Only a few weeks into the first wave of Corona, Zagreb-based artist Ana Kužmanić launched www.artwithoutplace.com to collect testimonies of cultural workers around the world. One year and 45 testimonies later, the contents of the website were bundled and published as a book by Oaza Books. You can order the gem here: http://www.oazabooks.com/?page=books&book=art-without-place.
P.s. readers will encounter a testimony by yours truly, a time capsule dated April 2020. It reads:
‘Critical theorists have been shouting ‘PRECARITY!’ in the faces of anyone who would hear them for years. We know the story by now. Or, so we thought. It is only now, in the Corona-lockdown, that many of us really feel what precarity is, beyond an ever-looming feeling of being on the edge: once crisis sets in, the precarious are the first to be hit. Structures of social security are shaken and dissolve. What follows is economic free-fall.
In the Netherlands, the government provides freelancers, including those in the cultural sector, with something of a basic income during these months. This is, however, not enough for most artists to live off, let alone to pay for studio rent and material costs. And even if it is, the long-term effects are unclear. What happens to the young artists, whose precious exhibitions and other jobs are canceled? What about the freelance teachers, whose lessons at academies have been canceled once of a sudden? What will happen when artists can’t afford their studio rent anymore, and studio complexes go bankrupt? One thing is clear: the infrastructures and social property we will lose now, won’t come back when we go back to ‘normal’.
On top of it all, it’s hardly allowed to ask these questions. According to public discourse, there are only two types of legitimate artistic production in this time: 1. bringing solace, and 2. making face masks. It is, apparently, the task of artists to veil (crises, faces, themselves), rather than to unveil.
I see artists around me struggling with this situation. They are so used to be confronted with their superfluidity in society, that they started to believe in it. How to ‘just’ continue to make work, as if nothing happened? It’s interesting how artists should ask themselves these questions, while banks, airlines, and oil companies receive government bail-outs.’
When it comes to printing a book, Print-On-Demand (POD) is an interesting option. However, there is a lot to consider to get the print right and end up with the book you have in mind. The book Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities by Isabel Löfgren is published by Institute of Network Cultures. Comparing how the print turns out when it’s done by the Swedish POD service Publit or the American Lulu Press results in the following reflections.
Printing Local, Shipping Global
In all cases, it’s nicest when you can make use of local companies in the production chain of a book. Isabel lives in Stockholm herself, the Stockholm based Publit makes for a logical print on demand service. The print I’ve received from them was sent by mail from Malmö, where the printer ExaktaPrinting AB is located.
One of the printers of Exakta. Source: their Twitter account @exaktagroup
On the other hand, Lulu’s headquarters is based in Morrisville, USA. Following the DHL tracing information, the books are shipped from Poznán in Poland. (Except for this article that announced Lulu’s new printer in Australia, the company is incredibly secretive about where they get their books printed.)
Poznán knows many printers – which one actually produces Lulu’s prints remains a mystery.
Shipping costs vary greatly between the two different POD’s. Publit’s shipping costs depend on weight and delivery address – the book is 584 gram and would travel approx. 850 kilometers to Rotterdam – running the shipping price at 295 SEK (29,10 euro). A quick search tells that shipping within Sweden is much cheaper; it would cost 71.76 kr (€7,06) to send the book back to Stockholm. Other Northern European countries have similar shipping fees the Netherlands (Denmark €23, United Kingdom €29). Shipping to Brazil, where the writer is from, would cost €63,78. The same print from Lulu ships to Rotterdam for €4,84 (with additional taxes of €1,75).
The production of the Publit print costs 145.56 kr (€14,33) with a listed price of 193 kr (€18,99). The same Lulu print costs €14,61 and is listed for €29,22. So, when you’re ordering from Sweden, the Publit print definitely wins in terms of pricing. The further away from Sweden, the more the Lulu print could be considered.
Customer Support
It’s important to be able to get in contact with the POD customer services – for whatever questions that come up in the process of publishing. Publit has great customer support, responding very quickly and thoughtfully to all my questions, ranging from preparing the files to detailed questions on how the print turned out. Lulu is known for not having great customer support. After a test print cut off 1 cm too many of the book, they did respond rather quickly and sent a new print free of charge (although in black and white instead of color, one step forward, one step backward.)
Lulu’s print mistake, ‘trimmed in excess of our accepted variance’.
The Print Itself
And the most exciting question: which print turned out better?
We’re comparing a softcover/paperback print of Satellite Lifelines, a color book of 309 pages, with dimensions 156.00 mm x 234.00 mm.
The Publit print: yellow-toned paper and a structured paper cover (pictured left).
The Lulu print: color standard on white paper with a matte finish of the cover (pictured right).
Cover:
Publit: The structured cover is very beautiful, the colors of the pattern look great. The paper is a nice thickness and the un-printed inside of the cover works beautifully. One possible downside is that the print wears off on the edges, which could be solved by getting a laminated cover instead. It can also be embraced as part of the type of the paper.
Lulu: The cover overall looks good. It’s a smooth print, the matte finish looks nice. The particular colors of the pattern aren’t as fresh as the Publit print. The paper of the cover is rather thin, and is shiny on the inside. On both prints I’ve received, the back of the cover seems to have ‘bubbles’, the paper isn’t fully flat.
Binding:
Publit: Overall, the binding looks good. If you look up close you can see the glue in between the cover and the first page. The books opens easily and doesn’t seem to damage after opening it.
Lulu: The pages are glued neatly – no glue rests to be found.
Inlay:
Publit: The text is easy on the eye. Especially the black and white pictures of concrete buildings looks beautiful on the yellow toned paper.
Lulu: The print overall looks good, but the paper doesn’t lend itself as beautifully for images.
Other:
Publit prints info such as a barcode and QR code on the final page. Lulu’s final pages are empty.
So the winner is … Publit!
For the most beautiful print, order via Publit. Depending on where you’re located, a Lulu print might be preferred due to shipping costs. (Or hack the system and get a Swedish friend to sent it to you by mail!)
Tips & Tricks
As everyone who has ever got something printed-on-demand knows: there are a few general rules to have a better chance at getting a proper result.
1. Always (!) get a test print.
2. Triple check your files on color profiles (Lulu confusingly uses RGB instead of CMYK. A first print ended up with black and white images in a pink tone, probably as a result of not using the right colour profiles in the files).
3. This also counts for bleeds and margins. If you print with Lulu you can check this in the preview. I kept on getting errors when uploading my files with the correct bleeds, this was solved by starting a new ‘project’.
All in all, nothing is better than reading a book in print, feeling the paper and getting a close look at the images.
Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities by Isabel Löfgren is availablefor ordering:
We have exciting news about awards, upcoming events, new and forthcoming publications, an interview with our Editor Melissa Purkiss and a conversation with our recent volunteer Marie Palmer. Also, the latest set of MARC records containing all our new and past titles is now available here.
There’s lots to explore below, so dive in to find out more about our plans for the months ahead...
Announcements
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
200 Books
Ask an OBP Author
OABN
COPIM
Books, Readership and Content
Landing Page Accesses
New Open Access Publications
Call for Proposals
Events
New Blog Posts
Call for Reviewers
Latest Reviews
People
About us: An Interview with Melissa Purkiss
Our Volunteers: An Interview with Marie Kate Palmer
These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as an important -often the first- treatment of their subject. Constituting about fifteen percent of the titles reviewed by Choice during the past year, and four percent of the more than 11,600 titles submitted to Choice during this same period, Outstanding Academic titles are truly the 'best of the best'.
OBP provides permanent and free access to our open access books for readers with no BPCs (book processing charges) for the author. All our books are published in hardback, paperback and ebook editions; we also publish free online editions of every title in PDF, HTML and XML formats that can be read via our website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere.
We wish to thank all our authors, contributors, editors, volunteers and readers for your support all these years - it is thanks to you that we can celebrate milestones like this!
The Open Access Books Networks has recently released 'Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective' a blog post by two librarians at Cambridge University Library, Jayne Kelly (Ebooks Administrator, Collections and Academic Liaison Department) and Clara Panozzo (Latin American & Iberian Collections, Collections and Academic Liaison Department) where they discuss the various issues they have encountered when trying to flag Open Access content in their institutional catalogues.
We provide our library members with MARC records on a quarterly basis but we also understand some institutions don't have the means to deal with the ingestion of this metadata manually, so if you have any thoughts or comments on how we can work together to avoid the issues highlighted in this post, please contact Laura Rodriguez at laura@openbookpublishers.com.
Access the latest joint OPERAS-P & COPIM report 'Academic Libraries and Open Access Books in Europe: a Landscape Study' written by our own Agata Morka and Rupert Gatti where they explore the role these institutions play in providing and promoting Open Access content and innitiatives in a number of Europan countries.
A significant increase in traffic to our website in the year 2020 reflects how the COVID-19 situation has increased the need for openly licensed, free educational resources and textbooks, at a time when most institutions, academics, researchers and users everywhere depended on remote access to academic publications as a consequence of the inability to access their libraries and faculties. Our top five most-visited pages were:
We have various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!
Global Communications
Global Communications is a new book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here. What do we care about? A Cross-Cultural Textbook for Undergraduate Students of Philosophical Ethics
Texts in ethics designed primarily for students should have four main focal points: exposing students to normative moral theories, the history of ethics and ethicists, the nature and major contents of applied ethics, and exposing students to the analysis of moral terms and questions of moral validation in meta-ethics. However, what is currently available in this regard are texts that provide a one-sided and narrow narrative of these focal points: the Western narrative. As it is becoming more obvious in academic philosophy such hegemony of knowledge in any area of philosophy is not only a fraud and disservice to humanity – deliberately or non-deliberately – but also results in the poverty of knowledge. This book is a bold attempt to remedy this and provide a comprehensive and broad perspective of ethics to undergraduate students. The book will indeed provide information on the four focal points mentioned above, but it will also:
incorporate in a non-eurocentric, non-biased way of presenting traditions from Asia, Africa, North-America, South-America, Australia and Europe.
have a recurring section at the end of every chapter that will attempt to embed the respective ethical traditions into lived experience by asking (as reflected in the title): 'What, exponent of tradition X, do you care about? What is an ethical issue dear to you? And what do you do to address it? What do you do to promote that which you care about?' Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
Findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable: Why open or FAIR data is crucial to support scientific research in academia and industry.
About the event This event is FREE.
When 4 March 2021, 3 PM UK Time
SPEAKERS
Marta Teperek, Head of research data services at TU Delft, Netherlands
Liz Bal, Director of open research services, Jisc
Ian Harrow, FAIR Implementation project manager, Pistoia Alliance
Webcast hosted by Tim Gillett, editor, Research Information; and Robert Roe, editor, Scientific Computing World
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture is currently looking for a reviewer for one of our latest Open Access title Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda edited by Christopher Webster.
Submission Guidelines
Book reviews should be up to 2000 words in length and include the following aspects:
A summary of the book’s information - details of the author(s) and editor(s), title of the book, year of publication, name of the publisher, and total page numbers
A concise overview of the book’s primary themes
Original and insightful composition, including detailed synopses and critical evaluations of the book and giving an account of the aims and remits
References
Reviewers will be provided with electronic or print copies of the book. Prospective reviewers should get in touch with the Managing Editor, Poonam Devi atpoonam.devi@usp.ac.fj.
This book is a history of collections, as well as of nascent hybrid manuscript production, and also elaborates on Rudy’s own research methods, offering a case study on the difficulty of conducting and publishing discipline-melding research on such a grand scale. Her methodological introduction situates the work within the burgeoning field of material, or rather, functional print history, and touches on themes she addressed in her August 2019 Times Higher Education article on the hidden costs of art history. This serves in part to explain her striking use of the first person, and the many years of travel and hundreds of reference photos required to research this book.
—Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Newberry Library, Speculum 96/1, January 2021, 250–252.
['Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora'] is one of the most comprehensive overviews on the Guyanese diaspora ever published. Being the only South American nation in which English is the official language, Guyana is considered part of the Anglophone Caribbean, and many Guyanese migrate to North America. The majority of the population, however, speak Guyanese Creole as a first language. The photographs, letters, installations, video stills and digital collages interspersed among the narratives allow a glimpse into biographies and artistic practise, while providing crucial information about the life-courses of Guyanese women from different generations. Conceived as a visual exhibition on the page, 'Liminal Spaces' brings incredibly timely insights on the Guyanese diaspora to the fore. Through artworks, it is able to cover more ground than a classic scholarly analysis would be able to, while making it accessible to different audiences. As one of the only contributions of its kind, its importance cannot be overstressed.
— Eric Otieno, 'How artists from Guyana are thinking through the "Liminal Spaces” of Migration', GRIOT Magazine, December 17, 2020, available online.
It is precisely how the editors use the idea of translocality when engaging with the issues of identity, the state, informal economies, Islam, new technologies, and so on, that allows the reader to appreciate the volume’s theoretical contribution.
—Elena Borisova, University of Manchester, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 26, 872-918
[...] This is an interesting and well-conceived edited volume that contains some original conceptual as well as methodological contributions...the book is recommended to all migration scholars and others wishing to learn more about translocal (im)mobilities and how these play out in Central Asia and the Caucasus (and beyond).
—Noel B Salazar, Migration Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2, Pages 275–277, available online
L’inchiesta miscellanea (frutto finale delle trentatré "public lectures” tenutesi tra il 2012 ed il 2016 all’università di Cambridge nel Regno Unito) chiude il cerchio iniziato con la pubblicazione dei precedenti due tomi, apparsi rispettivamente nel 2015 e nel 2016, e incentrati sulla lettura "verticale” della Commedia. […] Strumento imprescindibile e prezioso, Vertical Readings 3, assieme agli altri due volumi, si pone […] come tappa obbligata, proficua e stimolante per chi voglia addentrarsi, con efficaci supporti epistemologici, nel complesso e multiforme universo della poesia escatologica dantesca.
Perhaps the example that best encapsulates this collaborative impulse, which both invites participation and innovates within the ‘literary’ field of Dante Studies, and speaks to the general themes adumbrated thus far, is the three-volume publication of the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s "Comedy”. The volumes had their origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held at the University of Cambridge between 2012 and 2016. Each speaker was asked to shake off previously held critical positions and invited to read the Commedia vertically: that is, to consider the three parts of the poem in parallel with one another under the umbrella of ‘connumeration’. Many of the authors in the volumes, somewhat humorously, stated their disapproval with the method, and yet went on to offer original readings which enhance our understanding of Dante’s poem. Other pieces are decidedly enriched by the vertical constraints put upon them – see, for example, Kenneth Clarke’s reading of the 10s, in which he demonstrates the rich and allusive intratexuality of the rhyming of ‘arte’ and ‘parte’ across the three canticles. The result of the vertical readings is a surprising admixture of novelty, nuance, and critical acumen. Above all, it is the result of true collaboration.
—Daragh O’Connell and Beatrice Sica, Italian Studies, 75:2, 129
All the chapters in the edited volume are scholarly and are supported by proper theoretical frameworks. It is a very valuable addition to the area of cultural knowledge of the Himalayan region.
—Himadri Lahiri, Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata, India, Asiatic, Vol. 14, No. 1, June 2020
An essential read and a valuable resource for all those concerned with matters of linguistic contact and politics, especially within educational settings.
—Ram Ashish Giri (2020), Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41:10, 899-900, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2020.1749770
Could you give us a glimpse of how you first became involved with open access?
I first became aware of open access as a university student and got to know a bit more about it later, during my PhD, when I was lucky to have an article I wrote published in open access format.
What drew you to work at OBP?
I was aware of OBP before I ended up working here thanks to some of their excellent French and Russian literature publications. Having previously done a combination of academic research and teaching, I was excited to be involved in their work and learn more.
Could you briefly describe what your role involves?
My role varies from project to project, but it will often involve a combination of editorial work with authors and contributors (which includes proofreading, copy-editing, and sometimes indexing of manuscripts), and production work (making the manuscript into an actual book!). This means I get to see some projects through the various stages of publication, which is fun and makes it exciting to see them being read and discussed afterwards.
What do you think is the most challenging aspect of your work? And the most exciting?
Although focussed on Humanities and Social Sciences, OBP publishes titles on a wide range of subjects, so I suppose one challenging aspect of my work is the need to adapt quickly to different formats or styles of book, and to the conventions and language of different academic disciplines. Learning about whole new fields or debates and getting to work closely with such a wide range of authors as their work takes shape are undoubtedly two of the more enjoyable and rewarding aspects of the job!
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
I graduated from Cambridge with an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies in the Autumn of 2019 and prior to that I obtained my undergraduate degree in English Literature. I have such a love of books and films and the academic texts and theories surrounding both. As a graduate student I was interested in considering how memory and landscape can be entwined in film. This interest influenced much of my research throughout, whether it was considering representations of the American desert on film, Italian Cinema of the early 1960’s, or Beyonce’s gothic ‘southscapes’ in her visual album Lemonade.
Since graduating I began obtaining experience in different creative fields. I am currently undertaking some freelance work for Modern Films, which is a London-based film production, distribution and events company. In this work I coordinate publicity outreach, collaborations and events for new film releases. I also undertook a journalism internship with the digital publication, Air Mail, and now do some freelance work for their London editor. Much of what I love in these roles is connecting audiences to the material we’re working on and coming up with creative and unique ways to publicise what we’re promoting. Publicity and marketing within the creative industry has always been fascinating to me – I was so pleased to join Open Book Publishers to establish a sense of how these work in the book industry, particularly for academic texts.
What drew you to volunteer at OBP? Are you interested in Open Access publishing?
I was so intrigued by your stance on Open Access publishing. I think OBP’s vision of accessible research and freely available knowledge is very innovative in the field. Sometimes the academic world exists in its own bubble, this model enables more readers and more accessibility from a wider variety of backgrounds. That definitely caught my attention when applying. I think the democratization of knowledge and educational resources is so important.
Another thing that drew me to OBP was the opportunity to work with multiple people in a smaller team to get a sense of how each department collaborates. It has been so valuable joining the meeting and switching between marketing and editorial work. Everyone has been extremely lovely to work with!
How has been working in the various departments?
It has been really valuable to work with different team members and get a sense of the many roles and tasks that make up a publishing house. I have enjoyed the variation of editorial and marketing projects. There’s a strong sense of how much time and care OBP staff put into looking at each manuscript and making sure all the details are perfect, it was wonderful to contribute to that. There’s an intricacy to the process of those tasks that is really satisfying. I also really enjoyed the marketing tasks. It was great to research all the relevant academics, blogs and journals and gather all the information on how to connect the book to the right audience before publication.
What is, in your opinion, the most challenging or interesting task you have dealt with?
I think the most interesting piece to work on was creating the contact list for an upcoming publication. So much thought goes into every aspect of where the right audience and readers are, and it was so wonderful to put that together. I often do similar outreach tasks or media lists in my freelance work but it was so valuable to do this for a book publication and see what type of contacts are required for an academic text.
How has your academic experience helped you in your work or vice versa?
I think my academic background definitely contributed in lots of ways. Many of the tasks required really adept research skills as well as a knowledge of academic journals and how to navigate those spaces. I think having a keen eye for detail when going over manuscripts and papers is also helpful. A knowledge of referencing styles also came up a few times but I think the most important experience is being able to research really thoroughly. Researching key terms, phrases, names and other relevant or related texts was so helpful when working on the marketing tasks.
Since March 2020, students and researchers have found themselves without easy physical access to library collections for prolonged periods as libraries have closed due to COVID-19. Even when libraries have been open, precautionary measures to limit the spread of coronavirus—and the desire to keep ourselves and everyone else as safe as possible—have made it more difficult to use physical resources.
While many closed-access publishers initially made their digital book content freely available to institutions as the global scale of the pandemic became clear in March, this generosity typically lasted for around three months before access was closed again and the gesture was not repeated when lockdowns resumed in the UK and elsewhere later in the year. On the whole, digital editions of books have often proven unavailable or unaffordable, as highlighted by high-profile statements and campaigns by librarians in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Canada. The campaign in the UK, in particular, has garnered widespreadsupport and significant media attention, with coverage in the BBC, the Guardian, WonkHE and Times Higher Education.
Our books are all Open Access, freely available to read and download in perpetuity. We were curious: given that the need for remotely accessible resources has risen so significantly in the last year, how has the usage of our books changed? We found that overall usage has risen significantly—but at a comparable rate to previous years, which suggests sustained growth in the use of OA books. However, we have also seen a significant drop in the usage recorded via university-registered IP addresses. This is unsurprising in a year when physical access to universities has been extremely restricted, but it highlights an issue we have raised previously: that traditional university-focused usage reports are a poor and potentially misleading measure of the usage of Open Access books.
Here’s some detail about what we observed.
Changes in usage on different platforms over time
Our books are hosted on various platforms and shared via many different channels, some of which we can track and many of which we can’t. This post will consider usage on three different platforms: our own website, Open Edition, and Google Books. It won't cover the usage data we receive from OAPEN or World Reader, because in 2020 we have some gaps for the provision of data from these platforms. We have also not covered platforms such as Unglue.it or the Classics Library, where only a small number of our books are available, and we have not included data from JSTOR, as this is collected per chapter rather than per book, making it more difficult to analyse and discuss alongside book-level data.
Across these three platforms, usage of our books in 2020 increased compared to the previous year, often significantly—as you might expect. But if you look at the increase in 2019 compared to 2018 the picture becomes more interesting, because usage of our books also increased significantly across these platforms in 2019.
It’s important to emphasise that the graph below is not intended to compare usage between platforms, but to look at the change in usage on each platformover time. As we have discussed before, different platforms have different ways of measuring usage, and comparing between them is therefore of limited use (apples and oranges) but comparing usage on a single platform across time is more meaningful (apples and apples). The y axis in the graph below therefore represents whatever unit of measurement each platform uses to calculate usage, whether that is views, downloads, or sessions.
From the graph we can see that the percentage increase in downloads from the Open Edition platform was much greater in 2019 than it was in 2020 (+115% in 2019, +15.4% in 2020) while the percentage increase in views on Open Edition (meaning, people who read the book on the site rather than downloading it) stayed broadly the same (+28.9% in 2019 and +29.6% in 2020). However, the number of downloads is much smaller than the number of views, reflecting the fact that many of our books are not available to download on Open Edition1—so the steady increase in online views is arguably much more significant.
Likewise on Google Books, the percentage increase in readership was similar and substantial in both years (+40% in 2019 and +45.5% in 2020).
When we look at usage on our own website, there were significant increases in usage in 2020 compared to 2019. Our HTML reader sessions (meaning, people who read our HTML editions on our website) grew by 96.6% in 2020, much greater than the 23.8% increase in 2019. Likewise the usage of our PDF reader (which allows you to read the PDF online, rather than downloading it) increased by 25.1% in 2020 compared to an 8.6% increase in 2019. Meanwhile book downloads on our site were up 53.6% in 2020 compared to 2019, a very significant difference – although that is dwarfed by the 169% increase in 2019 compared to 2018.2
As you might expect from these figures, traffic to our website was much higher in 2020: our books’ product pages (meaning the page that has all the details about the title, as well as its freely accessible PDF, HTML and XML editions and the buttons to buy paperback, hardback, EPUB and MOBI editions) saw a level of traffic in 2020 that was 78.2% greater than 2019, compared to a 2019-on-2018 uptick of 29.2%.
Delving deeper
What explains this increased traffic to our site in 2020? For one thing, we published significantly more books in 2020 than in 2019 (38 titles compared to 25, a 52% increase). New title announcements always drive traffic to our site—9 of our top 20 most visited product pages in 2020 were new titles, and 7 the year before—so it seems likely that an increase in site visits to explore our new titles will be at least partly responsible for this increased activity.
However, the greater number of publications in 2020 cannot account on its own for the substantial increase in usage that we have seen across all three platforms.3 If we look at our most accessed titles across all platforms, as opposed to the most visited product pages on our website, we see that of our top 20 most accessed titles in 2020, only 2 were also published in 2020. The others range between 2011 to 2019 with a fairly even spread (the top five were published in 2017, 2011, 2017, 2012 and 2015 respectively). The most viewed overall was a textbook (Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher), the second a book by one of the most well-known authors on our list (Peace and Democratic Society, edited by Amartya Sen) and the third a title that discusses some of the greatest and most widely known works of literature in history (Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden by Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian).
So while some of the people visiting our website may have been driven to the product pages of books we had just published and were heavily marketing, the actual usage of our books ranged across our backlist and was not driven by a publicity flurry but presumably by what people actually wanted to read—whether that was a textbook to help them learn, a book by an eminent academic, or a study of some of the most famous works of literature ever written—and this usage is growing substantially year-on-year.
Library usage
As we have previously noted, library usage metrics for our books might not reflect the actual usage by all library patrons. This is because closed-access material has to be accessed by one easily measured gate—the paywall—whereas Open Access books can be accessed via multiple routes, many of which are not measured. This situation was exacerbated by the widespread closure of library and university buildings in 2020. Even when closed-access books were made temporarily freely available at the outset of the pandemic, usage was carefully controlled via institutional access points, and freely downloading and sharing the content was not intended or encouraged. By contrast, our books are available via multiple platforms, accessible both on campus and outside it, and we do all we can to ensure that they can be shared freely. Nobody has to log in to our site using institutional credentials that we can track. In fact, we measure institutional usage of our books using the institution’s IP addresses – and comparatively few people were using their institution’s facilities in 2020.
As a result, it will look to libraries as though Open Access resources were used less this year, precisely because they can be easily accessed off campus and without logging into an institutional account. Indeed, we have spot-checked the library usage of our books in 2020, and the statistics all show a drop-off compared to 2019. But this is not because our books suddenly became less valuable to staff and students – in fact, as our overall usage statistics show, our books were used more than ever in 2020.
Usage and value
The fact that there were notable increases in usage across every platform in 2019 as well as 2020 suggests that Open Access books are becoming more widely used year-on-year regardless of the pandemic. In other words, while we have seen significantly increased demand for OA books in 2020, we aren’tseeing a pandemic-driven ‘bubble’ that might collapse once libraries are more easily accessible and our lives go back to something like normality.
The COVID-19 crisis has, however, highlighted exactly why openly available, high-quality, peer-reviewed academic resources are increasingly used: because closed-access resources leave behind very large numbers of people, including researchers and students at less wealthy universities with smaller collections and budgets, those without any institutional affiliation, those for whom physical access to the library is made difficult at all times (because of disability or chronic illness, for example), and readers across the world who are not professional academics, but who want to participate in intellectual life for other professional reasons or for their own intellectual development. A broadening of access to academic research—particularly at a time when misinformation circulates so freely—is a necessary public good, as well as vital for the exchange of ideas within academia.
