Computational Writing and Publishing
Geoff Cox & Winnie Soon
21 Apr 2023 @ Utrecht University
how i wrote one of my books
Italo Calvino, “How I Wrote One of My Books”, Bibliotheque Oulipienne No. 20, in Raymond Queneau et al, Oulipo Laboratory (1995), explaining the formulation of structure in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1981), echoing Raymond Roussel’s Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1935).
notes towards the complete works…
Featured in documenta 13, as part of The Worldly House, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Writings on Multi-Species Co-Evolution, now in the documenta collection.
https://archive.org/stream/NotesTowardsTheCompleteWorksOfShakespeare/Notes towards the complete works of shakespeare_djvu.txt
cover versions of the communist manifesto
from the collection of the museum of ordure
live writing the live coding book
Live Coding: A User's Manual by Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson (The MIT Press, 2022)
book-author
“In an important sense, it is not so much that I have written this book, as that it has written me. Or rather, ‘we’ have ‘intra-actively’ written each other (‘intra-actively’ rather than the usual ‘interactively’ since writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking, of ‘book’ and ‘author’).”
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, ix–x.
DIY Book binding tools - Unerasable Characters (2022)
Materials:
- 2x book binding wood (24.6x2x0.8 cm), hole's diameter: 0.5 cm
- 2x wing nuts
- 2x flat washers
- 2x long headless screws (35 cm)
- 1x A4 textile cloth for the book cover
Computationally generating Queer Motto via an API (w/ Helen Pritchard)
Queer Motto API: an artistic/technical manual to generate Queer Motto/Poem using machine learning techniques and the diastic algorithm.
Computational Publishing
Software Studies perspective
- book as software
- involves some sort of code execution/algorithms
- writing/coding
- software as a cultural artefact
- software as an object of study
- FOSS - free and open source software culture (production/distribution/consumption/community/licence)
Software & Experimental Publishing
Experimental
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
- Do-It-With-Others (DIWO)
- Exploration/Intervention/Speculation
Publishing
- Making things public (e.g data/writing)
- Creating publics
Entanglement (book - software - infrastructure)
Aesthetic Programming (2020)
- Physical book print + PDF: http://www.openhumanitiespre
- Web pages (static page generation): https://aesthetic-programming.net/
- Git repository: https://gitlab.com/aesthetic-programming/book
ss.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/ - versioning (platforms, iterations, software, language, etc) & forking
About
The book explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction.
It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation.
Literacy
We take inspiration from key sources
Vee's arguments for coding literacy, in that it is no longer just "reading for comprehension" but also "reading for technical thought as well as writing with complex structures and ideas." It is not simply a new way of reading and writing, but also a new way of thinking and understanding other codes. Such a compelling argument for literacy not only benefits individuals who acquire certain skills, but also has potential wider cultural and social ramifications, helping to force coding out of its specialization in certain disciplines and open up its critical and aesthetic potential. (Soon & Cox 2020, 29)
Procedural Literacy
being procedurally literate includes being able to unpack social and cultural assumptions of code (deep readings of code), to understand the relationship between creative expression and code, as well as being able to program, students must comfortable participating in a variety of discourses. - (Meteas 2005)
FORKING - OPEN INVITATION
In brief, the use of a Git repository for our writing further emphasizes FOSS working principles, and, by treating writing as software, or indeed software as writing, allows us to formalize the production of the book as an iterative process, in need of timely updates, allowing for forking and endless reversioning. By allowing new versions to be produced by others, we hope in a modest way to challenge commercial publishing conventions and illuminate our capacity to understand some of the infrastructures through which we encode our ideas and distribute them across networks. We believe that this way of working marks a departure point for collectively engaging with programming and creating changes in the social-technical systems (both inside and outside).[…]This helps us as readers to understand something of the iterative process of writing a book about code in the spirit of how software developers collaborate, host, review, and merge code, as well as build software together.
Merge request
What would it mean to fork a book the way we fork software?
