The future of print = the death of culture?

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Readings for February 04

OK, now that we've explored some different views of the "future of print" from different historical periods (and different kinds of interests) I've chosen four "theoretical and conceptual tools" articles that I think will be useful for our next step in this seminar.  They can be found in the readings repository under these titles:

• Darnton R 1982 Daedalus = What is the history of books
• Pawley C 2002 BookH = Seeking 'significance' - Actual readers, specific reading communities
• Striphas T 2009 ch 01 = E-books and the digital future
• Thompson J 2010 ch 00 = Merchants of Culture ~ Introduction

Besides reading all the articles, here are your individual blog assignments to be completed at least 12 hours before the February 04 session:

• Bard - Darnton article analysis
• Bond - Pawley article analysis
• Bottomley - Striphas article analysis
• Ineichen - Thompson article analysis
• Marshall - track down author Darnton
• Meneses-Hall - track down author Pawley
• Pegues - track down author Striphas
• Roeder - track down author Thompson
• Stalker - come up with three or four overriding questions

During and after class, the rest of you have these assignments:

• Boehm and Toff - take detailed notes in class
• Zhang - do a "next steps" literature search to suggest two articles that build on these four

This is not a big reading assignment -- only four articles -- but they are all substantial reads, and we will really work these pieces in detail over our two-plus hours.  Figure we will spend the first hour on Darnton and Pawley, and the second on Striphas and Thompson, with time left over for breaks and determining next steps.  OK?  See you next week! -- GREG

Hello from Mei

Same as Tracy, I posted my introduction as a comment to "Here we go", and I decided to move it as a separate posting.

I am Mei Zhang, a third-year doctoral student in SLIS. I'm interested in the e-book industry, especially how publishers/aggregators, libraries, and users have changed their perceptions of book. Taking this class will allow me to build a better understanding of the print culture (I know "print" is a much broader concept than "book"! ) in both past and future.

Here is a photo of me, taken in last September in Michigan!

Hello from Tracy

I posted my original introduction as a comment on the class introductory post, but thought I'd post again here and add a photo.

I am Tracy Boehm and I am a second year student at SLIS. Though my career goals revolve around technical services, traditional cataloging and metadata, my true passion lies with the difficulties single issue comics present in the realm of technical services.

I am very interested in the future of print in regards to single issue comics as more title are moving to the digital realm, as more born-digital and digital first titles are released, and the combination of print and digital media with the release of Marvel's AR (Augmented Reality) digital integration of print comics which not only combines print and digital items, but also the fictitious stories and non-fiction short videos.

Here is one of my husband's and my favorite engagement pictures, which also accurately illustrates our reading habits.

Late, as usual

Hi, folks. Late to the punch, but I hope Greg won't yank the bowl away!

So, I'm Dorothea Salo (SLIS page, somewhat out-of-date professional site, and yes, I really need to do something about that) and I teach various tech courses and other odds and ends for SLIS.

My personal history spans a lot of what I anticipate we'll be talking about in class. After bombing out of grad school in the late '90s, I worked as an SGML/XML conversion peasant and typesetter for a small company in Madison that no longer exists. (The typesetting system I used also no longer exists. RIP Penta, you crotchety old monster. You and I made some beautiful type together.) While I was there, the dot-com boom in full swing, I worked on The Standard Currently Known As .epub, which back then went by the ungainly monicker of "Open eBook Publication Structure."

Long story short, I came to SLIS in 2003, had Greg completely blow my mind about all things labor, graduated in 2005, and promptly found myself in the thick of the open-access movement. Which has a... vexed history in academic librarianship, and I'll leave it at that lest I start foaming at the mouth. I was also part of the original engine behind what's now Research Data Services.

In 2007, Kristin Eschenfelder approached me to design and teach what is now LIS 644 "Digital Trends, Tools, and Debates." I taught off and on for SLIS and Illinois's GSLIS until 2011, when I made the leap to SLIS mostly-full-time. I'll be truly-full-time starting July, with some of my time given to continuing education for librarians.

For those who are interested in my what-is-UP-with-publishing-seriously-WHAT course, last year's REM filk is still available (yes, I performed this, because I have no dignity whatever). I'm going to redo some stuff for this summer, and obviously there's lots of new stuff to talk about, notably the Aaron Swartz tragedy and the outcome of Wiley v. Kirtsaeng.

No pictures. What does anybody need to see more of my ugly mug for?

Less-Glib Introduction

Hello again, everyone,

My name is Jordan Stalker and I am a first-year doctoral student in the J-School and I'm moving along with a Print Culture minor, just for fun. I have interests in the business and social histories of media technologies and non-U.S. journalism history but my passion is education. My dissertation will focus on the development of journalism education in the United States and India. I'm taking this course to understand evolving notions of how processes and artifacts of print culture improve understanding and encourage conversation about the world in which we live.

Below is a picture of me eating golgappas at a Haldiram's in New Delhi in the summer of 2012. Bahut tasty hai.

Hello Classmates!

Hello all!

I know I'm late introducing myself. Sorry about that! My name is Ambar Meneses-Hall and I am on my last semester of course work for my PhD in Literary Studies. I am taking this course as part of my minor and I am really excited about making the e-book for the final class project. Being a Literary Studies Graduate Student who hopes to teach literature classes in the future I am certainly concerned with the future of print, traditional paper print as well as digital, which is certainly all the rage among undergrads who do not want to purchase hardback textbooks anymore.

I am taking this class both because it sounded cool and because as a PhD student one is always looking for ways to enhance one's resume. I hope that becoming savvier about print mediums will be one way of doing that. I am currently taking two other course that I hope I will be able to relate to this one in my Distributed Minor rationale letter. I think that there is definitely room for communication between them. I am taking CA 950 Writing Media History with Prof. Hilmes and that course will look at the difficulty of doing media history and history of the recent past when non printed (!) sources are the main primary sources, such as television. I am taking also talking "ENG 706 Rhetoric and the Nonhuman" (nonhuman = objects) at the English and I think I will be able to talk about "print" as an object (and from there it will get complicated =))

Here is a picture of me taken with my IPhone over the last half hour =)

Hello from Jake

Happy spring semester everyone!

My name is Jacob Ineichen and I'm a second year SLIS student here at UW-Madison.  I'm currently working as a teaching assistant for the Professional Leaning Team in the Office of Education Outreach and Partnerships, part of the School of Education.  We do professional development for practicing teachers through workshops, conferences, and online courses.  I really enjoy it.

Turning to library school, I don't really know specifically what kind of librarian I want to be, so I've taken the classes that interest me, instead of trying to focus on one specialization.  Some of my scholarly interests include print and digital culture, linked data, and, recently, critical cartography.  I took History of Books and Print Culture last semester and am really excited to look at the future of print this spring to complement the foundation I was given about its past.

And here's a picture of me:

Greg's Introduction

Happy New Year (and Semester)!

My name is Greg, and I am looking forward to this interesting topic. I had the opportunity to TA for Prof. Downey last semester in his class about the Information Society, and I am excited to study some of the topics we touched upon in that class in more depth. After finishing my degrees in the History Department here a few years ago, I am back in school taking classes (mostly) about archives and about digital libraries and other new technologies to try and learn more skills for the job market.

One of my many campus jobs is working on the stat crew for the UW basketball teams.

Here is me in the background of a picture of Kam Taylor paying defense against Ohio State a few years ago. I am the last person on the far right sitting at the scorers' table. Fun fact: I was most likely saying "JV 12" when this picture was taken.

<-------- Greg.

Hello Future of Print Mates!

I’m Janetta Pegues, a second year SLIS student. Before coming to Madison, I worked at the Chicago Public Library. This class is going to be a challenging.  I expect to learn a lot and have some fun too! See you all soon.Can you guess which local Madison Public Library this photo was taken at?

Hello from Mitchell

Hi everyone,

I am a PhD student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and I am in my final semester of classes. My area of research interest is how the atomization of the 20th century mass media system has affected news in the 21st century, especially on television and the Internet. I often joke that it's a fancy way of saying I study Fox News, but that would, in fairness, be a gross over-simplification (but usually good for a laugh).

Before returning to school, I worked as a writer and editor for publications in different media (books to the Web), beginning in legal publishing after a year of practice as an attorney. I still am a featured blogger for Huffington Post. And I produced, wrote and directed film and video projects, including features, shorts, commercials, music videos and corporate films.

Greg asked us to post a photo, but, really, nobody wants to look at a picture of me. So, instead, here is a photo of my wife and son walking ahead of me in the groovily-lit underground passage between terminals in the Detroit airport.

Hello there!

This is Zach and I'm a graduate student in English literature.  I'm taking this class as part of a print culture minor, and I'm looking forward to it. 

Hello there!

My name is Melissa, and I'm a first year student at SLIS. I have a background in the wet sciences, and I worked for many years in Biotechnology.

I decided to pursue librarianship, and I find myself drawn to organizing and taking care of all that great scientific information. I am also very interested in what is going on in the publishing world right now with open access, journals and their paywalls and figuring out how to get the information to the people who need it.

I thought this class would be a great way to learn about the future of print, and I'm really looking forward to it.

See you all Monday!

Here we go

Hi everybody.  You're receiving this message because you have registered for LIS 875/910, "The Future of Print," on Mondays from 9am-11:30am in 4246 Helen C. White with Professor Greg Downey.  (That's me.)  Welcome!

