be better off if we did.

Comment by SenorG: This strikes me as a key factor in web annotation reaching the mainstream, especially in education. When an educator asks, "How is this significantly different from leaving comments at the end of an article?" it will be helpful to have a concise, comprehensible and convincing response. When I speak about this, I focus on the "contexting" that web annotation facilitates and the potentiality for authentic audience and dialogue. The problem with both of these points is that a critic can (rightly) respond that existing page-bottom commentary can already allow a degree of both of these.

Comment by BMBOD: in the same line of thought as with choral explanations?

Comment by actualham: Honestly, I am flummoxed about how to respond to the fake news/propaganda thing. Notions of "truth" and "credibility" and "verifiability" are so complicated, and I don't want to be forced by the terms of a fucked up debate to rally around reductive ideas that some things are true and some are false. And then again, I don't want to advocate for an anything-goes approach that makes room for climate- and holocaust-deniers. I am an active user of Snopes. But how do we allow for the richness and complexity of diverse perspectives and non-dominant narratives, while resisting the emerging leftist role of "truth police?" I think H might allow us to do the kind of discursive work-- dialogic work-- that helps here. I don't like to think about that work as fact-checking as much as the critical exposure of epistemologies. We are all biased. Anyone else uncomfortable with the idea that if we just science enough (or whatever) we can get to some kind of pure, irrefutable truth? How could that end up hurting the causes we are trying to advance?

Comment by BMBOD: I think there are particular personal epistemological assumptions tied up in this, that impact not only how we wish web annotation to be used, but how it functionally can and will primarily be used. If you approach knowledge as something coming from an authority, it is very hard to fathom being able to create it yourself, or talk back to it, even if those platforms exist. Conversely, if you think any opinion is valid, because knowledge is completely subjected as individual "truths" then I think you end up with what we see in a majority of places on the internet that allow discourse... I wonder if, and suspect that, hypothes.is could a powerful tool in shifting personal epistemology - especially where the text creators or "authorities" engage with annotators and the comments they pose...

...forgive me, I bring everything back to personal epistemologies

Comment by BMBOD: As always, so glad you did.

Comment by actualham: Interesting phrase. Thinking about how all spaces are social (I think?) and all are built (I think?), and so what exactly makes the sociality or structure of a space "open"? Could it have to do not just with inclusivity, but also with the decentering effect that resists boundaries and borders-- and maybe therefore meaning? Invoking Homi Bhabha here in thinking about how margins define centers (not vice versa) and wondering if part of what feels politically important about web annotation is the way that it decenters the text itself, makes it incomplete, multi-authored, dynamic. And that will both challenge master-narratives and maybe also challenge meaning itself, which can be alienating to participants and a challenge to community building. Sorry-- I used to teach Intro Lit Crit. :)

Comment by BMBOD: What sort of digital literacy does this require?

Comment by SenorG: Just as there is ambiguity around defining a word as simple as open this conversation hints at an emerging struggle with a shared meaning of annotation. As Remi points out, the traditional view of annotation is as a tool acting in service of reading comprehension. What we are talking about goes beyond that.

While Merriam Webster and other disseminators of meaning can add extra definitions to their dictionaries under the word 'annotation', I wonder if an easier path to meaning making might be through using different words. There's a risk that it only leads to complications and muddying the waters over semantics but is it worth considering? I describe it as uptexting (not sure if I thought of that on my own or borrowed from someone else). I've heard University of Texas' Carl Blyth describe this as Social Reading and am drawn to this term because it captures the community aspect and might be less confusing because it doesn't seek to reappropriate an existing, commonly held definition.

Comment by SenorG: Allow me to push back a bit here. While the "canned responses" could, in some environments, build fences around student creativity and expression, it does not have to. From my limited play in the Ponder sandbox, I noticed that students could click on the canned responses OR offer their own annotation just like with Hypothes.is (though I am not sure if the annotation is limited to text). Also, I perceive the canned responses as allowing for scaffolding for younger readers and second language learners.

Comment by actualham: I know I am basically just another lit crit perspective here, but honestly that background-- particularly as a poststructuralist and probably as a postmodernist--inflects so much of my thinking about what the web is and can be. I think moving from English to Interdisciplinary Studies has also made me value the perspective that sees all knowledge as always incomplete; I love that my new field has a core value of noting that there is always another perspective, even if it's not visible or known yet. So when I work with students on the web-- especially in "intro" courses that are supposed to indoctrinate them to the core principles and theories of Interdisciplinary Studies-- I like to present the web as a space that allows and supports dynamism rather than stasis (process over product). But this is so out of line with so much about how teachers think about "public" writing and projects; we want them to be "portfolio" worthy, tidy, complete. When student work is flawed, I think it's a reminder to us about how we can think of all scholarly work. I love that H lets us focus on critique without a requirement that we devalue the work-- in fact, quite the opposite (we critique what has value and potential and impact and utility...). Just thinking out loud, but I think this aspect of "open-endedness" is really the core (ha ha-- irony) of so many of my areas of interest right now.

Comment by actualham: Thinking about this term, and about preceding it with "everyday." Wondering how one becomes this, whether it can ever be mundane without erasing the privilege inherent in the status.

Comment by ndsteinmetz: An important establishment in learning from text. How often we presume the author to be the authority. It's important to be open and willing to listen to the ideas of others if we are really seeking expertise. Growing from feedback and criticism is one of my greatest achievements.

Comment by ndsteinmetz: It is my hope to see this in all learning environments, too often it is pre-established or determined without respect to learners' needs and interests.

Comment by BMBOD: Are there standards for citing web annotations? How do we acknowledge and credit this shared authorship?

Comment by actualham: So much of this resonates after reading Martin Weller's wonderful little post today (and the awesome PPT embedded therein): http://blog.edtechie.net/openness/the-paradoxes-of-open-scholarship/

Comment by BMBOD: I think this is such a powerful motivation for using web annotation as a component of peer-review and academic conversations.

Comment by BMBOD: I love the idea of the public playground, and I think that concept along with the affordances of hypothes.is, say something about the relative safety net of open annotation. Like a public playground, it is not without risk to those participating; however, a degree of anonymity is still offered. You can disconnect your hypothes.is user information from your identity. This can, of course, be both a good and bad thing in generating commentary, but is an important feature of this particular "openness"

I also just love the connection to "play"

Comment by jeremydean: Burn!

Comment by ndsteinmetz: RK is not the only one, I'm still feeling very new as well and learning each time I annotate. The newness is sometimes intimidating but I proceed nonetheless. How might it become more user friendly and inviting to grow the audience and participants?

Comment by ndsteinmetz: Great point here, when can I use Hypothes.is on my mobile device? I'm falling behind due to the need of being at a keyboarded laptop. How might be promote equitable access to such great tools?

Comment by BMBOD: Could we perhaps use tags or groups to functionally sort through the layers of "noise" ? Perhaps things like: content critique, meta, grammatical nuances, etc?

Comment by BMBOD: Interrupted seems like such a harsh word here. Perhaps punctuated fits better? You don't have to interrupt reading the conversation with the annotations, but you can. Of course in a journal of disruptive media, maybe interruption is exactly the disruption desired...

Comment by lskains: They shouldn't be! After all, in a lot of ways, no matter what our purpose in creative practice -- whether for research or not -- it nonetheless is a form of research. We are experimenting with art, trying to be better, get better. It's always research in an implicit sense. What makes it explicitly research is when it is incorporated into a defined methodology that allows us to explore and respond to specific research questions, and to communicate how the practice helps us answer those questions. Ideally, it should be a symbiotic relationship.

Also, who defines what is "good"? The academy? Research councils? Consumers? Prize committees?

Comment by lskains: Depends on the research question, and whether or not it is applicable as research.

