Oh this was such a nice project... so sad it dissappeared...

Not sure I am following this step...

Experiments both make existingn 'natural' systems more visible while providing new imaginaries. Quite similar

Sounds similar to how we perceive experimental publishing

It is never changed well from above...

This is where I struggle with folks implementing infrastructures. I am not sure infrastructures need to rely on standardisation

This also reflects infrastructures' inherent conservatism.

Lots of our project work concerned with this question of course.

I am still not quite sure this article has outlined what a radical archival framework is, a summary/reflection based on the case studies would have been great.

Example? Evidence?

Governance again seems key here

This argument would have been much stronger with an example.

Of course there is an issue with ownership of traditional knowledge but this is all a bit generalised.

This seems to imply that community archives do not hold power? There are always power relations at work in any archive.

Funding vs governance

Yes, this is interesting.

I think this has been a key argument in the last 70 years of archival studies...

An editor/tutor should have picked up on this, not citing original sources...

There does seem to be some clear institutionalisation happening here though... And arguably is a private house really more accessible than a public building in all instances?

But is this a community archive or an organisational archive? And what is the difference?

That's very cool

Community here as opposed to public? Are we talking about a geographical aspect here, i.e. local communities?

That's very cool, but many instutional archives work with forms of crowdsourced archiving/citizen science

This is very much a straw man argument, there isn't really such a thing as 'traditional archiving' anymore one can argue, and the author does not provide evidence for this either.

Hmmm yes, as I expected...

This is very cool, the case studies seem much more relevant here than the theory.

To be fair, this is not exactly a novel approach/critique of the archive (although the critique still holds of course)... Not quite sure what 'traditional' archival frameworks are referred to here.

Interesting, but can this work not also be done/is it not also done in existing institutions? Just also thinking about issues of resources, longevity, standards etc. as a potential counterargument.

I wonder if this article will touch on the issue of institutionalisation, arguably a lot of archives/cultural institutions start small and become more institutionalised.

Comment by chrisaldrich: This was eventually published at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682753.2017.1362168 which also has additional links/references.

Comment by onewheeljoe:

For example, we might simply ask that each participant refrain from using hashtags as a final thought because that is a form of sarcasm or punchline that can be misconstrued or shut down honest debate or agreeable disagreement.

We could ask respondents to reply to any comment that they read twice because of tone to use "ouch" as a tag or a textual response. The offending respondent could respond with "oops" in order to preserve good will in an exchange of ideas.

Finally, the first part of a flash mob might occur here, in the page notes, where norms could be quickly negotiated and agreed upon with a form of protocol.

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 danallosso: To what extent does the fact that Hypothesis annotations show up in our feeds (and are thus useful for us tracking our movement through texts) while mere highlights do not, determine usage patterns ?

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 danallosso: In another sense, though, it makes the reader's process more visible so that the reader no longer needs to trespass into the author's territory. I've always been dissatisfied with the lit-crit position that the author must be completely decentered and her contribution minimized to make room for the reader. THIS seems to create a real space for the reader, and in so doing maybe it also allows the author to reclaim some of her space.

Comment by actualham: YES, I agree with this.

Comment by chrisaldrich: "Information" is another word that might fit into this group of over-saddled words.

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 silvertwin: Does this undersell your contribution? By which I mean, this looks like it's restating an opposition - between authority and 'the people' that takes us back to Gilmoor and others, Clay Shirky even, but what's happening here is disrupting such binaries? Or - and this may be another tangent you don't need - it's like Ranciere's stuff on the pedagogic relation - something like 'flipped' only inverts the relation, it doesn't disrupt it necessarily?

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 danallosso: Interesting -- what would it look like to have a shared annotation layer that could be accessed by a variety of tools?

Comment by actualham: Yes. This.

Comment by chrisaldrich: This explanation also highlights an additional idea of open itself. I have heard many in the W3C space criticize the open standard of web annotation arrived at because of the ultimate monoculture of the space. Most of the participants of the process were all related to Hypothes.is in some way and the result was a single product that implemented the standard. To my knowledge no other companies, groups, or individual programmers have separately implemented the standard.

In this sense, while the "standard" is openly defined, it isn't as open as other standards which were mote slowly evolved and implemented gradually and more broadly by various programming languages and disparate groups.

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 chrisaldrich: One of the pieces missing from Hypothes.is is the curateable notebook which more easily allows one to create new content from one's annotations.

