:( Surveiller et Sourir :)

MediaCommons Press is thrilled to host the open review of Sophie Limare’s manuscript, :( Surveiller et Sourire :) La vidéosurveillance dans l’art contemporain in situ, which has been proposed for publication in a new book series on digital culture, co-edited by Michael Sinatra and Marcello Vitali-Rosati for the University of Montreal Press.

Sinatra’s invitation to the community is below. Please join the discussion!

—–

Bonjour,

j’ai le plaisir de vous inviter à participer au processus d’open review du livre “:(Surveiller et sourire:). La vidéosurveillance dans l’art contemporain in situ” de Sophie Limare, proposé pour publication à la collection Parcours numériques que je codirige avec Marcello Vitali-Rosati aux Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

Comme plusieurs d’entre vous le savent, la collection propose des textes de réflexion sur le fait numérique, tout en expérimentant de nouvelles formes d’éditorialisation. Chaque livre est publié en version papier mais aussi en version augmentée en ligne et en accès libre (cf. par exemple http://parcoursnumeriques-pum.ca/introduction-20)

Parmi les expérimentations de la collection, nous nous sommes donné l’objectif d’essayer de nouveaux modes d’évaluation des manuscrits. Le texte de Sophie Limare est donc proposé en version intégrale en ligne afin de recevoir les commentaires et les remarques de la communauté des chercheurs. Nous croyons que ce processus enrichira le livre et que, à plus long terme, il pourra constituer une alternative efficace au système d’évaluation par les pairs tel que nous le pratiquons aujourd’hui.

Dans le cas du livre de Sophie Limare, Marcello Vitali-Rosati et moi-même nous chargerons de travailler avec l’auteure pour l’intégration des commentaires. Nous soumettrons ensuite le manuscrit retravaillé à une évaluation par les pairs traditionnelle.

Il va sans dire que la réussite de l’expérimentation dépend de la participation de la communauté des chercheurs. Le manuscrit sera disponible pendant un mois sur la plateforme media common press ici : http://mcpress.media-commons.org/regardnumerique/

La plateforme est très facile à utiliser. Laissez des commentaires et faites circuler dans vos réseaux ! Merci !

Voici un court descriptif de l’ouvrage :

“Décriées par les citoyens, les caméras de vidéosurveillance suscitent, depuis les années 1990, de virulents débats dans les sociétés occidentales. Mais qu’en disent et font les artistes ? Accompagnant tout d’abord la résistance d’une partie de la population, les artivistes contemporains se sont ensuite lancés dans des appropriations esthétiques puis ludiques de la vidéosurveillance. Leurs démarches signent au passage, non pas la fin d’une dénonciation de la société sécuritaire, mais une nouvelle forme de sensibilisation aux enjeux sociaux qui lui sont inhérents. S’éloignant de l’approche foucaldienne qui considérait que l’on surveillait pour punir, certains artistes actuels proposent de sourire et d’interagir vis-à-vis des dispositifs de contrôle visuel de notre société hypermoderne. De Banksy à Jill Magid, de Ai Weiwei à Michael Wolf, cet ouvrage analyse l’histoire récente, mais déjà en transformation, du regard numérique de la vidéosurveillance.”

postmedieval Crowd Review

MediaCommons Press is very happy to host the crowd review of a forthcoming issue of postmedieval, focused on Comic Medievalisms. Journal editors Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman and special issue editor Louise D’Arcens invite broad participation in this process.

postmedieval is affiliated with the BABEL Working Group; the Comic Medievalisms crowd review features six essays that have already been through an initial round of review and have been revised and identified as fit for publication. The crowd review will run from Wednesday, 6 November to Sunday, 15 December 2013. During this time, anyone who would like to constructively review the work is invited to do so in an open and transparent way. postmedieval invites input from multiple perspectives, amateur to professional, non-specialist to specialist.

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well being of digital media and files during different stages of the acquisition process.

Co-authored by a team of ten archivists and curators from the Beinecke, the Bodleian, the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Rubenstein Library at Duke, the report is the outcome of a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories.

A draft of Born Digital has been published with MediaCommons Press, an innovative online publisher that allows readers to offer feedback via an easy-to-use commenting interface, and is currently open for comment.

The main body of the report surveys the primary issues and concerns related to born-digital acquisitions and is intended for a broad audience with varying levels of interest and expertise, including donors, dealers, and archival repositories, as well as scholars, students, and researchers. Appendices provide information about how to prepare for the unexpected and possible staffing costs, as well as ready-to-use checklists that incorporate recommendations from throughout the report. These recommendations are not meant to be universal and do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the authors’ institutions. Rather, they offer broad, useful guidance for donors, dealers, and repository staff involved in the acquisition or transfer of born-digital materials.