Comment by lskains: I think this is a key element in practice-based research in media in general - if we look at the creative practice as analogous to data (in the sciences, for example), then we still have to make the contribution to knowledge explicit through a statement of research and/or exegesis. The sciences don't just throw raw data at each other and ask one another to figure out what its contribution is - that's what papers and reports are for. I can tell you a lot of them don't like writing it up either! But at its core, isn't that what research is -- collecting data, analyzing it, and communicating it explicitly to others in the field (and even outside the field)?

Is this true within an academic publishing context? First copy costs remain substantially high: editing, review, typesetting, server and band with costs, marketing etc. are still part of a digital only model. One thing that is important to explore though is what these first copy costs consist off in a digital context, to explore from there what the profit margin is that publishers put on top (plus cost for printing etc.). This could lead to the development of perhaps a more fair and transparent system based on actual costs. For books the OAPEN-NL project tried to do exactly this: https://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/oapen-nl-final-report.pdf

One of the complaints I hear more and more often from academics is that traditional publishing houses are actually no longer doing this work. Editing and formatting are increasingly outsourced to academics themselves (as are indexing etc.) and even marketing is something publishers ask authors to so themselves using their social media profiles and academic brands. This is one of the issues many scholar-led publishing initiatives are trying to address, by highlighting for example the various processes that go into creating a scholarly publication and giving these due recognition. Mattering Press is at the forefront of this:https://www.matteringpress.org/

http://www.csisponline.net/2014/06/18/from-openness-to-openings-reflections-on-the-experiments-in-knowledge-production-workshop/

If this special issue of Ephemera ever comes out (I have been keeping an eye out for it but nothing as yet) it might be highly relevant for this discussion: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/content/labour-academia-0 Back issues of Ephemera do cover topics related to this discussion too though, so might be a relevant resource anyway (and OA!)

Comment by LucaMorini: And most of what actually comprises our work in the 21st Century, such as this kind of discussions, will never give us any "points" in the "game" of publishing, where only the final outcomes (that are still produced under a pre-digital, Gutenbergian paradigm) count for something. A system oriented to quantification and control over 19th century media. Please note I am not saying that I would prefer that my tweets counted toward my career, but indeed further highlighting the inconsistencies and absurdity of the current academic publishing policies (and market).

Comment by LucaMorini: It is interesting, in comparing foucauldian and cybernetic conceptualisations of power (Wiener, 1948, and especially Von Foerster, 2002) to highlight similarities and differences. While both constructions are deeply relational, showing how power is not simply imposed but co-constructed, the cybernetic ideal is markedly (and maybe deceivingly) more optimistic, by focusing on the mutuality of this relationship. Maybe only a plurality of epistemologies and points of view can help us successfully navigate and resist the pervasivity of power.

Comment by markreadman: As Ben says here, the process is opened up to scrutiny, becomes 'part of the work', which means that we have to read these images differently – we're not going to fall into the trap of what Gregory Currie calls 'aesthetic empiricism' and judge the photos as art works in a vacuum. But perhaps there's the danger, lurking, of aestheticising the abject? And (although it's probably the seaside setting that prompts this association) the beach photos taken by the participants just occasionally reminded me of some of Martin Parr's New Brighton photographs. So what kinds of photographic language have the participants internalised? Are they conscious or unconscious rhetoricians of the image?

Comment by markreadman: It strikes me that the soundtrack that accompanies the montage presented here (which is much more limited than the gallery exhibition described in the conversation between Anthony and Ben) is as important as the images; it allows us access to the negotiations behind the camera, the handing over of the cable release so that the subject becomes their own object, the pedagogic conversation, the gratitude. But there is always the awareness of a power differential between artist and participant, and of the editing of the sound, the selection of what to include and what to exclude, despite its vérité quality.

Comment by markreadman: Jo Spence is a great reference point, given how she forged such a powerful voice through images of her vulnerable body. Photography was an autoethnographic tool for her – is there an explicit connection to be made here I wonder?

Comment by markreadman: This apparently oxymoronic term that Ben Burbridge uses, 'photo voice' encapsulates a key issue for this project - how a picture 'enunciates'. Anthony, the artist, understands this debate well, and both he and his interlocutor Ben, are aware of the play of meaning here.

Comment by markreadman: There is something interesting here about the facilitation of the use of professional equipment, rather than, say, a phone camera; this could be empowering (but the access is temporary – a gift then taken away?), or it could be alienating – a self-portrait produced with strange machinery. The technological dimension is not addressed explicitly, despite the power that inheres within 'pro kit', despite the language of democracy and facilitation that the project uses ("invite", "assist"). I wonder what the rationale was for the use of the medium format camera.

Comment by markreadman: Echoes here of the sociological participant observer with, perhaps, the attendant ethical concerns about appropriation. The artist's roles as facilitator, 'voice', 'lens' begin to emerge here.

I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?

I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?

I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?

Comment by reviewer_SorenPold: Both the article in itself and its design in DJMP raise questions about the architecture and materiality of the book and publishing, including academic publishing, through its discussion of artist books and open access. The interesting discussion is of course how ways of publishing, textual formats, ways of writing, editing and reading relate to different kinds of politics, e.g. institutional, economic, ways of ascertaining quality, etc. These are very important questions, both in global politics (e.g. the discussions on ‘fake news’ and its relation to social media), in institutional politics (e.g. the standards and quality assessment of academic publishing) and in art and literature (e.g. whether readers are able and willing to actually read and understand different forms of texts). In general, it is a question of how the text mediates and transforms the reading, how meaning is produced and how/whether it reaches an audience, whether it is productive of e.g. meaning, knowledge and/or action. It is a discussion of the text between mediator and tool.

It is noteworthy how little has happened after several decades of digital publishing and a plethora of death sentences for books and print: Even though some things have changed and are changing e.g. WWW’s ‘non-linear’ and labyrinthine, multi-cursal (Aarseth 1997) hypertext and the collaborative writing tools and platforms like wikis and social media are part of our everyday textual culture, we still have books and journals. Why? Is it because, as Stuart Moulthrop suggested already in 1991, that although hypertext affords new visions about a shared writing space, the responsibility for changes of this magnitude come from a diverse elite (of software developers, literary theorists, legislators, capitalists) who despite their differences remain allegiant to the institutions of intellectual property (the book, the library, the university, the publishing house). In other words, Moulthrop suggests that “it seems equally possible that engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution.” (Moulthroup 2003 (1991), Andersen and Pold 2014). Is it because of institutional conservatism, because readers are conservative and slowly adapting (as the rather slow development of hypertext seems to suggest), is it a political battle (as the current discussions of the role of digital media, social media versus traditional media might suggest)? And to which extend is it a battle we should go for, if it includes breaking down the kinds of authority that comes with established publication formats and editorial processes (at least the current political climate raises some concerns).

I know that many of these concerns are afterthoughts to an article and a design done before the current situation, and in this sense, they are more reflections that might be relevant for further work. However, the questions remain, whether hypertext and collaborative authoring always leads to more freedom and productive reading/writing? Whether deconstructing the order of the text and its extended argument is always a good thing? We have of course examples of great hypertextual formats that function well as tools and presentation of knowledge, e.g. the encyclopedia, but maybe there are also good reasons to preserve the extended argument of the book and the article? Today it seems simply wrong to assert that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice” (Landow 1992) faced with Trump and Wilders’ tweets. Consequently, I think, the argument of the article and its design could relate to the history of hypertext and electronic literature, though the discussion of artist books and open access publishing is also relevant.

The implementation in DJMP is in many ways exemplary and manages to present the article in nice ways, including the posters, the ability to comment and follow keywords. It allows its reader to access and use the text in different ways, and gives the valuable possibility of commenting and reading other people’s comments. In this it also follows paths from hypertext and electronic literature/digital culture, e.g. Electronic Book Review of A Peer Reviewed Journal About_. The design in many ways affords that it can do as it ‘preaches’, and in this way experiments with different ways of publishing academic texts. This is needed and current academia is not open enough to these kinds of experiments, that are, as argued, much more than making open access a homogeneous project – there is a need for an ongoing critical struggle that includes the forms of publishing. This is necessary, also to reach the popular masses on Twitter and Facebook! Currently, it is a problem, that standardizations within academia driven by STEM standards does not invite for such experiments that would in many cases not even be accepted as examples of academic publication. Also, I want to finish emphasizing that my discussion above is mainly stirred by the qualities of the publication, the important questions and reflections it raises.

