In Britain in the 1870s, when Eliza Orme began to think about going to university to study law, there were no women lawyers because the institutions that controlled entry to the profession were open only to men. The nominal reasons for this prohibition were taken very seriously, although they sound ridiculous today: in court, a lady barrister might hear evidence of sexual misconduct that was deemed unsuitable for her feminine sensibilities; she would have to wear a wig, which would make her look ridiculous; her brain was not designed to encompass the logic necessary to deploying legal argument; or the intellectual labour might impair her body for its foreordained purpose, that of childbirth. And so on.
Nevertheless, to coin a phrase, she persisted. University College London permitted women to study law, although there was no pathway from academic degree to credentialed practice. Eliza Orme earned her degree, and found ways to work around the professional barriers without challenging them directly. She earned good money and developed a reputation for competence and responsibility. In her own words, Orme was ‘hopelessly practical’. Some twenty-five years later, when a handful of younger women were making yet another (unsuccessful) effort to attain official recognition as pupil barristers, she was interviewed about her own career. The interviewer, rather than pursue Orme’s success in property conveyancing, expressed concern that male lawyers would be too gentlemanly to engage in acrimonious courtroom debate with a lady:
In 1903, the Law Journal asked ‘Would not the introduction of women into the field of advocacy hinder the administration of justice by checking the fighting instincts of the chivalrous barrister? Is not the struggle in the Courts too keen and personal to admit of the rivalry of women?
Eliza Orme responded: No undesirable results have followed the admission of women to the legal profession in America. I have met a number of American advocates of both sexes, and have been told that any sense of strangeness has soon disappeared. I cannot believe that any man would be less vigorous in the cause of his client merely because he was opposed by a woman. The forensic attitude would be too strong, and no woman who succeeded in becoming a member of the Bar would expect or wish it to be otherwise.
Here is a splendid recording of the London actor Julia Pascal, of the Pascal Theatre Company, reading those magnificently dismissive words. Eliza Orme doesn’t engage with the Law Journal’s provocative question on its own trivial terms. Instead, she takes the opportunity to report on her experience of a more enlightened jurisdiction. She reminds the hapless reporter that a well-trained lawyer is a lawyer, regardless of gender.
Law recording
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When I first started the research that eventually became Eliza Orme’s Ambitions, it was before the days of search engines. In libraries I found this Law Journal article, some journalism that Orme had written, and a little about her family. I learned that she had been involved in politics, as a member of the Liberal Party and a leader of the Women’s Liberal Federation. In 1892 she headed up a government sub-commission on the employment of women in various industries including bartending and metal forging. A few years later she reported on the conditions of women in prison. That was all good to know, but unsatisfying. It didn’t help me understand how she might have felt, in 1903, still being asked the same question she’d been answering throughout her working life: how is it possible for a woman to be a lawyer?
Recently and with the help of digital searches and online sources, I have learned enough to guess what was behind Eliza Orme’s sarcastic remarks about gendered politeness having no place in a court of law. I can also speculate on what she might have been thinking during the quarter-century between the interview and her own legal education and training: I believe the answer lies in her ambition. It was wildly ambitious to aim to practice law on the same basis of men, but I believe she wanted even more: to challenge the assumptions that excluded her from something else lawyers could do, namely use their professional experience and connections to launch a career in parliamentary politics.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Sous la direction de Benjamin Coriat, Justine Loizeau et Nicole Alix
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Parler aujourd’hui des communs de proximité répond à au moins deux actualités. Dans un contexte où l’impératif de la transition écologique se consolide tandis que la dégradation des services publics sur les territoires ne permet plus de pallier les exclusions créées par un marché lucratif en extension sur de nouvelles sphères de l’activité humaine (social, santé, culture, éducation, accès à une alimentation digne…), les initiatives citoyennes qui prennent en charge l’intérêt général se multiplient, y compris dans des domaines où on ne les attendait pas. Comment nommer ces initiatives de proximité?
Par ailleurs, la théorie et la pratique des communs ne cesse de s’enrichir dans la lignée légitimée par Elinor Ostrom. On parle désormais de communs fonciers, numériques, urbains, ou même globaux. Pourquoi ne pas ajouter les communs de services de proximité?
Dans cet ouvrage collectif, nous explorons des initiatives et réfléchissons à partir d’une définition proposée par Benjamin Coriat. Nous caractérisons les communs de proximité par trois critères interreliés : (1) une initiative citoyenne et autogouvernée, (2) dont la visée est le service de l’intérêt général dont l’accès reste ouvert et (3) ancrée sur le territoire et respectueuse des écosystèmes dans lesquels elle est insérée.
La Coop des Communs a réuni pendant trois ans des personnes praticiennes et du monde de la recherche qui se sont mis à l’écoute et l’analyse d’autres, actrices de terrain venues présenter leurs expériences et leurs questions. Le présent ouvrage est le résultat de ce travail collectif.
Within this issue, you'll discover a wealth of updates, valuable insights, and fantastic new open access books. Prepare to immerse yourself in a realm of knowledge, innovation, and our forthcoming releases. Here's a glimpse of what awaits inside:
Announcements • Exciting Website Updates! • Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series • Share your experience with the OA Books Toolkit • Featured Blog: 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes' • Unveiling 'Prismatic Jane Eyre': A Video Series
Books, Resources and Reviews • Featured Book • New Open Access Publications • Forthcoming Open Access Publications • New Blogs and Resources • Call for Proposals • Latest Reviews
Exciting Website Updates!