But perversely, library metrics actually reward limited usage—they are designed for closed-access systems and therefore struggle to assign value to content that is freely, widely, and perpetually available.4
This issue of valuation poses a problem that has been well-rehearsed in discussions about Open Access (and is tackled in different ways in the practical work of developing BPC-free models to support OA): how do you persuade libraries to pay for resources that their students and researchers can access outside institutional channels? The answer (one of them, at least) lies in the understanding that Open Access is a collective good that requires collective support, not a one-to-one transaction whose value can be measured and paid for as one does with closed-access resources. Currently however, whether or not this understanding is widely shared depends in large part on librarians who can make this argument persuasively and on institutions that will listen and respond (an issue Demmy Verbeke, Head of Artes at KU Leuven Libraries, explored in depth in a recent discussion about his advocacy for the Fair OA Fund at KU Leuven).
Library support underpins our work at Open Book Publishers: our Library Membership Programme provided almost a quarter of our revenue in the year ending 30th September 2019, and library support is vital for non-legacy Open Access more generally (see for example the consortial library funding programmes run by punctum books and Open Humanities Press, and the work currently being done by COPIM to foster community-led library funding for Open Access books). It is therefore vital to us and to everyone who uses our books that libraries understand the limitations of closed-access metrics for evaluating open access content. This is part of a shift in thinking about how to fund research dissemination, as well as broader issues of collection management, the complexities of which are far beyond the scope of this post.
1. This is because Open Edition freely releases EPUB editions along with PDFs on their site, but we charge a small fee (£5.99) for most of our EPUB editions, while releasing the PDF, XML and HTML editions freely. We cannot release our PDFs via Open Edition without also releasing the EPUBs, so most of our books are only available on Open Edition in HTML format (which can be read on the platform but not downloaded).
2. The relatively large increase in HTML usage in 2020 compared to downloads is interesting. It may indicate more users on mobile phones who preferred to read the book on the site rather than incurring the higher data costs of downloading, but this is only speculation. We also discontinued the use of our PDF reader early in 2020, which might have encouraged more readers to use the HTML edition instead—although the use of our PDF readers still increased in 2020, indicating increased usage of our backlist books relative to 2019. The high increase in downloads in 2019 is not something we can easily explain.
3. For one thing, we published 26 books in 2018 compared to only 25 in 2019, yet we still saw a substantial increase in book usage across all platforms in 2019.
4. For a thoughtful post on the different types of value that books possess, and how OA can unlock this value, see the recent post by Eric Hellman, ‘Creating Value with Open Access Books’.
‘Will the post-corona universe be just another future or something new “to come”?’ – Slavoj Žižek
Corona is a reset. A chance to learn. An opportunity to grow. After all: never let a good crisis go to waste. True enough, there’s plenty of injustice in the world to justify a thorough reset. But the question that crossed everyone’s mind at least once in the past year is: what kind of reset will this be? Or, to use the phrase commonly used in the Dutch public debate, what will the ‘new normal’ be like?
During the better part of 2020 and the start of 2021, in-person gatherings have been reduced to a minimum. While understandable in terms of crisis management, these measures deeply affect public life: education stalled, cultural activities were decimated, and the institutions of Dutch democracy have entered into uncharted and wobbly territories.
Funny enough, a part of the public debate moved to the streets in the meanwhile. A wild discussion about the old and the new normal has unfolded – through posters and stickers. The beauty of this debate is its conciseness: a poster or sticker only has to get across its message (whether political, cultural, or nonsensical) in one image. Let’s take a tour.
Stay Sane Stay Safe
During the first months of the first lockdown, the international – but predominantly Dutch – campaign Stay Sane Stay Safe was launched. It seemed like every socially aware designer alive was on board. Within a matter of days, hundreds of posters were uploaded, promoting to ‘flatten the curve’, ‘stay in’, ‘keep distance’, and ‘call your grandma’.
This was nice. Harmless. Sane and safe. It was March, and the weather outside was beautiful. You would almost think that corona was nothing more than a reason to make sleek posters and act woke.
The New Normal
Not much later, Dutch graphic designer Rob Simon made a series of posters around the ‘new normal’ (signed with ‘Georgies’). Rather than promoting social distancing and mask-wearing, he raised questions. Simon stated in an interview with a local newspaper that he wanted to ‘trigger people to think’.
While these posters show a degree of discomfort about temperature checks at supermarkets and bonuses in the banking sector, they’re not necessarily critical. They refrain from any overt political statement and remain purposely vague. But there is a shift when compared to Stay Sane Stay Safe: from happy obeying to active thinking.
What Do You Really Really Feel?
Well into the summer (August-September), a group of Amsterdam-based community artists also started raising questions under the hashtag #HoeGaatHetEchtMetJe? Going back to the local basics, and realizing that those hit hardest by the crisis are often least visible in public space, these artists went into the different neighborhoods of Amsterdam and asked people intimate questions to find out how they were ‘really’ doing. From the conversations, a selection of quotes was printed on posters, distributed through the city, and launched at Framer Framed. The more political (although by no means party-political) reasoning behind the project is not hard to guess: it is the task of artists and art institutions to challenge the aesthetic regimes of the sensible, that determine what is visible and what is not.
Corona and Solidarity
There were skeptics from the start, mainly among the ranks of anthroposophists and conspiracy theorists. Vague critiques of the child-rape by the ‘deep state’ or collective poisoning by ‘big pharma’. Sentiments and fantasies that represented a materially valid dissatisfaction, a good Marxist would say. I don’t want to be the Big Psychologist here (or the Big Material Dialectician, for that matter). However, I think it’s fair to say that they hardly presented any serious threat to the dominant political narrative of crisis management.
But in November 2020, while the measures were loosening, the first real cracks started appearing in the narrative of common cause and uniform solidarity. It started becoming obvious how the corona measures impacted certain parts of the population more heavily than others. The education gap was demonstrably widened. Reports of domestic violence rose. Some people fled to their holiday destinations while others stayed home because of financial troubles. As the sociologist Justus Uitermarkt put it: the common trust and conformism started to wear off. No-brainer solidarity once of a sudden turned into a political question.
In fact, already since July 2020, a poster was circulating in Amsterdam (as well as on Reddit), which read: ‘We cannot go back to normal. Because “normal” was exactly the problem.’
The Great Reset
From something that we all just had to do and accept, it slowly became clear how corona measures – and the political decisions behind them – impacted some people harder than others, materially as well as psychologically. Now the end is in sight, the question is no longer so much if we will get there, but how. Which companies and organizations will make it through? Who will lose their job (or sanity) before it’s all over? Do we let students go to university, or do we rather open nail and hair salons first?
In a recent Jacobin Magazine article, Slavoj Žižek joined the discussion. We should reject, he asserts, the false dilemma of choosing between things that we can imagine. The left-leaning and liberal world sighed with relief as Biden was elected president of the US. But we know that Biden’s centrist and bipartisan politics of reconciliation and ‘healing’ in fact signal a return to pre-Trump normality. Alternatively, the great reset might lead to a tech bro utopia – a corporate Great Reset.
We can imagine both of these post-reset normalities, either as a return to 2019 or as an extrapolation of the ever-increasing power of Big Tech. But do we have to choose between a return to the old, exploitative normality and a post-Covid corporate Great Reset that promises to be even worse? What we really need, Žižek states, is ‘a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse’.
This is where the public discussion is at in The Netherlands as well. We’re close to a reset, but what kind of reset? Do we stick with the lazy and unpolitical narrative of unavoidable crisis management, or will we manage to stretch and expand our imaginations?
Who remembers the first time they heard the term ‘Girl Boss?’ For most, it was around the time founder of the fashion brand Nasty Gal, Sophia Amoruso, published her autobiography ‘#GirlBoss’ in 2014. Since then, the term has grown in popularity to the extreme, creating its own aspirational ‘category’ of woman, archetypal image, and countless spin-off self-help guides, websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, ‘influencers,’ a Netflix series, merchandise, seminars and courses – to name but a handful of #GirlBoss lifestyle commodities.
Amoruso’s #GirlBoss book covers her path growing a multi-million-dollar company, Nasty Gal, out of an eBay vintage-resell store. It tells/sells an authenticity story of a woman going against the grain (including shoplifting, which “saved her life”) in the face of changing media, technologies, and social circumstances. Amoruso’s mantra is “Life is short. Don’t be lazy.” It captures the zeitgeist of millennial women ‘thinking divergent,’ ‘being fearless,’ and ‘staying game strong,’ to pursue and monetise their passions. Shortly after the book’s release, marketeers caught onto the sellability of the Girl Boss ideal, which quickly spread into visual culture. Seven years later, the Girl Boss continues to linger on social media platforms, but who is she now? What does she indicate about real contemporary setbacks? And how does she fit into today’s discourses? First, let’s begin with an explanation of what exactly is a ‘Girl Boss.’