References

Andersen, C. U. and S. B. Pold (2014). "Post-digital Books and Disruptive Literary Machines: Digital Literature Beyond the Gutenberg and Google Galaxies." Formules 2014(18): 164-183.<br /> Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press.<br /> Moulthroup, S. (2003 (1991)). You Say You Want a Revolution. The New Media Reader. N. W.-F. N. Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, The MIT Press: 691-704. <br /> Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press.

Comment by KamilaKuc: 'Altered books tap into our collective heightened interest in books as objects. Physical books, as differentiated from digital versions, tend to trigger memories, both visual and tactile.' (Kuhn, 2013: 11). The question of what will be left behind of the digital is a curious one here, perhaps. While we know what film and a physical book leave behind, the traces of their existence are still present (film strip, video tape, paper), what will be left behind of digital works (books)? What traces do digital forms leave behind?

Comment by KamilaKuc: See the idea of 'altered books', or bookworks, as defined by Doug Beube, as presented in 'Art Made From Books' by Alyson Kuhn, which looks at the conceptual underpinnings of artists books but also art made form books whereby the physical material of the book functions as a material and a platform to exercise ideas.

Comment by KamilaKuc: For the changing guises and forms of a book, see The Book Is Alive blog, which displays book 'as an evolving, open and visual medium' that is curated and alive, thus its shape and content can change.

I would like to further extend this practice-based project both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), alongside other projects and practices. As part of this I would like to explore the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose. By using hypothes.is—an open source software/browser extension that enables an annotation layer on top of websites and online files and objects—which for this special disrupted issue of the Journal of Media Practice functions as a way to enable conversations around its processual papers, I would like to draw in these conversations around performative publications by directly setting up a dialogue with various theorists and the works, concepts, practices and values that connect to both this project and to performative publications as I envision them more in general.

What is certain is that poetics in general, and narratology in particular, must not limit itself to accounting for existing forms or themes. It must also explore the field of what is possible or even impossible without pausing too long at that frontier the mapping out of which is not its job. Until now, critics have done no more than interpret literature. Transforming is now the task at hand. That is certainly not the business of theoreticians alone; their role is no doubt negligible. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice?

(Genette 1988, 157)

Comment by KamilaKuc: See for example an experiment concerning gestures of reading and writing, 'unruly gestures.' 'unruly gestures: seven cine-paragraphs on reading/writing practices in our post-digital condition' is a performative essay for 'Shifting Layers. New Perspectives in Media Archaeology Across Digital Media and Audiovisual Arts' edited by Miriam De Rosa and Ludovica Fales (Mimesis International, 2016). In it we aspire to break down preconceptions about gestures of reading/writing that relate to their agency, media-specificity, (linear) historicity and humanism. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists tried to subvert established traditions of authorship, intentionality and linearity, this visual essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs, accompanied by text.

If performative publications are the material expressions or incarnations of specific research projects and processes, entangled with them are various other agencies of production and constraint (i.e. technological, authorial, cultural and discursive agencies, to name just a few). What I want to argue is that performative publications as a specific subset of publications actively interrogate how to align more closely the material form of a publication with its content (in other words, where all publications are performative—i.e. they are knowledge shaping, active agents involved in knowledge production—not all publications are 'performative publications', in the sense that they actively interrogate or experiment with this relation between content and materiality —similar to artist books). Yet in addition to this there is also an openness towards the ongoing interaction between materiality and content which includes entanglements with other agencies, and material forms of constraint and possibility.

This concern for the materiality and form of our publications (and directly related to that the material production and political economy that surrounds a publication) is not a response to what elsewhere as part of a critique of certain tendencies within the field of new materialism is seen as a reaction to ‘the linguistic turn’ (Bruining 2013). On the contrary, I see this as a more direct reaction against perspectives on the digital which perceive digital text as disembodied and as a freeing of data from its material constraints as part of a conversion to a digital environment. However, content cannot be separated that easily from its material manifestations, as many theorist within the digital humanities have already argued (i.e. Hayles, Drucker). Alan Liu classifies this 'database' rhetoric of dematerialization as a religion that is characterised by 'an ideology of strict division between content and presentation' where content is separated from material instantiation or formal presentation as part of an aesthetics of network production and consumption (Liu 2004, 62).

Scholarly poethics is what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, ethics and poetics are entangled and an ethical engagement is already from the start involved in the production of scholarship, it informs our scholarship. Whilst formulating a narrative around the idea of a scholarly poetics—what it would look like, what it could mean, imply and do and, perhaps most importantly, what it could potentially achieve—in relation to our publishing practices, I want to argue that we should pay more attention to how we craft our own poetics as scholars.

Just as we have internal discussions about the contents of our scholarship, about the methodologies, theories and politics we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should similarly have these kinds of discussions about the way we do research. Thus we should also be focusing on the medial forms, the formats and the graphic space in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices. This ‘contextual’ discussion, focusing on the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the contents of our work. The way we do scholarship informs its ‘outcomes’, what scholarship looks like. It informs the kinds of methodologies, theories and politics we can choose from, and of course, vice versa, these again shape the way we perform our scholarship. A focus on scholarly poethics might therefore be useful in bridging the context/content divide.

So what then is the altered status of a (digital) scholarly poethics today? Which theoretical streams, disciplinary fields, and schools of thought (inside and outside of academia, connecting the arts and the humanities) have specifically incorporated attention to the practices and performances of scholarship and this internal/external divide? Here it would be useful to look to fields such as design, poetry, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, the (radical) open access movement, and—in some instances the digital humanities and in cultural and literary studies—where the way we conduct scholarship can be seen to have been at the forefront of academic inquiries. What can we learn from these discussions and how can we add to and expand them to enrich our understanding of what a scholarly poethics could be(come)? As I envision it a scholarly poethics is not one thing, not a specific prescriptive methodology or way of doing scholarship, it is a plural and evolving process in which content and context co-develop. Scholarly poethics thus focuses on the abundant, and continuously changing material-discursive attitudes towards scholarly practices, research, communication media (text/film/audio) and institutions.

Comment by KamilaKuc: A number of recently curated sources explore this idea in a similar manner. See for example Photomediations: An Open Book.

As a term, performative publications have a lot in common with Katherine Hayles’s concept ‘technotexts’. In her book Writing Machines (itself a technotext, beautifully designed by Anne Burdick in a hybrid print and ‘webtake’ version) Hayles introduces the term technotext as an relative and alternative to concepts such as hypertext and cybertext. She defines a technotext as something that comes about ‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it’ (Hayles 2002, 25) and elsewhere as ‘a book that embodies its own critical concepts (Hayles 2002, 140)’. In Writing Machines Hayles then goes on to analyse 3 technotexts, Talan Memmott’s work of electronic literature Lexia to Perplexia (2000), Tom Phillips artist’s book A Humument (1970), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000).

