chapter
Dušan Barok
4 July 2024, 12:00 PM
Introductions
07:40 To briefly introduce my background: I studied Information Technologies back in Slovakia where I grew up. Parallel to my studies, I was involved in the local culture scene, mostly between art and technology, as part of the non-profit sector. In the late 90s, I started a small culture magazine, but then we lost the funding for printing. A friend introduced me to HTML and I realised that it could be a better solution than paper because, at that time, people already had access to the web. So it became quite exciting, and that’s how I discovered digital objectsweb publishing. We would redesign the first website, called referencesKoridor, every few months, exploring different ways it could be organised and designed. We would use the word “portal” at the time. This was in Bratislava where I was part of this collective. The idea emerged to set up a website that would document our work, which then became Monoskop, two or three years after Wikipedia arrived. Suddenly, there was toolssoftware that allowed people to put things online without understanding programming. This was before content management systems This MediaWiki installation is still there and operating.
In the early 2010s, I did my Master’s in Rotterdam at the Piet Zwart Institute, a program which is now called XPUB but at the time was called Networked Media. toolsIt was an eye-opener, especially in terms of using free software and an interventionist way of working with technology, and tools that built things. It involved writing HTML files in the text editor, using Terminal and doing prototyping, which greatly influenced my work ahead.
Why: Politics of Publishing
17:08 Thank you. I also wanted to think through the idea of a living archive. We tend to see archives as something frozen or stopped in time, things that are stored in a dark room to be looked at and touched with gloves. How do you see new advancements and new publishing ways of fostering living archives?
18:24 In a way, printed objectsprint is archiving of the digital, while digital objectsthe digital is constantly changing. Oftentimes it disappears, or maybe remains in the web archive. However, even with live websites, things get reformatted, designs, content and embedded media change, and so on. So with digital publishing, you never really have a final version, unlike the print. This is also how print publishing operates, working with the PDF as an intermediary between content production and the print.
Over the years, of course, one can see how the environment and navigation changed — I would say that in the 2010s, we lived through the era of social mediasocial media, which was more and more sucking attention. We would eventually stop clicking on those links and basically just end up scrolling. These silos have locked us in, and the experience of the web has essentially shrunk to a handful of websites, with everything else remaining invisible or sucked into these platforms. Today, it’s even worse with AI. We were expected to use our critical faculties to filter out relevant social media posts and search results, but AI chatbots give us only one answer, which is likely wrong and unsourced.
The question for digital publishing and web publishing is how to operate in this context, which is very different from what the web was 10 years ago. governance and ownershipThe experimental artistic approach would be, for example, to develop our own chatbots, train our own AI tools and just figure out how to work with AI in a sustainable way that doesn’t burn the planet and credits the sources. Not in a general knowledge AI, but a focused, topical AI. If artists build these tools, they will treat what they do as a data set for training bots. In classical pre-publishing, this would be the type of thinking that goes into creating anthologies, or where we collect different sources and bring them together under a thematic umbrella. Maybe it’s interesting to think about publishing today as creating and producing content-based datasets that can train AI to serve different purposes and different audiences while being aware of what’s happening with this Silicon Valley approach, and how to do publishing sustainably.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
25:43 It’s interesting that you mentioned this because, for instance, where I live in the Netherlands, there are already some museums that are using AI to make archives more accessible, passing a little bit of that threshold of archival knowledge where you have to know how to search from a specific archival studies perspective. Then you can just ask the archive the way you’d ask a chatbot. In that way, it’s interesting to think of these technologies serving a more cultural purpose and within the fields that this consortium serves. How do you see these infrastructures also related to linked open data and how can we create stronger networks in between each of these repositories of data?
26:50 I was never very good at linked open data, for better or worse. digital objectsNow, when people look at shadow libraries, they say that really good work has been done to make these things available. On the other hand, we end up sustainability of workflowsfeeding ChatGPT and similar companies that get a lot of value out of this free labour. This is an interesting argument to think about not just in terms of shadow libraries, but in terms of everything that is published online, and see what we can do about it. With Monoskop in particular, there are a lot of pages and files but metadata is not as standardised as Wikidata. There is a classic digital library, and there is always some kind of metadata, but it’s meant for a full-text search, I never thought it would get this big. At the size it is now, one can find anything with a full-text search, but the Monoskop dataset is useless for training bots because there’s no structured data, it’s more like a collage of different texts, images and PDFs. It may have been a lazy approach but at the moment it looks counterproductive to what’s happening on the web, how content is being sucked up by AI. But then, I’m also saying let’s build data sets. So yes, there’s a way to think about it without the grand-scale vision that it has to be an all-knowing machine.