Search is certain there, but being able to move the pieces about and re-synthesize them into new emergent pieces is the second necessary step.

Comment by chrisaldrich: Not to mention the fact that the experiment will continue on into the future past the official publication.

Comment by chrisaldrich: I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

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 chrisaldrich: There's something discordant here in a scholarly article about having academic participants with names like SenorG and actualham. It's almost like a 70's farce starring truckers with bizarre CB handles. It's even more bizarre since I know some of the researchers behind these screennames.

Is the pseudonymous nature of some of these handles useful in hiding the identity of the participants and thereby forcing one to grapple only with their ideas and not the personas, histories and contexts behind them?

Comment by chrisaldrich: Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

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 onewheeljoe: In that way, using a digital, sharable sticky note matters. Anyone can make a mess with sticky notes and a more skilled respondent can support another's meaning making with sticky notes.

Comment by onewheeljoe: What do annotations in an edited volume of Shakespeare communicate to a struggling 9th grade reader? It strikes me that reader-text interactions always leave meaning negotiable, messy and interaction dependent.

Does this question attempt to rubric-ize the notes we'd put in margins?

Comment by onewheeljoe: This question seems like it should be more specific to disciplines. What is annotation in the legal world? How about for scientists? For beginning readers?

If I'm annotating a text to make meaning, that's different than if I'm a prof annotating a historical text to provide relevant background. The two notes have only their "noteness" in common, I'd say.

Comment by onewheeljoe: Neatness matters for teachers who have to keep track of the artifacts students create as writers. If my students are doing great work but I can't see it, I'm disorganized as a teacher. In the online instructional space it is even more important that teachers can see a footprint. If a tool leaves it to chance whether a student's work will be found by the teacher or a stranger, it is a messy tool, from a teacher's perspective.

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 silvertwin: Does this, then, also do something to disrupt the discourse of 'impact' as currently articulated / imposed by REF etc?

Comment by Whippo: It may be a challenge, but it shouldn't be very hard. The hypothe.is R package is a good start in creating a data science workflow. This workflow would have a clear advantage in higher education... especially in academic disciplines that use R.

Comment by onewheeljoe: I'd be interested to know how you test this theory, or hypothesis. What does user feedback look like? How is it analyzed?

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 BMBOD: oh right, authoritative scholarly voice... guess I should leave out all those "I think"s... ;)

now I am just adding noise; this can be deleted.

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 BMBOD: +1

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 onewheeljoe: Great question because it shows how our language evolves as we learn in much the same way we do.

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 onewheeljoe: Teachers ask for textbooks all the time and insist that student's online work stay inside a walled garden LMS. Profs, too. Empathic listening reveals that they are not novices but professionals with legitimate concerns.

Comment by jeremydean: Burn!

Comment by onewheeljoe: Agreed that tone matters. Open standards are real things but the word open has been evolving since it was first uttered and it predates Linux and the Apache server.

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 onewheeljoe: This is a conversation I heard as I worked with Karen Fasimpaur on various projects beginning with P2PU. She used to hold to a rigid conception of the word open that prevails in web design communities, before accepting more nuanced definitions of the word as she worked more with learners in open spaces.

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 otterscotter:

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 SenorG: This term is new to me. It really catches my attention while at the same time making me wonder whether there is such a thing as a published text that is not performative. Is the act of publishing - even if as an annotation in the margins of a niche academic journal where it is unlikely to ever be discovered by another set of eyes - inherently performative, regardless of author intent and potentiality for audience?

Comment by amidont: There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

Comment by onewheeljoe: The analytics of this article as inquiry are to some degree plain to interested readers. If a reader wants to test out the hypothesis that the conversation will be "interrupted," all they have to do is check the margins. I'm curious about the choice of the word interrupted, tho. Won't bookworms in these margins build on the conversation, the way kids in a sandbox build with what they find? Do annotations interrupt or do they make plain the reader-text interactions?

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 onewheeljoe: This reminds me of Paul Allison's LRNG playlist in which youth have to choose keywords associated with their own inquiry questions.

Comment by silvertwin: General point - I've been asked to join in this dialogue but it is already very rich and substantial so opting to add only a couple of comments rather than reinvent the wheel.

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 k_wimpenny: Hi, this is my first entry, I have uploaded our ideas for our paper 'Remembering, Reflecting, Returning', we (Peter, Karen and I) want to explore creative ways of sharing our poetry through our images and accompanying music alongside scholarly critique. Annual leave is approaching but we look forward to engaging in conversation with this exciting community!

