User:Artemis gryllaki/Writing & Research MethodologiesIII

Letter from XPUB: The Library Is Open

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Rotterdam, 3 July 2019

Dear readers,

In the spring and summer of 2019 we developed The Library Is Open, a publication which focuses on the operations, actions, and roles of legal and extra-legal libraries. Central to this project is the community that forms around a collection of texts – the custodians of the collection and the readers.

The Library Is Open is the result of the third iteration of Interfacing the Law, an ongoing research project between XPUB and Constant (BE), which explores issues around extra-legal libraries, software and legal interfaces and intellectual property. Led by our guest editor Femke Snelting, we participated in many activities which were organised by invited guests:
With Bodó Balázs, an economist and researcher on shadow libraries, we analysed the gargantuan dataset of Library Genesis, to determine trends which indicate access to texts and the social, geo-political and economic aspects at play
.
With Anita Burato and Martino Morandi at the Rietveld Library in Amsterdam, we discovered the subjectivity of subjects and thorny issues of classification and representation
.
With other readers, we deepened our understandings of texts through collective annotations.
With artist and researcher Eva Weinmayr, who introduced us to The Piracy Project, we examined the possible motivations and differences between pirated books and their "source".
With open-source software such as Tesseract, pdftk, and LibreOffice (and many others) we explored the technical processes used during the creation of pirate libraries, and the hidden labour involved in this.
With fellow pirates, we considered the multiplicity of roles and activities involved in maintaining various libraries, such as Monoskop, Libgen, Aaaaaarg, Sci-Hub, Memory of the World, Project Gutenberg, +++.
With Dušan Barok, the administrator of Monoskop and an alumnus of the Piet Zwart Institute, we discovered how Monoskop was initiated and how it has changed over time.

The variety of our collective sessions, and the practical exercises we performed led us to organise an afternoon of three workshops that directly address the active role of piracy, rather than simply talking about it. Encouraging small, informal, collective actions, we wanted to challenge the ordinary, hierarchical presentation of research projects in the academic context, and individual notions of authorship.
When choosing a suitable venue for our event, we decided to ask Leeszaal (in Dutch "Reading Hall") to host our workshops. Situated in a busy, multicultural area of Rotterdam, Leeszaal exemplifies many values we sympathise with, particularly open access to knowledge, and a focus on the community that uses the space, not just for reading but for many other social purposes. These values we recognise (somewhat nostalgically) as reminiscent of public libraries of yesteryear. However, the landscape today is quite different, with huge online commercial repositories of texts (e.g. JSTOR), protected by paywalls which limit access to them, and in response the emergence of "shadow libraries".

In the following pages we invite you to wander through the dilemmas, outcomes and reflections that came out of our three different workshops, and interviews with people whose work is at the centre of the issues that each workshop uncovers.

Knowledge In Action explores the roles and activities within libraries, such as selection and inclusion of books. Interview with: Dubravka Sekulić & Leeszaal staff.
Blurry Boundaries reveals the hidden processes and labour between the publishing and distribution of physical and digital books. Interview with: Dušan Barok.
Marginal Conversations highlights the sociality of texts, and how they can become conversations through collective reading, annotation and performance. Interview with: Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak.

Yours in piracy, XPUB

Marginal Conversations Workshop

INTRODUCTION

Marginal Conversations is a workshop which explores collective reading, annotating and performing texts. We read, and write notes in the margins; usually in private, isolated from other readers. We come across texts with others' notes on them; the author unknown, their thoughts obscure. What happens when we share our notes, vocalise and perform them?

In this workshop, participants read, annotate and discuss the open letter "In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub", which asks for pirate library practices to come out from the shadows. This letter was selected for many reasons; it was an introduction for us to the thematic "Interfacing the Law", it's available in many languages, and presents an argument that generates interesting conversations. We compare annotations to detect common areas of interest and to also explore different methods, where readers can develop codes and techniques to extend the content of the source and express their personal understanding of it. The goal is not only to find areas of agreement, but also to discover tensions, disagreements etc. with the letter, which can also develop into fruitful conversations.

We leave traces of our reading, enriched by our doubts, sympathies, tensions and diverse understandings. We personalise the text, opening it up for collective conversations. Our voices occupy the space and leave traces on the text and in the library.

Marginal Conversations Workshop

STRUCTURE

Introduction

First of all, we have a quick round to introduce ourselves and share some thoughts around pirate/shadow libraries.

This workshop is divided in 3 parts:
Part 1: Reading && annotating
Part 2: Creating “heatmaps” && discussing through annotations
Part 3: Performative reading and recording

Why annotate together?
We see annotations as a way to express our understandings, questions, comments, disagreements, tensions and positions about what we read.
We aim to form collective understandings of this text and open up conversations about its theme; shadow libraries and piracy practices.
We explore ways in which texts can become conversations through collectively reading aloud and performing our annotations.

Part 1: Reading && annotating

— Organisation: Individual
— Materials: Annotation packs, containing: a) an A3 printout of the open letter “In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub” in English, b) an A3 sheet of carbon paper, c) an A3 sheet of tracing paper, and four-colour ballpoint pens
— Supplementary Materials: A4 printouts of the open letter “In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub”, in languages other than English (Bulgarian, Belarusian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Croatian, Ukranian)

Steps:
1. Provide the annotation packs.
2. If needed, provide the text in languages other than English to support our reading.
3. Each participant reads the text individually.
4. Each participant annotates the text on their annotation pack.