For Long performative publications are directly connected to the idea of practice, where following the concept of performativity, he argues that ideas should be put to practice, where practice can further inform and enrich ones ideas again. Long applies these values directly to several of his own performative projects. In his book The Socratic and Platonic Politics: Practicing a Politics of Reading, he shows how Socratic philosophy and Platonic writing was designed to cultivate dialogue and community. By digitally enhancing his publication, Long explores how writing and reading can promote community in a digital context, in specific a community of collaborative readers. As Long argues:

If, however, the book is not to be a mere abstract academic exercise, it will need to be published in a way that performs and enables the politics of collaborative reading for which it argues. (Long 2012)

https://youtu.be/-f9N1n-4cI8

A further extension of this project is a podcast series titled Digital Dialogue which aims to cultivate dialogue in a digital age by engaging other scholars in open conversation online. Long is also involved in the Public Philosophy Journal project, which is specifically set up to crawl the web to find diverse positions on various philosophical subjects and to bring these together in a collaborative writing setting. As Long explains:

The PPJ is designed to crawl the web, listening for conversations in which philosophical ideas and approaches are brought to bear on a wide variety of issues of public concern. Once these conversations are curated and a select number chosen for further development, we will invite participants into a space of collaborative writing so they can work their ideas up into a more fully formulated scholarly article or digital artifact. (Chris Long 2013)

Fajfer and Bazarnik make some interesting observations on how in liberature the book does not contain the work, it is the work. In this sense they don’t see the material book as a representation of the work but as something that actively shapes and determines the work.

Their focus on liberatic works is both a reaction to a previous literary context and a plea to authors to take responsibility for the future becoming of literature. First of all, as a specific response in a Polish context (but more wider too), it rallies against literary traditions that see the materiality of the book as non-significant, that classify literature as ‘disembodied’. As Bazarnik and Fajfer state:

If I emphasise this bodily, material aspect so much, it is because Polish literary studies seem still dominated by scholars indebted to Roman Ingarden, a Polish philosopher who ventured into literary studies to produce a highly influential theory of the literary work of art in which he denied its “material foundation” (as he called it) any significance. It was to be passed over and not interfere with reading (Fajfer and Bazarnik 2010).

Secondly, they present liberature as a way out of the ‘crisis of contemporary literature’, which they say has its roots in the continued focus on the text and its meaning, while neglecting the physical shape and structure of the book. This is delimiting the creative possibilities for the author, they claim. As Fajfer writes:

I believe that it is his responsibility to consider the physical shape of the book and all the matters entailed, just as he considers the text (if not to the same extent, he should at least bear them in mind). The shape of the book should not be determined by generally accepted conventions but result from the author’s autonomous decision just as actions of his characters and the choice of words originate from him (Fajfer 2010, 25).

Liberature is a term, concept and genre coined in 1999 by the Polish avant-garde poet Zenon Fajfer, and further developed by his collaborator: literary scholar and theorist Katarzyna Bazarnik. Liberature is literature in the form of the book. Bazarnik and Fajfer define liberature as ‘a literary genre that integrates text and its material foundation into a meaningful whole' (Bazarnik and Fajfer 2010, 1). In the introduction to Fajfer’s collected essays, Bazarnik describes liberature as literary works in which the artistic message is transmitted not only through the verbal medium, but also through the author ‘speaking’ via the book as a whole (Bazarnik 2010, 7). Liberature is therefore a total approach that reaches beyond the linguistic medium, where the material form of the work is essential to its understanding and forms an organic element of the (inseparable) whole. Both Fajfer and Bazarnik emphasise that in liberature, the material book is no longer a neutral container for a text, but becomes an integral component of the literary work.

Katarzyna Bazarnik, Zenon Fajfer, Oka-leczenie [Eyes-ore] (2000), Liberatura vol. 8, Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2009.

I would like to further extend this practice-based project, both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), and the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose.

This article for The disrupted Journal of Media Practice focuses on performative publications and is itself at the same time a performative publication. Written in Hypothes.is this article will hinge upon specific aspects, fragments, and concepts of the original performative project that it engages, entangling the community’s engagements along the way.

Both the article in itself and its design in DJMP raise questions about the architecture and materiality of the book and publishing, including academic publishing, through its discussion of artist books and open access. The interesting discussion is of course how ways of publishing, textual formats, ways of writing, editing and reading relate to different kinds of politics, e.g. institutional, economic, ways of ascertaining quality, etc. These are very important questions, both in global politics (e.g. the discussions on ‘fake news’ and its relation to social media), in institutional politics (e.g. the standards and quality assessment of academic publishing) and in art and literature (e.g. whether readers are able and willing to actually read and understand different forms of texts). In general, it is a question of how the text mediates and transforms the reading, how meaning is produced and how/whether it reaches an audience, whether it is productive of e.g. meaning, knowledge and/or action. It is a discussion of the text between mediator and tool.

It is noteworthy how little has happened after several decades of digital publishing and a plethora of death sentences for books and print: Even though some things have changed and are changing e.g. WWW’s ‘non-linear’ and labyrinthine, multi-cursal (Aarseth 1997) hypertext and the collaborative writing tools and platforms like wikis and social media are part of our everyday textual culture, we still have books and journals. Why? Is it because, as Stuart Moulthrop suggested already in 1991, that although hypertext affords new visions about a shared writing space, the responsibility for changes of this magnitude come from a diverse elite (of software developers, literary theorists, legislators, capitalists) who despite their differences remain allegiant to the institutions of intellectual property (the book, the library, the university, the publishing house). In other words, Moulthrop suggests that “it seems equally possible that engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution.” (Moulthroup 2003 (1991), Andersen and Pold 2014). Is it because of institutional conservatism, because readers are conservative and slowly adapting (as the rather slow development of hypertext seems to suggest), is it a political battle (as the current discussions of the role of digital media, social media versus traditional media might suggest)? And to which extend is it a battle we should go for, if it includes breaking down the kinds of authority that comes with established publication formats and editorial processes (at least the current political climate raises some concerns).

I know that many of these concerns are afterthoughts to an article and a design done before the current situation, and in this sense, they are more reflections that might be relevant for further work. However, the questions remain, whether hypertext and collaborative authoring always leads to more freedom and productive reading/writing? Whether deconstructing the order of the text and its extended argument is always a good thing? We have of course examples of great hypertextual formats that function well as tools and presentation of knowledge, e.g. the encyclopedia, but maybe there are also good reasons to preserve the extended argument of the book and the article? Today it seems simply wrong to assert that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice” (Landow 1992) faced with Trump and Wilders’ tweets. Consequently, I think, the argument of the article and its design could relate to the history of hypertext and electronic literature, though the discussion of artist books and open access publishing is also relevant.

The implementation in DJMP is in many ways exemplary and manages to present the article in nice ways, including the posters, the ability to comment and follow keywords. It allows its reader to access and use the text in different ways, and gives the valuable possibility of commenting and reading other people’s comments. In this it also follows paths from hypertext and electronic literature/digital culture, e.g. Electronic Book Review of A Peer Reviewed Journal About_. The design in many ways affords that it can do as it ‘preaches’, and in this way experiments with different ways of publishing academic texts. This is needed and current academia is not open enough to these kinds of experiments, that are, as argued, much more than making open access a homogeneous project – there is a need for an ongoing critical struggle that includes the forms of publishing. This is necessary, also to reach the popular masses on Twitter and Facebook! Currently, it is a problem, that standardizations within academia driven by STEM standards does not invite for such experiments that would in many cases not even be accepted as examples of academic publication. Also, I want to finish emphasizing that my discussion above is mainly stirred by the qualities of the publication, the important questions and reflections it raises.

References

Andersen, C. U. and S. B. Pold (2014). "Post-digital Books and Disruptive Literary Machines: Digital Literature Beyond the Gutenberg and Google Galaxies." Formules 2014(18): 164-183.<br> Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press.<br> Moulthroup, S. (2003 (1991)). You Say You Want a Revolution. The New Media Reader. N. W.-F. N. Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, The MIT Press: 691-704.<br> Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press.

This closing section has a lot of wonderful bits in it. I think the artfulness of this piece earns you the ability to make a stronger claim in the closing section. Even if it is an impressionistic one. It could even be in the parenthetical describing this last bit of music. I kind of love the parentheticals that offer a bit more substantive commentary on the choice. They feel like productive tangents that brush against the text in a useful way.

So lovely.

I like that this sentence theoretically explains the movement from the "I" to the "we." I wonder if you could call that out more directly with a line like. "We (Peter, Karen, and Katherine) draw our stories together here in order to..."

The writing here is so lovely and precise.