I will give you an example of a small project, which was done as part of Monoskop: an anthology of articles about shadow libraries. This is a data set that can be thought of as something that could be developed into a chatbot. It is based on the Monoskop wiki section on shadow libraries, which has a lot of articles. I would take those articles, convert them to Markdown, and put them in a directory. Then I would run TF-IDF algorithm. This is a pretty interesting algorithm for finding words or phrases that are specific to each text. For example, if you click on Infrapolitics, it will give you referncesNanna Thylstrup's text.
34:30 It’s interesting because, at the moment, we are taking notes and making a hybrid report that produces a digital and a print publication using a tool developed in collaboration with Open Source Publishing in Brussels and it has that function as well. So, we are thinking through the same things.
35:04 For text or corpus analysis, it’s one of the basic algorithms, but I think it’s very powerful. You can twist or tweak the algorithm in whatever way you find interesting. It worked for this anthology, but it’s a corpus analysis tool as its main interface. If I were to do this now, I would probably end up with some kind of chatbot.
Who: Community of Publishing
35:44 I enjoy thinking about these new structures, and also new ways of reading. Tagging, and nonlinear readings, are ways that we can put publishing within new readerships and acknowledge this through communities, to see that these wikis are very dependent on collective labour. How do you see the sustainability of these practices in the longer term? How does one even maintain something like Monoskop in a longer term within a group of people and keep it as a sustainable space for publishing?
36:43 governance and ownershipWe have been able to maintain Monoskop for so long because we run our own infrastructure. We have our own computer server, which was first installed in 2008. We don’t even have a rack. It’s not a virtual machine, it’s a real piece of metal, sitting in a small server house in Prague. It’s not just Monoskop but almost 100 different domains, platforms and websites that run from the server, and we are two admins. I’m not very good with server administration, but I’ve been learning it for many years, know how to set up an email account. a domain, etc. We operate the server and we have control over the hardware and software environment that makes these websites available to the public. The server itself is operated by two of us, but we are part of the NGO that for many years used to run a festival; there is a legal body behind the server. business modelsIt used to run partly on grants when we did events. Now it’s mostly donations, and we have one or two websites for larger cultural initiatives that give us some fees. We’ve been able to run it for 17 years. If Monoskop were on a commercial provider, they would cut us off sooner or later. In terms of traffic and security we’ve had some attacks, and it requires work on our part. It’s not easy to run a server but it’s possible: there are so many community servers communityout there and some of them are run by artists. There are a lot of different communities that have their own infrastructure and I mention this because it is often overlooked, invisible and considered “too geeky”. It’s crucial for working and experimenting with the web over the long term.
Discussion
42:30 Thank you so much. I saw an interview with Femke Snelting, she was talking about how we only see infrastructure when it’s broken or when there’s a problem because we think of it as something so seamless and eventually invisible. This might be a good time to pass on the mic to the rest of the table. Does anyone have any questions?
42:57 I would like to know more about the editorial process. Of course, the platform is open to everyone, but I’m curious to know how you collaborate with collaborators, and how the editorial stream is conceived and processed. How do you or your collaborators select content? I’m also curious to know more about the workflow.
43:33 We never had a clear definition of what we were doing. So it’s not clear if it’s a publishing project, documentation, or an artwork. No one knows what Monoskop is. I would say it was very socially determined from the beginning, it started in a physical space, a media lab called Burundi in Bratislava in 2004, and the first users were members of this place. If someone created an account on this Wiki, they would likely contribute something relevant to what’s already there. This contribution could be changing information in an article. adding contextual information, a file that was missing, or creating new articles. It’s always been relatively organic, I look at the recent changes almost every day to see what’s happening and very rarely do I have to delete anything. Sometimes I email authors but usually they contribute to Monoskop mostly through social links. I almost always work with a few people who know the subject much better. For the sound art section, there were three of us from the start. There is a section about federated networks. I talked to people who use them from the start and asked what should be there, but I also look a lot online. I have also worked with Ilan on the conceptual comics section, and I was mostly a technical help, he could do almost everything by himself.
