recursivepublic.net

As part of the publication process of my book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, I have discussed with Duke University Press ideas of “modulating” the book. “Modulations” are a key part of the book, in which I explore how the practices of Free Software have been used as templates and taken up in areas close to and far from Free Software. Such practices are “good to think with” in classic anthropological terms, meaning that they allow people to rethink their practices and habits using an exemplary and easily available set of ideas and tools. As such Free Software practices have spread to science (open access) to education (open educational resources), to music, film and culture (Creative Commons) and so on.

Because I’ve thought a lot about Free Software and its relation to science, I’ve naturally wondered: What does “scholarly” remix look like? And especially in those domains of the human and natural sciences where what might be shared or re-used is not immediately obvious. Thinking through free software might change how we think about research, and it might provide us with ways to change how our own scholarship is written, read, published, circulated and built upon. The idea is related to those “remixing” experiments like Larry Lessig’s Code V2 wiki (http://codev2.cc/) and Yochai Benkler’s wiki version of his book (http://www.benkler.org), The Wealth of Networks, but I want to push it a step further. I don’t want to remix my book, I want us to re-mix the network of ideas and scholars who led to the book.

Hence, “modulations.” What are modulations? To begin with, it might mean articles, essays, or student papers and projects that make use of, take issue with, or expand on Two Bits itself–any work on free software, public spheres and recursive publics, history of software, software studies, geeks and hackers, intellectual property, liberalism and technology, free culture and so on– especially those works that track the spread and movement of these issues beyond the domain of free software.

But it isn’t all about me: I’m looking for stuff in our collective conceptual space. Articles, published or not, and ideas for projects that come from any of the fields we play in: science studies, anthropology, media studies, history, sociology, legal studies, information studies, philosophy etc. I have a few works lined up that I will try to highlight over the next few months, and hopefully that will give people some ideas about where to take it.

I think of this project as blurring the lines between an online repository, a scholarly journal and edited volume. More than a blog, less than a large-scale publishing project, and with the blessing of Duke University press and HASTAC, slightly more official and legitimate than a list of links. An on-line volume of work, edited by me, with uneven periodicity and hopefully some occasional vibrant discussion.

Why? In short because I think we need to start experimenting with the limits of scholarly collaboration–beyond the journal and the edited volume, but also beyond the blog and the wiki. There is nothing technically new about what I’m proposing here (yet); what’s new is that I want scholars and scholarly presses to re-think publication and circulation, and to use the example of Free Software to do so: free, permanent, legitimate, alive. I worry, perhaps too much, that our scholarship is increasingly unfree, unstable, unauthorized and unread, and I certainly don’t think it’s because our work is boring or bad. We suffer from too much focus on getting published, and not enough
focus on getting circulated. I think we need to change that.

I think our works (much like our selves in consumer society) are increasingly isolated and individualized by the current journal and university press system. Rather than works in conversation, threaded together by commentary and response, they are increasingly singled out, marketed alone, unconnected to other works, often in places far from the communities of scholarship that produced them. Edited volumes seem like a good solution–but in fact they are usually a disaster… hard to produce, even harder to obtain, and appearing well after the energy that ignited them is dissipated. They look more like failed communes than lively research programmes.

By contrast, the vivid discussions that we all know from our blogs, our friend’s blogs and our blogs’ blogs have not yet become something that might supplement or replace the scholarly communication we used to expect from journals and books. This is the kind of empty space I want “modulations” to try to fill. A key aspect of this, therefore, is support from authorizing institutions, like Duke University Press and HASTAC, both of who are very keen to support such an idea, because they expect it to come from scholars, not from themselves. We need this legitimation, even if we like to think that it’s all about the work. We need it both to project our works’ legitimacy to our colleagues and beyond, but also for ourselves, to know that some of our work is validated, circulated, contributing to a commons that we can all take responsibility for.

I will edit (curate is probably a better word here, I don’t intend to do any copyediting, or necessarily ), but I dream of expanding this role to others. I will maintain it, but I dream of making it into an “official” publication somehow–perhaps just something in a catalog, perhaps an experiment in print-on-demand. It will be technically simple (a table of contents and a blog with disussion and an RSS feed) but I dream of exploring new tools and new platforms…