My blog is called Oh Brave New World using Miranda's words from The Tempest when she sees for the first time humans other than those inhabiting the only world she has ever known, an island peopled by her father, the spirit Ariel, the witch Sycorax and the odious servant Caliban. When she utters these words, she is playing chess with Ferdinand, who was shipwrecked near the island but who managed to swim to shore.  Her words are unintentionally ironic, a fact played upon by her father Prospero, who says, in response, 'new to you' and who is all too aware of the dastardly nature of most of humanity, especially those in power. When Aldous Huxley wrote his dystopian fiction Brave New World he was being overtly ironic in describing the horrors (to him at any rate) of the American encroachment on the manners and habits of Europe - the horrors of chewing gum, movies and other accoutrements of everyday life in America.  Behind both these texts lies a deeper context, the Elizabethan wonder at and admiration for journeying and exploration and the discovery of new lands. This wonder is captured too in much of Donne and Marvell's poetry from a slightly later period.
I believe we are entering another brave new world but whether this is utopian or dystopian remains to be seen - the possibilities for both are rife. The new world we are inhabiting or which is inhabiting us has been labelled many things, the digital era, the networked world, Web 3.0.  Whatever else it is, this world is mobile, digital, wired and open.  This last word is "open" to interpretation which is why, I presume, we are enrolled for this Mooc #oped12
I am looking forward to discussions and debates over the next weeks.

"Hacking the Academy": A brave new book

And, magically, this item appears today (Thursday 15 September, digitalculture.org or hackingtheacademy.org) about a book 'crowdsourced in one week'. What a brave and wonderful idea -  to 'reform' the academy using digital technology and social media. The book will appear in conventional print format as Hacking the Academy, produced by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt and published by MPublishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library.  I am reading the edited volume in its open access format and there is also a longer web version. What is so splendid about this is its versatility, its openness (obviously), the way in which the book was compiled (using the best contributions from a total of 329 submissions from 177 authors) and the tight time-frame for submissions (seven days) which meant that contributions were focused and engaged.
Harking back to my previous post, here is evidence that authors (177 of them at least) are keen to share ideas through open source media and who may be part of the brave new world of open publishing.
To give you a taste of the book, here is an excerpt from a section called The Meaning of "Hack" by Tad Suiter:

Originally, the term was used to describe computer code. There were two opposing meanings to calling a piece of code a “hack.” One, it is expertly written, efficient, and does precisely what it is intended to do, with eloquence. The other was that the code was hastily written, sloppy, and essentially only just good enough. It was a workaround, the software equivalent of a hardware kludge.

As mutually exclusive as these two connotations of the term may seem, however, both the polished, impressive hack and the quick-and-dirty hack have a fundamental similarity. They are both born of a certain relationship to a certain type of knowledge.

Hackers are autodidacts. From the earliest hackers working at large research universities on the first networks to anyone who deserves the term today, a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing. They teach themselves and one another because they are at the bleeding edge of knowledge about that system.



Suiter goes on to encourage a sense of play amongst academics:

[Play is]... something that “serious” academics don’t get to explore as often as they should. Play is good for the soul—it reinvigorates, brings joy, renews commitments. It makes things fun. And it is also good for the intellect. Play leads to types of problem-solving and synthesis that would otherwise be impossible. There’s a reason that “clever” means both funny and smart.

If hacking is play with a purpose, I am all for it.
#change11

The Death of the Author? Yes, Roland Barthes, but not in the way you were thinking.

This story from Wired Campus today (Tuesday September 13 2011) got me thinking about open resources, open publishing and Roland Barthes.  The story of how the Authors Guild intends suing five US universities and Google rapidly overtook the original news that Duke and Google had joined forces to publish books in a digital repository. Good, I thought at the time. But Scott Turow's formidable language "These books ... are now at needless, intolerable digital risk" got me thinking further.  "Intolerable risk"? Intolerable? Are open resources now not to be tolerated?
Like a good scholar, I tried thinking from another angle, from the point of view of a lawyer representing scores of outraged authors and objectively I could see the problem. If these authors had not given permission, then this was, I suppose, theft of a sort. So now I'm torn between wearing my social justice hat and saying ra-ra for open publishing, for Duke and for Google ,and wearing my academic's cap and tut-tutting over flagrant abuse and injustice for authors. Hmmm.
And then along came my memory of Roland Barthes and his famous essay, The Death of the Author. So perhaps what we now have is a case of The Death of the Author Revisited. Barthes suggested that the author was dead because s/he didn't really exist in the first place. There is nothing new under the sun, said Barthes, well, no, not really, he didn't say that, it was Shakespeare, no, oops, it's from Ecclesiastes, ie the Bible ["What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"], but I was close, because Shakespeare is often the source of the most quotable quotes. What Barthes was suggesting was that all ideas, all creative thoughts are floating in a delightful sea of intertextuality. When we think we are creating a text, we aren't at all, because we are dipping our creative fingers into the sea and hauling out a pre-existing idea (okay I am really simplifying Barthes here, but bear with me).  What we have are texts, not authors, so, the author is dead.
Now, with this latest catastrophe, we have a number of authors howling about having their creations being made openly available in another sort of web, the wonderful internet with its rich range of possibilities to create a brave new world. Why are they howling? Well, stoopid, because they earn money from royalties, so we are taking away their livelihood.
Which brings me to the BIG question.  Are we staring at an imminent future where writers cannot earn money from their writing? If so, and this is a distinct if distant possibility, we will no longer have a profession based on authorship. Instead, the idea of the single and singular author will dissolve (yes, Roland, you were right) into a more socially distributed model of shared authorship and we will be left with authors who write for love.
#change11

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/authors-guild-sues-hathitrust-5-universities-over-digitized-books/36178?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en