There's a stylistic inconsistency in how each of these sections is presented. I feel like tidying the formatting so that each of these biographical sections has a similar form (and parallel structure) would help keep the reader from veering too far. Honestly, though, I'm loving the mash-up of forms, media, voices. That is working really really well. Just needs a bit more polish as you continue revising.

I find myself wanting this to be the lead-off sentence of the piece. It sets the stage in a way that helps the rest flow from this claim, rather than around it.

I find myself pausing here. I find stronger your emphasis on how critically-engaged practice-based research makes the work better. And I appreciate how auto-ethnomethodology allows different pathways into and out of the work. But this actually feels on the cusp of being regressive. It's a fact of academic culture, certainly, but there is something about practice-based research that transcends (for me) the conventions rather than just kowtowing to them. Think on this two-sentence close. I'm not sure if we need to be brought this far back to earth, as it were ;)

Yes, glad you're bringing this in. The other thing I have been thinking about as I read is Writing Machines by Hayles: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/mediawork/titles/writing/writing_book.html

Find myself thinking about Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/uncreative-writing/9780231149907

Find myself hungering for a fuller anecdote here :)

Yes! Nice turn.

This whole section is very very strong. Really enjoying the trip you're taking me on as a reader.

Might be a stylistic choice. But I feels there's something strange about removing yourself from the claim here. You're talking about auto-enthnomethodology while removing the "I" from your own writing. Even if you don't bring the first person more fully into the whole piece (which I'm in favor of), it feels apropos to at least bring the "I" back to this section.

I wonder if you need this sentence. It feels so broad that I find myself nodding, but I also get pulled right out of the specificity of your previous claim. Would the section work if you just removed this sentence altogether?

Love. And glad this is called out in the formatting. The assertiveness of this propels me into the rest of the section nicely.

You start with a passive sentence, which pushes me further away as a reader. Can you move a main noun and action verb to your opening? Something like "Practice-related research confounds traditional distinctions (and hierarchies) that put our 'work' and the writing we do about that work on two ends of a spectrum." Doesn't have to be that, of course, but looking for a way you can reel the reader in to sit with all the nuance that unfolds throughout this section.

So much life in this bit. A flurry of fields I want to dive more deeply into.

You might consider being even more explicit/assertive. Something like: "Readers will, for all intents and purposes, write the text alongside the authors."

Love this.

This is where the energy really starts to amp up. I wonder if some version of this could be your opening. You can always back up and offer context. A claim like this that wonderfully pushes the discussion forward shouldn't be relegated to the backside of paragraph 3. :)

I love everything in these opening paragraphs, but I feel like I want a bit more of the author at the outset. I think this could all be the second paragraph, and the stage could be set more vigorously with a claim that draws me in.

There is something interesting here about the facilitation of the use of professional equipment, rather than, say, a phone camera; this could be empowering (but the access is temporary – a gift then taken away?), or it could be alienating – a self-portrait produced with strange machinery. The technological dimension is not addressed explicitly, despite the power that inheres within 'pro kit', despite the language of democracy and facilitation that the project uses ("invite", "assist"). I wonder what the rationale was for the use of the medium format camera.

As Ben says here, the process is opened up to scrutiny, becomes 'part of the work', which means that we have to read these images differently – we're not going to fall into the trap of what Gregory Currie calls 'aesthetic empiricism' and judge the photos as art works in a vacuum. But perhaps there's the danger, lurking, of aestheticising the abject? And (although it's probably the seaside setting that prompts this association) the beach photos taken by the participants just occasionally reminded me of some of Martin Parr's New Brighton photographs. So what kinds of photographic language have the participants internalised? Are they conscious or unconscious rhetoricians of the image?

It strikes me that the soundtrack that accompanies the montage presented here (which is much more limited than the gallery exhibition described in the conversation between Anthony and Ben) is as important as the images; it allows us access to the negotiations behind the camera, the handing over of the cable release so that the subject becomes their own object, the pedagogic conversation, the gratitude. But there is always the awareness of a power differential between artist and participant, and of the editing of the sound, the selection of what to include and what to exclude, despite its vérité quality.

Jo Spence is a great reference point, given how she forged such a powerful voice through images of her vulnerable body. Photography was an autoethnographic tool for her – is there an explicit connection to be made here I wonder?

This apparently oxymoronic term that Ben Burbridge uses, 'photo voice' encapsulates a key issue for this project - how a picture 'enunciates'. Anthony, the artist, understands this debate well, and both he and his interlocutor Ben, are aware of the play of meaning here.

Echoes here of the sociological participant observer with, perhaps, the attendant ethical concerns about appropriation. The artist's roles as facilitator, 'voice', 'lens' begin to emerge here.

YES!!! This should be the goal in its entirety. I'm so glad to hear you say "promote a more civil discussion". Too often civil discussions are avoided and, many times in education, not even offered. How are we to sustain a successful democracy without civil discussions being present and offered regularly? How are we to train up successful, contributing citizens without offering civil discussion opportunities with regularity? It can't happen and won't happen, my hope is Hypothes.is can help achieve this!

You're right, however, a culture of civility and inquiry can very easily overpower trolls if it's built correctly. A strong community can withstand many attacks if it's genuineness and civility remain strong!

I share this worry with you! I believe this infringes on the realm of censorship. How can one post something on the web and opt out of web annotation? Seems to be a double standard...I want the public to hear this but I don't want to hear their thoughts. Certainly limits the ability to speak truth to power.

Completely agree here! It is in listening to each other that we progress. Without listening to their readers, authors are simply writing what it is they want, think, need, and feel. Without listening to authors, the readers are necessarily even reading for understanding. It seems cyclical but important to note, I wonder what would happen if we listened to each other more often, especially in the case of web text truly bringing about the "net-working" RK described.

An important establishment in learning from text. How often we presume the author to be the authority. It's important to be open and willing to listen to the ideas of others if we are really seeking expertise. Growing from feedback and criticism is one of my greatest achievements.

It is my hope to see this in all learning environments, too often it is pre-established or determined without respect to learners' needs and interests.

RK is not the only one, I'm still feeling very new as well and learning each time I annotate. The newness is sometimes intimidating but I proceed nonetheless. How might it become more user friendly and inviting to grow the audience and participants?

Great point here, when can I use Hypothes.is on my mobile device? I'm falling behind due to the need of being at a keyboarded laptop. How might be promote equitable access to such great tools?

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

https://hyp.is/dC9gEs-CEeaF06PqJMlnWg/disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/about.html

As a term, performative publications have a lot in common with Katherine Hayles’s concept ‘technotexts’. In her book Writing Machines (itself a technotext, beautifully designed by Anne Burdick in a hybrid print and ‘webtake’ version) Hayles introduces the term technotext as an relative and alternative to concepts such as hypertext and cybertext. She defines a technotext as something that comes about ‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it’ (Hayles 2002, 25) and elsewhere as ‘a book that embodies its own critical concepts (Hayles 2002, 140)’. In Writing Machines Hayles then goes on to analyse 3 technotexts, Talan Memmott’s work of electronic literature Lexia to Perplexia (2000), Tom Phillips artist’s book A Humument (1970), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000).

Scholarly poethics is what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, ethics and poetics are entangled and an ethical engagement is already from the start involved in the production of scholarship, it informs our scholarship. Whilst formulating a narrative around the idea of a scholarly poetics—what it would look like, what it could mean, imply and do and, perhaps most importantly, what it could potentially achieve—in relation to our publishing practices, I want to argue that we should pay more attention to how we craft our own poetics as scholars.

Just as we have internal discussions about the contents of our scholarship, about the methodologies, theories and politics we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should similarly have these kinds of discussions about the way we do research. Thus we should also be focusing on the medial forms, the formats and the graphic space in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices. This ‘contextual’ discussion, focusing on the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the contents of our work. The way we do scholarship informs its ‘outcomes’, what scholarship looks like. It informs the kinds of methodologies, theories and politics we can choose from, and of course, vice versa, these again shape the way we perform our scholarship. A focus on scholarly poethics might therefore be useful in bridging the context/content divide.