Ref: https://markcmarino.medium.com/how-to-fork-a-book-the-radical-transformation-of-publishing-3e1f4a39a66c and https://gitlab.com/sarahciston/book/-/tree/main/source/8.5-TalkingBack
FORKING - INVITATION ACCEPTED
Chapter 8.5: Talking Back (2021)
by Sarah Ciston and Mark Marino
Towards Forking and Translation (forthcoming)
Traditional Chinese site: https://hackmd.io/@aesthetic-programming/book (working with Taiwanese art and coding community, supported by Digital Art Center, Taipei)
The term "Computational Publishing"
- dynamic and computational objects
- open to re-versioning, merging, forking
- more than "discrete objects" (Batchen 1998: 47)
- as "a continuous stream of data […] without temporal restriction" (ibid)
broader interest: experimental publishing
- zines/manuals, (art) books
- git2print, html2print, wiki2print…
pj machine (Machine Research 2017)
@ Constant, w/ Sarah Magnan
pj (cf. vj/dj)
git/markdown to print (Research Refusal 2021)
- Consolidation:
https://gitlab.com/osp-kitchen/aprja.research-refusal - Interface: http://ascii.heij.be/ (Gijs De Heij from Open Soure Publishing)
- Peer-Reviewed newspaper
Octomode
Octomode is a collective editing space for PDF making, using Etherpad, Paged.js, HTML, CSS and Flask. (developed by Varia)
Inspired by the multi-centered, tentacular cognition capabilities of the octopus, we imagined a space in which the artificial boundaries of writing and design can be crossed; where writing, editing and designing can be done in one environment simultaneously, allowing the format to influence the matter and vice-versa.
https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/wiki/Octomode ; https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/octomode/computational publishing/pdf/
Thank you
Q & A
Workshop
Rundown
- 15.00-15.20: round table introductions
- 15.20-15.40: context - experimenting together
- collective writing / making & coding / design
- thinking through doing (e.g open access, authorship/credits, collectivity, workflow, temporality etc.)
- 15.40-16.00: the publishing platform: Octomode
- 16.00-16.20: Participants put in text + title (and reading them)
- 16.20-16.30: BREAK
- 16.30-17.15: Reading/discusion/feedback, agreeing the editorial approach (e.g code of conduct?, combining text, new sub-headings and connecting paragraphs?)
- 17.15-17.45: Collective making: adjusting and editing the code/sections/text/style, etc
- 17.45-18.00: Discussion
Reference for the participants:
- Martino Morandi, “Constant Padology.” MARCH (2023). https://march.international/constant-padology/
- Winnie Soon & Geoff Cox, "Preface" + "Design notes", in Aesthetic Programming (Open Humanities Press, 2020), pp.13-25. https://aesthetic-programming.net/
- Annette Vee, "Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy", in Coding Literacy (The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 1-42. https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/ec32fdcc-a48c-444c-837d-f793dd8de667
- Janneke Adema, "The Processual Book. How Can We Move Beyond the Printed Codex?" (2022), https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/01/10/the-processual-book-how-can-we-move-beyond-the-printed-codex/ (Further reading: Living Books, https://livingbooks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/35x6zq2o/release/1)
Task: You are asked to write a short text reflecting on computational writing and publishing, drawing upon the above references, and based on your own research interests. Feel free to include images in your text. This will provide material for the workshop to share and rework (500 words).
Octomode - context + walkthrough
Today's collaborative working space:
username: "octomode" and password: "tentacular" - https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/octomode/computational publishing/pdf/
Octomode is a collective editing space for PDF making, using Etherpad, Paged.js, HTML, CSS and Flask. (developed by Varia)
resource:
Markdown, CSS & other web development ref:
- Markdown cheatsheet: https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet
- Put together by Joana Chicau: https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/JoanaChicau/web-dev-studio/wiki/All-Pages-—-INDEX
- font: https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp
Examples with Octomode:
- example - Forkonomy(): https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/octomode/forkonomy/pdf/
- example - ATHOFS: https://systerserver.net/ATNOFS/ATNOFS-screen.pdf
- example - computational publishing dummy: https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/octomode/computational publishing/pdf/
- example - CSS prints: https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/wiki/CSS_Print
Paged.js:
- Open source web publishing library: https://pagedjs.org/
- pagedjs presentation: http://slides.julie-blanc.fr/20221013_xpub-rotterdam.html
- recorded video: https://media.xpub.nl/2022/2022-10-13-pagedjs.html
- cheatsheet: https://www.pagedmedia.org/about-paged-media/pagedjs-cheatsheet/
need external host: images + font
Font related: