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Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts. Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,
  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
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  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?
  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen. This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.
  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
Nele Noppe

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World - 0 views

  • copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies.
  • For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright's true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists.
  • make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help.
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  • They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it).
  • Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.
  • For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits. True, there are a few stars — some quite talented — whose works are backed by the industry; these receive the lion's share of distribution investment, and generate a correspondingly greater profit, which is shared with the artist on better than usual terms because the artist's negotiating position is stronger. Not coincidentally, these stars are who the industry always holds up as examples of the benefits of copyright.
  • The first copyright law was a censorship law.
  • The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed.
  • The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors. New books were entered in the Company's Register under a Company member's name, not the author's name. By convention, the member who registered the entry held the "copyright", the exclusive right to publish that book
  • The Stationers' right was a new right, though one based on a long tradition of granting monopolies to guilds as a means of control. Before this moment, copyright — that is, a privately held, generic right to prevent others from copying — did not exist.
  • Dissolution of the monopoly might have been good news for long-suppressed authors and independent printers, but it spelled disaster for the Stationers, and they quickly crafted a strategy to retain their position in the newly liberal political climate.
  • The Stationers based their strategy on a crucial realization, one that has stayed with publishing conglomerates ever since: authors do not have the means to distribute their own works. Writing a book requires only pen, paper, and time. But distributing a book requires printing presses, transportation networks, and an up-front investment in materials and typesetting. Thus, the Stationers reasoned, people who write would always need a publisher's cooperation to make their work generally available. Their strategy used this fact to maximum advantage. They went before Parliament and offered the then-novel argument that authors had a natural and inherent right of ownership in what they wrote, and that furthermore, such ownership could be transferred to other parties by contract, like any other form of property.
  • The first recognizably modern copyright, the Statute of Anne, was passed in 1709 and took effect in 1710.
  • The Statute of Anne, taken in historical context, is the smoking gun of copyright law. In it we can see the entire apparatus of modern copyright, but in still-undisguised form. There is the notion of copyright as property, yet the property is really intended for publishers, not authors. There is the notion of benefitting society, by encouraging people to write books, but no evidence was offered to show that they would not write books without copyright. Rather, the Stationers' argument was that publishers could not afford to print books without protection from competition, and furthermore that printers could not be depended to reproduce works faithfully if given unfettered freedom to print. The corollary, they implied, was that without the prospect of reliable distribution, authors would produce fewer new works.
  • The authors who succeeded in selling this new right to printers had no particular motivation to complain — and naturally, we don't hear very much about the authors not so favored. T
  • This is the secret that today's copyright lobby never dares say aloud, for once it is admitted, the true purpose of subsequent copyright legislation becomes embarrassingly clear.
  • Having granted the premise that copyrights should exist at all, the English government found themselves under pressure to extend copyright terms further and further.
  • The industry's centuries-long campaign for strong copyright law is not merely a reflexive land grab, however. It's a natural economic response to technological circumstances. The effect of the printing press, and later of analog sound recording technology, was to make creative works inseparable from their means of distribution. Authors needed publishers the way electricity needs wires. The only economically viable method of reaching readers (or listeners) was the bulk print run
  • There is nothing inherently exploitative about this; it's just straightforward economics. From a business point of view, a print run is a daunting and risky project.
  • When one realizes that all this must happen before the work has generated a penny of revenue, it is little wonder that publishers argue hard for copyright. The publisher's initial investment — that is, their risk — in any individual work is greater, in economic terms, than the author's
  • The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation.
  • But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end [7]. Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is trivially easy — it's making an imperfect copy that requires extra effort.
  • Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution.
  • Thus the practice of charging the same fee for each copy, regardless of how many copies there are or who made them, is now unjustifiable. The cost of producing and distributing the work is now essentially fixed, no longer proportional to the number of copies
  • From society's point of view, every dollar spent beyond the amount needed (if any) to bring the work into existence in the first place is a waste, an impediment to the work's ability to spread on its own merits.
  • The Internet did something the Company of Stationers never anticipated: it made their argument a testable hypothesis. Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will.
  • Imagine the simplest scenario: you walk into the neighborhood print shop and tell the clerk the Web address of the book you want. A couple of minutes later, the clerk comes back with a freshly printed, hardbound book, straight off the Internet. He rings up the sale. "That'll be eight dollars. Would you like to add the one dollar author's suggested donation?" Do you say yes? Perhaps you do, perhaps not — but note that when museums charge a voluntary admission fee, people often pay it. The same sort of dynamic is at work in the copy shop. Most people are happy to pay a tiny extra bit on top of some larger amount, if they have their wallet out already and think it's for a good reason.
  • This is not the only possible system, and it can easily coexist with others. Those not convinced by voluntary donations should consider another method: the Fund and Release system (also called the Threshold Pledge system [9]).
Nele Noppe

Martha Woodmansee - The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetic... - 0 views

  • What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details
  • Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).
  • too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.
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  • turning a defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm--the "fine" arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.
  • Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author.
  • As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy was rampant. In order to put an end to piracy and claim a portion of the profits from book sales for themselves, writers had to prove that ownership of a work extends beyond the mere physical foundation to which pirates had reduced it.
  • Succeeding copyright legislation turned Fichte's financially-motivated theory into law
  • Recent theory has made much of the "death" of the author; Woodmansee completes the sketch by narrating the story of the author's birth.
  • If Moritz, Fichte, and Schiller were interested in reforming the "supply side" of artistic production in response to the crisis of the new reading market, Johann Adam Bergk sought to work on the "demand side." Woodmansee shows how Bergk's hefty 416-page tome "The Art of Reading Books" (1799) was a response to Addison's advocacy of widespread leisure reading in the early years of the century.
  • Bergk seeks "to carry forward Addison's project under the radically altered conditions of literature in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 93) by expressly detailing not so much what should be read as how books should be read, advocating an active and creative reader who, he hoped, would "automatically make the 'right' choices" once he/she learned to read, becoming "too sophisticated to derive much pleasure from the growing literature of sheer diversion" and turning instead to classical authors for leisure reading (p. 100).
  • After a brief, but interesting, excursus on the role of gender in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that focuses on the career of the first popular German woman writer, Sophie von La Roche, whose gender denied [End Page 967] her (theoretical) ownership of her works,
  • Woodmansee ends her book by returning to the legal realm, detailing Wordsworth's defense of the Copyright Bill of 1842, which in effect legislated his anti-market aesthetic theory of 1815 and encouraged the production of "difficult" art for posterity rather than for the contemporary book-buying public. The law had finally intervened and provided support for those who would "rescue" art from the market.
  • In The Author, Art, and the Market, Woodmansee provides an exemplary model for integrating aesthetics and cultural studies,
  • In her insistence that "art" is not a stable concept, but rather is contingent upon material concerns, Woodmansee points a way to treating this larger history, in whose legacy we live and which we help to fashion.
Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

  • The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer- oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry.... But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
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  • The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans jam session
  • The problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else
Nele Noppe

The Road to Comiket - 0 views

  • held twice a year in August and December at the Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan, and attracts over 450,000 participants over its three day run.
  • primary focus of the event is the buying and selling of doujinshi
  • Comiket is also known colloquially as the birthplace of cosplay and thousands of visitors come dressed as their favorite anime, manga and game characters as well.
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  • establishment of an official industry presence in the form of an industry booth dealers’ section
  • alternate media such as software, music, and character goods.
  • doujin circle (同人サークル). A doujin circle is an individual or group of creators who collaborate as a discreet entity to produce doujin items for sale;
  • Recently the so-called “kojin circle” (個人サークル, personal circle) composed of a single member has been increasing, as individuals take on all aspects of doujin production from the application process, illustration, post-production, printing, and staffing of the table space allotted at the event.
  • Step 1 Purchase an application packet.
  • Step 2 File the application correctly and on time.
  • Comiket is an all genre event, meaning literally anything goes
  • Step 3 Wait for the election results.
  • Step 4 Produce a doujin.
  • Also, copyright considerations that apply to other events such as Wonder Festival are in effect here when it comes to certain types of character goods (no unauthorized figures), and while most IP is considered fair game for parody in the doujin community, a few exceptions such as Disney stand out as taboo.
    • Nele Noppe
       
