User:Simon/Trim4/The Library as Community Garden
10.10.19
From a pad shared with Manetta:
A few notes on what I'm doing at the moment:
bootleg library
The "bootleg library" is a pirate library I've set up that is available over the Hogeschool Rotterdam local network. It's basically calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web at the moment, and I'm bootstrapping the instance (as opposed to developing the software before release) because I'm interested in what type of culture can develop around its use, and therefore what type of sociability comes from this type of library. If you find yourself near one of their buildings (and still have access to the network), you can visit the library at this address:
I think I might have mentioned the way in which I'm thinking about the library, which is kind of like a community garden. The collection is not very big (there's always lib gen, sci-hub et al if you just want to download a particular book), and I'm trying to highlight the embodied knowledge available within my local network of people by encouraging uploaders to tag the books with a reference of the referrer (the uploader themself or another person). Kind of like an ex-libris that lets you know something about the book if you know the person. Other than this rule, I'm also asking people to upload texts that they are familiar with, wish to share, and feel that they represent them in some way. This is with the aim of associating texts more closely with readers, rather than writers, and to therefore somewhat reduce the authoritarian position of the author.
The library is also physical; so far I have created a small selection of printed books (all made at PZI), and have them available to be borrowed, read and annotated, as long as they are returned. I'm interested in what type of transformations may happen to the texts in this way, and whether the para-text that evolves could somehow become a part of new publications.
material translations of texts
If the library is a community garden, then the texts are the seeds, and the form of the books within it can mutate and change from generation to generation depending on the way the garden is tended, by myself or other gardeners. Starting with Burrough's idea of the written word as a virus that makes the spoken word possible, I'm exploring what can happen when texts are treated as biological elements that can grow and evolve. I'm thinking about this evolution as "material translations", not in a linguistic sense, but to see what happens when texts travel through different material representations.
Which leads me to what I wanted to ask you about...
I'm interested in exploring new ways of working with texts as a departure to the tool I'm most familiar with; the Adobe CS. Apart from weasyprint and flat https://xxyxyz.org/flat, I haven't worked with many more F/LOSS graphics software, but I'm quite interested in finding out more, and adding a material diversity to the community garden of a library I've made.
I thought I'd ask you for some help with this as you are quite skilled, passionate and involved in using F/LOSS graphics, and could probably point me in the right direction in terms of workflow. First of all, are there any you'd recommend for laying out long documents? I'm also quite interested in ones that might be used to design layouts from texts available on Etherpad (another ambition of mine is to see if I can create publications from the pads we use).