The report’s authors encourage archivists, curators, manuscript dealers, writers, scholars, students, and other custodians of archival materials to read the report, offer feedback, and take part in a discussion with the larger community of people concerned about the acquisition and preservation of born-digital materials. Your comments and suggestions will provide an important level of peer review as the report’s authors continue revising and preparing Born Digital for final publication.

Fit for Purpose: Developing Business Cases for New Services in Research Libraries

MediaCommons Press is very pleased to announce the release of “Fit for Purpose: Developing Business Cases for New Services in Research Libraries,” a report co-sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF). “Fit for Purpose” argues that libraries developing digital scholarship services should adopt structured, disciplined approaches to planning for their success; the report presents a set of recommendations that libraries can adopt when developing any new service. “Fit for Purpose” attends closely to entrepreneurial activities such as library-based publishing and data stewardship because of the uncertainty and complexity of those services.

“Fit for Purpose” was developed by a team that includes Mike Furlough (Penn State), Ted Fons (OCLC), Elizabeth Kirk (Dartmouth), Michele Reid (North Dakota State), and Carol Hunter (University of North Carolina). Noted consultant Judy Luther serves as an advisor to the project.

MediaCommons Press, CLIR, and the project team hope that readers will engage in a dialogue with the authors and their colleagues about the recommendations and their related experiences.

The Piracy Crusade

MediaCommons Press is proud to host the peer-to-peer review of the in-progress manuscript The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties by Aram Sinnreich. The project, which is under contract with University of Massachusetts Press, is being posted chapter-by-chapter for open-review. Please join in the discussion!

Complex Television

It was a pretty thrilling moment: during a workshop on collaborative structures in digital scholarship at last week’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Jason Mittell, Skyped-in from Germany, launched the MediaCommons Press hosted peer-to-peer review of his book manuscript, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, while the rest of the panel and the audience watched.

Jason is releasing the text chapter by chapter, with each new installment due every week or two. The book is under contract to NYU Press, but this draft manuscript and its surrounding discussion will remain on MediaCommons Press, even after the book has been published.

We hope that you will read along as Jason publishes his chapters and contribute to the discussion of this exciting volume!

Sustaining Scholarly Publishing

MediaCommons is very happy to host an open discussion of the Association of American University Presses report, released on Monday, “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses.” This report examines the experiments currently underway in university press publishing and makes several key recommendations for the success of future innovation. Central to these recommendations is a call for greater collaboration and communication in these publishing processes.

Thanks to the support of Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at NYU, the AAUP task force has not only graciously agreed to but enthusiastically supported this discussion. Please come join us, and help MediaCommons and the AAUP together foster the kinds of communication that will support new modes of experimentation in scholarly publishing.

Shakespeare Quarterly Open Review

MediaCommons is very proud to be collaborating for a second year with Shakespeare Quarterly on the open review of essays under consideration for publication in their special issue on Shakespeare and Performance. As special issue editor Sarah Werner reports,

The essays cover a range of interesting subjects: a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth; Othello in 1903 Japan; Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; prophecy as a trope for performance; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.

Discussion will be open to registered users for six weeks; further instructions for participation are available on the review site. Please stop by and join the discussion!

Learning Through Digital Media

MediaCommons Press is proud to host the open review of essays proposed for inclusion in the collection, Learning Through Digital Media. As editor Trebor Scholz describes it,

The simple yet far-reaching ambition of this collection of essays is to discover how to use digital media for learning on campus and off. It offers a rich selection of reflections on social practices, methodologies, and hands-on assignments by leading educators who acknowledge the opportunities created by the confluence of mobile technologies, the World Wide Web, film, video games, TV, comics, and software while also calling attention to recurring challenges. The authors in this publication ask how tools and services that are part of the contemporary media landscape can be used to create situations in which all learners actively engage each other and the teacher to become more proficient and productive, to think in more complex ways, gain better judgment, become more principled and curious, and lead distinctive and productive lives.

Please join in the discussion of these engaging and important essays!

The Net Effect

Thomas Streeter’s The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet is now available from NYU Press (and Amazon.com). MediaCommons Press is pleased to make chapter 6 of The Net Effect, “Open Source, the Expressive Programmer, and the Problem of Property,” available for reading and discussion.

In addition to participating in the discussion in the margins of the text, Streeter will also be blogging about the ideas in the book and their implications for understanding contemporary issues surrounding the Internet.

Join the conversation, and spread the word!