Posts By: Andre Castro

Collaborative workflows

By Andre Castro, November 25, 2014

During the Showcase of the Digital Publishing Toolkit Michael Murtaugh gave a presentation entitled Towards a hybrid workflow: editor, designer and developer UNITE!, that resonated strongly with my experience of creating The Volkskrant Building ebook by Boukje Cnossen and Sebastian Olma. In a previous blogpost I half-heartedly criticized the top-down dynamic experienced during the development [...]

Making the VolkskrantBuilding.epub

By Andre Castro, November 23, 2014

Last week The Institute of Network Cultures and Amsterdam Creative Industries Network launched the publication The Volkskrant Building: Manufacturing Difference in Amsterdam’s Creative City (TVB) by Boukje Cnossen and Sebastian Olma. I use this post to share the process that led to the production of its EPUB edition. From the onset it was clear that [...]

John Haltiwanger: Free Your Objects (And Let The Subject Follow)

By Andre Castro, June 10, 2014

A post by Mathijs Weijers John Haltiwanger was the third speaker of session 2, which focused on publishing workflows, tools and platforms. His talk aimed to give the audience a better understanding of the recent work of Gilbert Simondon on cybernetics theory. Simonodon’s work shines a new perspective on Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics, originally [...]

Joost Kircz: Going Electronic

By Andre Castro, June 5, 2014

A post by Mathijs Weijers Joost Kircz was the first speaker of the 2-day conference “Off the Press – Electronic Publishing in the Arts”, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures. From 2006 till 2013, Kircz was a part-time lecturer on electronic publishing within the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), and currently [...]
Angie Keefer is a writer, artist, and co-founder of The...

Angie Keefer: The difference between the two

By Andre Castro, May 29, 2014

Angie Keefer is a writer, artist, and co-founder of The Serving Library, along with David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey of Dexter Sinister. The Serving Library, as described by Keefer, is a cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing means. It first releases e-publications of the artworks and texts of various artists under PDF format, for [...]

Dušan Barok: Communing Texts

By Andre Castro, May 28, 2014

Publishing in the humanities holds many unrealized potentials online, argues Dušan Barok, the artist, writer and cultural activist who founded Monoskop (a wiki for art, culture and media technology). The Internet is not just a medium to distribute, store and manage e-books, he continues, but is in itself a medium that dictates specific means of reading [...]

Marcell Mars: Free access to resources for every member of society

By Andre Castro, May 28, 2014

The final session of the “Off the Press: Electronic Publishing in Arts” conference approached another side of the e-publishing field, namely what happens after the e-books are launched: where do we distribute, store and manage them? In traditional publishing, perhaps the most iconic actor to play this role is the public library. However, as Mars [...]

Arjen de Jong: Sketching skills

By Andre Castro, May 27, 2014

De Jong is a visual designer for design agency Essense and a member of BIS Publishers, both located in Amsterdam. He attended the conference “Off the Press: Electronic Publishing in the Arts” as a representative of the latter and shared the production process of two of their recent e-publications. The first case study he presented [...]

Florian Cramer: Electronic publishing in the arts – what works and what doesn’t

By Andre Castro, May 27, 2014

Florian Cramer announced the soon-to-be-released Digital Publishing Toolkit – the results of a two year project with publishers and designers that taps into their practical experiences and difficulties in developing a number of pilot e-book projects. It furthermore addresses ways in which publishers can change their internal ways of working so that releasing one publication [...]

Elizabeth Castro: CatalanTalk – Publishing multilingual interviews, from Twitter to ebooks to paper

By Andre Castro, May 27, 2014

Elizabeth Castro kicked off the second session of the conference by introducing herself as a computer book writer. She is the author of several guides on how to create webpages and epubs by working with tools like HTML, XML, InDesign and CSS. In this talk, however, Castro showed how she applies this know-how to a [...]