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.

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.

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.