Last April, I read an article by Gary Wolf in the New York Times Magazine about people who are “self-trackers” – that is, people who use new digital tools and services to produce data about themselves or their activities. The article stuck in my mind because it definitely fell into the category of “people who create information in unconventional ways” – a topic that I was (and still am) interested in. But I didn’t think much more of it at the time. Then on Monday morning, I came across this article on Slate by Michael Agger titled Data for a Better Planet where the Wolf articles came-up again. It gave me an opportunity to revisit the other article and the blog where Wolf and others write regularly.

What interests me in this type of research is how people who aren’t necessarily social scientists or other kinds of expert researchers use tools and methods inspired by these disciplines to produce information. What I found particularly frustrating about the Slate article was that it completely overlooked one of the fundamental points that Wolf was trying to make in the NY Times Magazine article. Agger’s interest in self-tracking seems to be limited to how it represents an opportunity for people to “improve society” by “sharing their data”. In other words, collecting this data about yourself and making it available to everyone and anyone is somehow necessarily going to lead to more information and a better state of affairs. But I don’t want to get into lofty critiques of certain versions of information society that assume that more information is necessarily better or about how this certainly leads to problematic issues of surveillance and bio-politics.

Rather, what I find particularly problematic is that Agger is basing his argument on a set of assumptions about how all of this data can be collected and fed into standardised information frameworks. Who decides what data is valuable and what isn’t? What is the benefit of my knowing how others self-tracked their work patterns if I don’t share the same values about what are good work patterns? After rereading the Wolf article, I realised that what had left an impression on me was that he highlighted the eccentricity of the way in which these self-trackers were gathering data. The point of collecting this data and turning into information about their day-to-day activities wasn’t to change the world but to devise situated tactics for a better understanding of their everyday lives. The value of self-tracking for these people wasn’t only the information that was produced but the opportunity to think differently about a particular aspect of their lives. Part of the conclusion that Wolf came to when examining his own self-tracking was that he was putting too much emphasis on a certain kind of metrics for measuring the quality of his work:

“I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.”

For Wolf, self-tracking represented a great way to challenge existing standards rather than building new ones. This understanding of data gathering practices as critique is exactly the kind of thing that seems to be a part of the ongoing work at Proboscis with the eBooks. Of course, there are also some significant differences including the fact that the kind of work people are doing with eBooks that I’ve encountered to date is less focused on the ‘self’ and that the “capturing” people have described with the eBooks is quite different from the “tracking” that Wolf described.

http://proboscis.org.uk/projects/
http://proboscis.org.uk/projects/diffusion/
http://diffusion.org.uk/?page_id=2
http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2152
http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=202

Proboscis contributors like Karen Martin and Hazem Tagiuri also occasionally revisit Diffusion as an archive of previous projects:

http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/10/diffusion-archive-review-perception-peterborough/
http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/10/diffusion-archive-review-the-collected-tweets-of-brandon-cummerbund/
http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/09/ebooks-for-evaluation-and-reflection/

Now, some of you might now be thinking (sarcastically): “Wow, Fred, you’ve discovered the World Wide Web… Congratulations!”.  What this little search for information got me thinking about was how these websites operate as a database (à la Lev Manovich) that is used in part to define the eBook as a cultural form. So rather than spend too much time on the history of Diffusion.org.uk, I want to look at how the site is itself used to classify eBooks. This may sound like a particularly dull thing to do, but I think that it is essential since it can not only give us an insight into how the eBook has been developed as a creative tool but also how Proboscis disseminates information about the eBook (which is tied directly to my own research interests).

Diffusion.org.uk is “powered” by WordPress. Using the blog post format, Proboscis give each of the eBooks they want to profile a “post”, making it easy to sort in various categories that can be defined using the WordPress system. These different categories can found under the website’s Library tab.

The first set of WordPress categories used to sort eBooks on the Diffusion website is “Sharable Form”. It seems I was wrong in a previous post when I wrote that Proboscis didn’t make the distinction between capture and publication. At least on some level, Diffusion presents a classificatory distinction between what they refer to as “eBooks” and ”eNotebooks” – the former designates any kind of publication using the eBook format while the latter specifically designates eBook designs for information capture. I’m still going to keep my own categories, partly for convenience but also because some of the material used to capture information with eBooks isn’t presented on the Diffusion website. As of today, there are 428 eBooks on the Diffusion website, of which 37 are also classified as eNotebooks.

The next way in which the eBooks are categorised is through authors. As of today, there are 138 authors listed on Diffusion.org.uk. It’s interesting to note that the recent series of Pitch In and Publish (for example) involves testing ways to publish collaboratively using multiple authors.

Some of the eBooks are also subdivided into Series. There are 16 different series online including Dodolab (18), Topographies & Tales (11), and Performance Notations (12). The last category that is also included is sorting by date. Based on this preliminary examination of Diffusion.org.uk it seems the eBooks are classified in a fairly straightforward way. There doesn’t seem to be any qualitative judgment about the different eBook iterations. They are mostly just categorised in fairly conventional ways so as to be easily retraced –name, author, date, and related project. The one initial insight that I’ve found significant is this distinction between the eBooks and the sub-category of eNotebooks. As a next step in examining Diffusion.org.uk, I will start to take a closer look at the eNotebooks.

Sample project: Melanesia Project

According to James, both Porer and Pinbin knew a lot about materials and the ways in which some of these objects were made which meant that the exchange could lead to some fascinating insights. Having worked with James in the past, they were also familiar with how to work with anthropologists.

As part of the exchange, James invited Giles Lane to drop by and demonstrate how to use the eBooks to record the event. Giles showed them all how to put the eBooks together and also brought a small portable Polaroid printer that could quickly and easily print digital pictures in a small format that could then be glued onto the eBook pages.

This was certainly a case of using the eBooks to capture information (see here for previous post where I introduce what I mean in by this) – in this case James described using the eBooks as a way to produce a realtime record that involved “capturing the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing”. Representatives of the BM were also recording the exchange but using the eBooks served as a complimentary archive of what had happened. While the exchange was taking place, James would write down some of what Porer and Pinbin were saying in both English and Tok Pisin next to the images glued down in the eBooks. The addition of the eBooks to the process was partly challenging for James because it involved an additional set of tasks in an already hectic and brief exchange. Nevertheless, James felt that it proved to be a positive addition to the session because it provided a better record of the process of the exchange itself. He felt that although other methods for collecting and presenting information were better suited to the documentation of the knowledge being imparted of the objects by his two friends, the way in which the eBooks were used provided a simple, quick and accessible way of sharing what had taken place during the meeting.

Later on, the eBooks were re-scanned and subsequently reprinted into the professionally printed and bound version of the eBooks. James then distributed copies of the new books in Reite as well as at the local University in Papua New Guinea, and other regional institutions who were interested in what they had been doing. The eBooks were useful for giving people a feel for what had taken place, particularly for people who were unfamiliar with anthropology as a discipline.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

James used a wonderful way of describing his work as an anthropologist as being comprised of “moments”. He felt that the eBooks were used at the right moment in the process of conducting this type of research. Although he was unsure as to how this type of practice could fit in other parts of his work, he could see how this process would be helpful in situations requiring the documentation of how people “respond to images or information for themselves”.

He also suggested that as objects in themselves, the professionally bound versions of the eBooks were useful as a way to disseminate general information about the exchange:

“[…] As something to give people, they’re an extremely nice thing. People are very keen. I also took some to an anthropology conference before I went [to Papua New Guinea] and would show them to people and they’d immediately say “Oh, is that for me?” People kind of like them. They’re nice little objects.”

However, since many people of Papua New Guinea don’t have access to Internet, resources like Bookleteer or the Diffusion website proved to be significantly less of an advantage for distributing this information (they obviously can’t download a copy of the eBook).

