User:Simon/Trim4/Text Laundrette

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Text Laundrette

Text Laundrette is a workshop in which we use a home-made, DIY book scanner, and open-source software to scan, process, and add digital features to printed texts brought by the participants to the workshop. These are included in the “bootleg library”, a shadow library accessible over a local network. The workshop was organised by Simon Browne and Pedro Sá Couto, for the 2020 py.rate.chnic sessions and first held at WdKA in the Publication Station, February 2020.

Description

The bookscanner

Text Laundrette is a print party workshop.

We will use a home-made, DIY book scanner, and open-source software to scan, process, and add digital features to printed texts brought by the participants to the workshop. Ultimately, we will include them in the "bootleg library", a shadow library accessible over a local network.

Shadow libraries operate outside of legal copyright frameworks, in response to decreased open access to knowledge. This workshop aims to extend our research on libraries, their sociability, and methods by which we can add provenance to texts included in public or private, legal or extra-legal collections.

At WdKA Publication Station

The workshop follows a workflow of the following steps:

  1. Choosing texts
  2. Watermarking
  3. Scanning
  4. Processing
  5. Uploading
  6. Rinse and repeat (return to step 1)

First workshop 03.02.20

The workshop ran over 2 hours with invited guests from the academy. It was an ambitious workflow, but we managed to run through several iterations of watermarking, scanning, processing and uploading. The realisation of how much work is involved in digitising and processing texts was certainly a take-home for participants. An interesting moment occurred when uploading - who was the author of the altered text?

Some photos here: