An unfinished lexicon for autonomous publishing

Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2012

Against the Grain

Whose Book is it Anyway?, 2019

In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communication and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post Office Press (POP). Alison Baverstock is a publisher and pioneer of publishing education and profession-orientated education within universities. She co-founded MA Publishing at Kingston University in 2006 and has researched and written widely about publishing. How to Market Books, first published in 1990 and now in its seventh edition, has been widely licensed for translation and is an international bedrock of publisher education, within both the academy and the profession. She is a champion of the widening of literacy and the value of shared-reading: Well Worth Reading won an arts and industry award and since then she has founded both www.readingforce.org.uk and The Kingston University Big Read, which won the 2017 Times Higher Award for Widening Participation. In 2007 she received the Pandora Award for a significant contribution to the industry. Michael Bhaskar is a writer and publisher based in London and Oxford. He is co-founder of Canelo, a new digital publisher, and Writer in x Whose Book is it Anyway? Residence at DeepMind, the world's leading AI research lab. Previously he has been a digital publisher, economist, agent and start-up founder amongst other things. He is author of The Content Machine (2013) and Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (2016) and is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Publishing (2019). He regularly speaks and writes about the future of publishing, media, culture and society. J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer working across print, digital, and live performance. Her pioneering works of digital literature have been presented in journals, museums, galleries, and festivals around the world. Her recent web-based work The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. A print book by the same name was published in 2017. Her debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins) was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2018. John Cayley is a writer, theorist, and pioneering maker of language art in programmable media. Apart from more or less conventional poetry and translation, he has explored dynamic and ambient poetics, text generation, transliteral morphing, aestheticized vectors of reading, and transactive synthetic language. Today, he composes as much for reading in aurality as in visuality.

mako.cc

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024

This article engages with Wolfgang Klein's (1989) invitation to think about the emergence of the knowledge industry and the extent to which it makes it impossible for readers of scientific journals to keep up with overproduction. Taking acceleration as a key economic property that governs contemporary academic capitalism, we explore some inner workings of this industry but also examples of collective (and prefigurative) initiatives that have attempted to undermine such workings in non-academic settings, in order to reflect more specifically on the possible implications for academic publishing. In so doing, we identify some relevant features as to how capitalist temporalities organise scientific editorial work, and provide a few focal points of consideration with the hope of contributing to wider conversations on how to begin (re)imagining alternative ways of doing academic publishing.

2013

In October of 2011 I hosted a roundtable discussion on radical publishing with editors from Pluto, Zed Books and New Left Review. The conversation, featured in Interface 3/2, engaged issues around the labour of radical publishing, raising questions about how we write and research as activist academics. Shortly after the roundtable appeared, I received a Facebook post from Stevphen, a friend and colleague, applauding the roundtable but questioning where the autonomous press fit in with this rendering of radical publishing? Nearly a year later this inquiry moved from virtual critique to living room debate. In June 2012 Stevphen, Jamie and I organised a follow up roundtable with folks working with Autonomedia, PM Press, AK Press, The Paper, Occupied London and the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Since ancient times human beings have been communicating to express their ideas through various medium, be it for any personal or public expression. One of the most dominant and currently relevant media of communication is publishing. Publishing is the act of communicating a message to the public through a medium. Publications link authors and their creation with readers. With evolution in technology, there has been a shift from the publisher-centric model to the author-friendly model of publishing. Many platforms assist the authors and the users in getting access to quality material for an affordable price. In this era, it thus becomes necessary to have an overview of the new publishing models. A critical analysis is conducted for each model starting from post-Gutenberg to open access publications of the modern era. The impact it has on libraries is also studied and how a library can play a crucial role in this new publishing scenario. This paper will discuss how various publishing model works and how authors, users, and librarians are benefiting from them.

Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2016

The term “mattering” in Mattering Press comes from science and technology studies (STS), which brings together a growing number social anthropologists, sociologists, human geographers, cultural economists, and many others with the aim of problematizing science’s self-understanding as a disembedded and disembodied undertaking. STS as a field was established in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the first ethnographic studies of some Western European and North American laboratories were published. Since then, STS scholars have extended their gaze to a wide range of sites, from hospitals through high-tech innovation centres to stock exchange trading rooms, in order to explore how scientific knowledge is being produced and distributed through seemingly trivial material practices—and how it could be produced and distributed differently. Ironically, what’s largely missing from the list of usual sites in STS-inspired works are the institutions that play one of the most important roles in shaping the academic world STS scholars themselves operate in, namely publishers. To address this hiatus, Mattering Press was established in 2012 by a small group of young STS scholars with the aim of better understanding current developments in academic publishing by actively participating in them. In this short paper, I will try to articulate what the politics of such an active participation might be using the case of illegal—samizdat—publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. First, I will briefly recount the history of samizdat production in Central and Eastern Europe in general and in Hungary in particular. Drawing on the insights of samizdat research, I will then identify three dimensions of the politics of self-publishing: materiality, experimentation, and the ethics of openness. Finally, by mobilizing some STS resources, I will discuss how these three dimensions can be simultaneously captured by the term “mattering,” and the publishing practices of Mattering Press.