Syllabus

Introduction

In this class we will conduct a studio investigation into the contemporary technical, aesthetic, and social possibilities of digital publishing. We will at the same time critically examine publishing as a cultural practice with a particular pre-digital history, and as a contemporary practice conditioned by specific technological and market forces. Digital publishing is a field in flux; it poses a fascinating set of contradictions and capacities. This class will have a dialectical focus: we will investigate publishing as a formal and historical oscillation between print and digital.

As a constant side-light to our studio work, we will think critically about the form and social construction of publishing as a cultural practice, and how shifts in technology create aesthetic and social reconstitutions of what we call the book. What new form of the book is coming into being? We will carefully examine the rhetoric surrounding digital publishing---which both nostalgically laments the death of print and ecstatically proclaims that everyone is an author---in order, as critical practitioners, to see the contemporary landscape more clearly and to understand what new forms and actions are possible.

We will also think about the prospects for the discipline of *design* in this emerging field. The clear divisions of labor which formerly structured the publishing industry are reshuffled and conflated in the advent of the digital. Designer, programmer, editor, author, publisher, reader: How do these divisions get merged in contemporary practices and what distinctions remain? What does the designer do in all this: less, more? In this class you will take on roles besides that of designer; you will also edit and publish and code. All at the same time!

Projects

You will produce---edit, design, and publish---four books in a series. Each book will be produced in a different medium, and will address a different temporality of a single topic. Your topic is up to you. It should be something you find interesting and expansive enough to spend a semester researching and working with. Whatever you pick, you will address its future, past, present, and then all three together, in print, online, in an ebook.

Reading and Writing

Each week there will be a short reading pertaining to publishing. You will choose an excerpt from the reading and write a short response (approximately 300 words) in a blog you develop. This blog will be a sort of digital commonplace book you keep throughout the semester. Wikipedia says:

"Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe."

In addition to being a stable archive of your thinking about publishing this semester, the blog will also be a design project. Despite being archaic in internet time, Blogger has many customization features. Explore and experiment with these. See what you can get it to do. This is something you should work on throughout the semester. By midterm, the design of your blog should be intentionally and experimentally designed, a first solid draft. By the end of the semester, it should be complete.

Presentations

Each student will make an in-class presentation on a platform, plug-in, publisher, book, archive, etc. I will provide a list of possible subjects next week.

Reading and Discussion Sections

The Death and Afterlife of Print

Technological Determinations

What is a Digital Book?

Property Problems

Archives

Autonomous Practices

Grading

The rough breakdown of how I will determine your grade at the end of the semester is:

  +  50% the work 

  +  50% the thought & words (written & spoken) 

And any deliverable which is undelivered, or late, will count against your final grade. Two absences and/or one lateness is acceptable and will not adversely affect your grade. Three absences will diminish your grade by one full step (i.e., a becomes b, b becomes c, etcetera). Four absences is technically grounds for failure, though with extenuating circumstances, exceptions can be made. Three lateness equals one absence.