PROGRAMMA

Showcases Digital Publishing Toolkit.
The ABC of digital publishing_

What: Event about e-publishing in the arts
When: 28 november 2014 / 13.30 – 17.30 uur
Where: Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Floor, Kohnstammhuis, Wibautstraat 2-4
Subscribe: http://bit.ly/dpt28november (Free entrance)

The Institute of Network culture invites you to join our meeting on e-publishing in the arts that is organized in relation to the RAAK-research project “Digital Publishing Toolkit” on the 28th of November from 13.30 – 17.30. The results of this project will be presented and the publication  ‘From Print to Ebooks: a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts’ will be launched.

We will look into questions like: How does the workflow from publisher to designer change? How can publishers in the arts create visual, esthetically interesting, and interactive e-publications? What platforms can the publishers use for electronic publishing? How do digital developments change the role of the designer?

PROGRAM

13.30 – 14.00 Coffee and tea
14.00 – 14.05 Opening Margreet Riphagen
14.05 – 14.30 Silvio Lorusso | The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies
14.30 – 14.50 Showcase BISPublishers | Phonegap & multi-channel publishing
14.50 – 15.10 ­Showcase Valiz | Context Without Walls – a generative workflow with EPUBster
15.10 – 15.30 Showcase nai010 uitgevers | My Collection
15.30 – 15.50 Showcase Institute of Network Cultures | Edit, design, develop: towards a hybrid workflow
15.50 – 16.05 Harold Konickx | It’s not a page; new familiar ways of book design
16.05 – 16.25 Florian Cramer & Geert Lovink | The Power of Editorial Design: Publishing and Control in the 21th Century
16.25 – 16.45 Discussion
16.45 – 16.55 Book Launch: ‘From Print to Ebooks: a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts’
16.55 – 17.30 Drinks

Abstracts of Talks

Silvio Lorusso – The Post-Digital Publishing Archive – An Inventory of Speculative Strategies: The Post-Digital Publishing Archive (P—DPA) is a research and curatorial platform aimed at systematically collecting, organizing and keeping trace of experiences in the fields of art and design that explore the relationships between publishing and digital technology.
In the context of the Digital Publishing Toolkit, publishers in the art and cultural sector worked together with designers, editors, and programmers to develop custom tools and outline processes letting their practice reflect the coexistence of digital and physical media. In doing so, a particular emphasis was put on content production, role of tools, modular workflows, multiple formats and revenue models.
In this presentation, the above aspects will be linked to the experimental work of artists and designers included in P—DPA in order to highlight some questions that are relevant to both areas, such as the following ones. How can the adopted tools and workflows have their own voice in the final publication? If publishing is becoming a ”function”, what kind of function is that? In a major shift from product to service, how to avoid claims of universality in favor of a worthwhile specificity? Putting QR codes aside, how to derive value from the interplay among diverse supports?

Showcase BISPublishers – Phonegab & multi-channel publishing: Where other groups of the Digital Publishing Toolkit have focused on developing an Epub, the BIS publishers publication has explored the possibilities of a hybrid application as medium. With Phonegap, a mobile development framework, a bridge is made between html and a native app, which allows for a multi-channel publishing workflow.

Showcase Valiz – Context Without Walls – a generative workflow with EPUBster: Valiz, Meeus Ontwerpt and PUNTPIXEL have collaborated on the development of an EPUB version of Common Skin, a publication in the series Context Without Walls. The multilanguage publications in this series focus on artists from all over the world and contain essays as well as pictures. Meeus Ontwerpt designed the physical and digital publication variants. The transformation from a printed version to an EPUB is not a one-on-one translation, the limitations of graphic design in the EPUB format and the complexities of the production process for a series of publications had to be considered. Therefore PUNTPIXEL developed a publication platform assisting with the production of EPUBs. During the presentation Meeus Ontwerpt, Valiz and PUNTPIXEL will show the end results and explain some the choices made during the development process.

Showcase nai010 uitgevers – My Collection: nai010 publishers, Medamo and PUNTPIXEL have developed a digital version of the Stedelijk Museum Highlights Catalogue. Instead of creating an ebook version of the existing catalogue, the group has opted to develop a digital distribution platform accessed via a mobile (web)application. The application allows users to find, filter, search, preview and collect highlights from the Stedelijk Museum collection in preparation for their visit to the museum. Related content (essays, interviews, images, etc.) for the selected highlights may be chosen and are subsequently bundled as a personalised EPUB-catalogue, available for generation within the My Highlights application. The generated publication may then be downloaded and viewed (offline) on any device capable of rendering EPUBs. PUNTPIXEL will demonstrate the application during the presentation. Extra features are planned for future versions, such as further EPUB personalisation options and the implementation of payment gateways in order to charge a small fee for premium content related to the highlights. The application has been developed in order to allow other interested parties to develop their own version of the application to be used to publish other collections, during the presentation Medamo will demonstrate the possibilities of such a scenario.

Showcase INC – Edit, design, develop: towards a hybrid workflow: How can small edition, low budget publishing houses edit, design, and develop a new, hybrid workflow for editing, designing and developing? The hybrid workflow we propose is based on the need for publishing across different media, while keeping the majority of the work process in-house instead of outsourcing. The research of the INC was aimed at making the transition from a print-centered publication process towards a digital-and-print (hybrid) publication process. The leading question being: how to handle documents in order to publish on different platforms? Creating a workflow that is both structured and flexible enough to cater for different choices is a key step towards an efficient electronic or hybrid publishing strategy. Instead of ‘adding’ the digital publication at the end of an existing workflow, which is based on the printed book as end result as is done often by publishers, the workflow should be made efficient and practical towards hybrid publishing in an earlier stage. From-scratch development of each publication format is thus replaced by single source-multi format publishing. Editor, designer, developer UNITE!

Harold Konickx – It’s not a page; new familiar ways of book design: In his A history of reading Albert Manguel says: ‘The codex gave the reader the opportunity to leaf through pages almost directly; doing so they kept an idea from the text as a whole – an idea intensified by the fact that the complete text rested in the lap of the reader. [vert. hk]’ As we move from pages to screens, as reading is taking more and more place on smartphones and tablets instead of physical books one could worry that readers will loose their grip on the whole. That reading becomes a less meaningful experience. In this talk I would like to have a closer look at this problem by exploring the world of Device 6, a crossover between a book and a game.

Geert Lovink & Florian Cramer – The Power of Editorial Design: Publishing and Control in the 21th Century: In this age of digital network everyone is a publisher. But isn’t this mere democratic ideology? We lack control over the algorithms of the new intermediates that own the distribution and marketing platforms. Is our emphasis on (e-book) design and the growing role of geeks and programmers in this, justified? Where are the strategic playgrounds for experiments these days? Is the emphasis on physical spaces such as libraries and bookstores an impotent compensation for our inability to deal with the power of invisible cloud? How can we reinvent the power of editorial design in an age of big data and social media monopolies?