Last week I was invited to participate in a workshop organized by Dr Smita Kheria (School of Law) and Penny Travlouw (Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture) both based at the University of Edinburgh. They are leading the project “Creation and Publication of the ‘Digital Manual‘: Authority, Authorship and Voice” funded by UK Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Digital Transformations Programme.
The project’s engagement with emergent models of textuality and the implications of this for knowledge, authorship, publishing, copyright and community formation relates a lot to work we are doing here at INC, for example Theory on Demand but also the research project Out of Ink (that will have a follow up from September on by Francesca Coluzzi).
This project looks at how the Digital Manual can be a paradigm for exploring multi-authorship, co-creation and publication in other digitised textual forms as well as how it can have relevance to the analogue book and serve as a premise to learn valuable lessons.
The workshop ran for two days. The first day of the workshop (which I did not attend) there was a focus group with the case studies participants to discuss commonalities and differences between findings from each case study as well as to identify and develop issues that may not have arisen within the confines of individual interviews. The second day we discussed the findings of the case studies with the network members and case studies participants in order to identify possibilities for future collaboration and the establishing of a consortium to investigate emerging themes and issues through a future project. Also present on the second day were academics, PhD students and local digital artists/practitioners, like Michel Bouwens. David Garcia, Simon Biggs and Franco Iacomella (see here for the full list).