How can texts be extended?
The provided tools provide possibilities for participants to create diverse codes and levels of expression.
We don’t see this text as a sacred document. Our aim is to extend its content and enrich it with our collective questions, doubts, agreements, disagreements, points for conversations.

Part 2: Creating “heatmaps” && discussing through annotations

— Organisation: Groups of 2-3
— Materials: Same as Part 1

Steps:
1. Divide in groups of 2-3 people.
2. In our groups, compare our annotations and discuss the text. What was interesting? Did we make sense? Are there specific parts we want to discuss?
3. Create a “heatmap” of the text by placing tracing papers with annotations on top of each other, comparing which areas are annotated, how and why.
4. Each group selects parts of the text to read aloud and perform in Part 3.

What positions can be accomodated?
We collectively develop strategies to “amplify” specific parts of the text that we want to comment on, for diverse reasons, not only agreement.
We invite a plurality of positions and strategies; doubts, queries, tensions, suggestions, additions, experimentations, +++

Part 3: Performative reading && recording

— Organisations: All together
— Materials: Annotated “In Support of Library Genesis & Sci-Hub” letter, audio recording device, speakers

Steps:
1. Work with the paragraphs selected in the previous part.
2. Read aloud the text in turns (changing at every sentence).
3. Record!
4. Play the recordings from small speakers in the space of the library.

Why record our performed annotations?
We perform the text and our annotations in ways that show our positions and understandings. When we have an annotation, we do or say something (e.g. interrupt, raise our hands, make a noise, use an accent, use intonation to convey emotion etc).
The text becomes a “play”, a performance. We want to activate the text, by transforming it into a conversation through spoken annotation. The recording exists as a trace of our voices and bodies, with their expressive qualities, movements and sounds.

1st personal workshop plan

Pirate collective self-education

1st part:
Bring your laptop and sit together.
A collection of library items is provided, relevant to piracy/copyright/authorship. Choose one text.
Where is it available in Rotterdam (library/school/bookshop/internet platform)? Search online.
Is anywhere available for free or for what price?
Is it available both in physical and digital form?
Which pirate libraries do we know already? Name a phew and discuss there differencies.
Try to download the chosen item through a pirate library.
Discuss on our experience.

2nd part:
Discussions will be the form of annotating the "source" in this workshop. Creation of a "local" forum.
Verbal annotations help us towards forming shared understandings of the text.
Read out loud collectively (and record?) part of the downloaded item.

Comments on the text? Which part was interesting or relevant to you?
The resulting discussions can be recorded and published in a pirate library along with the "source", as an "extended audio version" of it??
It would be interesting to annotate again at another time, the extended audio version, after publishing it in a web-platform(e.g. soundcloud annotations on audio files).
There are 3 stages of this experiment: 1) The first published content/source from an author 2) A temporary local community which reflects on the source through piracy and annotations 3) On top of the extended source, remote annotations through a pirate internet platform.

Practical info: Group of 5?
Have a time limit for each "action".
Take care of having internet connection, computers and recording infrastructure.
Tools:
1)Record in decent quality a discussion of a group of people
2)Text annotation in audio file. Or audio annotation if audio file?

Aim

Create a temporary situated learning community supported by pirate libraries. Awareness of what is possible and what interfaces the law.

Think if that experience would be possible for everyone if we didn't use pirate ways of sharing "knowledge".
Transformation of the "source", "translate" it in another medium (from text to audio). The extended version includes the temporary discourse about the thematic contained in the "source".

Questions of the workshop

How difficult it is to have access to a text in legal and extra legal means?

What happens when we pirate and annotate "collectively"? Can piracy be a social activivty?
Why is it interesting to try this?

Role of annotation

Annotations in the form of discussions shape a space to learn from each other and have collective understandings. 

In this process the "source" is enriched with our personal voices/stories/understandings.
The "content" is then extended to a situation of learning.

Previous Workshop Ideas

A collection of pirate annotated research readers

Making public the process and materials for research, according to our experience. What is the "content" of a research? Apart from the final project with its bibliography, what about the different materials and proccesses that lead to it. What is regarded as knowledge?
It makes sense to work with something that is relevant to our personal interests and will be useful to us, or other students in the future? Working with readers that circulate at PZI? To bring together these scattered references. Base-collection would be the material that is already being annotated. Connect the references to the issues? Relate to workshops/lectures that took part? How do the references,materials become part of research? Multiple forms/levels of annotation.
It seems useful to create a place to gather

1) our researches and materials that lead to them

2) categorise the collections in thematics/issues (a different way of organising shared items in a library)

3) publish extended-augmented versions of processes, references, (multimedia) annotations along with final research projects

Questions:

- Digital/analog/multimedia?

- How is it (could it be made) interesting for other people outside PZI?

- What technologies?

- How do we create, collect and share these collections?

- Related to Rita's question about different media annotations. Relates probably to tancre's idea of augmented epubs.