      This is interesting- dojinshi using copyrighted characters may be sold, but no unauthorized figures of said characters? Is this because figures cost just a little too much for copyright holders to be comfortable with letting fans produce them? I'm not surprised about the Disney exception, non-Japanese companies with little experience with the dojin economy are probably a lot more likely to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone selling things based on their copyrighted characters.
  • Step 5 Coordinate replication.
  • Step 6 Make final preparations.
  • This broadening of distribution means that it’s no longer necessary to attend events in person to obtain many professionally produced books at a reasonable price. While they’re still cheaper at Comiket, many circles have recognized the need to provide something more to encourage fans to attend (or just to show gratitude to those who do show up), and that’s where the copy book comes in.
  • Step 7 Show up and sell!
  • At some point before 9:30 an event staff member will visit you at your table where your participation will be officially registered. You must provide both a sworn statement that you’re not selling anything illegal and copies of the books you’ll be releasing that day to the staff, and then you’re clear to go.
    • Nele Noppe
       
      I wonder if the staff sometimes takes away merchandise or closes entire boots at the last minute because they've found something objectionable in the advance copies provided to them (apparently only hours or minutes before the opening of the event)?
Nele Noppe

Re-read The Sorcerer's Stone Today! An Unauthorized Guide - 0 views

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    Has some fun parts/theories, but fans have gone much farther. Will probably just read parts online.
Nele Noppe

Bring Forth the Best Robes - 0 views

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    Looks at Snape from a very emphatically religious perspective. Not sure what to think of that, personally, but it may give me some good ideas. To buy.
Nele Noppe

Drexel CoAS E-Learning: Happy Accidents: A Must-Read for Open Scientists - 0 views

  • In Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs; When Scientists Find What They're NOT Looking for, Morton Meyers reviews examples of the unpredictability of scientific progress.
  • A quote from the preface foreshadows the tone of the book:The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way. Consequently, not only the general public but the scientific community itself is unaware of the vast role of serendipity in medical research.
  • A quote from the preface foreshadows the tone of the book:The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way. Consequently, not only the general public but the scientific community itself is unaware of the vast role of serendipity in medical research
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  • The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way
  • The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way.
  • An applicant for a research grant is expected to have a clearly defined program for a period of three to five years. Implicit is the assumption that nothing unforeseen will be discovered during that time and, even if something were, it would not cause distraction from the approved line of research. Yet the reality is that many medical discoveries were made by researchers working on the basis of a fallacious hypothesis that led them down an unexpected fortuitous path.
  • The fact that some of us in the Open Science community are discussing this does not mean that we are advocating for the abolition of peer review or the NIH. We are not that naive. We still submit proposals and manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals (although given a choice we probably would pick an Open Access journal over one running on a paid subscription model).The point is what we do in addition to all those traditional processes.
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    The dominant convention of all scientific writing is to present discoveries as rationally driven and to let the facts speak for themselves. This humble ideal has succeeded in making scientists look as if they never make errors, that they straightforwardly answer every question they investigate. It banishes any hint of blunders and surprises along the way
Nele Noppe

Open-work: Dining at the Interstices - 0 views

  • In the New Millennium, the tradition that Judy Chicago pioneered of recognizing and celebrating women’s contributions continues in the vibrant new medium of the Web. Talan Memmott has suggested the term "Rich Lit" for the cornucopia of delights that this new "Dinner Party" offers.
  • The protest of the literati may be misguided, but it has enough nanograms of truth to prompt me to suggest a complementary term to Talan’s rich lit: open-work.
  • As a term, open-work calls attention to the fact that the craftwork of making has again become a recognized and important component of textual production. During the last several hundred years, the commodification of book production drove a wedge between authorial process and the hands-on labor of producing the book as a physical object. The complex history behind this separation has been documented by Mark Rose in Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, among others. Suffice it to say here that a constellation of economic, political and class forces was successful in promulgating the idea that what the author produced was an immaterial concept separated from and untainted by the commercial networks that brought the actual book into being.
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  • "work"--associated with the same male-centered world view that so enraged July Chicago-
  • The intelligence, knowledge, and creativity it takes to write and/or implement software for artistic purposes can no longer be separated from the work,
  • The open-work is open in the sense that it serves as a fluid space in which artistic intent commingles with technical expertise. At many levels and in many ways, the material basis for the production of the open-work interpenetrates the work as concept and cannot be separated from it.
  • rt itse
  • Especially illuminating in this regard are open-works that foreground the importance of craftwork by "treating" traditional texts so their concepts become literalized or materialized in new ways, thus opening spaces within the traditional texts where the fluid and hybrid nature of the open-work can asse
  • appropriation
  • Another aspect of the openness of the open-work is expressed in its fusion of text and image. With digital technology
  • The encoding of text into binary code allows fragmentation and recombination to operate in ways unthinkable with alphabetic language.
  • Finally, the open-work is open in the sense that it radiates out to a physically dispersed community, uniting together in collaborative projects women from different regions and countries, as well as bringing into existence an international Web community who can access and benefit from each other’s works.
Nele Noppe