49:11 I started an archive of comics and I discovered Anna’s Archive which you probably know very well. Anna’s Archive is a huge repository containing 5% of the books that have been printed in Humanity. There are so many resources out there: LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive — I don’t want to exaggerate — but as a researcher, it’s quicker for me to go get the books in Sci-Hub or papers in Sci-Hub and books in LibGen than go through my university’s library access, which is antiquated. I need to ask for permission and then the book comes two weeks later. Piracy works better than everything that is around. If Monoskop Log started now in 2024 and you were 25 years old, and because the generational question has come up, how would you make it? I have a feeling that it will not be enough to just put media online, we need to find other ways to deal with distribution and dissemination of knowledge. So what is the next step now? How do you distil all this knowledge in ways that are both democratic and with the same ethical principles that Monoskop started with?
49:21 Yes, it’s true that Monoskop Log in particular started with discovering Russian shadow libraries, where you could suddenly find lots of media theory books that we heard about, but never really had access to. This was in the late 2000s. There was a lot of excitement about putting things public. By 2008-2009, Gigapedia had hundreds of thousands of books, and it made sense to copy some of those files into something more thematic, the same goes for other large websites and the entire web. Most of what is on Monoskop was copied from somewhere. It’s the act of creating our context out of what’s out there. So in a way, we’re still doing the same thing. The web has always been huge, and we are bringing very small pieces of what’s out there together on one page. I think that filtering, selecting, highlighting and re-contextualising these things makes a difference. I would say it’s still relevant, regardless of whether it’s treated as a data set for training neural nets. Like what you did with conceptual comics. There are so many comics out there, but you came up with a specific idea of looking at comics through this lens of conceptualism. Then this created a separate library, which became a reference point for many people.
54:08 I’m curious to know about your relationship with publishers. What’s your take on hosting books or PDFs of other publishers? Do you have a collaboration, silent communication with them or legal problems?
54:49 That’s a big question! For example, the multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb been around for many years. They do amazing things with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and a few months later, publish them in translation. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they really like Monoskop; they decided that they would share all their books with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and their Monoskop page became a large MaMa library. digital objectsThey are also open about it: one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They don’t sell PDFs, they stick to the print. business modelsIt’s worked well. It’s an example of how free digital distribution helps print sales, because the more people read it, the more it’s discussed.
digital objectsIf you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, then you need a PDF. printed objectsBut if you want to read the book cover to cover, you just prefer print. That’s how it will probably always be. Then there’s copyleft publishing. In terms of books that appear on Monoskop, authors are generally happy that more people can access their work. As for the publishers it depends, some don’t like a certain book to be there, and we delete the files. Sometimes we have a longer discussion, but sometimes it’s very short, and I delete it, but of course, these books are in other libraries — maybe they don’t know about it or maybe they do, it’s also not like everyone just searches for a book online before they buy it. People look for books online because they’re mostly researchers and they need to find something quickly. In that sense, I don’t think selling ePUBs helps that much.
1:00:13 I think you already answered my question and you showed a very good example of a collaboration with publishers. But my question is also about bad collaborations. I don’t know if you saw the news, but Internet Archive was forced to remove half a million books from their archive because of a lawsuit in the US: the big publisher corporation asked for all the books to be removed. I think this is a tragedy in this context. Have you ever encountered these kinds of issues and if you did, how did you deal with them? You said something about removing some books, and your context is slightly different, but maybe I can expand on what Lorenzo was saying before for example, some of the shadow libraries in Italy are banned. One cannot access Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. You can access them with a VPN, of course, but it’s becoming more difficult. I live in the Netherlands and the same is happening here. How do you position yourself in this? Have you ever encountered issues like that? How do you counteract?
1:02:34 Publishing is a very broad term, even when it comes to books. Monoskop is not a site where you would find blockbuster books that were made as consumer products in the first place. You can probably find those on the Internet Archive, which may be why it triggered these publishers so much, because maybe they were thinking in terms of pure commerce. So that’s just one side of the story, that Monoskop is very much a niche in terms of big publishing — we don’t have big publishing because it’s not relevant to this project. Then there’s academic publishing, probably publicly funded, and other kinds of publishing, sustained by publishers not connected to universities or academia. Sci-Hub mostly consists of publicly funded content coming from researchers at universities. governance and ownershipI think it’s ethically wrong what’s happened to the whole academic publishing field, that it’s ended up with five big publishers who own all the journals. University libraries have to cut off access to a lot of these journals, or whole packages of journals, because they simply can’t afford it. What Sci-Hub does is a necessity today for researchers worldwide to survive, otherwise, the life of an academic is very limited, even with access to university libraries. But with other publishers who are not blockbusters and who are not academic, it’s mostly about the revenue. It’s case by case. If the book is good, the free digital distribution does help sales. There are examples like Alessandro Ludovico’s books that are openly access. I think his first book, “Post-Digital Print”, went through three or four printings, and the book was launched on the Monoskop Log. On the day of the launch, they gave me a USB stick, I put it on Monoskop Log and that was the first day the book was published. He did the same with new books with MIT Press, it’s open access, and I think it does help the sales. So if the book is not good and it appears online, people might see that it’s just not good and they will not buy it, but it’s really hard to talk about in general. I would say that I totally support all publishers and I don’t do it to hurt them, I do it to support them and to give visibility and access to their work because maybe they can’t do it, even if they would want to, which was also a case I heard many times.
