User:Simon/Trim4/Text Laundrette

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

Obverse of the poster/flyer
Reverse of the poster/flyer

The workshop follows a workflow of the following steps:

Choosing texts
Watermarking
Scanning
Processing
Uploading
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:

Explaining the steps of the workshop
Poster/booklet (a3, folds down to a5)
The physical bootleg library, installed
Using the bookscanner
A view from inside the bookscanner
Hand-watermarking section
Watermarked annotations from artemis, verso
Watermarked annotations from artemis, recto
Watermarks on cybertext
Watermarks on cybertext, verso
Watermarks on cybertext, recto
Folded instruction sheet and acetate
Running OCR through the terminal