How to Construct a Girl Boss
The Girl Boss is a boss, but not in the traditional sense. The Girl Boss does not perpetuate the image of a middle-aged CEO dressed in a suit. After all, that image is unattainable, being reserved to only one gender identity. The Girl Boss might wear a suit, but she will make it playful and pop-coloured. It will be a statement. For a magazine feature, she will pose with her arms crossed, camera aimed from below, and shot against a skyscraper backdrop. Then, she will gush over her children in the interview and reveal her favourite beauty products and fitness routines. She may be the owner of a fast fashion brand that mistreats garment workers in Bangladesh, but she will sell you a banging t-shirt with ‘The Future is Female” printed across it.
Since the Girl Boss has had to pave her way, having been overlooked or underappreciated by fellow (male) entrepreneurs, her story hinges on self-determination and unparalleled work ethic (what Amoruso calls “sweat equity.”) Having ‘made it’ despite no end of obstacles, the Girl Boss now has it all; a successful business, incredible discipline, an army of assistants and interns, a loyal squad of girlfriends, and a wardrobe of effortlessly chic fashion to go with it.
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The enduring appeal of the Girl Boss lies in her ability to succeed as a business owner whilst retaining traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics. She’s a killer in the boardroom, and never has bags under her eyes. The Girl Boss elevates herself beyond the need to act like ‘one of the boys.’ She is 100% herself, and unapologetically so. A girl’s girl in a world of businessmen with all the accessories to prove her success: an It bag, red-soled stilettos, and a bad-ass sports car to zoom away in.
Not only has the Girl Boss achieved financial independence; she hasn’t given anything up to achieve it. The Girl Boss promise is that great monetary success is possible and can be attained without compromise. In ‘having it all’, the Girl Boss embodies a post-feminist dream of equal-opportunity access to educational resources, mentoring, start-up capital, and financial security. Not just security – abundance. In this dream, no patriarchal structures are holding her back. Her life, imagined collectively on social media platforms through pastel images and energetic videos, is not a humble brag. In this rendering, her life also does not include dealing with workplace misogyny, harassment, and she does not have to experience ongoing derogatory treatment. There are no pay gaps, no sexism or racism in the workplace. There are no gatekeepers. Only a free market, which any woman can circumnavigate via hard work. “Life is short. Don’t be lazy.” The Girl Boss is a queen of her kingdom, and nothing can snatch her crown.
The Girl Boss makes no apologies for her femininity because her femininity is an asset. It is a crucial ingredient in the recipe of how to make a Girl Boss; the construction of a business owner who refuses to change herself to blend into a male-dominated field. In this sense, the Girl Boss challenges the preconceived notions of what success looks like. Emerging into the world of money and power, the Girl Boss brings the promise of change with her. Her mere presence in this space represents all women everywhere, paving the way for others to follow, and displaying that it is possible to reach such levels of success as a woman. The Girl Boss is the poster child for equal opportunity. However, behind her dazzling facade still lies a reinforcement of patriarchal archetypes that restrict women more than they empower them. It calls to question: Who actually benefits from the presence and prominence of the Girl Boss? Scholar Mary Beard offers some food for thought, suggesting that “We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured.”[1]
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TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest overflow with Girl Boss content. Here, you will find luxurious shoes and bags, important-looking paperwork, beautiful pens, extravagant sunglasses, fun on rooftops, glamorous cars, champagne flutes, and flawless manicures, all sewn together with inspirational quotes about perseverance. Girl Boss social media grids are sleek, colour-coded, and establish an alluring image of independence and wealth. These images of playful expensive nail art and impractical-but-‘boss’ heels run counter to the content of the male ‘hustler’ entrepreneur – equally ubiquitous on social media platforms. Despite the now household-ness of the Girl Boss ideal, the majority of the entrepreneurial lifestyles promoted and venerated across social media still minorly cater to women. The aforementioned self-identifying ‘hustlers’ mainly identify as male and are generally ignorant towards misogyny in the world of business – which it doesn’t take long to notice when perusing their sub-Reddit homes such as /r/entrepreneur, /r/investing, /r/CareerSuccess, /r/startups, or /r/growmybusiness. Hustlers are not interested in addressing the inequalities that affect access to education, funding, and mentorship. They’re interested in making money. What lingers, no matter the sub, is a pervasive association between positions of power and masculinity. One that endures as a signifier to the past when the subjugation of women made it impossible for them to pursue independent careers or make self-governing decisions.
The Construct Crumbles
It comes as no surprise that many journalists and theorists link the term ‘Girl Boss’ with the infantilisation of women. The ‘Girl Boss’ label categorises the successes of women as separate from, and inferior to, the achievements of their male counterparts. Since the glory days of Sophia Amoruso’s brand (circa 2010-2015), the popularisation of Girl Boss wavered, and critical engagements with the concept weakened its persuasive powers. The year 2020 saw many Girl Bosses resign over allegations of toxic workplace cultures. Still, #GirlBoss tags persist on social media and millions of users interact with Girl Boss content every day, seeking to personify the (unattainable) ideal of the Girl Boss that presents itself as something within reach. After all, being perceived as a success is just as important as success itself; and perhaps the aesthetics of life in big business alone are more compelling than the reality of pursuing such a career. More on this in the next section.
The Girl Boss imaginary romanticises the idea of wealth but does not take into account the methods by which it may be acquired. In this sense, the Girl Boss is a neoliberal pawn; an affluent individual whose inspiring story supposedly proves the accessibility of success and demonstrates that opportunities wait for anyone willing to work hard enough. Don’t spend too much time thinking about what business the Girl Boss owns, how it operates, or who may be affected by it.
“Simply incorporating women into positions of power does not guarantee equality or justice in the larger sense. We always seem prime to celebrate individual advancements of black people, people of colour, women, without taking into consideration it might simply mean that previously marginalised individuals have been recruited to guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems.” – Angela Davis
Reflecting Angela Davis’ expanded contemplation; would it be sensible when examining the Girl Boss figure to consider a more communal approach instead of accepting another archetype representative of individual success? How else might we reach a collective redefinition of ideas of power and influence? This is not a proposal that seeing women in business is a setback for women everywhere. On the contrary, it is necessary to elevate women’s voices and provide increased access to positions of power. However, that in itself does not guarantee structural changes in the workplace, or the conduct of influential bodies of power. Ruby Staley writes: “When female CEOs and managers mimic the behaviour of the archetypal male boss, the patriarchal barriers placed in front of women in the world of work remain the same – they aren’t deconstructed, instead, they’re reinforced.”[2] The Girl Boss facade of glamour and empowerment might be exciting and motivating to some aspiring women in business, but the prominence of this figure does not automatically challenge expectations, nor does it change the fabric of economic inequalities. Here, we also encounter the danger of tokenism; women and marginalised people are regularly exploited as tokens of diversity in conglomerates that could not care less about truthful representation, nor more equal access to opportunities and professional development. Women deserve more than a pity promotion motivated by pressure to meet a diversity quota.
What Comes Next?
Girl Boss and hustle cultures share many characteristics. For one, they refuse to acknowledge wider contexts of individual success stories. They both thrive on social media platforms where inspiring imagery and self-help tips taken out of context convey a message of an unhealthy dependence on work and quantifiable achievement. Both versions love easily digestible images and use short videos that entice users with promises of financial independence and lives of luxury. The more one encounters this kind of content, the more likely they are to start seeing their employment status as a definer of self-worth and identity. I fell victim to this trap when diving into online Girl Boss culture. Even though I lack the aspiration to be a business owner or a millionaire, I did catch myself feeling envious of the status enjoyed by these figures. Like many people, I too long for a life free from financial worries, unrestricted by the high prices of some comforts. It did provoke me to think… If I bit the bullet and went corporate, maybe it would be worth it? If I started to seek out a highly paid job, maybe I would be happier?
What Girl Boss culture has never really acknowledged is that the very incident of becoming a CEO might not automatically lead to satisfaction. Juliette O’Brien states: “It’s not just that hustle culture and productivity obsessions are exhausting, incurious, and self-aggrandizing. It’s that, on their own, they can offer an anemic, superficial, and tedious experience of life.”[3] In an ironic turn of events, O’Brien’s critique was published by none other than GirlBoss.com, a networking platform Amoruso founded in 2017, and abandoned two years later. It seems as though through its evolution over the past few years, GirlBoss.com’s online content – created by Amoruso and others – has gradually increased its nuance around issues like toxic productivity, whilst its male-counterpart ‘hustle culture’ continues to hold strong with the workaholic mantra of doing “whatever it takes.”
The destabilising ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic marks a seismic shift in relationship to work. For one, it makes start-ups, side hustles and passive income more desirable and marketable. Anything to stop feeling threatened and endangered by an unpredictable economy and unstable employment. Some Girl Bosses claim a pandemic is a prime time to set up a business. These calls only multiply existing pressures to perform productivity, monetise interests, and invest whatever time and money you might have left into new sources of stress and anxiety. Instead, let’s follow Davis’ lead and focus on how oppressive systems dictate and demand these unattainable standards.