So what then is the altered status of a (digital) scholarly poethics today? Which theoretical streams, disciplinary fields, and schools of thought (inside and outside of academia, connecting the arts and the humanities) have specifically incorporated attention to the practices and performances of scholarship and this internal/external divide? Here it would be useful to look to fields such as design, poetry, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, the (radical) open access movement, and—in some instances the digital humanities and in cultural and literary studies—where the way we conduct scholarship can be seen to have been at the forefront of academic inquiries. What can we learn from these discussions and how can we add to and expand them to enrich our understanding of what a scholarly poethics could be(come)? As I envision it a scholarly poethics is not one thing, not a specific prescriptive methodology or way of doing scholarship, it is a plural and evolving process in which content and context co-develop. Scholarly poethics thus focuses on the abundant, and continuously changing material-discursive attitudes towards scholarly practices, research, communication media (text/film/audio) and institutions.

If performative publications are the material expressions or incarnations of specific research projects and processes, entangled with them are various other agencies of production and constraint (i.e. technological, authorial, cultural and discursive agencies, to name just a few). What I want to argue is that performative publications as a specific subset of publications actively interrogate how to align more closely the material form of a publication with its content (in other words, where all publications are performative—i.e. they are knowledge shaping, active agents involved in knowledge production—not all publications are 'performative publications', in the sense that they actively interrogate or experiment with this relation between content and materiality —similar to artist books). Yet in addition to this there is also an openness towards the ongoing interaction between materiality and content which includes entanglements with other agencies, and material forms of constraint and possibility.

This concern for the materiality and form of our publications (and directly related to that the material production and political economy that surrounds a publication) is not a response to what elsewhere as part of a critique of certain tendencies within the field of new materialism is seen as a reaction to ‘the linguistic turn’ (Bruining 2013). On the contrary, I see this as a more direct reaction against perspectives on the digital which perceive digital text as disembodied and as a freeing of data from its material constraints as part of a conversion to a digital environment. However, content cannot be separated that easily from its material manifestations, as many theorist within the digital humanities have already argued (i.e. Hayles, Drucker). Alan Liu classifies this 'database' rhetoric of dematerialization as a religion that is characterised by 'an ideology of strict division between content and presentation' where content is separated from material instantiation or formal presentation as part of an aesthetics of network production and consumption (Liu 2004, 62).

Liberature is a term, concept and genre coined in 1999 by the Polish avant-garde poet Zenon Fajfer, and further developed by his collaborator: literary scholar and theorist Katarzyna Bazarnik. Liberature is literature in the form of the book. Bazarnik and Fajfer define liberature as ‘a literary genre that integrates text and its material foundation into a meaningful whole' (Bazarnik and Fajfer 2010, 1). In the introduction to Fajfer’s collected essays, Bazarnik describes liberature as literary works in which the artistic message is transmitted not only through the verbal medium, but also through the author ‘speaking’ via the book as a whole (Bazarnik 2010, 7). Liberature is therefore a total approach that reaches beyond the linguistic medium, where the material form of the work is essential to its understanding and forms an organic element of the (inseparable) whole. Both Fajfer and Bazarnik emphasise that in liberature, the material book is no longer a neutral container for a text, but becomes an integral component of the literary work.

Katarzyna Bazarnik, Zenon Fajfer, Oka-leczenie [Eyes-ore] (2000), Liberatura vol. 8, Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2009.

Fajfer and Bazarnik make some interesting observations on how in liberature the book does not contain the work, it is the work. In this sense they don’t see the material book as a representation of the work but as something that actively shapes and determines the work.

Their focus on liberatic works is both a reaction to a previous literary context and a plea to authors to take responsibility for the future becoming of literature. First of all, as a specific response in a Polish context (but more wider too), it rallies against literary traditions that see the materiality of the book as non-significant, that classify literature as ‘disembodied’. As Bazarnik and Fajfer state:

If I emphasise this bodily, material aspect so much, it is because Polish literary studies seem still dominated by scholars indebted to Roman Ingarden, a Polish philosopher who ventured into literary studies to produce a highly influential theory of the literary work of art in which he denied its “material foundation” (as he called it) any significance. It was to be passed over and not interfere with reading (Fajfer and Bazarnik 2010).

Secondly, they present liberature as a way out of the ‘crisis of contemporary literature’, which they say has its roots in the continued focus on the text and its meaning, while neglecting the physical shape and structure of the book. This is delimiting the creative possibilities for the author, they claim. As Fajfer writes:

I believe that it is his responsibility to consider the physical shape of the book and all the matters entailed, just as he considers the text (if not to the same extent, he should at least bear them in mind). The shape of the book should not be determined by generally accepted conventions but result from the author’s autonomous decision just as actions of his characters and the choice of words originate from him (Fajfer 2010, 25).

I would like to further extend this practice-based project, both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), and the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose.

This article for The disrupted Journal of Media Practice focuses on performative publications and is itself at the same time a performative publication. Written in Hypothes.is this article will hinge upon specific aspects, fragments, and concepts of the original performative project that it engages, entangling the community’s engagements along the way.

I would like to further extend this practice-based project both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), alongside other projects and practices. As part of this I would like to explore the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose. By using hypothes.is—an open source software/browser extension that enables an annotation layer on top of websites and online files and objects—which for this special disrupted issue of the Journal of Media Practice functions as a way to enable conversations around its processual papers, I would like to draw in these conversations around performative publications by directly setting up a dialogue with various theorists and the works, concepts, practices and values that connect to both this project and to performative publications as I envision them more in general.

This strikes me as a key factor in web annotation reaching the mainstream, especially in education. When an educator asks, "How is this significantly different from leaving comments at the end of an article?" it will be helpful to have a concise, comprehensible and convincing response. When I speak about this, I focus on the "contexting" that web annotation facilitates and the potentiality for authentic audience and dialogue. The problem with both of these points is that a critic can (rightly) respond that existing page-bottom commentary can already allow a degree of both of these.

Just as there is ambiguity around defining a word as simple as open this conversation hints at an emerging struggle with a shared meaning of annotation. As Remi points out, the traditional view of annotation is as a tool acting in service of reading comprehension. What we are talking about goes beyond that.

While Merriam Webster and other disseminators of meaning can add extra definitions to their dictionaries under the word 'annotation', I wonder if an easier path to meaning making might be through using different words. There's a risk that it only leads to complications and muddying the waters over semantics but is it worth considering? I describe it as uptexting (not sure if I thought of that on my own or borrowed from someone else). I've heard University of Texas' Carl Blyth describe this as Social Reading and am drawn to this term because it captures the community aspect and might be less confusing because it doesn't seek to reappropriate an existing, commonly held definition.

Allow me to push back a bit here. While the "canned responses" could, in some environments, build fences around student creativity and expression, it does not have to. From my limited play in the Ponder sandbox, I noticed that students could click on the canned responses OR offer their own annotation just like with Hypothes.is (though I am not sure if the annotation is limited to text). Also, I perceive the canned responses as allowing for scaffolding for younger readers and second language learners.

Yes, this is part of the paradoxical way that open works, as Martin Weller has argued. This is the crux of all of the challenge for me right now.

suggest edit: change to "hopeful."

YES, I agree with this.

Honestly, I am flummoxed about how to respond to the fake news/propaganda thing. Notions of "truth" and "credibility" and "verifiability" are so complicated, and I don't want to be forced by the terms of a fucked up debate to rally around reductive ideas that some things are true and some are false. And then again, I don't want to advocate for an anything-goes approach that makes room for climate- and holocaust-deniers. I am an active user of Snopes. But how do we allow for the richness and complexity of diverse perspectives and non-dominant narratives, while resisting the emerging leftist role of "truth police?" I think H might allow us to do the kind of discursive work-- dialogic work-- that helps here. I don't like to think about that work as fact-checking as much as the critical exposure of epistemologies. We are all biased. Anyone else uncomfortable with the idea that if we just science enough (or whatever) we can get to some kind of pure, irrefutable truth? How could that end up hurting the causes we are trying to advance?