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 drneilfox: Hello. This is my first entry. Dario and I plan to create a podcast that has three elements:

1) A formal exploration of the podcast form using our own podcast as a case study. 2) A discussion around academic research and the podcast. 3) A discussion around the 'disruptive journal' featuring input from JMP contributors.

The aim is to construct a text that operates as a viable and valid piece of research and also is reflexive regarding the changing nature of academic research.

We will be talking in person late July following some leave and will be emailing disruptive JMP participants shortly to invite them to participate.

For now I listening to podcasts to prepare, and recommend the latest NPR Invisibilia episode on problem solving, and any episode of the brilliant Longford Podcast.

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 Alan_Hook: There are different mixes between the way the streams are produced, is this intentional? The first has both music and poetry through both ears, the second has one in each, is this intentional?

Comment by Alan_Hook: I think that there needs to be a base coat of Narrative Research methods to help to understand the approach to the generation of knowledge and how the particular extrudes out into a wider contribution to new knowledge

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 Alan_Hook: would it make more sense here for this to shift from make do to make due

Comment by Alan_Hook: sat at a

Comment by Alan_Hook: There needs to be a meta-communicative channel that helps to orientate the reader between the different research personas

Comment by Alan_Hook: me

Comment by Alan_Hook: This needs to be introduced earlier to help frame the research process as it is a recurring theme. I would argue that the authorship is also a bricolage rather than a co-authorship, and framed in this way can help guide the readers interpretation.

Comment by Alan_Hook: I think that there always needs to be a positioning of the 'I'. The authors have separated and created distinct authorial personas and positions which should be highlighted throughout the work, especially given the connectedness of some of the relationships

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 Alan_Hook: I think this gives context to the approach. There are many ways that practice researchers position what they do, and this sometimes needs to be foregrounded to help the reader orientate the approach and other researchers understand, and be less resistant too the multiplicity of forms that research can take.

Comment by Alan_Hook: There are issues from a readers perspective in how fragmented this is and how it jumps between people, viewpoints etc. Is there another way of presenting this in the journal which makes the flow easier to navigate. There are a lot of authorial styles and voices which the reader/viewer needs to juggle which cause tensions.

Comment by Alan_Hook: There is a break in the paper to provide a back-story, which maps the researchers relationship to the process which is important and has been outlined as an important process in Design based research. This research narrative positions the research subject, and their bias, in relationship to the research outputs, so that the reader can understand how the new knowledge is shaped, and contorted by the researchers subjective encounters with the research process.

This research process is important for more traditional researchers as there needs to be a solid foundation of this as research for the sceptical.

Comment by Alan_Hook: I had considered this a process of bricolage rather than juxtapositioning. My reading might be wrong, but there is interesting tensions between static images, temporal media such as music, historical context and reconfiguring these to represent something different.

Comment by Alan_Hook: This paragraph shifts the focus from data representation to data source. There needs to be some clarity here, is this a cyclical process. As this sets out some of the bounds of the argument then it becomes a little confusing as to how the authors consider the poems as data. There should be a consideration of the mediating process in this data collection and representation if they are to consider them as data.

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 Alan_Hook: I think that you need to expand, i would guess as a reader that this has something to do with the transitional nature of the organic material, and its becoming or inbetweeness but i think that you need to explain more about the authorial decisions to help guide the interpretation of the work.

Comment by Alan_Hook: This approach is really important to open up the complexity and 'messiness' (Law 2004) of the generation of new knowledge. It works against the positivism of other research intensive disciplines, but is there a tension in-between the output of research activities opening a space for consideration and reflection and the miscommunication of the new knowledge that has been generated?

Comment by Alan_Hook: I think that there needs to be a recognition of some of the instrumental constraints of research as practice. It would be nice to see the accompanying 300 words for this as a research output as there is a lot of complexity to the work and the authorial process that is not apparent through the practice itself

Comment by Gary_Hall: Is this the JMP style. Aren't articles in journals and books usually indicated using quote marks?

Comment by postoccupant: It seems, at the end, I chickened out and produced a pat conclusion. I need to keep the writing 'boiling,' not to bring it down to any kind of conclusion about 'how to think x.' If I am trying to write against causality, the paper needs to remain open - and this means seeing it as an open structure, a mechanism, not an ornament. I have to go through this again. My ideas right now are about bringing this all back to the metaphor of construction - that this is at one and the same time a 'brick' or a piece of a 'ruin.' I'm grateful to my reviewers who have provided useful points for refining the argument - but what is really valid is the fact of their contribution.

