User:Simon/Trim4/Project proposal first draft

What do you want to make?
General introduction
I want to make a series of works that investigate translations between material forms of publishing, and the subsequent representation of language (and individuals) in a multi-lingual environment. Part of this is the creation and maintenance of a "bootleg library", which houses a decentralised collection of texts that are shared over a local network. All of the texts currently within the library have been "bootlegged" -- according to the simple definition of a "bootleg" as a fairly faithful unauthorised recording, published in a gesture of homage.

Through a browser, users are able to upload, download, and also write and edit metadata. Through doing this, the collection becomes a conversation between the diverse range of people who frequent a localised area.

As a parallel process, I have been reformatting, re-designing and uploading texts in different formats both for digital use and for print. I have been reprinting books (as singular copies), and also digitising texts to distribute them over the local network.

How do you plan to make it?
Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important at this stage to have some concrete idea of how your project could come together as a whole.

I plan to make this with others -- that is, collectively and in reflection on what type of culture evolves from the use of this library. The library will be a repository for not only texts that we have read and care to share with each other, but also for tools that can be used to create multiple variations on the same text (e.g. scripts to create booklets from source PDFs etc.).

Reading and writing will be fundamental parts of my practice, both in reflection on the texts housed in the collection, and also in exploring modes of address in the thesis.

What is your timetable?
Please include a timeline of what needs to be done and the order in which those things will be done.

Trimester 4:
Collect and bootleg texts for the library
Create and modify scripts for reformatting texts
Design (and modify) typefaces for republishing texts

Trimester 5:
?

Trimester 6:
Profit!

Why do you want to make it?

In my experience as a teacher of ESL (English as a Second Language), I've worked with people in multi-lingual and mono-lingual environments. I was always dissatisfied with the commercial view of English as a language in isolation, and subsequently denial of its many accents, idiolects, . English as a "common language", is one that exists always in translation. As a largely self-taught graphic designer I have designed graphic identities, typefaces and publications. Through this work I have encountered broad notions of typography and voice, and have been deeply impressed by the reflexivity of language, both as the thing inscribed and also the thing that inscribes.

I'm interested in the reflexivity of language (both natural and "artificial") and their relation to subjects; language that is the thing inscribed, and also the thing that inscribes. As "language" is an extremely broad area, I plan to investigate the effect in literate and typographic cultures, specifically in texts (as opposed to oral traditions).

Who can help you and how?

Steve Rushton, with his knowledge of cybernetics and the materiality of language as a writer and editor

Michael Murtaugh, with his experience in investigating representation within archives

Clara Balaguer, with her experience working as a publisher and also within marginalised communities

Florian Cramer, with his knowledge of the relationships between code and language

Relation to previous practice
How does your research connect to previous projects you have done? Here you can use the descriptions you made during the Methods seminar or make new descriptions. Your Text on Method will also be useful in completing this section.

Previously I have worked on projects that explore collections of texts, and the cultures that develop around them.

"From The Books" explores marks of use in books from a specific section of the State Library of Victoria in a taxonomic study. http://simonbrowne.biz/projects/from-the-books-slv-rbrr-000-099/

"Marginal Conversations" is a workshop that explores what happens when we annotate together, and perform our annotations. http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Marginal_conversations

Relation to a larger context
Meaning practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material which share an affinity with your project. For example, if you are researching urban interventions, you might want to research about Situationist approaches to psychogeography, urban tactical media and activist strategies of reclaiming the streets. Or, if you want to explore the way data is tracked, you might touch upon the politics of data mining by referencing concerns laid out by the Electronic Frontier or highlight theoretical questions raised by Wendy Chun or others. (Keep in mind that we are *not* expecting well formulated conclusions or persuasive arguments in the proposal phase. At this juncture, it's simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon as your research progresses.)

Allison Parrish "The Poetics of Technology" - Parrish uses existing corpora such as Project Gutenberg to explore experimental literary techniques https://video.constantvzw.org/Algolit/Allison_Parrish/allison_parrish_JA.html

Lawrence Abu Hamdan's "Conflicted Phonemes", investigating the use of audio analysis in creating "voiceprints" to identify the legitimacy of asylum seeker claims. His work examines the relationship between voice and subject. http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/#/conflicted-phonemes/

Memory of The World (and many other pirate/shadow/extra-legal libraries) and the idea of amateur librarianship. https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/

Eva Weinmayr's "The Piracy Project", which looks at "source" publications and their copies, and the editing decisions in between. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/oct/25/piracy-project/

References A list of references (Remember that dictionaries, encyclopedias and wikipedia are not references to be listed. These are starting points which should lead to more substantial texts and practices.) As with your previous essays, the references need to be formatted according to the Harvard method.) Feel free to include any visual material to substantiate, illustrate or elucidate your proposal. For example use images to reference your work or that of others.

Austin, J.L., Urmson, J.O., 1971. How to do things with words: the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Oxford paperbacks. Oxford Univ. Press, London.

Dolar, M., 2006. A voice and nothing more, Short circuits. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Gitelman, L., 1999. Scripts, grooves, and writing machines: representing technology in the Edison era. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.

Hayles, N.K., 2005. My mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago London.

Ong, W.J., Hartley, J., 2012. Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, 30th anniversary ed.; 3rd ed. ed, Orality and literary. Routledge, London ; New York.

Zuckerman, E., 2013. Digital cosmopolitans: why we think the internet connects us, why it doesn’t, and how to rewire it. W.W. Norton & Company, New York. (Chapter 5 - Found in Translation)