I want to come back to the way James used the idea of “moments” to describe his work and apply it to the way in which the eBook was designed and used. We could say that each project I have described to date was composed of a series of moments and that nested within these projects was the eBook component which in itself was composed of its own series of moments. In reference to my previous post on the distinction between capturing and publishing, the trajectory of how eBooks were designed and used in some of these projects was composed of both capturing and publishing moments. For example, the way in which the eBook was used on the Melanesia Project included both a capturing moment as part of the exchange with the British Museum and a publishing moment in which Giles and James printed-out scanned copies of the original eBooks and made them available online or passed hardcopies out to people who were interested in learning more about the project (or, in some cases, who just wanted to get their hands on a free neat little object).

These series of moments were significant because they each involved different challenges and successes. In James’ case, it seemed both the capturing and publishing moments proved valuable – in the case of the former as a way to capture “the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing” during the exchange, in the case of the latter as a way to distribute printed copies of the eBooks. But both capturing and publishing in this particular case also faced challenges that suggested there were some additional key moments that made-up an eBook’s trajectory as part of a project. Here are two moments that I want to add to describe an eBook’s trajectory:

Appropriation: James had only a cursory knowledge of how the eBooks worked before the exchange took place. In other cases, (for example see Ruth Sapsed’s work with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination) we saw how people had attended “Pitch-up and Publish” events as a way to test the eBooks and decide whether or not they could fit into the way these people executed their projects. For the Melanesia Project, James took the risk of adding the eBooks as an extra element to the project in part because he trusted Giles’ work and his abilities to adapt the eBooks to these particular circumstances. In this case, therefore, moments of appropriation and capturing took place at the same time. I will therefore use appropriation to describe how people decide the way in which eBooks relate to their pre-existing practices for capturing and publishing information.

Design and printing: It may seem that “design and printing” and “publishing” should be categorised as part of the same moment. The reason for making the distinction is that I want to highlight how the physical process of composing the eBook’s pages and physically making the eBook, whether it be printing it out or cutting and folding its pages into a notebook, are distinct from the publishing category I defined earlier. Both capturing and publishing necessarily involve designing and printing an eBook. But the way in which they are designed and printed and the way in which such a design will be evaluated as part of the project will likely be very different.

Of course, in making-up these four distinct analytical categories, I may be over-emphasising distinctions between moments that are in fact all bundled-up and confused in time and space. But the reason for making these distinctions is so that I can begin to develop a typology of how eBooks are part of all of these very different kinds of projects.

Next time, I’ll examine the Diffusion website in greater detail.

I had the chance to pay a visit to Julie Anderson, Assistant Keeper for Ancient Sudan and Egyptian Nubia at the BM on the 14 September to talk about her work with the eBooks. Julie is the project leader for what is known as the Berber-Abidiya archaeological project in Sudan. She and her collaborator Dr Salah eldin Mohamed Ahmed in Sudan have been working with Proboscis to develop a version of the eBook as part of this project. This was my chance to find out a bit more about the project.

Sample project: Excavations in the Temple Precinct of Dangeil

One of the sites where Julie and her team have been excavating since 2000 is in Dangeil, about 350km north of Khartoum. The motivation for creating an eBook first came when teachers from local schools started bringing their students to visit the site. Most of these teachers had very little information about the site itself or about the Kingdom of Kush who were attributed with having built a temple on this site more than 2000 years ago. It was at this point that the team realised they needed to make some kind of resource available to people from the region so that they could learn more about the project and why it was so significant.

Julie was later introduced to the eBooks through someone else from the BM who had been using them as part of an ethnographic project (more on that next week). She then got in touch with Giles from Proboscis who demonstrated some of the material and proposed a number of options for using the eBooks. After considering their options, she and Salah decided to use the eBook and began the process of writing the material.

The book would cover some of general history of the period and specifically develop the history of the site. The information contained in the eBook was designed to be fairly flexible: although it was written at a level that would not have been easily understood by primary students, it was accessible to teachers and older students as well as the general public who would be interested in the site. You can download an English version of the eBook here. The final version is nearly 40 pages long in the A5 format which meant that the foldable version of the eBook was ill-suited to this project (it tends to get quite difficult to fold that many pages together, especially when you want to make a lot of them). For this reason and for greater durability, they chose to work with the pre-bound version of the eBook.

When I met with Julie, the project was entering its final phase of development. She was hoping to have 500 copies of the eBook made in English and 500 copies made in Arabic. These would hopefully be distributed widely: in the National Museum in Khartoum – to antiquities staff, but also with local government officials, as well as anyone visiting the site including school groups, as well as the local community.

Distributing to the local community was particularly important for Julie. The site itself is located right in the middle of the village. Having been there for over 10 years now, the team has been working closely with many of the villagers and she felt this was one of the many ways in which she could ensure a good interaction with the community.

Julie sees this eBook as potentially the beginning of a series of of eBooks about the project and hopes to produce more versions that would cover other sites in the region. She hopes to get some feedback from the villagers about this version and incorporate any suggestions into future iterations of the publications.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

Julie found the eBooks and the Bookleteer website extremely easy to use. She felt that it was easy to modify the eBooks in case there was anything wrong with the text and to quickly see the new results. For her, this was an advantage compared to dealing with other forms of desktop publishing where you can’t immediately change something and produce it again.

As with the case of Niharika Hariharan last week, the ability to publish in other languages was also a considerable advantage. Although there were a few early formatting issues to resolve for publishing in Arabic, Julie felt that this option made it a particularly attractive resource for institutions like the BM who operated in many different countries:

“I can see actually from the use of this as a bigger institution, looking at this is that it’s very effective for communicating with our local audiences worldwide in their own languages.”

I would say that this project represents a clear example of the publishing category I initially proposed in a previous post. I will be pushing this reflection a bit further in future posts. But first, stay tuned next week for the second of my two part look at how the eBooks have been used at the BM.

In our interview, Niharika told me that she first used the eBooks on part of the Perception Peterborough project. She and Alice used the eBooks to document a cab ride around Peterborough using illustrations as a way to explore the different kinds of communities and systems that were embedded in the city. For Niharika, this early way of using the eBooks functioned more as a support for personal reflection. Although she would show the results to others, the eBooks she created felt more personal:

“It is shareable, but that is not the intent in which I created it. It was more like a personal log.”

Although she continues to be interested in this kind of approach, she has also used the eBooks as part of a more extensive project which I want to examine in greater detail:

Sample project: Articulating Futures

Proboscis commissioned Niharika in 2009 to design and deliver Articulating Futures. The project was a series of workshops held in New Delhi, India between the 17th and 21st November 2009. The work took place at the Chinmaya Mission Vidyalaya. Both she and members of Proboscis had been interested in exploring the pedagogical applications for eBooks and these workshops represented just such an opportunity.

The workshops involved pproximately 20 sixteen year-old students. As part of the workshops, students were given a “pack” with various materials including a number of pre-designed eBooks and StoryCubes. Niharika emphasised that she was working from within in a traditional Indian schooling system, a system that I was completely unfamiliar with. She explained to me that notebooks were used in a very different manner in this Indian school than in the manner that I was familiar with. Each notebook was apparently designated for particular subjects and students were given a standard format in which to record information in the classroom.  They could not personalise their notebooks in any way. They could not write down what their thoughts were. They could only copy material from the board or what their teacher teaches:

“the whole project was located in a very structured school institution, in a very structured classroom space where notebooks are a very sort of different medium. When you write down [something it] has to be right or wrong versus more creative. So notebooks are associated with a very different way of exchanging or recording information or knowledge”

Niharika saw the eBooks as a way to transgress this kind of approach. For her, the level of tactility in making the eBooks and their flexibility meant that students could express themselves more freely in the classroom context. The workshops included four different designs of the eBooks given to the students at four different times in the workshops. These included:

An eBook of Ideas- to note one’s personal thoughts and moments of inspiration

An eBook of search and research- to write down responses to specific questions discussed through the day

An eBook of storytelling- to help students think more creatively using methods and techniques of narrative and story telling

An eBook of Future- to use as a personal log to create the final future scenarios

In other words, the eBooks were used as a tool to enable students to develop their ability to be reflexive. As she states in her final report:

“Students were encouraged to reflect upon their daily activities by writing in their eBooks of ideas and research. They were also asked to write down a ‘thought of the day’ based on what they liked or disliked during the daily course of the workshop. Each days activities were explained to the students so that they could understand and comprehend why they were participating in it. Through discussions they were also linked to the proceedings of the following days as well to their academic curriculum. This enabled them to make sense of the workshop, meaningfully participate in it as well as make it relevant to their context.”

