Published! Van der Weel: Changing our textual minds

It is a great pleasure to announce that Adriaan van der Weel has just published a new book with Manchester University Press: Changing our textual minds: towards a digital order of knowledge. It can be ordered here.

Jenna Ng, Finders, Users, Upenders: the prezi

Here is a link to the prezi used by Jenna Ng with her paper 'Finders, Users, Upenders, or: Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-Ups, Crowdsourcing, Machinima.

After the symposium

I would like all speakers and members of the audience for making Remix in Retrospect such a marvellous and inspiring experience!

James Barrett kindly sent me his Prezi and the links to the videos he showed during his presentation ('Frankenstein's Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin').

If any of the other speakers wishes to share (parts of) their presentations, do let me know!

Full Programme

SYMPOSIUM

Remix in Retrospect: Looking Back to See the Future of Authorship

21 October 2011

VU University Amsterdam

De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam

Main building, room 11A05

PROGRAMME

12.30-13.00 tea & coffee

13.00-13.15 welcome

13.15-13.40 Adriaan van der Weel, Sociotechnical Construction of Authorship
13.40-14.05 Adam Smyth, Knives and Scissors: Cutting up Text in Early Modern England
14.05-14.30 Feike Dietz, Reading by Writing: Early Modern Reading Practices in Manuscript and Print Culture


14.30-15.00 tea & coffee


15.00-15.25 Kate Eichhorn, Late Print Culture’s ‘Social Media’ Revolution: Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines
15.25- 15.50 James Barrett, Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin
15.50-16.15 Jenna Ng, Finders, Users, Up-enders; or, Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-ups, Crowd-sourcing, Machinima


16.15-17.00 Round table discussion
How may knowledge of historical developments in manuscript and print culture feed the current debate on authorship, reading, copy-right, and creativity in the digital age? And how may a contemporary point of view help us understand and evaluate past practices?


17.00-17.10 closing remarks

17.10-18.30 drinks reception

Abstract of Adriaan van der Weel's paper

Sociotechnical construction of authorship

Prof. Dr. Adriaan van der Weel

Book and Digital Media Studies

Leiden University

Sociotechnical development describes the process through which technologies and humans construct social systems. In this view the construction of authorship vis-à-vis readership cannot be properly explained without taking the prevailing technological conditions into account.
Before the days of print, and thus before the days of commodification of authorship, there was a much less rigid distinction between textual production and its consumption than has become the case in the ‘Order of the Book’ that is now being challenged by digital developments. In the manuscript world, where few could read and write, literacy united author and reader more than the varying forms of their participation in the textual discourse divided them. It was normal, for example, for aspiring authors to appropriate existing texts through copying, imitating and emulating. In manuscript circulation the only difference between participants in the textual discourse was whether they copied or were copied, and if they were copied, how often. The decision to copy or not to copy can thus be constructed as a expression of reader power.
From the middle of the fifteenth century the technology of print proceeded to commodify authorship and, by imposing a system of rigidly one-way traffic, established a hierarchical relationship between author and reader (doubling as a prospective author). Publication in print also came to be regarded as formal recognition of authenticity, originality and social standing (as well as marketability), separating authors from readers.
By contrast, Web 2.0 returns textual discourse to the two-way, co-creative traffic of the manuscript age. This re-establishes a flat, horizontal relationship between author and reader, resulting in a loss of inhibition on the part of readers in using or appropriating authors’ work. There is, however, an important difference with the manuscript tradition in that in today’s Web world readers and writers are no longer part of an elite united through the relatively rare skill of literacy; instead there is, for the first time, mass participation in public textual production superseding a four-hundred year period of mass textual consumption.

Abstract of Adam Smyth’s paper

Knives and Scissors:
Cutting up Text in Early Modern England

Dr Adam Smyth
Department of English and Humanities
Birkbeck, University of London

In this paper I want to suggest that early modern readers often cut up printed and manuscript texts, and that they did this with no great sense of transgression. I’ll explore the archival evidence for this practice, and then think about the implications for early modern literary culture, and in particular for ideas of authorship. I’ll start with one spectacular instance of cutting and pasting: the remarkable Biblical Harmonies produced at Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. These Harmonies were lavish folio books constructed by cutting up printed texts of the four Gospels, and gluing the fragmented texts back into a new order. As well as cutting up and reordering printed text, members of Little Gidding included hundreds of prints to illustrate the text – prints which were themselves usually reworked with knives and scissors, and often conflated to produce something that would much later be called collage. This striking compositional method was, I suggest, oddly typical of a reading culture in which readers often consumed texts with knives and scissors. If this is the case – and I’ll provide evidence to suggest that it was – how does this enable us to rethink early modern writing, reading, and authorship? What challenges do these practices present to a history of the early modern book that is often organised around narratives linking print with fixity and the establishment of a stable literary canon? How different is the early modern book, and the early modern author, after cutting up?

Abstract of Jenna Ng's paper

Finders, Users, Up-enders; or, Authoring Media in the Digital Age: Mash-ups, Crowd-sourcing, Machinima

Dr. Jenna Ng

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

University of Cambridge

Up-end the stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for.

~ Seamus Heaney, “The Rain Stick”

This paper discusses a specific vectorial approach to thinking about digital media authorship, which I summarise as “finders, users, up-enders.” The idiom “finders, keepers” relates to an ancient Roman law (uti possidetis) of finding something (finders) and claiming ownership (keepers) to it if it is unowned or abandoned. I adapt the rationale behind this adage to the case of authoring digital media today, whereby, as I will argue, one comes across (finds) a particular media artifact, consumes it per its intended purpose (uses), and then employs it for goals beyond those intents (upends). I call this approach vectorial because it sets out a path—a specific trajectory—for that authoring process. This approach also implies that, instead of laying claim in terms of physical possession of property (as is the current practice of copyright), with digital media one now “possesses” creatively—by making something visually, conceptually and/or aurally new out of the media artifact, by subverting its intended purpose and content, by recontextualising it and shifting it to new places in the mediascape; a claim of possession to creative intent rather than to title, if you will. If authoring is conventionally about a distinctive style, an unmistakable influence, a vision writ large (in the narrow sense of la politique des auteurs), then digital authoring in this particular “up-ending” approach is about collaborative creativity, subversive humour, and an evolution of tools which take on varying degrees of imaginative and artistic expressiveness. I illustrate my argument with three cinema-based media forms: the film mash-up; the digitally crowdsourced film; and machinima. Using various examples, I show how each media technology follows the “finders/users/up-enders” trajectory, and how each is first acquired, adopted and then transformed. In the process, I also discuss two issues:  the first is the changing and sometimes overlapping roles of the viewer in the digital age as passive consumer, as active and collaborative producer, and as up-ender of media. This can also be compared to the past practice of attributing genius, finality and ownership to the vision of a particular author/auteur. The second issue is the fluidity of the digital text, significant here in the sense of being in dialogue with previous works as the media consumer/producer/up-ender re-works the text. The mash-up is held in particular relief here qua film text because the edit—the cut—as its central digital practice is, in its digital form, stripped of materiality and, in turn, its finality and finitude (you can only cut a film strip once; you can edit a digital text endlessly). I argue that the transformative authorship inherent in up-ending is thus also about a posthuman turn, a constantly changing, constantly resurrecting entity transcending a bodily materiality, as compared to the analogue text of a humanist paradigm, of materiality and of imperfection, wearing its marks, grains, cuts and scratches  on a body which bears all too clearly every scar and trace. Whether this is the music we would never have known to listen for or the rush of apocalyptic thunder is debatable. 

Abstract of Feike Dietz' paper

Reading by Writing: Early Modern Reading Practices in Manuscript and Print Culture

Feike Dietz MA

Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature 

Research Institute for History and Culture

Utrecht University

My paper discusses the relationship between manuscript culture and print culture in early modern religious practices, and in particular the way authors and readers reused printed texts in new meditative manuscripts. Contrary to earlier scholars, I do not consider the manuscript as a 'not yet printed text', but as a 'rewriting' of a printed product. I will focus on a seventeenth century illustrated manuscript based on the popular religious emblem book Pia desideria (1624). By reconstructing the relationship between the manuscript and its printed sources, I argue that the Pia desideria formed the starting point for a meditative reading and writing process in which fragments from different printed sources were creatively combined in a new meditation text. 