Plenty of work remains to be done about improving the societal positions of women within self-employment, labour, business, kinship and family. It might not be the kind of work the Girl Boss undertakes. Today’s online activity needs to shift in a new direction, away from the mythologisation of an egocentric figure and their individual successes in a “man’s world.” In recent years, there is a tendency to provide platforms to marginalised voices and to consider the bigger picture of intersections between labour, gender, race and class. Mobilisation via the online is another way to shift away from the hustle narrative, instead offering mutual support and resources to those interested in business and ethics. These gatherings can and should include users who resonate(d) with the Girl Boss narrative. Pink typography is not all bad; it might encourage users to dream and speculate about a future where gender does not dictate access to wealth and power. However, it is not sufficient, and the aesthetics of the online Girl Boss are much more likely to mask the impossibilities of standards they propose, instead of debunking them.
The Institute of Network Cultures is looking for an
intern with production and research skills
Internship period: April 1st until July 1st, 2021 (0.6-0.8 fte/3-4 days a week).
The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) is a media research center that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications, and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink as part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). The Institute of Network Cultures has a tradition of experiment in digital and hybrid publishing.
For more information, see: https://networkcultures.org/. For an overview of all INC publications, go to: https://networkcultures.org/publications. For previous work on this topic, check out our research programs Making Public, The Art of Criticism, the Digital Publishing Toolkit, MoneyLab and Tactical Visual Culture.
You will be a part of a small team within a large institution. Tasks within the team may include:
assisting with general office operations
attending meetings
collecting and reviewing interesting and relevant literature
being part of the crew at INC events
We are looking for an enthusiastic, energetic, inquisitive (former) student with knowledge of and a demonstrated interest in internet culture, net-critique and/or digital publishing. As the INC has an international scope, active English skills are required, in speaking and writing. In addition, you have strong writing and communication skills, and experience with social media management and web administration. You balance a desire to learn, take initiative and suggest better practices and take constructive feedback. A background in (graphic or interaction) design, art (history), cultural studies, or media studies is an advantage.
Monthly compensation: € 400 gross (0.6-0,8 fte)
For further information, you can contact info[at]networkcultures[dot]org or send a CV and motivation letter to the same email address.
A Series of Conversations with Designers, Curators, and Program Makers
The start of this new decade has not turned out the way many expected or hoped for. In an increasingly globalized world, a sudden halt to mobility seemed unimaginable. From ‘the world is your oyster’ to being forced to stay confined in small bedrooms for months on end, a lot has changed overnight. The pandemic has forced people to suddenly move their whole life – work, dinners, celebrations, relationships, and cultural activities – online. As a culture professional with a fascination for media arts and online exhibitions, I the roads the cultural sector travels in transforming their programs to online. formats with open eyes It’s a road full of technical bumps, many forks that need apt decision making, and some U-turns ending up back in the 90s. From exhibitions, panel discussions, lectures, workshops to entire festivals, what was once a sector that took place mostly in exhibition spaces, conference halls, and event locations, now is confined to the two-dimensional screen.
We are still in the middle (or at the beginning, who can tell), of these developments. Once the pandemic has come to an end, the initiatives might get lost in the endlessness of content online. Maybe we will come together and laugh at the time that our lives were spent online, telling anecdotes of our experiences in confinement – only to conclude: never again. Yet, there is much to learn from what is happening as we speak. More likely than not, online or hybrid events will stay around for a longer time, during and after the coronacrisis.
What are the possibilities of Going Online? Giving digital formats a quick thought might result in a range of possibilities – fewer costs for production, spaces, and storage leads to endless amounts of content that can be available for an infinite amount of time, reaching a global audience effortlessly at the click of a button. Particular possibilities are heightened, such as zooming into an artwork in Google’s Art & Culture. A guard would have already told you to keep the appropriate distance to the artwork in a museum. When it comes to digital formats, is the sky the limit?
Exploring HD artworks with Google Arts & Culture, zoom level 75% into Vermeer’s Gezicht op Delft.
Simultaneously, doubts arise. Content is one aspect, but what about the liveness of digital formats? How can an online event feel as lively as its physical counterpart used to be? Does drinking a beer at home alone behind your device taste as good as in the event’s bar? How can communities come together and participate when, more than 1.5 meters apart, they have to bridge new distances? Roommates or partners in the background of the call, classic Zoom fatigue, and the ever problematic attention span that comes with knowing you could be doing anything and everything else while joining into a digital format – there is a lot of distraction.
Metaphors
These digital event formats often borrow metaphors from older technologies or physical spaces. In her publication, Marianna van der Boomen investigates the metaphors of digital software, functions, and concepts with which we interact in our daily lives in her publication ‘Transcoding the digital, how metaphors matter in new media’. From e-mail ‘mailboxes’ to application ‘windows’, she follows the traces of metaphors as actors. Discussing the complex systems which shape and are shaped by metaphors, she says
I consider digital-symbolical objects as an onto-epistemological riddle because they are neither pure objects, nor pure symbolic forms, nor pure digital patterns. They are hybrids of computation, algorithms, and language – artifacts cut out of arbitrarily assigned numbers, processed by machines and humans, represented, symbolized, ontologized, and incorporated in the social texture. The riddle then is: how do such composites of numbers and language, of algorithms and discourse, of computer code and cultural code, come about and get stabilized? – Marianne van der Boomen[1]
What metaphors do organizations use to translate cultural formats to virtual ones, how are they shaped, and how do they shape the formats in turn?
A recurring metaphor is the television one, as a lot of these digital events manifest as live streams on a screen. The basics are nearly the same for everybody: video and audio are (live)streamed, the audience can ask questions in a chat or by dial-in, a moderator or host guides the speakers, a team of technicians makes sure everything runs smoothly. Television has been doing this for years and years already – cultural organizations (not always equipped with the right space, technology, technical expertise, or budget) have to adapt quickly.
Strategies
How to meaningfully translate content online is almost a trick question. With limits to time, budget, and technical expertise, only so much is possible. The alternative would be not to have a cultural sector at all and wait until the lockdown is over. Is not showing something a better alternative than showing something imperfectly? More than a question about ideals, it’s a practical reality. How about the fees of the people involved, creatives and freelancers who have to pay the bills? Organizations can not shy away from this social responsibility. As has been pointed out repeatedly in the past months, a lockdown wouldn’t be any fun without music to listen to, books to read, and films to watch. Culture is urgently needed, maybe even more so nowadays.
Going Online is a matter of necessity for some organizations, a way to reach their publics who are confined to their houses. It is not something desirable. Never meant to substitute the real event, it is a forced solution to seek ways of bringing the work of artists, designers, and thinkers to its audiences. For others, the pandemic has only emphasized the need for Going Online, a strategy that was already on the agenda for a longer time. Specifically for media (arts) organizations, it makes sense to (also) present their programs convincingly on the internet, and in doing so reach new global audiences.
These processes of making new content and translating existing content are by no means homogenous ones. Similar to how these events have tailored to their specific audiences and have worked based on their own expertise and vision, their online afterlives are as different and varying as their pre-pandemic counterparts. Not one solution fits all.
A quick look at the productions of cultural events in the Netherlands in the past year gives a breath of different strategies. A selection of events: Dutch Design Week ‘went online’, resulting in 3D Viewing Rooms, 360 degrees museum walkthroughs, and DDW TV. IMPAKT Festival provided lectures, panels, workshops, and films from their self-made web portal. Framer Framed teamed up with Amsterdam Museum for the online exhibition Corona in de Stad, an ongoing collection of photos, videos, texts, and audio fragments about the experiences of the coronacrisis period of people in Amsterdam. MU’s exhibitionSelf Design Academytook place in hybrid formats, in which online work complemented the physical exhibition. The Hmm set out to find the best platform for online events – Jitsi, Zoom, Twitch?. Varia’s Century 21 Calling – Party Line – Stream discussed the history of the videochat tracing it back to the 19th century. Of course, the past year showed many more events that in format and content reflected on the quick shift to the world wide web.
Varia tells it like it is on the event page of Century 21 Calling – Party Line – Stream.
Some strategies anticipated on an online or hybrid character. Others had to adapt quickly to new measures and were more reactive. What were the aims of these different events? How can the strategies and processes of Going Online become sustainable? Which choices were made along the way and why? Can and should the content stay available afterward? And if so, how do you create an archive that is lively and interesting?
Experiences
Next to metaphors and strategies, this series questions the experiences of digital events. Whereas the first corona wave still saw people excited about coming together online, much of the enthusiasm has died after months and months of online social lives. The other day a friend apologized for not texting me back. She told me that the joy of meeting up with a person and spending time with them to catch up fades out once social contact become a selection of ‘hey how are you’ messages back and forth at a continuous yet constantly disrupted pace. Similarly, the social aspects of cultural events changed, and there is a need to look for new forms.
These events can turn out to be very fun and playful, but also lonely. What are exciting ways to connect? How can visitors interact? How can an organization maintain a community online or add new audiences to their existing community? What are ways to keep up the energy level during an online event, both for the ones presenting as the ones watching?