In the end, Niharika felt that the eBooks offered three specific advantages as workshop tools for this particular project:

Multiple languages – Probosics had recently introduced the ability to use multiple languages which meant that she could design the eBooks in Hindi or other languages.

Pedagogical context – The eBooks flexibility allowed students to develop critical and reflexive skills.

Engagement – The uniqueness of the eBooks ensured that students would be interested get involved in the workshop activities.

Once the workshops were completed, Niharika scanned all of the eBooks as part of an archive of the event. She then keeps the originals in a Paperchase box. You can find versions of Niharika’s eBook design here.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

Having extensively worked with the eBooks in the past, Niharika felt that she had not fully grasped the importance and significance of making the eBooks – that is folding and cutting them into the final version – until she worked with the students in India. Sadly she only came to this realisation after she had pre-folded and cut the eBooks for the students. She felt that, had the students made the eBooks themselves, it would have added “ another layer of ownership and I think it’s also far more engaging and makes it more personal”.

Niharika still uses the eBooks to make personal logs. She is also looking forward to potentially designing an eBook as her own artist’s portfolio which she could handout to people interested in her work.

I’m going to propose a first set of categories to distinguish how the eBooks are designed and used: eBooks are designed in some cases to capture knowledge and in other cases to publish information.

Publishing information with eBooks seems to involve organising bits of information – texts such as interview transcripts and project reports as well as images including pictures and logos – using one of the eBook templates. This newly designed eBook is subsequently made available to people who might be interested in the information it contains. A good example is how Gillian’s Greenhill projects involve using the eBooks as part of an “end point” to summarise her research.

The term “capturing” is used repeatedly by Proboscis and by some of the people who use the eBooks. It seems to be most often used to describe instances in which an eBook is used to codify some kind of event, experience or other tacit form of knowledge. I will therefore use “capture” to describe the cases where the eBook is designed and used as part of a process of generating information about something. A good example is when Ruth Sapsed describes how CCI uses the eBooks as part of workshops with teachers and other groups of people to see what they think about their own creative process. (Please note that some of the details of this work are not specifically detailed in the blog post presented.)

Now someone might argue that publishing is the same thing as capturing. After-all, isn’t Michelle Kasprzak codifying a captured event when she publishes her interview with a curator as an eBook? The distinction I want to make with these two categories is that capturing involves creating information whereas publishing involves recreating information.  Michelle’s interview had already been codified: for example, she may have already recorded the interview with some kind of recording device before she then transcribed the interview into a written document. By the time that she produced the eBook, the information contained within it had already been produced in at least one other iteration.

Publishing in the eBook format was a way to supplement the information it contained. In most cases, it was used to make that information more distinctive or special. It could also make that information more easily accessible as a printed document. Currently, the Bookleteer website does not seem to make a clear distinction between these two categories.

Coming back to my initial discussion of feedback using the distinction between publishing and capturing, it seems that feedback is lacking in the cases of publishing: the publishers are wondering what happens after they’ve been downloaded or printed. The capturing process is, in most cases, a process of getting feedback from respondents.

Sample project: Greenhill Digital Storytelling Guide

Her first project with the eBooks involved exploring how community residents talked about and engaged with the place they lived in from a historical and contemporary perspective. The eBooks were developed as a part of the process of collecting and disseminating information about what residents of the community of Greenhill – a historical village within Bonnybridge in Scotland. Gillian was able to recruit participants for the project either through the Greenhill Community Resource Centre or through her everyday encounters with local residents.