Now, do I rewrite, perfect, refine and produce a 'complete' textual artefact, relegating all comments to my 'research file' - something secondary, annotations in the margin? Or, in the spirit of the Disrupted Journal, keep the paper in its annotated form and put it forward for publication as-is? Thoughts on a post-card please! (with acknowledgements to Derrida!)

Comment by bali: should this be an indented quote? it seems like the entire paragraph is a quote...

Comment by bali: very interesting idea - the project, and how it is unrepresentable because it occupies the space of the traditional institution even while challenging it

Comment by bali: Never seen this word before

Comment by Gary_Hall: The oldest university in Europe is the University of Bologna. It was founded in 1088. Isn't this before the Enlightenment?

Comment by bali: Small point. Rose et al's italics or yours, Adam? If Adam then you should claim that after the citation, i think

Comment by Gary_Hall: Isn't Matthew Fuller working on this kind of grey literature? Might be worth checking out.

Comment by bali: That's very interesting. Could you give examples of how resistance might be represented or portrayed in the real building vs the architectural representation of it before it exists physically? Are we talking graffiti? People using space in ways it wasn't intended for?

Comment by bali: Wow, I love this point! Making me think in many directions!

Comment by bali: This paragraph seems to be coming out of nowhere. Like it isn't clear why we are now talking about your labor and mechanisation. But I am sure you have a point there and a reason why you inserted this here. But you need to help the reader see that connection.

Comment by Gary_Hall: Is the bureaucratic control you refer to really as total as you seem to be suggesting?

Comment by bali: I would clarify to readers what is different or special about CGI renderings here

Comment by bali: Again, really liking how you are making this point explicit

Comment by Gary_Hall: This is interesting. Can you say more about how the ideas of these undergraduates etc. constitute unrepresented knowledges?

Comment by Gary_Hall: Is it just capital? Is there nothing in your work that escapes capture by capital?

Comment by bali: You may want to expand on these points. The multidisciplinary nature of your writing means that most of it is understandable to people from a critical stance (so far) but some terms will be completely new. To me, dreamwork is completely new.

Comment by Gary_Hall: This is one understand of what a university is. But there are others. For example, the UK government's emphasis on 'impact' is surely about making universities produce knowledge that is very tangible and instrumental-- certainly enough for it to be capable of being measured. Hence also the REF. Do you need to articulate which understanding of the university you are working with here?

Comment by postoccupant: There is a huge architectural metaphor I have yet to make the most of - if later I draw on the caricature of contemporary attitudes to research as the accumulation of factual 'bricks' (Bernard Forscher (1962) quoted in Gary Rolfe, see references) and oppose it to Bill Readings' notion that the University is in ruins, and that this is something that can be seen as productive, against attempts to aestheticize these ruins. Which is something the CGI University definitely attempts to do! He writes about 'the University as a space for a ... structurally incomplete practice of thought... (I)t is imperative to accept that the University cannot be understood as the natural or historically necessary receptacle for such activities, that we need to recognize the University as a ruined institution, one that has lost its historical raison d'etre. At the same time, the University has, in its modern form, shared modernity's paradoxical attraction to the idea of the ruin, which means that considerable vigilance is required in disentangling this ruined status from a tradition of metaphysics that seeks to re-unify those ruins, either practically or aesthetically.' (Readings, p. 19) CGI as the continuation of metaphysics by other means? Much to do here...

Comment by Gary_Hall: Do you need to establish that the university is a space designed to contain absolute uncertainty.? At the moment you are just asserting that it is. Don't you need to make a persuasive argument to this effect?

Comment by bali: Love this question! I had never thought of it before.

Comment by silvertwin: I am fascinated by a pedagogy of forgetting, need to read more.

Comment by silvertwin: There is a tension here, in the 'in between' status of what's presented for review. On the one hand, the curational and participative practices, partly ethnographic (though not stated as such) are documented as practice research, but on the other witness testimony, mainly written, is presented as 'data' (or equivalent) so the disruption appears to be in the act of curation (ie the un-collecting) but it's less clear how the format of the 'output' proposed here is disrupting the orthodoxies of capturing research evidence?

Comment by samoore_: I think this is a really interesting take on OA as necessarily embedded in the medium itself. However, I think it would be helpful for you to add one more paragraph or sentence here to make fully explicit the link between open access and the architectural features of the scholarly medium. It took me a couple of reads to fully understand this paragraph.