First thing's first: We have a weblog that will serve as our class syllabus and discussion board and reading repository.  Visit it at http://thefutureofprint.blogspot.com -- and I will invite you all as "authors" immediately.  Look for an email from Google -- check your SPAM folder -- and be aware that you may need to create a Google ID in order to access the blog, since it is hosted by the Blogger service which is a Google property.  For a class like this I like to blog "in the wild" which means that your blog postings and comments WILL be visible to the outside world.  That's one of the newly ubiquitous parameters of much "digital print" today, and we need to engage with it in this class.  (So be nice.)

This class is an experiment and I hope you will help me with it.  I imagine three main components in our study of "the future of print":

(1) Lots of weekly readings, all of them accessible online as PDFs from a MyWebSpace folder athttps://mywebspace.wisc.edu/xythoswfs/webview/_xy-29039743_1?stk=F18B34545F73220.  You will need to enter your normal UW NetID and password in order to access the readings in this folder (for "Fair Use" purposes).  I've already uploaded the first batch of readings: a tour of various statements about the future of print through recent decades, from the 1940s to today.  Consider these all "primary sources" to whet your appetite and stimulate your thinking; we'll explore some more conceptual and theoretical tools to make sense of such sources later.  If you could read these by the time we meet on Monday, January 28, I'd appreciate it.  (Some of them are quite hilarious.)

(2) Intensive online and in-person discussion of those readings, with group note-taking and weekly follow-up searches for "next readings".  After the first week, I'll call on a different student to summarize/critique each reading on our blog before we meet in person to discuss.  I'll also call on another student to act as overall discussion leader for each week, coming up with a few questions that cut across all the readings.  And I'll call on yet another student to take detailed, hand-written (NOT typed) notes of the discussion, handed in to me so I can scan them in and uploading them as a reference.  Finally, after each session I'll call on a final student to do a 24-hour-turnaround "just in time" literature search to seek out some suggestions for further readings that we can mobilize the following week.  As you can see, through the mechanisms of online readings, blogging about the readings, digitizing hand-written notes on the discussion, and using online article archives for quick turnaround for new class readings, I plan to make our current print and digital textual environment and tools here at UW-Madison part of the course to be experienced and problematized.  (Tricky, I know.)

(3) A big group project to create both a static print and dynamic multimedia book on "the future of print."  We will be trained in the new-ish iBooks Author program for creating books on either iPads or in PDF format, and we will split up into three teams in order to produce this book: editorial (introduction, conclusion, contents, index, organization, proofing), design (visual layout, typography, colors, images, multimedia performance, look and feel), or technology (bringing all the components together and outputting in various formats, testing and quality control, custom HTML coding).  Those are perhaps imperfect and overlapping divisions, but again, problematizing the print/digital production process is part of the point of the class.  You'll each get to vote on what topics/themes our book will try to cover, and you'll each be expected to individually author various parts of the book, coming together in your three groups to pull it all together at the end.  And we'll present our findings to some interesting UW-Madison VIPs -- I have in mind the Chief Information Officer, the Director of UW Libraries, the Director of the UW Press, and the like.  (In a pinch, at least we can get the Director of SLIS.)  

This is a graduate-level seminar so grading will be based on quality of participation in all three of the tasks above, with both individual and group effort taken into account, both online and in-person.  I expect an enthusiastic and creative bunch of students, and if that happens, you can expect that grades will reflect your energy and initiative, especially since this is such an unusual experiment.  (I will bring more specifics on grading to the first class meeting.)  

I think that's it for now.  So here's what I need from you before our first class meeting on Monday:

(1) Get signed up with the blog once I invite you, and post a brief "Hello there" introduction (bonus points if you figure out how to upload a picture of yourself).  

(2) Click through to the readings repository, to download and read the selections I've posted.

(3) Finally, think about whether you'd like to serve on the editorial, design, or technology group for the iBooks Author project; I'll be asking you to declare a first and second choice on Monday.

I think that's it.  This will be fun, you will see.  And we will learn a lot together.

Cheers,

GREG

Almost there

Our first class meeting isn't until next week, since the semester began with a Monday holiday, but that's good because I'm still weaving together the syllabus, readings, and assignments.  Hopefully I'll have something to send out on Friday as a "getting ready" reading.

One tidbit to look forward to at our first class meeting: A screening of a 40-minute documentary on "life without print," starring and presented by our own resident print culture authority, James Danky.  I think this film, which was funded and produced by the multinational printing and processing technology firm Hewlett Packard, will provide us a good entry point into many of the issues I want to explore with this seminar.

See you on Monday January 28 2013 at 9am in 4246 Helen C. White Hall.