The eBooks served as a kind of “end point” to the project. They were used to summarise all of the information provided by the participants and subsequently presented to these same participants as a way for them to see their contributions to the research. You can find some examples of these eBooks here. Because of the limited resources available, she usually limits herself to printing batches of approximately 25 or 50 at a time.

“I think, for community work, it’s really important that you engage in much more unique and creative and interesting ways as a way of trying to spur some kind of interest and excitement in community work […] The eBooks are such a lovely way for that to actually fit with that kind of notion.”

Gillian doesn’t see her use of the eBooks as something collaborative in the sense that she is the one doing most of the work of actually making the eBook with the Bookleteer platform. This is partly because she has found that information technologies can be a barrier to their engagement in these types of projects. She is, however, exploring ways to use the eBooks to collect information from participants as part of the research process. Nevertheless, she feels the eBooks are particularly well suited as a means of presenting research to people including stakeholders:

“As a community worker you obviously have to evaluate projects and you have to write long boring audit reports for management. For me the eBook is just my way of doing that. And I provide management – and always have done – with a printed-out eBook for them to put together themselves. They’re probably quite annoyed! [laughs]”

In fact, Gillian claims to have gotten some very positive responses from stakeholders on the eBooks, even though it seems they would prefer not to have to fold the eBooks themselves. Nevertheless, Gillian still finds it somewhat challenging to get more then anecdotal feedback from people who read the eBooks.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the main strengths of the eBooks for Gillian are the Bookleteer and Diffusion websites. She finds that eBook’s simple and effective templates work well with images and she enjoys perusing the website for new and unique ways of  using the eBooks. Another key strength for Gillian is the fact that it allows her to produce printed material that isn’t too involved or complicated.

Besides the challenge of feedback and the learning curve for people who are not familiar with digital platforms like Bookleteer, Gillian suggested in our conversation that she still had trouble with some of the formatting. Although she found that the new Bookleteer system’s way of enabling her to produce a PDF was quite useful, she still found that she had to go through five or six versions of the PDF before she had generated a version she was happy with.

The next case I want to present is considerably different in that the eBooks were not designed and used by members of an organisation, but by an independent curator and author: Michelle Kasprzak.

Michelle is currently working out of Amsterdam as the Project Director at McLuhan in Europe 2011. You can read more about her in here personal blog Michelle Kasprzak Art+Life+Technology.

I spoke to her from London via Skype on the 29 July 2010. Two specific examples of how she used the eBooks as part of her work came up in our exchange:

Sample project: Curating.info Conversations

Michelle had been following Proboscis’ work for nearly a decade – “a longtime fan of Proboscis and what it does”. It was through keeping in contact with them that she first heard about the eBooks. Having kept a personal blog since 2004 and created Curating.info as a way to publish her view on contemporary art curating, Michelle was on the lookout for new ways of publishing content. Since Curating.info relayed a significant amount of information about job opportunities or interesting events, she began to explore different options for publishing “something a little more “authored by me” as opposed to just passing on information.” One of the ways she devised was to publish interviews she had conducted with curators Karen Gaskill and Alissa Firth-Eagland as eBooks on Curating.Info under the title “Curating.Info Conversations”.
This was early days (2007-08) in the development of the eBooks when they were only available via the Diffusion.org.uk website. At this point, eBooks templates were less flexible so Michelle could only choose the title and print her name on the front cover of the eBook. In order to give it a bit more of a distinctive feel, she added coloured images and pull-quotes.

Unfortunately, this project proved to be considerably more challenging than Michelle had initially anticipated. She felt the eBooks were a simple and effective way of making these interviews “stand out” – making them available as a “downloadable series of books as opposed to just “Here’s another post in my blog””. However, the work of preparing and writing-up the interviews at the level of quality that she had initially set for herself proved too time-consuming and exacting (I can relate!). As is the case for many freelance cultural and creative workers, it was too difficult to maintain this kind of involved but unpaid project for an extended period of time.

Sample project: In-Site Toronto

A more recent project in which Michelle used the eBooks was In-Site Toronto. Michelle was invited to curate work to be presented on the portal pages of several wireless internet hotspots in the Wireless Toronto network. The artists invited to contribute to the project would have their work automatically displayed for people who logged in on the network at designated hotspots. The project was launched by the Arts organisation Year Zero One on March 31, 2010.

