Here at the PublishingLab, we often employ a makefile-based workflow to produce multiple outputs (EPUB, PDF, etc) from a single Markdown source.
While we believe that this automated workflow works well for our needs, we realized that it doesn’t push forward the idea of what a publication can be. Specifically, it addresses the issues of efficiency that many small and big publisher have.

In order to detach from this Fordist mindset, I conceived the Make Book Make Soup workshop. The goal is to approach the workflow from a more imaginative and speculative perspective. The particpants are therefore asked to create new automatic “recipes” that are then included in a growing “cookbook”.

The results of the first instance of the workshop were a recipe to produce a sentiment analysis visualization of the text, a recipe to create a noisy soundtrack, and a recipe to design a concrete poetry-like version of text in which the text disappears and whitespaces become black squares.

Feel free to do a push request if you have some recipes to share!

make sentiment (Luca Classaens, Nicoleta Pana)

make square (Thomas Walskaar, Fabiola Fortuna)