Going Online
These and other questions will be posed, reflected upon, and answered throughout the upcoming blog series. The title, Going Online, refers to the phrase we’ve been surrounded with lately, stating ‘X is Going Online this year’. It also refers to the act of connecting to the internet as an audience, what used to be referred to as ‘surfing the web’ (yet another metaphor that speaks to the imagination while evoking imagery of the internet as an endless ocean).
The list of digital events that I will discuss in this series is by no means exhaustive, as nearly every art institution and non-institution had to deal with the challenges of translating their programs into a digital version. Although I recognize that digital (art) events and experiments go back way further than the start of the pandemic around March 2020, this series focuses on festivals, events, and exhibitions that had to transfer their practices to online environments in the course of the last year. By having conversations with designers, curators, and program makers, I attempt to provide various perspectives on the topic of medium translations. Finally, these insights come together in a first attempt for ‘Towards a Toolbox for Going Online’.
References
[1] Marianne van der Boomen, Transcoding the digital, how metaphors matter in new media, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014
The Directory of Open Access Journals http://doaj.org is an excellent service that fulfills many important functions, in particular facilitating access to a vetted collection of over 15,000 freely available peer-reviewed journals. The DOAJ search services and metadata download are very useful for researchers as well. The purpose of this post is to alert researchers to some of the limitations of the DOAJ metadata that researchers need to take into account to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions. First, when downloading DOAJ metadata, it is necessary to open the .csv file in Unicode in order to retain non-English characters. We open in Open Office for this reason, then save as an excel file. The nature of the metadata means that some data is inserted in the wrong column; clean-up, as discussed below, is necessary before data analysis. When journal editors or others working on their behalf enter metadata into DOAJ, research is not the primary purpose of this exercise; for this reason, in-depth assessment and corrections may be necessary before analysis. Below, we present publisher size analysis as an example of what researchers may encounter. Finally, because the main purpose of DOAJ is connecting readers with content, the metadata of interest to a particular research project may not be up to date. As demonstrated below, as of Jan. 5, 2021, only 30% of DOAJ journals have a “last update” date within the previous year (2020). We do not know whether the “last update” date reflects a full or partial metadata review. We illustrate the potential impact on research results with the example of the SKC longitudinal APC study. Of the 4,292 DOAJ journals that responded “yes” to the APC question, only 30% have a last update date of 2020 or 2021. Even with this 30% of journals, we have no way of knowing whether the APC status and/or amount per se was updated, or only other unrelated metadata. This means that if we compare 2019 prices obtained from publisher websites in 2019 with 2021 DOAJ APC metadata, we will almost certainly get incorrect results, for example falsely assuming that matching APC amounts means no change in the prices. DOAJ provides rich and useful metadata for the researcher and the research question “is this journal listed in DOAJ?” is of value in and of itself. For this reason, we intend to continue using DOAJ metadata in addition to data derived from other sources, particularly data derived directly from publisher websites.
Details
Correcting for displaced observations
As previously mentioned, the first step to confidently use the DOAJ metadata for analysis and research is identifying and correcting data inserted in the wrong column, herein also called displaced observations.
Below we can see an example of a displaced observation from the DOAJ metadata. Column BB has no assigned variable while containing some observations, apparently displaced one column to the right.
Table 1 – An example of misplaced data from 2021 DOAJ metadata
Users may follow different steps to correct for displaced data. Here we explain in more detail how we have identified these displacements and corrected them.
Before proceeding with any analysis, it is important to get familiarized with the DOAJ metadata first. We recommend users to read the DOAJ Guide to applying, available online, because the metadata reflects responses to questions asked in the application process. The DOAJ metadata, as of 5 Jan. 2021, possesses 53 variables ranging from Journal Title to Country to Most recent article added. It may be helpful to start correcting observations from variables with easily identifiable responses, such as « Country » or « Country of Publisher », or variables that allow only two types of answers (i.e Yes or No), such as Author holds copyright without restrictions and APC. It is recommended to create a pivot table to identify displaced observations, repeating this process until no observations are identified in a wrong column.
When cleaning-up the DOAJ metadata, users will notice that in some cases only one observation was displaced; in other cases, an entire row was displaced beginning on a specific variable. In the example highlighted in yellow below, all observations beginning at variable Publisher were displaced one column to the right.
Table 2 – Line 36 illustrates an example of an entire row with displaced observations
Data entry inconsistencies
When correcting for displaced observations, we have also identified some inconsistencies in the way observations are registered in the DOAJ metadata. The table below lists the main visible inconsistencies found for some variables. In the majority of instances, the inconsistencies will not impact DOAJ users looking up information for a particular journal. However, it is important to take into account these inconsistencies before proceeding to any automated statistical analysis. For example, DOAJ metadata as is can be used to identify the number of journals with persistent article identifiers, but automated counting of DOI v. ARK or other approaches would require some advance data manipulation.
Variable
Example
Alternative title
Some journals alternative titles may be registered as a number. Some examples are “2300-6633” and “0”.
Keywords
Some observations have some special characters as follows: 6. rheology, tribology, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, mechanics of structures, mechatronics. water cycles, water environment, water treatment and reuse, water resource, water quality, hydrology • natural sciences, • environmental sciences, • social sciences, agricultural sciences, veterinary medicine, medical sciences
Copyright information URL
Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or the end. The example below illustrates this small error. There should be an “h” at the beginning and an “l” at the end of the link. ttp://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/services/publishing/jiuc/authors.htm
Plagiarism information URL
Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or the end. The example below illustrates this small error. There should be an « h » at the beginning and an « l » at the end of the link. ttp://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/services/publishing/jiuc/authors.htm
URL for journal’s instructions for authors
Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or the end. The example below illustrates this small error. There should be an « h » at the beginning of the URL ttps://revistas.unasp.edu.br/LifestyleJournal/about/submissions
Other submission fees information URL
Some URLs have extra letters. The example below, for instance, has a letter « i » at the beginning of the URL ihttps://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/voebm/m/index Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or the end. The example below illustrates this small error. There should be an « h » at the beginning of the URL ttp://psr.ui.ac.id/index.php/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines ttps://www.karger.com/Journal/Guidelines/261897#sec62
Preservation Services
Preservation services can be registered as a name or a website
Preservation Service: national library
Preservation services – national library can be registered as a name or a website
Preservation information URL
Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or the end. The example below, for instance, has a small error. There should be an « h » at the beginning of the URL tps://periodicos.uff.br/revistagenero/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope ttp://ejournal.stkip-pgri-sumbar.ac.id/index.php/economica
Deposit policy directory
Deposit policy directory can be registered as a name or a website
Persistent article identifiers
Persistent article identifiers can be registered as an acronym (UDC, DOI, ARK), but also as a website, such as dc.identifier.uri (DSpaceUnipr) or NBN http://www.depositolegale.it/national-bibliography-number/. Another example is the occurrences UDC and UDC (Universal decimal Classification), which are equivalents but were registered differently
URL for journal’s Open Access statement
Some URLs lack a letter « h » at the beginning or at the end, or they have an extra h at the beginning of the URL. The example below has an extra letter « h » at the beginning of the URL. hhttp://www.revistas.usp.br/gestaodeprojetos/about
Table 3 – Visible inconsistencies identified in the DOAJ metadata
Publisher’s names duplicates investigation and clean-up
The purpose of this project is preparation to develop a rough picture of publisher size to compare with Solomon & Björk’s findings (2012). In order to better perform publisher size analysis, we have specifically investigated the publisher duplicates and corrected most of the obvious errors, such as small differences in punctuation and/or characters, extra spaces at the beginning and/or at the end, and minor differences in entering the publisher name when it is the same, etc. (Please see examples in Table 4 – Investigative Strategies – Publisher Names Duplicates).
The process of clean-up was divided into three stages. Firstly, we created a pivot table for the publisher column to identify the entries in rows which were slightly different but weren’t gathered. Secondly, when potential duplicates were found, we conducted an investigation to confirm duplicates and/or to decide which name to keep (in priority order: use the name with the most journal entries; correct name with obvious typo; use the first name listed). Please see the investigative strategies below:
Thirdly, after identifying inconsistencies in publisher names, we created a table (please see Table 5 – Corrections Gathering – Publisher Names Duplicates) to register all the corrections on the variable Publisher. About 500 inconsistencies were corrected. Thus, the number of publishers in the pivot table has decreased from 7218 entries (data resource: pivot table based on DOAJ metadata) to 6804 entries (data resource: pivot table based on the cleaned-up version of database).
As illustrated in the two tables above, there were different types of data inconsistencies. In order to respect metadata to the greatest extent, we acted prudently when making decisions. In some minor variation cases, we tried to click on the URLs to check publisher websites and to collect convincing evidence. However, we met some intricate complex challenges.
