label

digital objects

Linked to 12 items

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  Aria 1:14:24 I think Noel’s intervention summed up a lot of points. I do agree that distribution is key, as we mentioned before. digital objectsThe only thing that I would add would be the role of cross-media and trans-media experiences. I do agree with Silvia about bringing the internet on a printed page. On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting and compelling projects about bringing paper to the Internet, so archiving and documenting all the different publications which may have not been accessible to everybody if they weren’t distributed online.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 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.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 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.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 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.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 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.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  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.

• from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

  Geoff 38:45 digital objectsMy interest in that is more conceptual. ServPub is an attempt to think through what autonomous publishing might look like. Our speculation following a book that Winnie and I did together called Aesthetic Programming, which was published by Open Humanities Press. We released all the materials, all the writing on GitLab with the invitation that you could do anything you wanted with the contents of this book. printed objectsYou could add a chapter, you could rewrite it, you could fork it essentially. Some people took up that invitation. We’re really interested in that as a model of academic publishing, where you just produce an iteration of a book and someone could then make their own.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 54:08 As for your first question, I’m used to working with artists because of my background. I’m trying to create a situation where people feel very free to just come with me with whatever, including artists wanting to expand on the publishing platform. You can leave it up to artists to come up with ideas. I was very happy that during the last issue, we published a sound piece from someone who responded to an open call with digital objectsthe idea of a sound piece, which in a way is separate from the publication, but it’s still part of the publication. So I thought that was nice and was happy to be able to give the space to this person to produce, and I was able to pay them for that. So, you can let the artist or the contributors lead. Sometimes, the limitation is cost. But overall, the people I work with are very happy to have their work appear in a physical paper publication.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 08:07 I see it as crucial. traditional publishing practicesThe point in which “Entreprecariat” and small independent publishing intersect is in the fact that making a book in the traditional sense, in a way that lasts, is distributed, has an ISBN, et cetera, is very difficult. The actors that are active in making this happen are very minimal. Especially for the kind of literature that I’m interested in both reading and writing, the options are small and they are becoming smaller. Currently, that’s my primary concern. I’m sorry if I take too long, but I think it’s a crucial point to articulate my understanding of expanded publishing. alternative publishing practicesIn the past I’ve been mostly interested in the weird experimental EPUBs or booking a JPEG, booking a floppy disk, a super long form that is interactive and so on… Nowadays, it’s a bit of a disappointment that many of digital objectsthese experiments, after about 10 years, are completely forgotten unless there is someone who, again, converts them into the traditional book — by the way, that’s what happening, for example, with the book by Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff that is coming out now for Spector Books, “Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism”.

• from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Thomas 57:16 digital objectsThere’s a game called Citizen Sleeper. And it’s, as I said, more a book than a game with very nice graphics, but not moving graphics. It’s like standing still all the time. It’s on only one view, you could say, and you see the characters that are talking. Other games did this as well, while thinking about how to present text in a modern way. So maybe there’s a connection. I think there were experiments in books, trying to look like Instagram or something like that, which doesn’t work very well most times, I think, but it’s more your expertise. Maybe you can think about if there’s a chance to somehow copy back games present text into the books, or the book cover or the marketing of the book. Also, if you have the resources to do a game around your book. But this could fail because people are used to good quality now. So even if you are doing a graphic novel, which is like this classic book where you can choose your own way. There’s a lot of expertise in the field and the presentation is very good and coming from people who know games. I think this is very important. If you want to publish in game or with games, you have to have people really knowing what the game is about or how games work. It’s like with school, everyone was in school and everyone thinks they can talk about school. But of course, you can talk about the game or have some opinions on that. Though if you want to appeal to the audience playing games, you have to have people experienced with games or assisting you in that, I think. Does this somehow answer your or is this your train of thoughts?

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  digital objectsIf I think about the future of Metalabel, I believe physical books and physical magazines and physical media of all kinds are important. And I celebrate them. But I don’t think that that’s an audience that can grow hugely from collectors. But I think digital can be a huge space of growth with formats. Creating digital formats that feel legit and make an artist feel legit and that make a consumer feel willing to pay for this. And that’s where I think there’s white space and opportunity. And any creation of viable formats there is a net win for the entire creative community because it’s just a new vehicle for all of us to express work.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  digital objectsThis is where we have this concept of a record. Think of a vinyl album‚ a record of work that has a cover, there’s a package, and inside it contains a number of pieces. And those pieces can include a digital work, a physical work, a talk, an invitation. And that’s exactly what Metalabel is. printed objectsThe Dark Forest book, you got the PDF, a physical edition, and you got to join a Zoom call with the authors all spoke together. That was $45. It’s allowing you to think beyond the boundaries that the market has created for us and to redefine them.