Charlie Gere’s – Poems From My Chinese Typewriter

and Gareth Evans and Andrew Kötting’s, Another Alphabetarium of Kötting

The new minimum order will be 500 StoryCubes (reduced from 1,000), which can be made up of different designs each printed in multiples of 50 copies (there is a small set-up charge for each design). We now have three price bands based on total quantity ordered : 500-550 cubes; 600 to 950 cubes; and 1000 or more. Shipping rates are indicated as approximations only (please contact us to confirm costs).

A few months ago I met accessibility and sensory design consultant, Alastair Somerville, who was in town to demonstrate using simple and cheap visualisation tools such as the 3Doodler pen. Over coffee we chatted about 3D printing, data manifestation and some of the tools and techniques we’ve each developed. Alastair showed me a material he has been using in wayfinding for people with visual impairments: Zy.chem swell paper, a specially treated material where the black ink ‘swells’ up to create a textured surface. Alastair had been using it to make simple tactile maps and for braille. We both then became excited about the possibilities of using the Zy.chem paper with bookleteer to create simple and low-cost braille and textured publications.

Very soon afterwards Alastair experimented with a wayfunding guide for a project he was working on for the University of Sussex’s new library, The Keep. He sent me a copy printed on the Zy.chem paper which confirmed for me that this was a material with hugely exciting creative potential. I then asked Alastair if he would consider making something special for the Periodical so we could demonstrate this to others. The result is this beautiful guide to Dal Riata, an ancient Scottish kingdom in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll which has some of the most extensive neolithic earthworks and structures in the UK.

Alastair’s book uses the zy.chem paper to impart the texture of some of the neolithic stone features of Dal Riata as well as some maps of significant sites. In addition to the tactile paper, one sheet is also printed on tracing paper, overlaying the bigger map of Scotland and Northern Ireland onto a tactile map of the kingdom of Dal Riata itself, and then providing a ‘mist’ overlaying a section about the disappearance of the kingdom during the Viking raids of the early Middle Ages. At once informative and poetic, it holds its own sense of magic and mystery within its very textures.

Alastair has posted a Vine video:

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

More and more beautiful, thought-provoking and inspiring eBooks are being created with bookleteer all the time so, with a nod to such illustrious forebears as William Hogarth, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens we’re creating the Periodical, a regular monthly publication to share some of the best examples – from the most beautifully designed, illustrated and written to the most experimental uses of bookleteer, its API and what can be done with the format.
Update : check out the new bookleteer Library page to browse what people have made.

For a small monthly or one-off annual subscription (see below), you can receive by post a different printed eBook each month crowdsourced from bookleteer. Our target is to launch the Periodical with at least 100 subscribers in October 2012, selecting and printing a new eBook each month for distribution. Whilst we build up the subscriptions we’ll be sending subscribers a choice eBook every month selected from among those we’ve previously printed for projects such as Professor Starling’s Expedition, Material Conditions, City As Material, As It Comes, Agencies of Engagement and others.

What Will Subscribers Receive?
The Periodical will be a monthly delight landing on your doorstep – you can expect consistent eccentricity and eclecticism in our choices. We will be seeking out the most extraordinary and unusual eBooks created and shared on bookleteer. Some will be selected by us at Proboscis, others will selected by invited curators and from time to time we’ll invite subscribers to vote for their favourite eBook to be printed and sent out as the monthly periodical. Anyone who wants to take part can contribute a book for consideration for the Periodical by signing up to bookleteer, then making and sharing an eBook. Each month we’ll post on the blog about what we’ve chosen and why – but only after we’ve sent it out, so the subscribers have the pleasure of an unexpected arrival landing on their doorstep.

Over the past 18 years Proboscis has built up a reputation for being eccentric and eclectic – for always choosing the oblique, less anticipated path. We have surprised and confounded people by building partnerships and collaborations that have taken us on a meandering journey of creativity, imagination and invention that spans a huge diversity of people, practices, places and situations. At any moment we might be found at the forefront of technology, citizen science or social media innovation (Urban Tapestries, Feral Robots, Snout, Private Reveries, Public Spaces); leading a landmark science-art collaboration (Mapping Perception); inventing new hybrid digital/physical publishing formats and platforms (Diffusion eBooks, StoryCubes, bookleteer); co-designing social innovation with grassroots communities, government and industry (Conversation & Connections, Pallion Ideas Exchange, Perception Peterborough, With Our Ears to the Ground, Sutton Grapevine); experimenting with new spaces, processes, materials and craft skills (Being In Common, As It Comes, Navigating History); working with schools (Experiencing Democracy, Everyday Archaeology) or taking a leading role in cross disciplinary research with academia (Sensory Threads, Agencies of Engagement). It will be this spirit of adventure, curiosity and exploration that will guide our curatorial choices – much as it drove the editorial policy I pursued with COIL journal of the moving image back in the 1990s.

To kickstart the Periodical we’re inviting a number of our friends, colleagues, fellow travellers and others whom we admire to explore using bookleteer themselves and to create some new publications with it that will seed the initial pool of publications from which we choose the first few issues. We’ll announce more about these soon.

Commissioned Series
To complement the crowdsourced eBooks, we are also seeking sponsors to help us commission new experimental and imaginative publications using bookleteer. These will be printed and distributed to subscribers as well as shared digitally on bookleteer for all. We’re looking for sponsors who see the opportunity that bookleteer and the Periodical offer for commissioning exciting new experiments in publishing – sharing new ideas, new knowledge and experiences in multiple ways to people all over the world. They might be themed series in themselves (following on from our previous series such as Material Conditions, City As Material, Transformations, Short Work, Liquid Geography, Species of Spaces, Performance Notations) or simply a one-off commission.
*** Please contact me for details of sponsorship opportunities.

Subscribing to the Periodical
You don’t need to use bookleteer or be signed up to subscribe and subscriptions from organisations and institutions are very welcome (email us with a purchase order to subscribe). The Periodical will be a great way to tap into the creativity generated with bookleteer, having some of its best creations delivered to your door.

Subscribers will also receive a 10% discount on any Short Run printing orders of their own (recouping their subscription by just ordering a minimum 25 copies each of 4 of their own eBooks).

Subscription Rates
UK – £3 monthly or £30 annual (Pay by Direct Debit, Barclays Pingit to 07711 069 569 or Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)
European Union – £12/€15 a quarter or £40/€50 annual (Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)
Rest of World – £15/US$24 a quarter or £50/US$80 annual (Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)

Subscribe today to receive your first eBook.

To test it we’ve created Paylinks for some of the recent eBook sets we’ve published (UK bank account holders and delivery only for now) – we’re interested to see if people find this more attractive or safer than using Paypal and/or credit cards. According to Go Cardless they expect to extend their service to European Union bank accounts later this year and to other places further in the future.

So, if you’d like to pay for a copy of one of our fabulous sets of eBooks by bank-to-bank transfer, then try out a link below:

Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition – https://gocardless.com/pay/3sh_gXZR

Material Conditions 1 – https://gocardless.com/pay/sqbBKQb_

City As Material 1 (London) – https://gocardless.com/pay/rUK2BFtk

You can find a range of our publications (both bookleteer and other productions) with Paylinks over at the main Proboscis Online Store.

Giles showcased two great examples of bookleteer portfolios in an earlier post; here’s another.

The unique and much-loved theatre company Cartoon de Salvo (currently enjoying major acclaim after their recent shows Made Up at the Soho Theatre and The Irish Giant at Southwark Playhouse) used bookleteer to create The Stories So Far…, an ebook of photos celebrating their production history:

They’ve also used bookleteer to document their Hard Hearted Hannah series of improvised stage stories, which you can read on Diffusion here.

As a new crop of students are preparing to graduate into one of the harshest employment climates ever, and with youth unemployment at an all time high, we have a special offer for anyone wanting to make and print their own pocketfolio – taking advantage of our recent price reductions for A6 Short Run printed books and lower minimum print run of just 25 copies:

For every Short Run Printing order for 25 copies of a portfolio style eBook, we will send an additional 25 copies free. Just use the discount code “PORTFOLIO2012”.

Sign up for a free account at bookleteer today and get creating!

Meanwhile here’s an excellent example by artist and lecturer, Gair Dunlop:

And check out this lovely example of using bookleteer to publish a group catalogue of work, created by Mah Rana for the 2nd Year Jewellery and Silversmithing Course at Cass, London Metropolitan University:

Next week we will begin the task of scanning in all the children’s reviews and making a selection of the funniest, best written, most interesting reviews to include in a compilation book, which will also be made and published via bookleteer. We’ll invite the chefs taking part to have their say too – responding to the children’s reviews with quotes of their own, and ask Fay and head teacher Rachel Earnshaw (who’s leaving at the end of this term after 10 years) to write introductions. We hope to have the final book ready around mid June.

We’re inviting donations towards the printing costs and to contribute to the school itself – please use the Paypal Donation button below, visit us at our table in the ‘Dessert Ghetto’ at tomorrow’s Feast or, if you’re a member of the school community, drop into the office to make a donation and get your copy. We’re suggesting a minimum donation of £7.50 – for which you’ll get your name printed in the book as well as receiving a copy by post.

Donate to We Are All Food Critics Best Reviews Compilation

And how systematic terms like ‘input’ and ‘output’ manage to constantly leak into my writing. Bah.

Aside from blogging and more technical project text, I use a pen and several different notebooks in my practice. One hard-wearing pocket notebook for ideas and notes related to projects I’m working on, as well as random thoughts and interesting words and quotes. One tiny notebook for scribbled bits of more creative writing, normally segments of poetic pieces, which are then edited and given form on a computer later, sometimes channeled longhand through paper first. One large notebook for lengthier and more fluid prose writing.

Keeping these separate is an attempt to conjure up the different frames of mind necessary for each style of writing, although inevitably they cross over, as is the nature of human thoughts. Handwriting (if you could call mine that, I exclusively use block capitals for EVERYTHING), instead of typing, is also conducive in my case to articulate ideas quicker and smoother than via a computer intermediary – from mind, to pen, to page. I intentionally left out hand, as a pen seems almost like a natural extension of it, rather than fragmented, systematic typing – even more so as I use only two or three fingers feverishly.

Using pen and paper to create, a screen to edit, then various forms of file sharing (E-mailing text to myself and others, Dropbox) to archive and disseminate material seems to me like a natural evolution of ideas and consecutive output. Like a snowball rolling downhill, accumulating stray threads of grass and loose stones, gradually gaining form and weight, then finally smashing into a multitude of pieces, spreading its essence – if you’ll forgive my poncy analogy.

Alex’s project is on a bigger scale than this, and suggests a very different approach to the problem of funding the time required to research and write the books, not just print them. This has some obvious and interesting implications for publishing as a whole, and for other creative endeavours as well. The concept seems so simple – the people who want to read his book also pay for the writing of it – but which has some other subtle implications. Usually we buy books (or other media) after the fact of writing – the burden of supporting the artist or writer is usually absorbed through some form of patronage (via public grants or private sponsorship), or through the personal dedication and effort of the individual themselves. But asking the readers to pay for more than the cost of the book, to support the very effort of making is to ask people to become part of the process. It establishes the possibility of creative work being seen in dialogue with others, as a craft, not just as something which appears magically from an aloof and remote genius. More and more the previously mysterious and detached processes of creative people are being acted out in ways that allow others to take part in some way or be witness. It is an empowering and transformational process that I believe gives hope to others that their own forms of expression may also have value. This is not about the distinction between amateur and professional or high/low art – tired debates now – but about that scope for the craft, skill and impact of creative people to be seen in relation to the work of others and valued in new and meaningful ways.

bookleteer is part of a toolset we have been building for more than a decade for public authoring and to enable cultures of listening. These tools are sometimes techniques which we develop to help people combine other media, to figure out how to create their own tools as much as use ones we may have introduced them too. What Alex is demonstrating with this project is not only how to use such tools, but how to create a community around the process of making too. With our new programme of projects, Public Goods, which we start next month too, we are hoping to engage people in similar processes of taking part in the construction and sharing of cultures and cultural artefacts that they value. Our new series of City As Material events in towns across the UK and abroad will be an important part of setting the frame for this kind of dialogue and collaboration, and perhaps a way for us to explore crowdfunding in direct collaboration with the people who want to contribute and participate.

Alex is aiming to reach his goal or raising $10,000 by Earth Day, Thurs April 14th – he’s more than 50% of thew way there (at time of writing). I do recommend supporting him as the results (judging from the wonderful 2nd edition of the Wordchanging book just published) are bound to be great.

We think this is a great way of showing how easy it is for individuals or groups to create and print multiple books in short runs (such as 50 copies) that can be collected together to make a beautiful publication. We will be aiming to add the ability to design and print out your own slipcases to bookleteer later this year, but in the meantime we’re happy to discuss designing and printing custom slipcases for your projects.

To help CCI widen the audience for their work we’ve posted 7 eBooks on our diffusion.org.uk library and will be making others available there as they are created. All are welcome to download and share eBooks from the Library of Traces.

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

Realising Tangible Souvenirs
This has been a long-cherished ambition for us – harking back to plans we made for linking the earlier Diffusion Generator to our Urban Tapestries public authoring and mapping platform in 2004 – where we imagined people being able to select or collate material on Urban Tapestries by theme or around a geographic place and outputting it in different paper formats (Diffusion eBooks, postcards and posters). This was the origin of our concept for creating tangible souvenirs from digital experiences – bridging different media (online/offline, digital/analogue) with the different capabilities that people have. Our experiences of working with local communities in social housing and other contexts showed us how important it is not just to be able to share things in many ways, but to tailor a range of modes of interaction to the capabilities and capacities of the people who had the knowledge and experience to share, but not necessarily the familiarity with web and mobile technologies to be engaged by the opportunities we saw them offering.

We’ve continued to develop our tangible souvenir concept through other projects – such as the Sensory Threads prototype – but the bookleteer API now represents a crucial milestone for us in building the links between our earlier work on public authoring and media scavenging and the current ecosystem of web technologies and public/open data initiatives. We hope to see lots of exciting ideas building on the first experiments – bookcubes – we commissioned from James Bridle last spring. Look out too for some forthcoming experiments by Simon Pope & Gordon Joly.

Accessing the API
Access to the API is limited for the time being to Alpha Club members and guest testers whilst we put it through its paces and explore how it can be used (our resources are rather limited for supporting it). We’re hoping to organise some events in 2011 where people can come along and explore what they might do with the API. In the meantime, if you’re taking part in Culture Hack Day this weekend (January 15th & 16th) then you can ask to test it out using the special account we’ve created for participants (ask the organisers for access details on the day).

If you do have an exciting idea for mashing up the bookleteer API with your own web service or public data please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you and see how we can help.

After I was introduced to some of the teachers, a class of year 5 children quietly walked into the classroom where Giles would talk to them about how bookleteer and eBooks worked, and also how this would tie into their current project, a project based on Antarctica and the effects global warming. The children were curious about who we were and what we had to say, and as Giles began to explain that we were going to help publish their school project by turning them into eBooks, some of the children shouted ‘yay!’ and everyone seemed to became even more interested. After Giles demonstrated how eBooks were made, the children were more than ready to get going and make their own.

We then began to upload the children’s work onto bookleteer, with the children standing close-by, often asking us about how bookleteer worked and what they thought about their Antarctica project. After a few near glitches with the schools computers, we began to finish uploading and naming the year 5 eBooks. Almost immediately after we waved the children goodbye, year 6’s entered the classroom with the same amount of wonder as to why me and Giles were standing at the front of the classroom. This time around, however, uploading the children’s eBooks was much faster and easier to do after having uploaded year 5’s eBooks moments before. Then came the task of printing off and making up the children’s eBooks – (a skill that Giles was clearly much faster than me at!) After proudly handing all 32 eBooks to the children’s teachers, Claudia and Matt, our work at Soho Parish was done for the day.

Following our work with with the children (and lots of help from the staff!) Giles and I had lunch with the head teacher, Rachel Earnshaw, discussing possible projects and ideas for the new term ahead. After how promising my first day was at the school, I can confidently say that I am looking forward to going back to the school after the Christmas holiday and collaborating on other creative projects with the children – and also exploring bookleteer in a school setting.

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.

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.