Michelle used the eBooks to produce what she referred to as e-Catalogues. Rather than creating a catalogue that would encompass all of the exhibition, she decided to create a series of downloadable eBook catalogues that would be available at each hotspot where the artworks appeared – something that made more sense for her in the context of this networked exhibition. This way, anyone interested in accessing more information about the artist or the artwork could do so.

Just as she had done with the Curating.info Conversations, Michelle designed the eBooks herself. Although this time she had access to the new Bookleteer system, she chose to keep things relatively simple. She opted for a uniform style across all six eBooks: keeping the same font and colours, inserting the exhibition’s logo on the second page, using the classic landscape format.

The advantage of the eBook in this case was that the eBooks would not only make the texts readily available to anyone who viewed the works, but that these texts would still be available in the distinctive “catalogue” format. Michelle wanted to provide something for people who “still long for that sense of “bookness”. “You still want people to feel like this is a real catalogue, it’s not just a pdf […] it’s almost a collectible.”

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

Michelle finds it interesting that people are using the eBooks as notebooks. She regularly checks the Bookleteer site to see what new uses people are finding for them. At times in the interview, Michelle seemed almost apologetic about the way she was using the eBooks in that she felt her use was “fairly straight forward”. To some extent, this may be tied to the challenge of not having the technical abilities that someone like a graphic designer might have for modifying the eBooks or having access to the resources for hiring someone with those skills. Nevertheless, I would argue that the way in which she has applied the eBook format as part of her curatorial work shows considerable imagination.

Just like Ruth and the work at CCI, it was still unclear for Michelle how the eBooks were being used once they were in the hands of people who accessed them. Michelle had formed a general idea of who reads her blog – aspiring curators or people who are interested in digital art, most of them from English speaking countries including the UK and the United States – but this information was mostly based on what she had been able to piece together from exchanges with readers who had contacted her. Although hundreds of people had downloaded the eBooks, they were like a kind of “message in a bottle” because she did not know who picked them up or what happened to them afterwards.

Stay tuned for more case studies and some early analysis of what I’ve been able to collect to date.

CCI uses the eBook in all sorts of ways with all sorts of people. You can find a number of examples of their designs as part of their Recent Publications on their website. The following is a brief outline of some of the work she is currently doing with the eBook.

Sample project: Trail of Imagination and Curiosity

One example of how CCI has used the eBooks is the project titled Trail of Imagination and Curiosity that took in the spring of 2009 in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.

CCI was commissioned by the Cambridge Folk Museum to explore how the people living and working around the Mill Road Cemetery, particularly the families of children attending St Matthew’s Primary School, Brunswick Nursery and ACE Nursery, could find ways to engage with the space in a more meaningful way.

The project was initially developed using the metaphor of a “trail”. The eBook was redesigned to function as a sort of scrapbook of ideas to help visitors to play in the cemetery and to provide potential visitors with traces of how others had used the site. Two creative facilitators who worked with CCI, Deb Wilenski and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, organised a series of workshops in the Cemetery with different family groups linked to the local organisations. CCI brought the families in and played with them, listened to their stories about the area and tried to notice how they engaged with the space. This part of the project was reflected in a design by Susanne Jasilek along the top of the eBook available for download. The other half of the eBook was designed so that families who would also like to use the eBook as a part of their visit to the cemetery and trace their own play and discoveries. The key objective of the project as defined by Ruth was to provide the families with a way to begin to find their own way through the cemetery.

For Ruth, this project was a great example of how to gather and publish information as part of CCI’s activities while avoiding dull and formulaic resources such as A4 worksheets. The eBooks could easily be made available as a free, downloadable resource for the potential visitors.

One thing that Ruth would have liked to do with this project, had there been more resources available, was to find a way for families who use the eBooks to exchange their ideas and work with the eBooks over the website, to maintain a dialogue between the families.

Why the eBook?

