Merve RemixA case study by the Hybrid Publishing Consortium with Merve Verlag and Data Futures https://twitter.com/pub_con #merveremix This case study addresses collaborative research using Merve Verlag’s back catalog of 150 books. Merve is a Berlin-based independent publisher focusing in particular on philosophy, art history and politics. Its publications are known to be critical, concise and contemporary. Merve publishes one book a month. And in the contemporary climate of rapid production and dissemination, together with the Hybrid Publishing Consortium, Merve has embarked on a critical assessment of how digital publishing and distribution can support small publishers and how the content of out-of-print publications can be restructured, re-combined and processed by readers in novel ways to remain part of the discursive life-cycle. Industry pressures have left little else for digital publishing other than simulacra of the book form—notably the eBook (which degrades or completely loses the typographic or mnemonic qualities of the paper book, for example—page number, folios, speed of browsing). By integrating leading software technologies—IMCC’s freizo and TypeSetr—A-machine provides a prototype to explore the way in which computation can enhance and evolve new types of reading and publishing experiences. The Hybrid Publishing Consortium began by deconstructing each publication of Merve’s back catalog. With the guiding questions: what is a book made of (recognizable traits), and what could become of a book (essay-based), if the Pandora’s box of computation and digital networking was applied to publishing. Through this forensic process we generated a workflow to re-purpose previously digitized material (original printed books were scanned and stored as single page images), applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and reassembling and restructuring the data to represent the book as a symbolic, re-computable data structure (For further information see our guide: http://consortium.readthedocs.org/). In this way, Merve’s back catalog has been transformed to enable the gamut of dynamic publishing processes to be applied: layout, multi-format conversion, distribution, rights management, re-use and re-mixing, translation, synchronized updates, payments and reading metrics. In particular, the Hybrid Publishing Consortium's partnership with the Data Futures project of IMCC at Westminster University, provides advanced digital collection management technologies for transformation of existing catalogs and comprehensive version control of new publications. During further research that will follow the translation of the Merve back catalog, we will explore how books can be re-mixed and re-used, either by the reader/editor recompiling publications or by applying algorithmic analysis to make new collections. This case study is one of four grouped under the umbrella theme 'Designing the Book of the Future'. TechnologyFor the ‘Merve Remix’ prototype a variety of technologies have been combined. Firstly TypeSetr, developed by HPC and LShift Limited. TypeSetr specifically addresses multi-format document transformation, eg., POD, EPUB, HTML, etc., and the creation of a single source structured master document. Secondly is freizo from the Data Futures Lab, which uses Mongo DB, an unstructured database schema. freizo is used in the research for; authentication, media storage, but also as a rapid prototyping environment for our forensic workflows to reconstruct the Merve book titles in digital form. A-machine is HPC’s technology ecosystem where different Open Source technologies can been combined, including examples such as; Meteor for real time browser content updating, le-tex GmbH workflows, and Tamboti from the Heidelberg Research Architecture to explore meta description frameworks for the publication’s media. The role of HPC and A-machine is also to identify parts of the workflow that need improving and then either develop solutions or find partners who can provide the specialised solution. Examples challenging areas are; distribution, sales, reading metrics and annotation etc. About Merve VerlagMerve is a small, independent publisher, located in Berlin Schöneberg, Germany with a particular focus on philosophy, art history and politics. Merve was the first German independent publisher to receive the Kurt-Wolff-Award, which laudes extraordinary contributions to the diverse literary landscape. Among the authors published are (just to mention a few) Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-François Lyotard, Heiner Müller, Paul Virilio, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Nicolas Bourriaud. Merve has published a series called the International Merve Discourse (IMD). Its publishing archive is hosted at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. About Hybrid Publishing ConsortiumThe Hybrid Publishing Consortium (HPC) is a research project with a mission to support the development of open source software for public infrastructures in publishing. One of our goals is to bring the ideal of universal access to independent publishing, in the way that the Open Access movement has changed academic publishing. We examine publishing workflows, build software components that enable multi-format conversion, e.g. eBooks, print-on-demand, online learning systems etc. We simultaneously promote computation and algorithm use in new hybridization in publishing formats, as well as valuing the knowledge worker, understanding publishing as a conflux of skills, technologies and machines. Within the wide variety of publishing types, we specialise in Museums, Libraries and Archives publishing. HPC is part of the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and is funded by the EU and the German federal State of Lower Saxony. About Data Futures and IMCCThe Data Futures project is based in the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture. Established in 2012 to focus on factors affecting long-term accessibility of research data and in particular upon issues arising from the growing importance of digital collections for scholarly research in the humanities. Its software migration platform freizo enables collections to be made portable and re-delivered using contemporary technologies instead of becoming stranded on the systems with which they were developed. Data Futures also examines the wider landscape of institutional logics and politics that affects the evolution and application of standards addressing sustainability of research data. Data Futures looks at questions around the assessment of digital collection vulnerabilities which have been inadequately addressed in the headlong rush to ‘digitization’ during the last decade. PartnersMerve Verlag http://merve.de/ Hybrid Publishing Consortium http://consortium.io/ Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) http://cdc.leuphana.com/ Data Futures Lab, Institute for Modern and Cntemporary Culture, Westminster University http://www.data-futures.org/ A-machine http://a-machine.net/ InfoMesh Technologies UG http://infomesh.technology/ TypeSetr https://github.com/hybrid-publishing-lab/typesetr Semantic documentation http://consortium.readthedocs.org/ |
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