Amazon.com: Gender And Power in the Japanese Visual Field (9780756781545): Joshua S. Mo... - 0 views

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    Gender And Power in the Japanese Visual Field
Nele Noppe

Reading Harry Potter: A personal and collective experience - 0 views

  • reception of the Harry Potter novels in France.
  • “media talk” has shaped an image of the Harry Potter readership and ascribed meanings to the novels.
  • Harry Potter readership seems to be very diverse, blurring some traditional age, gender or social distinctions related to reading preferences.
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  • Our research interest was to investigate how these very heterogeneous readers made sense of the books and organized their Harry Potter “reading career.”
  • We have tried to avoid the intellectualist bias of the academic discourse privileging the most analytic and erudite forms of reception, or the most articulate and literary forms of newspaper reviews (Barker, 2004). As Elizabeth Long pointed out, “the traditional imagery of the solitary reader” has privileged “a certain kind of reading: erudite, analytic” (Long, 2003, p. 2-3), and it “legitimat[es] only certain kinds of literary values and certain modes of reading” (p. 11).
  • The Harry Potter books are characterized by their serial publication over ten years, their dispersion on different media and tie-ins, and their symbolic status as best-sellers and objects of public attention: all these elements have shaped reading experiences.
  • Martin Barker emphasized the importance of the secondary, ancillary, or satellite texts that shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of novels are formed: marketing campaigns, articles, reviews and debates in the media, and fan productions (Barker, 2004).
  • All these public discourses constitute discursive frames around the novels. They tend to ascribe meanings and effects to the Harry Potter books and to spread a homogeneous and sometimes simplistic image of Harry Potter readers.
  • Although the Harry Potter readership is much wider, the readers who were mostly described were teenagers. Assumptions about teenagers’ emotional instability, vulnerability, and identity crises have influenced many of the categories used in media discourse to talk about Harry Potter.
  • Reading Harry Potter was supposed to contribute to the harmonious maturation of the readers, as the characters themselves were growing up. The mechanism of this readers’ transformation was supposed to be “identification”:
  • layed an important role in turning Harry Potter into a part of legitimate and safe culture.
  • These ancillary discourses targeting teenagers were thus clearly gendered, and the labels applied to the movies and the novels can help to define a diversity of reading expectations. But do actual readers conform to these solicitations? How do they appropriate the novels? How do their reading experiences relate to their movie experiences with Harry Potter?
  • The Harry Potter novels, by their wide and diverse readership, lent themselves very well to an investigation of the diversity of “appropriation” and levels of engagement.
  • Cultures of feelings and ethical perceptions: 2.a: a preference for adult or “bad” characters: the appeal of psychological complexity
Nele Noppe

Videogames and art - Google Boeken - 0 views

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    Videogames and art
Nele Noppe

Glossary | Organization for Transformative Works - 0 views

  • Fanwork The creative work done by fans for fannish purposes.
  • Media fandom ''Media fandom is generally used to refer to fictional, Western fandoms based on movies or television'' (from http://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_fandom). Books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people fandoms often intersect with, but also exist in parallel to, media fandom.
  • Remix culture Remix culture is a neologism that describes a culture of creativity based on previous creations. This is in contrast with permission culture, which aims to bind derivative creativity to the permission of the license holders. Both terms are simplified abstractions for current political and legal positions. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture)
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  • Transformative Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators.
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