Abstract of Kate Eichhorn's paper

Late Print Culture’s ‘Social Media’ Revolution: 

Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines

Dr. Kate Eichhorn 

Culture and Media Studies 

The New School University 

New York City

In the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly” but one that “will be felt more and more.” Today, it’s difficult to imagine the conditions under which McLuhan could have constructed the copy machine as “revolutionary.” After all, for most of us, the copy machine is more likely to conjure up thoughts of tedious labor than technological transformation. In fact, this may explain why so few scholars in the fields of media studies, book history and publishing studies have seriously considered the impacts of this ubiquitous late twentieth-century technology of print reproduction. In this paper, part of a book-length study on the copy machine’s impact on late twentieth-century aesthetic and social movements, I argue that the copy machine—a relatively new “old technology”—did have widespread and transformative impacts on the writing, production and dissemination of texts and on the development and role of textual communities in the decades preceding the arrival of the web. More specifically, this paper locates the copy machine as a precursor to contemporary “social media.” Following McLuhan who maintained that copy machines “enable the reader to become a publisher” and further enact a “total invasion of copyright,” thereby bringing about many “reversals in the relation of publics and writers,” I argue that copy machines played an essential but hitherto under appreciated role in promoting collaborative forms of authorship and cultural production in the 1960s to early 1990s, thereby paving the way for the types of user-generated content and social interaction now associated with Web 2.0 environments.

Abstract of Jim Barrett's paper

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home:

Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Jim Barrett

Language Studies/HUMlab

Umeå University

Sweden

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.

“One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”

Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry. However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as the present situation in the education sector of most Western democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of culture.  There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works. Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual, sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism, iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of the digital works.  These works are

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)

Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)

Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)

Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q

CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)

The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)

Speakers at Remix in Retrospect

I am happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to take part in the symposium:

Professor Adriaan van der Weel, Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include the digitisation of textual transmission and popular reading and publishing. Van der Weel is member of the editorial board of Logos, Forum of the World Book Community. His most recent book project is Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge, which will appear with Manchester University Press in August 2011. 

Dr Kate Eichhorn, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York
Kate Eichhorn's research is broadly concerned with the aesthetic and political efficacy of our everyday practices in those places where literature, art and social activism meet. One of her current book-length projects is Adjusted Margin: The Copy Machine as a Co-Agent of Social Change (a media history investigating how copy machines supported the rise of feminist and queer counter-publics in the late twentieth century). In addition to her research in the fields of book and publishing history, cultural studies and media studies, she is a writer and literary editor. 

Dr Adam Smyth, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Smyth's research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests include the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication, and the cultures of manuscript and print. He published on textual fragmentation in seventeenth century England, on printed anthologies and on life-writing. He is currently working on a book titled Literature and Laughter in England, 1485-1660,and a book on the 1630s Anglican religious community of Little Gidding.

Dr Jenna Ng, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research at CRASSH explores the intersections between image, presence and mobility in digital media technologies, particularly on how the kinesthestic in digital media images challenge screen engagements in digital culture today. She researches primarily on the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her other research interests include digital cinema, cinephilia and Asian cinema (Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean). 

James Barrett MA, HUMlab, Umeå University Sweden
Jim Barrett is a doctoral candidate at Umeå University in Sweden in English Literature and works as a teacher and researcher in HUMlab. He researches on narrative in transcultural and digital media contexts, with a particular interest in the concepts of reading and performance. He also works with digital art, virtual worlds, pedagogy that involves digital media, and digital culture. He teaches cultural studies, literature, and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. 

Feike Dietz MA, Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University
Feike Dietz' PhD-project 'Emblematic Dynamics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Word, Image, Religion' is part of an international research project and focuses on the reception of the Counter Reformational emblem book Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624) in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Her publications include an article on manuscript rewritings of printed emblem books in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. 

Remix in Retrospect: The Symposium

The annual Re-Mix symposium is organised within the framework of the English-language interdisciplinary minor program ‘Re-Mix: Creativity, Participation and Ownership in a Digital Age’, which is hosted by the Department of Arts and Culture at VU University Amsterdam. This year, the symposium is more specifically connected to the course ‘From Commonplace to Copy-Paste: Readers Using Texts’, focusing on a diachronic point of view. 

How may knowledge of historical developments in manuscript and print culture feed the current debate on authorship, reading, copy-right, and creativity in the digital age? And how may a contemporary point of view help us understand and evaluate past practices?

Six internationally renowned speakers will discuss the changing roles of authors and readers in different stages of media history (from manuscript to print and digital textuality) and the implications of these changes for the creation of texts and the status of authorship. 

A round table discussion involving all speakers as well as the audience will conclude the afternoon.

Date: 21 October 2011
Time: 1 PM-6 PM
Location: VU University Amsterdam