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Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing. Chapter 1/7
Published: March 26, 2020 at 3:48 PM.
This read will take 7 minutes of your time.
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[Introduction]: Explorations in Urgent Publishing
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Finally, there it is: your hard-wrought publication that provides all the necessary facts and reflections on a topic that inflamed public debate… two years ago. Time passes quickly and people have moved on, leaving behind the rubbles of badly informed and heavily polarized discussions and an ever more self-referential and hyped-up mediasphere.
Or: there it is, a wide-spread debate on a topic you don’t just care about passionately, but also know heaps about – urban design, political memes, technological biases; to name just a few examples – but why doesn’t your highly topical and informed work catch the attention of the public eye? And what if you would want to set the agenda yourself, as a writer or publisher, as the editor of a journal or book series: how can you grab the attention in a saturated information landscape, where previously existing criteria for quality content seem to have been overthrown or have turned out to be inherently myopic themselves?
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Questions such as these are what we set out to investigate in the two-year applied research project Making Public (SIA-RAAK-MKB-project Maak het publiek), a collaboration between a university for applied sciences, two art schools, various publishers from the arts and cultural domain, and studios for design and web-development (for all partners involved see this list).
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Publishers have always played an important role in initiating and stimulating the public debate – a role that has changed radically over the past two decades. The cultural capital of publishers consists in making public reliable, original, and engaging information, but the time-consuming workflows that are part and parcel especially of smaller or niche presses make it increasingly hard for them to keep up. Despite the promises of the desktop publishing revolution and the immediacy of publishing on the web, acceleration and optimization did not speed up the publishing processes as much as hoped for.
Speeding up the printing and publishing process is by no means straightforward. It seems that all too often, any one of the three success factors in publishing that we identified – namely speed, quality, and positioning of the publication with an audience – could only be realized at the expense of the other two. For example, speeding up can mean a sacrifice on the side of quality because there is less time for editing, or a too heavy focus on quality can mean that the positioning of the publication with an audience will fall short and the speed of publication will undoubtedly suffer.
This puts pressure on the role of publishers as catalysts of public and cultural debates, and on their publications as hallmarks of quality. How can publishers keep making content available to the public in a prompt, appealing, and focused way? What kind of innovations can help to present information in a timely manner, without losing out on quality and relevance? In this final publication of the Making Public project, we present strategies for such ‘urgent publishing’ practices. We hope to address both publishers and editors, as well as authors and those who work in the publishing field, whether in design, development, marketing, or research.
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While digital technology has always held much promise, not in the least when it comes to publishing, it hasn’t always been able to deliver. Speeding up workflows, allowing for experimental formats, making other voices heard, and reaching new audiences: many of these promises remain for a large part just that: promises. This is caused by a variety of factors, many of them huge, from hyper-capitalist tech monopolies to the favoring of certain types of content by algorithms. But still there is potential waiting to be found. After a review of dozens of interesting projects, prototypes, and articles from the field of publishing, we decided to organize the research around three possible pathways to explore further: modular processes, automation, and hybrid formats. During the unfolding of the research, these led to the formulation of a concept that would direct and contextualize our efforts: ‘Urgent Publishing.’
What urgent publishing can mean, is the focus of the chapters to come. Important is that it pertains not only to speed but also to relevancy. It refers to both priority and tenacity, and so connects momentousness to determination. The three pillars of success that we defined – speed, quality, and positioning – thus gain a renewed foundation when based on the concept of urgency. In short, urgency goes beyond the ‘now’ and connects to the afterlife of a publication; it understands quality not just as logically consistent and well-proven arguments, but also as alternative content structures; and asks to view positioning a publication not as getting as many clicks or conversions as possible, but primarily as finding and engaging the readers who care. In other words, urgency means prolonging the life of a publication beyond short attention spans, challenging your readers to navigate and interact with content in different ways, and entrusting your content to the network.
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Three separate groups worked on the development of prototypes and methods in the context of urgent publishing. They were loosely identified by type of publication: stand-alone book publishers, online platforms, and periodicals. Each group included two or more publishers, a designer, and a coder, who worked together in a horizontal manner right from the beginning. Thus the definition of the problem, the practical set-up of the research, and the formulation of the deliverables was done in an entirely interdisciplinary way.
During their work on prototypes and methods, each group identified key notions that guided their approach to urgent publishing during the project. These notions also structure their reflections further along in this publication:
RELATIONS
Why have alternative ways of structuring content never truly taken off after the advent of digital publishing, even while the potential for formats other than the A-Z argument seems obvious? The ‘stand-alone group’ sought to investigate content structure, starting from the idea that adapting a different way of structuring materials in a publication implies an alternative way of thinking. This requires a different way of looking at content at the start of the publishing process, where authors, editors, and publishers work together on the concept of a publication. By cutting up content, and taking a cue from modular processes in digital publishing, different relations between the content elements become apparent. These relations make new structures and reading paths possible. (More in Chapter 4. Upside Down, Inside Out: A Relational Approach to Content Structure)
TRUST
How can small online publishers benefit from each other’s reach of niche audiences, and by doing so help the positioning of content beyond a platform’s already established network of readers? One possibility is to refer readers to interesting content on other platforms. The ‘platform group’ worked on an algorithmic tool that allows online publishers to share semi-curated ‘related articles’ of others in their network. This goes beyond a regular recommendation algorithm that might reinforce a bubble of interests and moves towards the expansion of that bubble with content from other publishers. It creates a closer relationship between publishers and intentionally broadens readers’ possibilities. Sharing both content and readers in such a network requires trust: between publishers who should be trusted to provide quality content and use a fair referencing system, and trust from readers who expect a certain quality. (More in Chapter 5. Platform-2-Platform: Network of Independent Publishers)
REMEDIATION
Acceleration does not only mean that information comes into the world at an ever-increasing speed, but also that it is forgotten again in no time. How can the ‘afterlife’ of research publications such as journal articles be prolonged? The ‘periodicals group’ has sought ways in which remediation of publications could not only prolong their relevance, but also allow for interaction of the reader with the content. Through the use of a tool that was developed for making a personal zine on the basis of a journal archive, the publication not only builds a sustainable afterlife, but also a sustainable relationship with the reader. (More in Chapter 6. Parasitizing the Afterlife: Positioning Through Remediation)
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1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7
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