A Differential Thesis

  • Extracts

    Section titled “Extracts”
  • “By placing the comments alongside the text (instead of at the bottom of the text which is more common in regular blogs and websites) an attempt is made to subvert the implied hierarchy of ‘text first, comments second’.”
  • “transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. Several readers remarked that it was no longer solely the author speaking, but the book as a whole”
  • “Wikis thus enable the possibility to both write, edit, comment upon, update, remix, categorise, tag, reuse, translate, data-mine, annotate, copy and paste the material, in a collaborative manner. This means that the possibilities offered by this environment, in combination with the way it can be interacted with, might provide another opportunity to challenge and critique the”
  • “authority of the text’s initial author (or set of authors).”
  • “The more ‘definite’ or ‘final’ a text seems (which can be due to language, length, format, style of writing, genre, design, etc.), the harder it becomes for people to engage with it.”
  • “Marjorie Perloff has called differential texts, which she defines as ‘texts that exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one’ (2006).”
  • “James Somers experiments with prose versioning (culminating in Draftback, a chrome extension that lets you play back any Google Doc’s revision history”
  • “general trend here towards the iterative and dynamic publishing of open, distributed and versioned research,”
  • “the non-linearity of processual research, where different revisions, remixes, adaptations and readings of research do not flow into each other in a teleological way, but are rather remediations (Bolter) and deformations (McGann) of iterable publications.”
  • “Media theorist Lev Manovich, for instance, published different iterations of his monograph Software Takes Command (2013) online on his website as the book developed. As he argues with respect to this practice: ‘One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents.”
  • “Bringing out different versions of our research as it emerges also enables us to make material available for others to share much sooner, without the associated time-lags formal publishing brings with it, not to mention the pay-walls and copyright restrictions.”
  • “Instead of primarily emphasising the end result as part of such an object-centered approach, could a focus on the various renditions of an academic work also involve a shift in our attention towards the collaborative and more processual nature of research?”
  • “an opportunity to reflect critically on the way this workflow is currently (teleologically and hierarchically) set up, institutionalised, and commercialised”
  • “What currently counts as a formal version and for what reason?”
  • “versioning mainly seems to refer to the continuous updating of one single text, post, page, or topic (i.e. it assumes an original and a final version). What happens, though, if the updates and changes are ongoing and content is brought in from elsewhere?”
  • “The way we keep insisting on version control might be perceived as another sign of our fear of letting go of stability and fixity.”
  • “an opportunity to examine different software and technologies and to shape them at the same time; to develop a form of critical praxis and to explore what other kinds of publishing are possible.”
  • “interaction, experimentation, multimodality, openness and interdisciplinarity, as these are the features of scholarly communication that I would like to highlight and promote”
  • “reimagine the bound nature of the monograph and to explore versionings as a spatial and temporal critique of the book as a bound object;”