Interesting phrase. Thinking about how all spaces are social (I think?) and all are built (I think?), and so what exactly makes the sociality or structure of a space "open"? Could it have to do not just with inclusivity, but also with the decentering effect that resists boundaries and borders-- and maybe therefore meaning? Invoking Homi Bhabha here in thinking about how margins define centers (not vice versa) and wondering if part of what feels politically important about web annotation is the way that it decenters the text itself, makes it incomplete, multi-authored, dynamic. And that will both challenge master-narratives and maybe also challenge meaning itself, which can be alienating to participants and a challenge to community building. Sorry-- I used to teach Intro Lit Crit. :)

I know I am basically just another lit crit perspective here, but honestly that background-- particularly as a poststructuralist and probably as a postmodernist--inflects so much of my thinking about what the web is and can be. I think moving from English to Interdisciplinary Studies has also made me value the perspective that sees all knowledge as always incomplete; I love that my new field has a core value of noting that there is always another perspective, even if it's not visible or known yet. So when I work with students on the web-- especially in "intro" courses that are supposed to indoctrinate them to the core principles and theories of Interdisciplinary Studies-- I like to present the web as a space that allows and supports dynamism rather than stasis (process over product). But this is so out of line with so much about how teachers think about "public" writing and projects; we want them to be "portfolio" worthy, tidy, complete. When student work is flawed, I think it's a reminder to us about how we can think of all scholarly work. I love that H lets us focus on critique without a requirement that we devalue the work-- in fact, quite the opposite (we critique what has value and potential and impact and utility...). Just thinking out loud, but I think this aspect of "open-endedness" is really the core (ha ha-- irony) of so many of my areas of interest right now.

Thinking about this term, and about preceding it with "everyday." Wondering how one becomes this, whether it can ever be mundane without erasing the privilege inherent in the status.

So much of this resonates after reading Martin Weller's wonderful little post today (and the awesome PPT embedded therein): http://blog.edtechie.net/openness/the-paradoxes-of-open-scholarship/

Wow what a question. I can't wait to see what other people have to say. It seems like it would be easy to come up with ways that are not civil, or trustworthy, online discourse - but to frame this as which conditions are created is far more powerful.

As I mentioned in an earlier annotation, I think much of this has to do with shifting personal epistemology through the process of discourse with "authorities" and authors, the societal weighting of evidence and supportive information, and the interaction among participants and text at various levels. But there is a whole lot there that can go wrong. I love all of the occasions I've had to interact with others via hypothes.is thus far, but it does strike me that they have been primarily among peers with similar perspectives, epistemology, ideals, and academic background as myself. And perhaps that is a good place to start- modeling constructive and supportive behaviors in certain communities of practice?

Edit to add: I think the social expectation that comes with using hypothes.is the way I have (through annotation flash mobs and annotatathons) is important. Having annotated this article as separate from a flash mob type event I find myself constantly checking back for new annotations, commentary, and responses. Web annotation for me has become inherently a cooperative and collaborative practice.

something we should always ask ourselves, and ask ourselves repeatedly

in the same line of thought as with choral explanations?

I think there are particular personal epistemological assumptions tied up in this, that impact not only how we wish web annotation to be used, but how it functionally can and will primarily be used. If you approach knowledge as something coming from an authority, it is very hard to fathom being able to create it yourself, or talk back to it, even if those platforms exist. Conversely, if you think any opinion is valid, because knowledge is completely subjected as individual "truths" then I think you end up with what we see in a majority of places on the internet that allow discourse... I wonder if, and suspect that, hypothes.is could a powerful tool in shifting personal epistemology - especially where the text creators or "authorities" engage with annotators and the comments they pose...

...forgive me, I bring everything back to personal epistemologies

As always, so glad you did.

What sort of digital literacy does this require?

Are there standards for citing web annotations? How do we acknowledge and credit this shared authorship?

I think this is such a powerful motivation for using web annotation as a component of peer-review and academic conversations.

I love the idea of the public playground, and I think that concept along with the affordances of hypothes.is, say something about the relative safety net of open annotation. Like a public playground, it is not without risk to those participating; however, a degree of anonymity is still offered. You can disconnect your hypothes.is user information from your identity. This can, of course, be both a good and bad thing in generating commentary, but is an important feature of this particular "openness"

I also just love the connection to "play"

Could we perhaps use tags or groups to functionally sort through the layers of "noise" ? Perhaps things like: content critique, meta, grammatical nuances, etc?

There’s also a growing culture of people on Twitter hacking the microblogging platform as an annotation tool. They call them Screenshorts, Tweets that use screenshots of highlighted text to ground commentary. To me it’s just web annotation 1.0. But they’re just trying to be good English students, right?

From a pedagogical and rhetorical perspective, at least, an annotated Trump speech is more effective than a random comment out there in the ether of the net. Similarly, a close read of the Clinton emails I believe would reveal there’s not much of a story there. But as a culture, we are not engaging with politics in that way, and we would be better off if we did.

Interrupted seems like such a harsh word here. Perhaps punctuated fits better? You don't have to interrupt reading the conversation with the annotations, but you can. Of course in a journal of disruptive media, maybe interruption is exactly the disruption desired...

Burn!

Vote for UniverCity!

I've proposed a workshop to the Future Architecture platform, organised by the Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. The idea is that the ideas arising from the UniverCity forum can be worked through in discussion about the possibility of a future form of architectural visualisation not tied down to images of completed buildings. Renderings of unpredictability, of occupation, of diverse public knowledges. Vote online: and browse the other projects too.

Postoccupant took part in a workshop organised by UCL Urban Lab and Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, exploring the impact of University development projects in Newham (London) and Gothenburg (Sweden). 2 days of discussion, and a great series of presentations on subjects as diverse as activist histories of East London, the agonistic politics of university expansion here and overseas, territorial complexity and public space, workshopping architecture for communities in Bangladesh and London, and the V and A's approach to community engagement. Many more, and the conversations ranged far and wide.<br> See the post on UniverCity here... http://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=209

It is so refreshing to read a researcher - outside of dance academe - acknowledging the critical (in both sense) importance of gut instincts in guiding research enquiry. Somatic practice teaches that the gut - being the first organ to form in utero and thus a primitive 'nervous’ system - remains our first and more responsive ‘sense’, before conscious, prefrontal neural processing (e.g. see Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's Sensing Feeling Action (1993) or Linda Hartley's Wisdom of the Body Moving (1995)).

While academe is becoming more aware of or preoccupied with dissolving mind-body binary, and the validity of embodied and practice-based enquiry, having the bravery to pursue research that is guided by these things FIRST, with logocentric critical discourse only following subsequently is really important, but seems to be practised less than it is proposed.

For Long performative publications are directly connected to the idea of practice, where following the concept of performativity, he argues that ideas should be put to practice, where practice can further inform and enrich ones ideas again. Long applies these values directly to several of his own performative projects. In his book The Socratic and Platonic Politics: Practicing a Politics of Reading, he shows how Socratic philosophy and Platonic writing was designed to cultivate dialogue and community. By digitally enhancing his publication, Long explores how writing and reading can promote community in a digital context, in specific a community of collaborative readers. As Long argues:

If, however, the book is not to be a mere abstract academic exercise, it will need to be published in a way that performs and enables the politics of collaborative reading for which it argues. (Long 2012)

https://youtu.be/-f9N1n-4cI8

A further extension of this project is a podcast series titled Digital Dialogue which aims to cultivate dialogue in a digital age by engaging other scholars in open conversation online. Long is also involved in the Public Philosophy Journal project, which is specifically set up to crawl the web to find diverse positions on various philosophical subjects and to bring these together in a collaborative writing setting. As Long explains:

The PPJ is designed to crawl the web, listening for conversations in which philosophical ideas and approaches are brought to bear on a wide variety of issues of public concern. Once these conversations are curated and a select number chosen for further development, we will invite participants into a space of collaborative writing so they can work their ideas up into a more fully formulated scholarly article or digital artifact. (Chris Long 2013)

What is certain is that poetics in general, and narratology in particular, must not limit itself to accounting for existing forms or themes. It must also explore the field of what is possible or even impossible without pausing too long at that frontier the mapping out of which is not its job. Until now, critics have done no more than interpret literature. Transforming is now the task at hand. That is certainly not the business of theoreticians alone; their role is no doubt negligible. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice?