One of the challenges was the language. Due to the massiveness and the wide-range of publishers (124 countries, 80 languages, DOAJ, 7 Feb. 2021) [https://doaj.org/], we were unable to identify all of the sources of information. Besides, when there were invalid URLs or unmatched information, it was difficult to seek out any precision. What’s more, among 7218 entries of publisher names, some of the potential duplicates weren’t gathered because of their different beginning words. For example, “Editora da Universidade Estadual de Maringá (Eduem)” vs. “Eduem – Editora da Universidade Estadual de Maringá” and “Academica Brâncuşi” vs. “Editura Academica Brâncuşi”. They were usually far apart and hard to be detected. More details can be found in the Table 6 below:
Different beginning words (examples)
“Academica Brâncuşi” vs. “Editura Academica Brâncuşi”; “Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi” vs. “Editura Universităţii ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ Iaşi”; “Editora da Universidade Estadual de Maringá (Eduem)” vs. “Eduem – Editora da Universidade Estadual de Maringá”
Alborz University of Medical Sciences (URLs wrongly directs to a website whose contents are meaningless; when we searched the journal title, we were directed to this website : https://enterpathog.abzums.ac.ir/)
Given the barriers and challenges mentioned above, we can draw a conclusion to the limitations of publisher names clean-up project. Precision is not possible in this project because the question “who is the publisher” is complex. Instead of making any definitive claims about publisher size, we are primarily interested in whether the long tail effect (a few big publishers, a few more middle-sized, most very small) reported by Solomon & Björk (2012) can still be observed in DOAJ in 2021.
DOAJ metadata update analysis
The following analysis was conducted to determine whether DOAJ metadata on article processing charges (APCs) – charging status and amount – would be sufficient for SKC’s longitudinal study on APC trends over time. The answer is clearly no. The metadata for the vast majority of journals in DOAJ (overall and APC charging) has not been updated for more than a year, and it is unknown whether the most recent update would have included an update to APC or other metadata. We will continue to use DOAJ metadata as it is rich and the question “is this journal listed in DOAJ” is of value in and of itself, however for price comparisons we cannot rely on this data as it would likely result in erroneous conclusions.
DOAJ journals by year of last update.
This chart illustrates the percentage of DOAJ journals last update by year. Detailed figures are in the table below. Note that just under half the journals were last updated 2 or more years ago (2018 or earlier).
DOAJ last update as of Jan. 5, 2021
Year
# journals last updated
% journals last updated
2015
294
2%
2016
1,469
9%
2017
2,864
18%
2018
2,951
19%
2019
3,412
22%
2020
4,662
30%
2021
39
0%
Total
15,691
100%
Table 7
DOAJ APC charging journals by year of last update
The chart above illustrates the percentage of journals that answered “yes” to the DOAJ question about charging APCs by year of last update. The table below provides the detailed figures. Note that only 30% of DOAJ journals that charge APCs were updated in the past year (2020 or 2021). It is also unknown whether in these cases the last update was a thorough review of the metadata, or might have been an update of non-APC data.
DOAJ last update APC journals only Jan. 5, 2021
Year of last udpate
# of journals last updated
% journals last updated
2015
47
1%
2016
238
6%
2017
499
12%
2018
930
22%
2019
1,286
30%
2020
1,276
30%
2021
16
0%
Total
4,292
100%
Table 8
References
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) online: https://doaj.org/
Solomon, D. J., & Björk, B. (2012). A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(8), 1485–1495. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22673
Jane Austen has kept a lot of people company during the lockdowns of 2020-2021; Nora Bartlett’s book, Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader, explains why. The book is a posthumous publication; Nora Bartlett died from a cancer of the oesophagus at the age of only sixty-seven. Editing her talks during lockdown, I was acutely aware—like everyone—of daily freedoms suddenly withdrawn: walking outdoors; travelling anywhere beyond the immediate locality; meeting friends and family members; face-to-face communication; shared meals; unmasked smiles; ungloved touch. Our newly circumscribed existence forced me to reappraise those aspects of Jane Austen’s world which used to govern the lives of her female characters alone. Jane Austen’s fiction recreates the claustrophobia and the long vistas of enforced waiting which defined the daily experience of nineteenth-century women. Covid has made all of us suddenly aware of a new set of social expectations and rules for conduct, together with a depressing sense of diminished expectations. For months now, many of us have been plunged into the listlessness of Catherine Morland when she is sent back to Fullerton at the end of Northanger Abbey before Henry Tilney unexpectedly arrives or we have felt our spirits quail along with Emma Woodhouse’s as she faces the challenge of how to get ‘tolerably through the evening’ at the beginning of Emma or we have experienced Fanny Price’s desperate wish in Mansfield Park to escape to read in peace in the spare room, despite its lack of heating.
Nora Bartlett first read Jane Austen when she was six years old and continued to read and re-read the novels for the next six decades. She discusses the way one’s reading experience of Austen changes over time, the way we never step into the same river or the same novel twice (although people watching re-runs of the 1995 Andrew Davies Pride and Prejudice probably are stepping into the same river twice). The paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice accompanied Nora to palliative chemotherapy sessions and a few days before she died, she fought through the fog of morphine to send an email: ‘Jane, this is idle in the extreme, but when you are back could you send me the quote from Maria Edgeworth about touch in ch. 9 in Persuasion—the letter to the friend saying something like, “could you not feel it?” I am sure it must be in X’s book, but weirdly I can't find that–penalty for lumping together books by size and not alphabetically by author, grrr (to self) wonder if it is in the Norton, hmmm....’. ‘Hmmm’ was one of Nora’s characteristic shorthand expressions for ‘this is worth pondering further’. All the things she singled out for attention were worth pondering further, and this was no exception: Edgeworth’s sentence moves by steps into the feelings of Anne Elliot: ‘Don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don’t you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?’ ‘Don’t you in her place feel?’ goes to the heart of why Austen has been such a great escape through lockdown—her novels remind us of what it is to crave and finally to be granted the contact with the rest of the physical world.
‘Jane Austen’s novels are very often treated’, Nora Bartlett writes laughingly, ‘as though they were written by a brainy middle-aged spinster who was not much interested in bodies […] but even her later novels, concern themselves with the workings of the body—sick or well’. This new book highlights the deft touches with which Austen conveys our dependence on the tactile. Here, Nora illuminates, for example, Austen’s capture of the thrilling shock when Marianne Dashwood is lifted up by Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility:
He lifts her without hesitating (‘without farther delay’), despite her maidenly protests, and ‘doesn’t let go’ until he sees her safe. Here he shows a readiness to touch, to act, both strength and tenderness. He is going to turn out to be a cad in Volume II, but before we are distracted by that, we ought to note how much male nursing he seems capable of giving. The key seems to be the capacity for gentle, but unhesitating, action.
This extract is from ‘Courting and Nursing in Jane Austen’s novels’. It was written a long time before the pandemic, but with the timeless relevance of all really good literary criticism, Nora Bartlett goes on to show how Austen relays the physical actuality of the sickbed, the mental stamina required for nursing, and those steely, compassionate feats of repetition before which we all now stand in awe. Penetrating analysis tracks the crisis of Marianne’s fever, alert to the way that one long chapter watches Marianne, hour by hour, through Elinor’s eyes, and through the interventions of Mrs Jennings:
It is beautifully staged: Mrs. Jennings thinks that Marianne will die and surely her expectation, withheld from Elinor through an uncharacteristic tact, but communicated in her more usual incontinent fashion to her maid, is part of the brilliant presentation of Marianne’s illness, in which the steep rise of her suffering and delirium, the depiction of Elinor’s terror when Marianne becomes irrational and babbles incoherently about their mother and London all has to be attended to closely by the reader, for whom after however many readings Marianne’s recovery is always an achievement and a relief. And surely a part of the technical production of that suspense, that uncertainty about these events, even for the re-reader who has long known the outcome, is the weight of Mrs. Jennings’s pessimism, Mrs. Jennings who has nursed her husband in his last illness and perhaps has sat by many deathbeds. This pessimism adds substance to the undeniable drama of this episode, as the old lady’s unwise communication to the maidservant is brought home to the waiting and exhausted Elinor through her second sleepless night: ‘the servant […] tortured her more, with hints of what her mistress had always thought’.
The insight about how indirectly information about a patient is often delivered is strikingly original, as is Nora Bartlett’s sensitivity to the way Austen’s prose recreates the hesitant perception that a very sick patient might have turned a corner:
This scene is so beautifully constructed that, though I have read the novel many times and I know Marianne gets better, I cannot stop reading until the night is over and the apothecary had made his second visit in twelve hours (those were the days) and ‘About noon […] she began—but with a caution—a dread of disappointment, which for some time kept her silent, even to her friend—to fancy, to hope she could perceive a slight amendment in her sister’s pulse’.
Nora Bartlett’s book casts new light on Austen’s ability to make touch come alive; she shows us exactly why Anne’s response to Captain Wentworth’s assistance with the clinging child is so tumultuous. Calling it a ‘whirling moment’ of physical intensity, Nora Bartlett traces Austen’s skill in building up Anne’s long years of sensory deprivation, the flickering hope that her self-imposed sentence is at an end, the agony of suspense before the pulse of her life begins again after an almost unbearable postponement. All these insights and more make this warm, funny, compelling book a remarkable companion to the companionship of Austen’s fiction.
Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by Nora Bartlett, edited by Jane Stabler is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in paperback, hardback and various eBook formats here.
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