1:08:04 It looks like if you’re on Monoskop or a shadow library, it means that the book deserves attention, so it can be a way to give value to a publication.
1:08:18 On the Monoskop Log, people sometimes go “bingo!” when they find their books showing up there. I think there is some truth to it, that the more it gets known, the more it circulates.
1:08:53 Dušan, you brought up open-access publishing. As an academic, I see there’s a new ideology evolving around it. We tried to publish a book with De Gruyter, which is an important academic publisher, and they asked for 10,000 euros for open-access. It’s a new business. Why do I have to fundraise as a researcher?
1:09:25 They can’t afford to give you these kind of numbers. If you work with a normal, small, medium-size publisher, they would say “We can talk about open access”, but they would never ask you for 10,000 euros.
1:09:49 Exactly. I would like to contrast open access and piracy again. What is the new term for piracy? I thought it was an interesting way to remain in the system, but I’m more interested in things outside of the system with unsolicited networks of distribution. It doesn’t have to be a professional quest or something you have to pay, ask your university to find money to open access and I’m not accessing anything. I use proprietary things and then I put it on piracy. I send links to everyone. I provide access to SCDB, I just give it to every researcher who asks for it. I’m wondering if you see this tension also in Monoskop. It can be co-opted by saying it’s very important. For me, my ethics are: no, you should refuse interpretation. To say that you are involved in piracy, you are not involved with open access. Whatever they put away, you’ll take whatever you find interesting and put it on your website without any open access.
1:11:18 There is a language that has developed around open access, with colours: gold, yellow, green, etc. My experience with publishing in the Netherlands: I was at the university there and then we managed to publish two articles in journals which are not open-access. But the Netherlands already had a program at the time — this was five, six years ago — where it was relatively easy to tell the journal that I’m from a Dutch University and they connect to it and charge them, so I didn’t need to do much. Maybe they only had a limited amount of papers they could support every year, a few thousand. I don’t know how is it now. I’m not an expert with open access, it’s probably better if you talk to someone else, Janneke Adema or Gary Hall, who spent a lot of years researching this. Open access is a really broad field within which you have kind of different modalities and different economies and I don’t know how they work exactly.
What: Future of Publishing
1:13:45 We talked a little bit about the future of publishing, like you said, in the beginning, which is usually something we bring up at the end of these conversations. Could you share one final short thought on the future? Where do you see publishing going, and where you would like to see it go?
1:14:23 In terms of digital publishing, websites generally have a three-year lifespan, which is very short for many reasons. Sooner or later, we will have to look at archiving platforms digitally. Recently I worked on a project called Art Doc Web. The idea was to create a web archive of artist websites based in Berlin, and we approached 20 of them. Together with my collaborator, we were responsible for developing web archives and ideas around web archiving of social media accounts and websites. I was surprised to see that the tools are already out there that are relatively easy to use. They’re open source. We only needed permissions from the artists, they didn’t need to send us anything: this tool would make an archive of somebody’s Instagram account, for example. Each of these web archives is just one file, and when I click on it, it is loaded, opened and rendered in a browser in a way that it feels like it’s a live website, but it’s not live. You can search for images and text within this archive website, so it has functionality. I would emphasise the importance of thinking about these platforms, that we want them to be live, to have things added. At the same time, we also want to keep them — so this can go in parallel. This is a small bit about web archiving and how exciting this field is.
1:17:47 Absolutely. I think this is relevant as a lot of artists use social media to catalogue, to show their work. Silvio, who we talked to this week, is using Instagram stories to do a lot of design critique. These places are also incredibly fragile, so then it’s also the role of cultural work and publishing to preserve them. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your projects and your thoughts on this. We will keep in touch with you about the future of this project. We’re using these conversations as research material so we can keep developing a model for expanded publishing and we’ll keep in touch with you.
1:18:45 Thanks for having me.