(Genette 1988, 157)

Just been invited by Clare Melhuish from UCL Urban Laboratory to participate in a symposium this November. Title: 'Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future.' We'll be looking at UCL East and the University of Gothenburg in the context of University developments in urban contexts. The forum will feed into this.

Is this true within an academic publishing context? First copy costs remain substantially high: editing, review, typesetting, server and band with costs, marketing etc. are still part of a digital only model. One thing that is important to explore though is what these first copy costs consist off in a digital context, to explore from there what the profit margin is that publishers put on top (plus cost for printing etc.). This could lead to the development of perhaps a more fair and transparent system based on actual costs. For books the OAPEN-NL project tried to do exactly this: https://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/oapen-nl-final-report.pdf

One of the complaints I hear more and more often from academics is that traditional publishing houses are actually no longer doing this work. Editing and formatting are increasingly outsourced to academics themselves (as are indexing etc.) and even marketing is something publishers ask authors to so themselves using their social media profiles and academic brands. This is one of the issues many scholar-led publishing initiatives are trying to address, by highlighting for example the various processes that go into creating a scholarly publication and giving these due recognition. Mattering Press is at the forefront of this:https://www.matteringpress.org/

http://www.csisponline.net/2014/06/18/from-openness-to-openings-reflections-on-the-experiments-in-knowledge-production-workshop/

If this special issue of Ephemera ever comes out (I have been keeping an eye out for it but nothing as yet) it might be highly relevant for this discussion: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/content/labour-academia-0 Back issues of Ephemera do cover topics related to this discussion too though, so might be a relevant resource anyway (and OA!)

And most of what actually comprises our work in the 21st Century, such as this kind of discussions, will never give us any "points" in the "game" of publishing, where only the final outcomes (that are still produced under a pre-digital, Gutenbergian paradigm) count for something. A system oriented to quantification and control over 19th century media. Please note I am not saying that I would prefer that my tweets counted toward my career, but indeed further highlighting the inconsistencies and absurdity of the current academic publishing policies (and market).

It is interesting, in comparing foucauldian and cybernetic conceptualisations of power (Wiener, 1948, and especially Von Foerster, 2002) to highlight similarities and differences. While both constructions are deeply relational, showing how power is not simply imposed but co-constructed, the cybernetic ideal is markedly (and maybe deceivingly) more optimistic, by focusing on the mutuality of this relationship. Maybe only a plurality of epistemologies and points of view can help us successfully navigate and resist the pervasivity of power.

'Altered books tap into our collective heightened interest in books as objects. Physical books, as differentiated from digital versions, tend to trigger memories, both visual and tactile.' (Kuhn, 2013: 11). The question of what will be left behind of the digital is a curious one here, perhaps. While we know what film and a physical book leave behind, the traces of their existence are still present (film strip, video tape, paper), what will be left behind of digital works (books)? What traces do digital forms leave behind?

See the idea of 'altered books', or bookworks, as defined by Doug Beube, as presented in 'Art Made From Books' by Alyson Kuhn, which looks at the conceptual underpinnings of artists books but also art made form books whereby the physical material of the book functions as a material and a platform to exercise ideas.

For the changing guises and forms of a book, see The Book Is Alive blog, which displays book 'as an evolving, open and visual medium' that is curated and alive, thus its shape and content can change.

See for example an experiment concerning gestures of reading and writing, 'unruly gestures.' 'unruly gestures: seven cine-paragraphs on reading/writing practices in our post-digital condition' is a performative essay for 'Shifting Layers. New Perspectives in Media Archaeology Across Digital Media and Audiovisual Arts' edited by Miriam De Rosa and Ludovica Fales (Mimesis International, 2016). In it we aspire to break down preconceptions about gestures of reading/writing that relate to their agency, media-specificity, (linear) historicity and humanism. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists tried to subvert established traditions of authorship, intentionality and linearity, this visual essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs, accompanied by text.

A number of recently curated sources explore this idea in a similar manner. See for example Photomediations: An Open Book.

This is a really clear breakdown of the different kinds of contributions a practice-related research project can make, especially in creative practice. As you say these categories are not mutually exclusive, and I think often the way they bleed is most interesting for creative practice research.

I think perhaps another aspect that is part of this conversation is 'intention'. This for me is the difference between the kind of research and contribution artists make as opposed to researchers (that use an art practice as part of their research). A researcher's intentions need to have a scope beyond their own practice. The intention also needs to have a trajectory beyond that singular project. When I say 'intention' I do not mean a clear set of guidelines and questions that unfold logically and rationally toward a clear point. I just listened to a lecture by Pia Ednie-Brown at RMIT University who named intention as a tension between the involuntary and the elicited. It includes both discovery and invention.

UniverCity on Twitter #univercity @postoccupant

Just posting here to share this content about academia and Twitter... some good links to further discussion of digital academia...

'Digital platforms, from Twitter and personal blogs to e-journals and iterative monographs, are creating new ways to publish and new publishing opportunities. In this new model of academic publishing, Twitter interactions exist on the same spectrum of activity as peer-review and scholarly editing. But more importantly, new models for scholarly publication are creating new ways to engage in public scholarship beyond traditional publication, fundamentally blurring the boundaries between publication, conversation, and community.'

http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/beyond-academic-twitter/

I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?

One possibility of the blog as a research method might perhaps be that it aids in the creation of what I have called elsewhere 'differential publications'. In my own thesis, which made use of a research blog as part of its practical methodology, I used a blog to specifically highlight the processual and collaborative nature of research. A blog allowed me to do this better than traditional print-based (or email-based) forms of communication could in that respect. Yet, it also remains rather limited in what it can do as a medium, and blogs still tend to have a strong authorial voice, and remain limited in their collaborative and multimodal possibilities. Also see: http://www.openreflections.org/?page_id=45

The research blog or blogging as a research method is an intriguing question indeed. But what makes a blog, or better said, the specific usage of a blog into a suitable scholarly 'method' -- for you and/or for others? A blog in itself is a medium/a publishing platform. A method then is a certain approach to a blog, how you implement it into research strategies. If you make the case for (a specific use of) a blog, what makes it a potentially more useful research method (for you and others) than, for example, methods based on the usage of other (print-based) media?

They shouldn't be! After all, in a lot of ways, no matter what our purpose in creative practice -- whether for research or not -- it nonetheless is a form of research. We are experimenting with art, trying to be better, get better. It's always research in an implicit sense. What makes it explicitly research is when it is incorporated into a defined methodology that allows us to explore and respond to specific research questions, and to communicate how the practice helps us answer those questions. Ideally, it should be a symbiotic relationship.

Also, who defines what is "good"? The academy? Research councils? Consumers? Prize committees?

Depends on the research question, and whether or not it is applicable as research.

I think this is a key element in practice-based research in media in general - if we look at the creative practice as analogous to data (in the sciences, for example), then we still have to make the contribution to knowledge explicit through a statement of research and/or exegesis. The sciences don't just throw raw data at each other and ask one another to figure out what its contribution is - that's what papers and reports are for. I can tell you a lot of them don't like writing it up either! But at its core, isn't that what research is -- collecting data, analyzing it, and communicating it explicitly to others in the field (and even outside the field)?

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