Makingitpublic-report

Makingitpublic-report
Name	Making it Public
Start Date	Monday 2nd November 2015
End Date	Wednesday 4th November 2015
Organisers	Annet Dekker, Andre Castro
Guest speakers	Aymeric Mansoux, Amy Wu, Sandra Fauconnier, Micheal Murtaugh, Pia Pol, Florian Cramer
Thematic Project page link	https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Thematic-Making_It_Public

---

Decision made to return to the groups that prepared assignments for each of the days: Each group takes care of reporting all of the activities for each day: The reading assignment, the practice sessions, the speakers for that day.

Introduction & Conclusions will be produced after the first writing session along with the final report on how we decided to proceed with the actual thematic assignment of creating an epub.

A pad if you need it for collective report writing http://stuff2233.club:9001/p/PZI-making-it-public-report-writing Day 1 https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/day_1

Distribution Networks — Monday 2nd Nov

reading assignment

• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises

speakers

Thesis, argument and conclusion research strands

Writing the Archive — Tuesday 3rd Nov

reading assignment

• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises

speakers

Thesis, argument and conclusion research strands

Digital & Hybrid Publishing — Wednesday 4th Nov

reading assignment

• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises
• texts that informed the exercises

speakers

Working on the pad: http://piratepad.net/b5pzPdKFOF

PIA POL

Pia Pol, publisher at Valiz, talked about going digital from a publisher's perspective and her experience in this area. Valiz specializes on books mainly in the field of contemporary art, photography, design of architecture. In her talk she addresses background of publishing, advantages and disadvantages about e-publishing and the role of digital books in modern reading culture.

Thesis and arguments:

Publish ebooks is not as easy and cheap as it may looks like. Most of the time production costs are as big or even bigger as for paper ones, if to take in account that the digital book market is only 5 percent of the entire market, there is a lot of discussions about the necessity of production an ebook as a addition to printed one. Nevertheless there is a obvious advantages of ebook, especially when it comes to distribution and accessibility. Various other advantages were mentioned, such as searchability of the content, its interactive potential and the nearly not existing storage costs.

Conclusion:

Valiz still tries to be a relevant publishing house in the Netherlands. For them this means to cover all the steps of production and to work closely together with all parties like the author and the designer. To achieve this and to reduce production costs projects like the hybrid publishing toolkit are very interesting for them. Designers can now work simultaneously with the author and the work of each party can influence each other. They also tried to coax the author to write his text in markdown language because this would encourage the connection of the parties even more. She stayed out that as a publisher they have to watch the progression of the digital book carefully and be need to adapt to the upcoming changes.

FLORIAN CRAMER

Florian Cramer, theorist and critical researched, presented his point of view on how changed the role of curator and the whole term of curation in recent days. In the beginning curator was an Invisible bureaucrat hidden away in offices far away protecting collections. Originally the word 'curator' was not connected to the art system, but to natural science museums. However, in the 90-s the term 'curation' gained new meaning and curator became new type of cultural worker in the art business. Sometimes his role becomes even more important than the artist one.

Thesis and arguments:

Curator as a collector of objects and ideas, who establishes the policies whether the piece fits the collection or not. The collection became a new type of artwork. As in music industry DJ becomes new rockstar mixing and curating content, rather than creating it. Nevertheless collection should be stored and preserved. In terms of digital store it online do not guaranty safety. Cloud services, new collectors networks such as Pinterest, Tumblr are dependent on politics of the owner companies and the economical profits.

Conclusion:

An epub could be a handy tool for digital collections, providing various possibilities for different kinds of media and being independent from internet.

ANDRE CASTRO

André Castro is a media artist with a background in sound art and experimental music. His recent practice deals with digital publications, offline digital libraries, MIDI songs, and chatbots. His lecture was dedicated to various opportunities epub format and hybrid publishing offer for artists and writers.

Thesis:

The main feature of hybrid publishing is multiple outputs from a single workflow. So you have one content source and many different formats as output. As a result the influence of form over meaning becomes more apparent, what's more. Another advantage of hybrid publishing is that work on the source and work on the design can be coincident. This means the interaction between writing and design is closer together. The template can be reused this results in more flexibility and lower costs than traditional publications.

Conclusion:

In terms of these features, numbers of hybrid publishing tools and viewers have came out, such as Pandoc and Calibre. And also, according to the feature of open standard, publishers and/or designers are able to edit the content and styling with different languages like HTML and CSS. As a result, users could made their own e-books in a easy way.