Ruth’s first encounter with the eBooks was on the Diffusion website where she had a look at a number of Proboscis’ projects. Although she had tinkered around with the material online, she felt the only way she could determine whether or not these tools would be useful as part of her work was to attend one of the free Pitch-up-and-Publish sessions in Proboscis’ studio in London in the autumn of 2009. Although she didn’t know most of the people attending, she was able to get fairly familiar with the eBooks thanks to the presentations there.

Ruth was initially interested in finding new ways of documenting ideas and events within CCI’s workshops so as to make them visible to the participants in the workshops so that they could see the value in what they had done even after the workshop was over:

“If what you value is the process, how do you make that visible? […] It’s a way of trying to make learning visible and special: through our eyes, but using their voices and as much as possible”

CCI now uses the eBooks and StoryCubes as a way to record what goes on in every session they run. They then offer this documentation back to the participants after the session. Ruth attributes part of CCI’s success in using the eBook as part of their workshops it being an open-ended and low-tech tool rather than something more “threatening”. She explains:

“It’s not big. You know, you can write two or three things, or some people wrote essays. Some people wrote just one word. It feels that you can come at it any way that you want to […] It had a scope for people to respond to it in a way that they liked.”

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the resources that Ruth feels makes the eBooks particularly easy to use are the videos available online such as “How to make: Book Portrait Diffusion eBook”. CCI now provides a link to this video whenever they post one of their eBooks. This is a great resource for people who are unfamiliar with how to make the eBooks from scratch. Ruth also recommends using a bone folder for making the books.

After examining my own eBook, the eBookObserver, she cautioned me against using the sketchbook format if I was planning to use it without a flat surface to write on because in such cases, you rarely end-up using both sides of the pages.

Some of the artists she has worked with have also wondered whether it would be possible to generate an online eBook template that would enable the person printing out the eBook to choose the order of the pages before printing.

I’ll also be posting some of my ideas about my ongoing research on eBooks and the other resources available on Bookleteer. My personal interest on the subject of the eBooks began to take shape while conducting some research on a previous Proboscis project called Snout (read Measure Once, Cut Twice here) . It got me wondering about how people who work in cultural organisations create and disseminate information about their work. This is a particularly interesting challenge because, for the most part, the production, distribution and dissemination of information by and about arts organisations has taken-on negative connotations.

For example, there is a growing (and entirely credible) perception that publicly funded arts and creative organisations in the UK and elsewhere are facing pressure from government stakeholders and other funding bodies to “instrumentalise” and “deliver value for money” rather than focus on the work of making art. In an article entitled Auditing Culture (2004) Eleonora Belfiore claims that arts organisations “have found themselves forced to turn to the “rationalised rituals of inspection”” as the result of a “legitimacy void caused by the the erosion of cultural authority that followed the diffusion of theories of cultural relativism” (Belfirore 2004: 195). In other words, arts organisations have had to get better at generating reams of information that articulate and justify organisational aims and objectives that are consistent with the aims and objectives of stakeholders while also delivering on their promises to “be more inclusive” or “encourage audience participation”.

But the problem with this view is that this information is only generated for the benefit of funding bodies and without any meaningful ties to the actual work being done within these arts organisations. I would prefer to think about this kind of work as information practices rather than as “measuring impact” or as “providing evidence”. Once we move past framing this work within the intentions articulated by policy or funding bodies, it is possible to understand the creation and circulation of information as a practice; what Leah Lievrouw calls informing-as-praxis. That is: examining how the work of producing, distributing and interpreting information as practices in themselves are embedded within particular social, political and cultural environments and developed as part of these artists’ creative work rather than simply as an obligation to funding sources or a board of directors. I’m not arguing that the pressures that Belfiore and others have identified don’t exist, rather that these pressures are part of a more complex picture of cultural and creative practices.

The eBooks and how they are designed and used by Proboscis and their collaborators represent an interesting opportunity to take a closer look at how informing-as-praxis takes place between cultural and creative organisations. I’d be interested to hear anyone’s reactions to this approach and would love to any recommendations of authors you think might be relevant.