|
Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing. Chapter 2/7
Published: April 2, 2020 at 3:29 PM.
This read will take 12 minutes of your time.
|
|
|
Existing Tools, Best Practices, and What Readers Want
|
|
|
Just as in any other domain, there is a marketplace-slash-playground for digital tools for publishing. They promise revenue, reach, or a revolutionary change of workflows. In addition to such tools there is an art fair-slash-playground of hybrid projects that explore the materialities and conceptual or creative avenues of e-publications. During the Making Public project we collected and analyzed many of the existing tools and applications used in various stages of the publishing process, and examples of publications in different formats themselves. What do they have to offer to urgent publishing practices? What possible pitfalls, opportunities, and promising strategies do they reveal? Next to this comparative analysis of tools and collection of best practices, we conducted a survey among readers interested in arts and cultural publications, to get a sense of what expectations and wishes they have when it comes to publishing experiments.
In short, we found that existing tools may digitize parts of the publishing process but fail to innovate how the industry works. Often, they reinforce the status quo, for example when it comes to how revenues are made (advertising) or audience reach is measured (unique visitors). They might deliver on one of the three success factors identified in this project – speed, positioning, and quality – but they don’t allow for other ways of defining these factors nor open up the discussion about their uses, two elements that seem to be important for urgent publishing. On the other hand, many best practices show what else is possible. They suggest different approaches to what speed, positioning, and quality might also mean, and so present paths for innovation not just of tools, but of meaning. However, these paths should be followed with some caution. Our survey shows that readers are often somewhat conservative although media-savvy in their reading habits. While they feel the need for publications that respond to urgent matters, this does not mean that they should do so in a way that leads too far from the message at hand. Urgency for these readers, lies in the why rather than the how of publishing a work.
Below, we will expand a bit more on these conclusions and highlight some examples. To read all the details and find all the references, please check the links to the blog reports below.
|
|
|
Innovative or Preserving the Status Quo?
Before starting to build our own prototypes and developing our own hybrid publishing methods, we looked at what was already available. We analyzed some thirty to forty tools and applications directed at the publishing market that also had an open source or freemium model. They promise anything from efficiency and quality to smooth collaborations and peer review, community building, impact, and increased sales.
What we found is that most of these tools follow the drive towards datafication and quantification, for example when it comes to measuring and increasing impact. Examples are Authors․me, Optiqly, Mojo Reads, AltMetric, and GrowKudos. In some cases, they go so far as to equal metrics and quality of content. It was not evident how these tools would benefit our urgent publishing drive. Who do these tools primarily serve? Large-scale corporations and digital platforms, or publishers, authors, and readers? For smaller-scale publishers with a focus on high-quality information, this question is important. Tools should be able to help create cultural and not just economic capital and build communities around content or topics. It remains unclear how tools like these would manage to reach new audiences – and potentially also new authors – in a meaningful way. Are readers as interested in seeing statistics as publishers are? Can these apps help get the right publication to the right reader for the right reasons? Who decides what is ‘right’ in these cases? It seems impact should not be restricted to quantified measures, especially if we want to develop new ways of pursuing impact as well.
When it comes to tools and platforms that aim to facilitate collaboration, commenting, or other content-related work, such as Peerage of Science, Full Fact, or Hypothes․is, similar questions come to mind. Are they open to different workflows or do they command a strict use? If so, what does that use propagate? New tools often show a steep learning curve, and especially for small companies or teams this may prove too big a hurdle. Authors are often reluctant to change the tools they work with (usually Microsoft Word) and the editing process is not easily transposed elsewhere.
On a deeper level, the tools that we tested hardly seemed to rethink the materiality of the digital media that are available (such as epub or web-publication) or the contents (for example making different narrative structures possible). That is to say, they produce, propose, or prefer publications as we know them: static print books and e-books, or web texts with a low degree of interactivity. The tools analysis showed that for the purpose of urgent publishing, we would need to focus on openness, accessibility, and adaptability, on building communities rather than tracking stats, and on new forms for content instead of just optimizing the publishing process.
However, two of the tools tested deserve special attention: TopicGraph and Manifold. Manifold is a platform for publishing in a rich, modular, interactive, and collaborative way. It allows users to upload files in different formats and lets them include different enhancements such as data, interactive design, audio, and video. It also caters to readers, who can use highlighting and commenting functions. TopicGraph is a tool for automated textual analysis of the contents of scholarly publications. It highlights recurrent key terms, tracks them throughout a publication, and so creates a page-to-page topic model. This not only provides valuable insights to readers and researchers; it is also extremely helpful for writers on the level of the content.
|
|
|
Best Practices
The tools mostly seemed to want to preserve a status quo. Best practices however – whether publications, formats, publishing strategies, workflows, or activities – show what else may be possible. An ongoing search resulted in over thirty examples. The selection criteria were for the practice to concern research content, have a critical and/or artistic perspective, have reach outside of academia, and be of high quality. The examples were divided according to the three success factors: speed, positioning, and quality. Below, we will highlight the most important points for each of these, with a focus on how they pertain to openness, accessibility, community, and content when pursuing these three factors.
|
|
|
Best Practices: Speed
Two concepts provide a focus on speed that doesn’t so much rely on accelerating the publishing process but foremost has an eye on content and community. First are ‘curational’ practices. Second is what can be called ‘real time publishing’.
An example of the first is the #syllabus. This evolved from an academic format to distribute reading materials for a class to more or less annotated, open, dynamic, multimedia collections of ‘must-read’ contents. It is a fast, easy, open, and hybrid way to disseminate content. The syllabus as a publication format has become known through activist circles like the Women’s Strike, covering complex topics such as the US prison-industrial complex or rape culture. The syllabus thus provides a fast, collaborative way of disseminating research on urgent topics. It is easy to set up, for example as a link list, a page published on an existing platform, or a Google doc. Being mostly crowdsourced, it also helps build a community. It allows multi-format entries and is open to extension and adaptation; however, sustainability or archiving may prove a problem for these same reasons.
A way to manage the documentation of events or to organize input from diverse groups or participants is to set up a form of ‘real-time’ publishing. Examples are The Last Mass Mail, a newspaper that is produced, edited, designed, and printed at a Stockholm art fair, and Edit This Post, a means for producing audience-generated reviews of shows, concerts, or other events – written, edited, and printed on the spot. Benefits of such on-the-spot publishing practices, which couldn’t be performed without the aid of digital technologies, is that they are open to collaborative processes and engage directly with the prospective readers who may be made a part of the publication itself.
|
|
|
Best Practices: Positioning
What could positioning a publication look like from an urgent publishing viewpoint? Again, we start with not focusing directly on metrics or the marketing and communication flow of so-called engagement, but on finding audiences who are already engaged. Even niche audiences are usually larger than the audience that a publication already reaches on its own. Two concepts deserve attention.
The first is something we might call ‘publishing by surprise.’ One of the great annoyances of authors is that their work, which may be about topics of debates happening right here and now, have to deal with the traditional way publishers organize their PR: first announcing a publication, then doing the rounds of the bookshops, deciding on the print run, etc., which leaves the book to come out months or even a year later when the hot topic is already past its peak moment. Making something public can certainly be handled differently. Das Mag, a literary publishing house in the Netherlands, broke the long-standing tradition of first building a catalogue of books-to-come before putting them out. Books come when they are ready. Why not take a cue from what is done in the music industry from time to time, where artists ‘drop’ new songs with just one day’s announcement, or none? In the age of streaming, printing on demand, and viral marketing, many options ask for experimentation.
Another example came from Clara Balaguer’s talk at the Urgent Publishing conference. She spoke about the habit in her publishing practice to print very few copies (25 or so), distribute those very precisely among specific persons, and then to see what happens and decide how many to print next. ‘How many copies do you need to get your publication in the right hands?’ was the question she asked.
The idea of getting a publication in the hands of your intended audience, is one that keeps coming back. It is taking positioning most literally: bringing people together and placing the publication in their midst. The most concrete expression is the reading group. An interesting example from the Dutch language scene was offered by literary magazine nY, that discussed materials and related questions in a series of evenings with readers. Something similar was organized by STRP, who organized a reading group around the work of one of their speakers, bringing people together around a certain topic in the run-up to the talk. In this case, it was initiated by the event organization, but it might also be done in collaboration with publishers.
|
|
|
Best Practices: Quality Content
Lastly, there are some notable concepts that have a different take on quality. Again, these provide new ways of pursuing openness and accessibility, community, and of course, quality content.
We start with several projects that revolve around ‘open books’: books that are opened up to readers before they have reached their final stage. Using the internet to break open the writing and publishing process, including peer review, they step away from the single-author-knows-it-all-ideology. Sharing research in an earlier stage also makes for a timely publishing practice. An example is the Living Books About Life project from Open Humanities Press. Another example is MIT Press’ BookBook, which is hosted on PubPub: an online publishing platform that allows for an open peer-reviewed process, interaction with readers in an early stage, and wide dissemination of research content.
Second, options pertaining to length deserve a mention. Hybrid publishing opens up a world of possibilities for ‘shorter longform’, such as books that range between 20,000-50,000 words. More experimental forms can come into play as well, like zines, pamphlets, and manifestos. On the other hand, short forms can be collected into a longer publication, like a Tumblr or Twitter feed that is archived, fixated, or transformed into a stand-alone publication or anthology. Using a shorter form can also speed up the publishing process.
A recurring idea that uses the short form to produce longer form publications is what can be called the ‘chain reaction’. See for example Pervasive Labour Union Zine and NXS, which ask authors to respond to each other’s contributions. This opens up many interesting questions and pathways, from multi-voiced writing to never-ending publications. Where to make the cut in an ongoing publication and produce a (commodifiable) edition? A question that is relevant to the concept of open books as well.
|
|
|
Urgent Publishing Survey
At the mid-term of the project we presented some of these results to the intended audiences that the collaborating publishers address: readers of cultural, artistic, and research content. We asked how readers find new reading material, what formats they prefer, and how they evaluate certain experimental forms. In the first place, it was very obvious that people read both on paper and on their phones (also longread content) – it was not a question of either/or. But it turned out that while readers value experiments and innovations, they only do so when it doesn’t cut in on the information given. Fancy multimedia or interaction design is not always appreciated. However, interviews with authors and contact with other readers were deemed valuable. More established means such as Q&As with authors, moderated discussion nights with specialists, and real-life reading groups still hold sway.
When it comes to finding stuff to read, content recommendation by acquaintances turned out to be most important in deciding what to read. Perhaps surprisingly, specialized websites such as review blogs, discussion forums, publishers’ websites, and digital newsletters are used more than social media. Also, careful curation of content is welcomed. The promise of quality implied in curation, authorship, face-to-face communication, and specialism seems to gain rather than lose appeal. In-depth analysis beyond the hype of the day therefore is not something to fear, but to embrace.
The survey was only held among a small and specialized group, and it would be interesting to see whether these findings hold up among a larger audience. As we had mostly readers who are familiar with the participating publishers respond, the results might suffer from confirmation bias. However, our best practices, coming from different countries and areas, show that such niche groups exist in many different places. It would mean a lot if these could find each other over content and in communities.
|
|
1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7
|
|
|
|
