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"“It was the biggest upheaval in film exhibition since synchronized sound. Between 2010 and 2012, the world’s film industries forever changed the way movies were shown.”
This is the opening sentence of Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies. Written in lively and accessible language, it tells the story of how the recent revolution in film projection came about. It also situates the digital change in the history of American film distribution and moviegoing."
"After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it's not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I've tried to summarize my conclusions below. "
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1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?
2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...
3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).
4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.
"In thinking about these eschatological questions, I start from Matt Kirschenbaum’s observation that DH is not a single intellectual project but a tactical coalition. Just for starters, humanists can be interested in digital technology a) as a way to transform scholarly communication, b) as an object of study, or c) as a means of analysis. These are distinct intellectual projects, although they happen to overlap socially right now because they all require skills and avocations that are not yet common among humanists. "
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So DH has no future, in the long run, because the three parts of DH probably confront very different kinds of future. One will be generalized; one will likely settle in for trench warfare; and one may well get absorbed by informatics. [Or become a permanent trade mission to informatics. See also Matthew Wilkens' suggestion in the comments below. - Ed.] But personally, I’m in no rush to see any of this happen. My odds of finding a disciplinary home in the humanities will be highest as long as the DH coalition holds together; so here’s a toast to long life and happiness. We are, after all, only eleven.
"When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of "metadata", "controlled vocabulary" and "taxonomy" without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily."
in list: For Teaching
"A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation--even to art. "
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My version of object-oriented ontology, outlined in my new book Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like to Be a Thing, concerns the experience of objects. What is it like to be a bonobo or a satellite or a pixel?
There's a reason I start from aliens instead of computers, and from phenomenology instead of aesthetics. We usually understand alien either in a political or a cosmological sense: a terrestrial alien is a foreigner from another country, and an extraterrestrial alien is a foreigner from another planet. Even when used philosophically to refer to otherness more generally, aliennness is assumed to be a human-legible intersubjectivity. The other is someone we can recognize as enough like ourselves to warrant identification.
But the true alien might be unrecognizable; it might not have an intelligence akin to our intelligence, or even one we could recognize as intelligence. Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales. Everything is an alien to everything else. It is ultimately impossible for one thing to understand the experience of another, but we can speculate about the withdrawn, inner experience of things based on a combination of evidence--the exhaust they leave behind--and poetics--the speculative work we do to characterize that experience.
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The compendium is a better model than the aggregate. A list of things is most useful when it is large enough to show diversity and juxtaposition, but small enough to provide coherence: a tiny bestiary, not an infinite zoo.
I've suggested the term ontography as a name for creating lists, groups, or other collections of things for the purpose of documenting the repleteness under one tiny rock of existence. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory: it can take the form of lists, photographs, collections, even tumblrs, perhaps, with enough practice. Collection is aesthetically productive, but a collection that strives to trace an asymptote toward infinity creates obligation instead of clarity.
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"Over the last week in my new first-year undergraduate course, Media Fluency for the Digital Age, my students have been wrestling with a very counterintuitive digital media assignment, and I think it's worth exploring why these members of the "born digital" generation found this assignment so difficult — and so rewarding.
Here's the challenge they were given:
Finding information that's not online. Find an article (research journal article, analytic newspaper article, serious magazine article, or scholarly book chapter) that is on the topic of the Internet or new media, but not available (at least, not to you) on the Internet, and acquire a digital copy of that article. "
in list: For Teaching
"The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter."
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When there are no more printing presses -- when the books are gone, when all old knowledge has been digitized, and all new knowledge is digitally distributed -- then there will be only one way to access powerful and empowering knowledge, a way that is mediated (and monitored and limited) by corporations and governments who develop and control the proprietary delivery systems of all things digital. Who controls that technology? Who designs those tools? For whom will they be made available, and under what conditions? Who will guarantee texts a place on the grid, and who will guarantee us access to the grid as readers? And who will assure us that even if the grid goes dark, and stays dark for far too long, we can still access the knowledge embedded in those unreadable digital files?
Or will digital texts become the new hieroglyphics, faint scratchings on the pedestal of a vast colossal wreck of a culture that unwisely abandoned a well-worn instrument of liberation: printed words on a page, "portable property," books simply -- but not always safely -- passed from one hand to another.
"There's a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they'd be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren't going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it's not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way."
The world is suffering from a dark and silent phenomenon known as 'digital decay' – anything stored in computerised form is vulnerable to breakdown and obsolescence. And this has enormous implications for the arts, says Bruce Sterling
REAPER is digital audio workstation software: a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.
"The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on "user-centric identity" and trying to solve the technical challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with."
"This notion of a cloud-based personal data store is only now starting to come into focus. When I was groping for a term to describe it back in 2007 I came up with hosted lifebits. More recently the Internet Identity Workshop gang have settled on personal data store, as recently described by Kaliya Hamlin and Phil Windley. The acronym is variously PDS or PDX, where X, as Kaliya says, stands for "store, service, locker, bank, broker, vault, etc.""
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