PUB802: Technology and Evolving Forms of Publishing
Syllabus for “Spring” 2015
Mondays, 1pm – 4pm & Wednesdays, 9:30am – 12:30pm
Juan Pablo Alperin, jalperin@sfu.ca
DESCRIPTION
PUB802 asks the fundamental question: what happens to publishing in a predominantly digital environment? More broadly, it is intended to encourage a critical examination of the intersection of technology and publishing. This examination is divided intro three acts, with a prologue, an intermission, and an epilogue. The acts are obvious enough: making , discovering, consuming. These naturally correspond (although they are not limited to) producing with digital tools, making works available in the marketplace (both digital and physical), and the digital reading experience. PUB802 is a seminar. This means that the course is organized around discussion, not around the instructor presenting content. As such, you should expect to come to class each day well informed on the topic at hand and, more importantly, having thought critically about it. Expect and be prepared to be challenged, but also to challenge others—without discussion, there is no seminar. PUB802 is also a graduate course. This means the discussions are based around ideas, not around specific technologies or moments in time. We will, however, ground these ideas in with concrete examples and case studies. In combination with PUB607, you will also have the opportunity to gain practical hands-on experience with specific technologies that are of interest to you. We will use the specifics to understand the dynamics of today, but also to extrapolate far into the future.
MECHANICS
The course is split between Mondays and Wednesdays, with students leading Monday classes and the Instructor leading on Wednesdays. Mondays will generally be practical or technical and cover a lot of ground. It should provide us with the background materials for Wednesday’s discussions. In contrast, Wednesday’s discussions will generally be broad in scope and lofty in ambitions. All seminar materials, resources, and student writing will be submitted to the course website, or at least linked from there. All content, including the instructor’s, will be publicly accessible and openly licensed for reasons that will become evident as the semester goes on. Some written work will be peer-reviewed online as well. Seminar presentations and class sessions should be enlightening and entertaining. Nobody likes to be bored; everyone learns better when engaged. Instructor and students will be held to this (impossible) standard.
OUTLINE
The following is a rough outline of the course’s coverage. In reality, we will be much more flexible around dates and topics to allow our discussions to go on as long as we feel is necessary and to cover topics as they come up. We will use the first class to capture topics that we would like to add or remove from the current structure, as well as decide on weeks for the student topics.
Prologue: Setting the scene
Jan 7: Introduction to the course
- Bush, Vannear. 1945. As We May Think. The Atlantic.
- Castells, Manuel. 1999. Grassrooting the Space of Flows, Urban Geography, 20:4, 294-302
- Swartz, Aaron. 2013. A Programmable Web (An Unfinished Work).
Assignment: Come to class with a long list of topics, ideas, or even technologies that you would like to discuss during this course. You may draw from Swartz, from other sources, and from your own experiences.
Jan 12 & 14: The Web changes things
- Lessig, Lawrence. <free culture>. OSCON 2002.
- Yochai Benkler. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Yochai Benkler. 2002. Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. Yale Law Journal 112.
- Dash, Anil. 2012. The Web we Lost. Anil Dash: A blog about making culture. (read + watch)
Inspirations for student seminars:
- Meeker, Mary. Internet Trends 2014 – Code Conference
- Bryan Alexander & Alan Levine. 2008. Web2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a new genre. EduCause Review, Nov/Dec, 2008.
- Shapiro, Dani. 2014, August 18. A memoir is not a status update. New Yorker.
- Rickett, Oscar. 2014, August 3. Working on My Novel – the art of literary procrastination. The Guardian.
- Seely Brown, John & Duguid, Paul. 1996. The Social Life of Documents. First Monday, 1(1).
- Stewart, Margaret. 2010. How YouTube Thinks About Copyright. TED.
- CreativeCommons
On this week:
- Travis Copyleft and Sharing
- Amy on DRM and sharing
- Gabby on file sharing
Jan 19 & 21: The Internet business model
- Shatzkin, Mike. 2011, July 24. Publishing is Living in a World Not of its Own Making. The Shatzkin Files.
- Bridle, James. 2012, May. From Books to Infrastructure. Domus.
- James Grimmelmann. 2011, August 17. Google Books Settlement, 2008-2011! The Laboratorium.
- Kelleher, Kevin. 2014, November 6. Amazon Bound: Is Bezos Reaching His Limits? PandoDaily.
- Osnos, Peter. 2012, April 17. The Coming Book Wars: Apple vs. Amazon vs. Google vs. the U.S. The Atlantic.
- Shatzkin, Mike. 2014, August 17.This is a teamwork play that could really give Amazon a headache if they got together. The Shatzkin Files.
Inspirations for student seminars:
- Shirky, Clay. 2009. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.
- Shirky, Clay. 2012. How We Will Read: Clay Shirky. Findings
- Shatzkin, Mike. 2014, July 24. Subscriptions are in the news this week. The Shatzkin Files.
- Deahl, Rachel. 2014, Jul 25. Spotlight Falls on E-book Subscription Services. Publisher’s Weekly.
On this week:
- Taisha on Privacy (Google/Apple/Amazon)
- Paulina on surveillance and control
- Katie on Internet Business Models
- Taryn on the war between Google, Apple, and Amazon in ebooks (Monday)
- Laura (15mins) on Torrents
Act 1: The act of making
Jan 26 & 28: Production processes
- Brantley, Peter. 2013. The New Ones: The Only Horizon is Before Us. PWxyz.
- Bjarnason. Baldur. 2013. Which Kind of Innovation? baldurbjarnason.com
- Maxwell, John W & Fraser, Kathleen. 2010. Traversing the Book of MPub: An Agile, Web-first Publishing Model. Journal of Electronic Publishing. 13 (3).
- Knauff, M., Nejasmic, J. 2014. An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115069.
- Wilke, Claus. 2014, December 27. Post-publication review of the PLOS ONE paper comparing MS Word and LaTeX: How not to compare document preparation. The Serial Mentor.
- Daly, Liza . 2013. The UnXMLing of Books. SafariFlow Blog.
- McIlroy, Thad. 2012. Has XML Failed Publishing? The Future of Publishing.
- XML Workflow Diagram. Chicago Manual of Style
Inspirations for student seminars:
- MacFarlane, John. 2014. Pandoc.
- Gylling, Markus & Herman, Ivan. 2014, November. Advancing Portable Documents for the Open Web Platform: EPUB-WEB
- Richard Ishida. 2012. An Introduction to Writing Systems and UniCode. rishida.net.
- William J Turkel. 2013. History 9877A: Digital Research Methods.
- Alan Liu. 2013. Digital Humanities Resources for Student Project-Building.
- Stephen Ramsay. 2004. Databases. In A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
- Alan Galey. 2013. The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination. Book History 15.
On this week:
- Sophie and Ala on ebooks, standards, and workflows (Monday – 2 hours)
- Travis on magazine apps vs. mobile browsing
Essay 1 Due Jan 30
Feb 2: Production concepts
- O’Leary, Brian. Context First: A unified field theory of publishing. From Books in Browsers 2010. Text & video.
- Armstrong, Peter. 2011. The Lean Publishing Manifesto. LeanPub.
Inspirations for student seminars:
- Bridle, James. 2012, May. From Books to Infrastructure. Domus.
- Fadeyev, Dmitry. 2012, October 29. The Return of the Scroll. usabilitypost.com.
- McCoy, Bill. 2013. Why Publishers are Making a Push for EPUB3 Now. DigitalBookWorld.
- Mod, Craig . 2013. Subcompact Publishing. @craigmod
- Mod, Craig. 2012. Unbindings and Edges. @craigmod
- Mod, Craig. 2011. Post-Artifact Books & Publishing. @craigmod
- Miller, Aaron. 2013. Real Pages Are All About Flow. Medium.
- Bridle, James. 2010, October 25. Network Realism. BookTwo.
- Bjarnason, Baldur. 2013. Great Text Transcends Nothing. Studio Tendra.
- Immersive reading
- Larusso, Silvio. 2015. From Print to Ebooks – A Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts
On this week:
- Gaby on a variety of production concepts (see above)
Feb 4: No class (Juan away)
Feb 9 & 11: (Reading Break)
- do the readings from week 1 if you hadn’t done them already
Act 2: The act of discovering
Feb 16 & 18: Distribution & Discovery
- Hugh McGuire. 2010. Sifting Through All These Books. Tools of Change for Publishing (O’Reilly Media).
- Tuma, Tanja. 2014, October 10. Are There Too Many Books? Publishing Perspectives.
- How does the Amazon Recommendation feature work? StackOverflow (see all answers).
- Hugh McGuire. 2013. A Publisher’s Job Is to Provide a Good API for Books. O’Reilly TOC.
Inspiration for student seminars:
- Dawson, Laura. 2012. What we Talk About when we Talk About Metadata. In McGuire, Hugh & O’Leary, Brian (Eds.). Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. O’Reilly Media.
- Patrick, Chung, Kyusik & Chandler, Otis. 2012. How do Books get Discovered? n McGuire, Hugh & O’Leary, Brian (Eds.). Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. O’Reilly Media.
- Beel, Jöran, Gipp, Bela, & Wilde, Erik. 2010. Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO). Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 41(2):176-190.
- Information Retrieval
On this week:
- Alessandra on Book Metadata
- Sandra on Academic Search Engine Optimization
PUB 607 Kicks off
Feb 23 & 25: Information flows
- Konnikova, Maria. 2014, January 21. The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You. New Yorker.
- Kleinberg, J. & Easley, D. 2010. Overview. In Kleinberg, J. & Easley. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World.
- Kleinberg, J. & Easley, D. 2010. Cascading Behavior in Networks. In Kleinberg, J. & Easley. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World.
- Hodas, N.O. & Lerman, K., 2014. The Simple Rules of Social Contagion. Sci. Rep., 4.
Inspiration for student seminars:
- Daniels, Steve. 2014, October 26. How To Pay Attention. Medium.
On this week:
- Travis on Networks redefining community
- Ala on social contagion, viral phenomena and breaking the internet (1 hour)
- Taisha & Molly
Essay 2 Due Feb 27
Intermission
Mar 2 & 4: Knowledge Production (case study)
sociology of knowledge; access to knowledge; permanent identifiers; links; citations; citation formats; bibliographic databases; bibliometric databases; readings TBA On this week:
- ???
Peer Review 2 due Mar 6
Act 3: The act of consuming
Mar 9 & 9 (morning and afternoon): Digital reading
- National Endowment for the Arts. 2009. Reading on the Rise.
- Genner, Noah. 2014, March 7. Canadian Readers by the Numbers. BookNet Canada.
- National Reading Campaign. 2013, October. Pleasure Reading Survey. Environics Research Group.
- BNC Research. 2013. The Canadian Book Consumer 2013: Coast to Coast: Book Buyers Across Canada.
- Zickuhr, Kathryn & Rainie, Lee. 2014, September 10. Younger Americans and Public Libraries. PewResearch Internet Project.
- Manjoo. Farhad. 2013, June 6.You Won’t Finish This Article: Why people online don’t read to the end. Slate.
- Konnikova, Maria. 2014, July 16. Being a Better Online Reader. New Yorker.
- Rosenwald, Michael. 2014, April 6. Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say. Washington Post.
- Crosbie, Vin. 2008, August 20. Transforming American Newspapers – part 2!. Corante—Rebuilding Media.
- Pelli, Denis G. & Bigelow, Charles. 2009, October 20. A Writing Revolution Seed Magazine. Seed Magazine.
Inspiration for student seminars:
- Klinkenborg, Verlyn. 2013, August 10. Books to Have and to Hold. New York Times SundayReview.
- Carr, Nicholas. 2008. Is Google Making Us Stupid? Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education.
- Any or all of these articles on the psychology of reading.
On this week:
- Mike and Laura on Online Reading Habits/Trends/Technology
- Nitant on Technology and long form prose
- Molly on Technology and quality of lit/creativity
Mar 16 & 18: Interacting & socializing with text
- Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim, & Parmar, Robin. 1995. The Electronic Labyrinth.
- Namakura, Lisa . 2013. Words with Friends: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads. PMLA 128 (1)
- Hoffelder, Nate. 2013. There’s A Reason That No One in Publishing Bought Goodreads. The Digital Reader.
- Liu, Alan . 2013. From Reading to Social Computing. In Price & Siemens (ed.) Literary Studies in a Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology.
On this week:
- Mike on Younger generation and technology
- Sandra on Social Computing
- Alessandra on “The Power of the (Digital) Reader: Old and New Ways of Interacting with Text”
- Amy (1hr.)
Mar 23 & 25: Measuring & Tracking
- Alexis. Madrigal. 2012, Oct. Dark Social: We have the whole history of the Web wrong. The Atlantic.
- Goel, Vindu. 2014, June 29. Facebook Tinkers with Users Emotions. New York Times.
- Poulsen, Kevin. 2014. How a Math Genius Hacked OK Cupid to Find True Love. Wired.
- Carr, David. 2013, Feb 24. Giving Viewers What They Want. New York Times.
- Simon, Phil. 2013, March. Big Data Lessons From Netflix. Wired.
Inspiration for Student Seminars:
- Vooza. Big Data. vooza.com
- Vooza. Bullshit Metrics. vooza.com
- Pornhub Stats (Super Bowl & World Cup)
-
Google Analytics / Usage logs concepts
On this week:
- Laura on “Does the internet know you better than your best friend?
- Taryn on Machine Learning
- Nitant on Network Realism
- Paulina on Government Surveillance
Epilogue: What is next?
Mar 30 & Apr 1 — Possibilities and new models
- Brian O’Leary. 2013. Disaggregating Supply. Klopotek Publishers’ Forum 2013.
- James Bridle. 2013. Hacking the Word. BookTwo.org
- John W Maxwell. 2013. EBook Logic: We Can Do Better. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 51 (1).
- … more to come …
On this week:
- Molly, “Hacking the Word”
- Gabi and Paulina Tech Forum (2 hr. on Wednesday)
- Sophie and Katie on the assigned readings (2 hrs. on Monday)
- Amy (1hr seminar drawing O’Leary’s Disaggregating Supply on either of the days)
Apr 6: (Easter: No class)
Apr 8 & 13: Wrap-up
TBA
ASSESSMENT STRUCTURE
Assessment is based on a combination of assignments, as follows. All work is to be posted online. Seminar schedule to be defined in class #2. There is no exam. Essay topics should be negotiated in advance.
- 45% – 3 essays (15%x3). due Jan 30, Feb 27, Apr 3
- 30% – 2-4 seminars. due throughout semester.
- 10% – Peer review of essays (5%x2). due Feb 6, Mar 13.
- 15% – Participation.
ESSAYS
Essay topics are entirely up to you, but must be negotiated with the instructor in advance. To negotiate a topic, submit a 250 word abstract (will not be graded) that summarizes your core idea. If necessarily, the instructor will contact you to arrange a time to discuss your abstract. Essays must put forward a core idea or thesis, they must substantiate that idea, and they must be compelling. Essays have no word limits, although they are suggested to be around 1000-1500 words. The use of good Web practices (i.e., hyperlinks) are expected. Citations do not need to follow a particular style, but must be hyperlinked in both the body of the text and in the reference section.
STUDENT SEMINARS
Students are expected to lead at least half of the seminars, potentially more. Although, by their very nature, seminar courses involve every student’s participation, one student must take the lead in organizing any in-class room activity and in facilitating group discussions. Students must specify required readings, and may opt to provide a handout or do a short mini-lecture on the topic. Student lectures are intended to lay the groundwork with some of the specific skills necessary to understand the topic of the week.