#tara mann

[publishing-futures]

Reading Response: The Network: Transforming Culture, Transforming Publishing

This reading sort of sums up many of the discussions we have had throughout the course of the semester. In terms of distribution,  "the network," both in the physical and digital sense, has played an essential role in the sharing of independent media. It's interesting to think about how networks are no longer just means of distribution, but are means of production as well. Tumblr, for example, is a network, publisher, and creative tool all at the same time. You can technically run an entire publication from a network like Tumblr. On the other hand, a product like Wordpress (either .com or .org) would not give you the ability to run an entire publication, as the distribution model and network is not built in. If you'd like to get a "magazine" about, I don't know, boats, off the ground, you can do so on Tumblr. Create a new blog, name it, post in it, tag your posts, follow a bunch of other people interested in boats, gain readership, bam. Themed Twitters, like the famed ShitMyDadSays (which was turned into a TV show and book, etc), can be considered publications as well, created, published, and distributed within Twitter's network. 

-Tara Mann

[publishing-futures]

Semi-DIY Book Scanner

So this is kind of cool.

"Google engineer builds $1500 page-turning scanner out of sheet metal and a vacuum."

-Tara Mann

[publishing-futures]

Reading Response: The Wealth of Networks

Benkler discusses the fact that the production and distribution of information, and subsequently "culture" is changing and has changed due to the availability of affordable technology. In the past, means of production were limited to corporations who could afford them, but this is no longer the case. Almost anyone could produce a song entirely from their home computer, and distribute it from that same machine with very little, if any, capital. Emerging networks and technologies facilitate the the creation of user-produced "information," and dilute the existing pool of corporate content. Since we no longer feel confined to a mass media market, we are thinking more openly about non-traditional, and perhaps subversive ideas, simply because we can. Works are produced and distributed, often without the intuition of gaining profit or fame. While these things can also be gained from the dissemination of independent media, they are not always the most important element involved, leading to a more diverse selection of articles by people of varying amounts of knowledge and experience. 

-Tara Mann

[publishing-futures]

Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.

-Kevin Kelly, Scan This Book!, 2006

This particular passage made me question the future of long-form writing. If information is expected to be extracted from its original context, and put into a new one (perhaps to prove a particular point or serve as a reference), what kind of control does the author have over the reception of that content? Isolated pieces of writing, encapsulated in the comfort of context, may cease to exist if people decide to Frankenstein them together. Putting books into "playlists" changes the meaning of a group of books, as the title of the playlist connotes its own idea of what the books are or are not. Of course books are already categorized into playlists of sorts, as they sit on certain shelves in stores, libraries, or are labeled as a certain genre by publishers. But this typology is more broad and less definitive, as there are many subgenres that are not always clearly labeled. Anyways, this also reminded me of a service called Readlists, which allows users to create a list of web pages to share with others, literally a playlist for online-reading.

-Tara Mann

[publishing-futures]

"Will 'reflowability' soon make predefined formatting and layout altogether obsolete? Whatever the case, this is clearly another example of the forced simplification of an old medium by a new (electronic) one. The loss of a predefined layout is not perceived as an actual loss of content, but rather a requirement for rendering the content as 'naked' so that it may later be dynamically 'dressed up' at will - a typical digitization process. In this case, losing part of the content, its original layout, means making the rest of the content portable, and in the end, possibly universal."

Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print - The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894

(In direct response to this passage)

In questioning the "reflowability" of a publication, we are questioning the role of the designer as well. While designing for specific strings of text may become obsolete, designing for certain kinds of text will not. As access to publishing tools has increased, the formally precious nature of a carefully crafted sentence has become less important. Words are now disposable in a way they never were before. This disposability of words and decreased emphasis on word choice forces the underlying idea of a piece of writing to float to the surface. As designers, we have to design for the idea, not the words. The design structures we predefine are based entirely on the understanding of/assumption of future, reflowable content. 

-Tara Mann

[mobilemedia2012]

PackTrack: Final Presentation

Final Presentation 

[mobilemedia2012]

PackTrack: Designs

1st round of designs

[mobilemedia2012]

Pack Track: Ideas

We are presenting our ideas today, here are our ideas....

Track 1 App Map PDF With notes

Track 2 PDF

Track 3 PDF