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!

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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