Comment by samoore_: Does academia.edu not want to also emulate the profit margins of the large commercial publishers? Only here, it wants to exploit transactional data among its users and charge for 'add-on' services, thus creating new forms of enclosure. See: http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/106236504/The%20Academia_edu%20Files

Comment by samoore_: I think you need another paragraph here to show just how much the large commercial publishers have hoovered up public funding for APCs (in the UK at least). See: https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.72/ (Table 2).

Comment by Gary_Hall: OHP used to, during the initial five years of our OHP monograph project, which began in 2009. We are not working with Michigan now, though.

Comment by Gary_Hall: This section on open access seems almost to be positioned as a solution to some of the problems discussed previously in relation to Elsevier. Yet can't Elsevier in some respects be understood as one of the largest of open access publishers? (For more, see the recent discussion of 'Elsevier As An Open Access Publisher' on the GOAL email list.)

Comment by samoore_: This is related to the point above. Harvard has an endowment of $35.7 billion. (http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance-history.html.) and can clearly afford all the resources it needs.

The reason I say this is because such institutions may be in a position to take the publishing process in-house, away from large corporations, and compensate the editorial labour mentioned above.

Comment by samoore_: While I agree that they have already seen the writing on the wall for the subscription system, they have rapidly moved into APC-based publishing and ‘vertical integration’ of its products by trying to access the data for all aspects of the publishing process (see their purchase of SSRN for example). It’s the data that is most valuable here and allows them to sell services to universities and other institutions.

Comment by samoore_: It might be worth briefly summarising Schmitt's argument here.

Comment by samoore_: In fact, the pull of high-reputation is so strong that roughly a quarter of those who do sign the boycott still end up publishing in an Elsevier journal http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frma.2016.00007/full

Comment by Gary_Hall: I'm not sure about this. One of the requests we often get at Open Humanities Press, for example, concerns whether we can provide people who want to start an open access journal with free or at least affordable server space.

Comment by samoore_: This is true, but does it not somewhat diminish your argument above about the workload pressures of academics? Universities require academics to publish more and more, for fewer career opportunities, and at the same time publishers are pushing increasing amounts of the labour onto academics. Would a disruptive approach be one in which universities provide time and space for editorial/publishing responsibilities?

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/

Comment by samoore_: This point is completely true, but is it not also the fault of universities who perpetuate this system? Publishers merely exploit it. I feel it's quite difficult to talk about disrupting the journal without also talking about disrupting the increasingly privatised university too.

Comment by Gary_Hall: Yes, following on from Sam's comment, do you need to provide some evidence to support this claim? What about journals published by scholarly societies, or by university presses? Aren't they valued even more than those owned by large corporations precisely because the latter are seen as possibly being motivated more by money than an interest in supporting high-quality scholarship?

Comment by samoore_: I'm not sure how true this clause is. I think large corporations own a disproportionate number of journals but I think they're valued just as much as those owned by smaller commercial publishers (e.g., Sage) or not-for-profits (university presses, PLOS, etc.)

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 samoore_: This section could do with fleshing out. There are a number of similar instances around accessibility for disadvantaged communities (https://jhatkaa.org/oxford-cambridge-university-press-drop-the-lawsuit/); Publishers attacking fair use for universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_Press_v._Patton); Commercial publishers in the UK seeking to control public access to research with 'walk-in' services https://www.elsevier.com/connect/free-access-to-research-at-your-local-uk-public-library

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 Gary_Hall: Isn't it more often the other way round? Many authors are currently writing about the power associated with digital capitalist companies such as Google, Twitter and WhatsApp (Facebook). But they are doing so in 'ink-printed' books, copyrighted to for-profit presses (such as Polity, who distribute their titles through John Wiley and & Sons Ltd., one of the 'big four,' profit-maximising, scholarly publishing mega-corporations, along with Reed Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor & Francis/Informa), and published on an all-rights-reserved basis, with little appreciation of the issues of power (or hypocrisy) involved in doing so. And this includes many media archaeologists and software theorists. They, too, have yet to learn the lesson you attribute in your conclusion to Derrida and Kittler: that there is no outside of media.

Comment by Gary_Hall: Is this only the case if you adhere to the Anglo-American copyright tradition? I know this is the understanding of copyright that is discussed most often. But is there not also an understanding of copyright connected with what is known as author’s or moral rights, which is understood as having originated in the culture of Western Europe?

