User:Cristinac/Notes on self directed research

Partly in response to this ‘monograph crisis’, a steadily increasing number of initiatives have now been set up to enable authors in the HSS in particular to bring out books open access–not just introductions, reference works and text books, but research monographs and edited collections too. These initiatives include scholar-led presses such as Open Humanities Press, re.press, and Open Book Publishers; commercial presses such as Bloomsbury Academic; university presses, including ANU E Press and Firenze University Press; and presses established by or working with libraries, such as Athabasca University’s AU Press.

It is interesting then that, although they can be positioned as constituting two of the major driving forces behind the recent upsurge in the current interest in open access book publishing, as ‘projects’, the at times more obviously or overtly ‘political’ (be it liberal-democratic, neoliberal or otherwise) project of using digital media and the Internet to create wider access to book-based research on the one hand, and experimenting—as part of the more conceptual, experimental aspects of open access book publishing—with the form of the book (a combination of which we identified as being essential components of the experimental and political potential of artists’ books) and the way our dominant system of scholarly communication currently operates on the other, often seem to be rather disconnected. Again, a useful comparison can be made to the situation described by Lippard, where more (conceptually or materially) experimental artists’ books were seen as being less accessible to a broader public and, in some cases, as going against the strategy of democratic multiples, promoting exclusivity instead.

Can open access be understood in similar terms:less as a homogeneous project striving to become a dominating model or force, and more as an ongoing critical struggle, or series of struggles? And can we perhaps locate what so me perceive as the failure of artists’ books to contribute significantly to such a critical struggle after the 1970s to the fact that ultimately they became (incorporated in) dominant institutional settings themselves–a state of affairs brought about in part by their inability to address issues of access, experimentation and self-reflexivity in an ongoing critical manner?

-The political nature of the book: on artists' books and radical open access. Adema, J. and Hall, G.

Future Bibliography:

Jan Van Dijk - The Network Society

Manuel Castells - The Rise of the Network Society

Mark Poster - The Information Subject (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture) . http://aaaaarg.org/ref/b0c4ac03c8526ff275cf6ac838502dd1

Geoff Cox, Alex McLean - Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression . http://aaaaarg.org/ref/be9b5c91bb2e8c931f20b7c07b0d0e44

John Sowa - Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical and Computational Foundations

Scott Lash - Critique of Information

Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star - Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences . http://aaaaarg.org/ref/8c5c380694eef8f7d96e7487a7bd17c6

Anne Balsamo - Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work . http://aaaaarg.org/ref/fb84c71d9b5075a996298891a9b87542