Comment by Gary_Hall: Doesn't academic journal publishing have other stated goals besides this one? The establishment of trust, for example, and of a permanent record. Hence all the concern with the fixed and finished, 'final' published version of a text.

Comment by Gary_Hall: The issue of paywalls seems highly relevant to to the content-driven world of profit-maximising academic publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis/Informa. It seems less relevant to the the data-driven world of search engines, social media, and social networking, and of digital capitalist companies such as Google and Twitter. In the latter world, who gate-keeps access to (and so can extract maximum value from) content is less important, because that access is already free, than who gate-keeps (and so can extract maximum value from) the data generated around the use of that content, which is used more because access to it is free.

All of which raises interesting questions for the issue of JMP and its open/public peer review. Reviewers are encouraged to use Google Chrome to install the Hypothes.is plug-in needed to make these public annotations. Which means the work is no longer behind a paywall, yes. But haven't we've just swapped the content-driven world of paywalls for the data-driven world of Google, with its emphasis on open and free content?

So how much is disruption a matter of coming out from behind paywalls? And how disruptive is this issue of JMP?

Comment by Gary_Hall: Do you need to say something about how you are understanding 'disruptive' here and throughout this piece. Is it along the lines of Silicon Valley rhetoric; of Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School; of the affirmative disruption some of us at Coventry have talked about?

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)?

Comment by NealW: Really interesting - as well as knowing, there is not knowing, about a subject or an area, which leads to research processes being developed. These new approaches or methods being the actual area in which new knowledge lies, can also be transformative, or lead to epistemic things (Rheinberger, Schwab, White etc) - many in the field of art research, that do not seek to explain a subject, might use such as distinction which also speaks of methods, or 'models of research practice'.

Comment by NealW: Impact in UK - which is part of our beloved REF is not the same as dissemination. For Impact to have value, its qualities must be transformative, to an audience, a policy, or to a group in terms of distinct categories, such as; health and wellbeing, cultural enrichment. Providing evidence of the pathways, or in areas such as public engagement, has been under scrutiny for some time, but the arts / creative areas have been looking at this for years too - so Arts & Humanities fared well relatively in 2014.

Comment by NealW: The challenge for institutions is very real, as to differentiate between scholarly activity, practice which is also research, and practice which is not, might mean recognising activity which is also not paid for, practice outside the academy. Then we have issues of ownership etc too, along with many others. Again, if there are practical approaches that have been researched as part of your previous activity, and which are of use to other practitioner / researchers, this would be valuable to readers.

Comment by NealW: I would question this - many papers in science are riddled with all kinds of language, material, graphs, mathematics, that require a high degree of a priori knowledge. I am sometimes concerned within non-science areas, the demand for dissemination/enhanced understanding (category alongside new knowledge of increasing importance in UK) overrides the expediency by which a range of communications can be utilised. In this sense, do we have, or only make use of a narrower lexicon?

Comment by NealW: Can you reference your research in some form. Endnotes?

Comment by silvertwin: As we've heard from, in the UK context, REF sub-panel reports and consecutive editorial pieces in JMP, there is a vicious circle here in that the REF panel are calling for more practice researchers to 'step up' to be on such evaluative platforms but also practice researchers may need to be more coherent as a community about criteria for rigour. So posing the question again within an 'output' is part of the problem, not the solution, perhaps? In which case, can you articulate how the informal conversations to camera, this piece and SIghtlines work as a research 'output'?

Comment by silvertwin: I cannot access these links, they are pretty important context I think, so please try to resolve.

Comment by silvertwin: Is it helpful to the reader to signpost this approach as practice research by citing aligned studies / previous work in the field taking a similar approach?

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'?

Comment by Alan_Hook: I think that there needs to be a recognition of some of the instrumental constraints of research as practice. It would be nice to see the accompanying 300 words for this as a research output as there is a lot of complexity to the work and the authorial process that is not apparent through the practice itself

Comment by Alan_Hook: I think that there needs to be a recognition of some of the instrumental constraints of research as practice. It would be nice to see the accompanying 300 words for this as a research output as there is a lot of complexity to the work and the authorial process that is not apparent through the practice itself

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.

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: Here the notion of a design as a political tool is also crucial. From the Constructivist practices onwards, the question of how design comments on and engages with contemporary life is definitely manifested in this project as well as in corresponding practices such as Photomediations: An Open Book.. How does the content one wants to present/communicate to the audiences fit the format in which this information is presented/accessed seem to be the key questions.