We have recently completed a comprehensive update to our website! This update has made it more informative and visually engaging for our readership.
Here are some of the key updates our team has implemented:
Content Refresh: Our team has meticulously updated numerous pages that were previously outdated.
Enhanced Visuals: To improve user experience, our team has incorporated a variety of visuals, including diagrams, graphs, and logos, across various pages (see, for example, Our Vision). These additions not only make the content more visually appealing but also aid in conveying complex information effectively.
New Page - 'Our Reach': Our team has introduced a new page titled 'Our Reach' (accessible here) which meticulously showcases our readership statistics. This page serves as a testament to our impact and is prominently linked from our home page for easy access.
Improved Organization: To streamline content presentation, our team has relocated information regarding our readership statistics from the open software section to the newly created 'Our Reach' page. This change not only enhances the coherence of our website but also addresses previous concerns about content alignment.
We invite you all to explore the revamped website and discover the wealth of new information our team has meticulously curated. Take a moment to visit the updated site and delve into the latest content
Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series
We are delighted to unveil the inaugural book of the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series, a distinguished collaboration between the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews and Open Book Publishers.
The St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series endeavors to enrich scholarly discourse surrounding the historical culture of the French-speaking world. Covering a diverse array of themes—from political and military history to literary culture—the series is committed to publishing concise yet illuminating monographs and studies.
Each title in the series undergoes rigorous peer review by our editorial board and external assessors, ensuring academic integrity and excellence. Available in both digital and hard copy formats, these publications will contribute significantly to our understanding of French history and culture.
Stay tuned for more groundbreaking publications from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series!
Share your experience with the OA Books Toolkit
Over three years after the launch of the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, a round of redesign and enrichment with new, research-based content is taking place this year. To make sure that the Toolkit offer users what they need, we’re reaching out to you, as users of the Toolkit. Please help us to redesign by sharing your user experience in this survey. It will take less than 5 minutes to complete and the deadline for responses is Thursday 29 February. We look forward to your feedback!
Of course, please feel free to forward this survey to other users, such as your colleagues or authors. For more information, please contact Lotte van Aalten, Publisher Relations Manager at the OAPEN Foundation: l.vanAalten@oapen.org
Featured Blog: 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes'
Dive into the latest insights on open-access publishing in 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes', a new blog post written by Geoffrey Khan. Delve into the foundational principles behind the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series, its mission to democratize access to Semitic studies, and the transformative impact of open-access initiatives on academic scholarship and global knowledge exchange. Click the link to embark on a journey of scholarly exploration: https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/open-access-book-publishing-a-series-editor-writes/.
Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge, is the series editor of Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures, an open access book series published by OBP. He first delivered this post as a talk at a seminar co-hosted by CRASSH and the University of Cambridge’s Research Culture Team on 28 November 2023: 'Should I consider publishing my monograph open access?'
Join the minds behind this book as they delve into the intricacies of their essays, offering a thought-provoking journey through the prism of languages and cultures that shape Charlotte Brontë's timeless classic. In this exclusive series of videos, each author prvides a unique perspective on their contribution to the collaborative work.
edited by Floriana Cerniglia, Francesco Saraceno and Andrew Watt
We are thrilled to announce the release of the fourth installment in our 'European Public Investment Outlook' series. Tackling the pressing issue of financing essential investment amidst high levels of public debt, this book stands as a beacon of insight for governments grappling with this complex challenge across Europe.
Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook brings together a wealth of expertise from academics, researchers at public policy institutes, and international governance bodies. Through meticulous analysis and thoughtful proposals, the contributors illuminate the current landscape and offer feasible solutions to this critical dilemma.
This book offers a comprehensive examination of cross-continental policies and trends while delving into specific contexts in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Part II of the book ventures into the challenges of financing climate investments, the role of national promotional banks, EU budget reform, and evolving trends in tax progressivity.
A must-read for economists, policymakers, and anyone invested in European public policy, this book provides invaluable insights into the intricacies of EU governance and institutions. Whether you're seeking to implement effective policies or understand the evolving landscape of public finance, this Open Access title is an indispensable resource.
Don't miss out on this essential addition to the discourse on European public investment. Grab your copy today and embark on a journey towards informed decision-making and impactful policy implementation.
Endorsements
This book should be the go-to-book for anybody working on European Union fiscal rules and their potential interactions with public investment and the fight against global warming.
Prof Olivier Blanchard Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
Europe's growth prospects hinge on balancing sustainable public finances with the need for greater investments in our common priorities, from the green and digital transitions to our competitiveness and security. This requires a reformed framework of fiscal rules and new tools and resources at EU level. The 2023 European Public Investment Outlook is the go-to text to understand the trends shaping this debate and explore possible solutions.
Dobbs-Allsopp, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, explicitly approaches Whitman from the perspective of a biblical scholar. Utilising his wealth of expertise in this field, he constructs a compelling, erudite and methodical argument for the King James Bible’s importance in the evolution of Whitman’s style – from his signature long lines to the prevalence of parallelism and tendency towards parataxis in his works.
This edited volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present.
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur'an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period.
Dive into thought-provoking philosophical insights on limitarianism, now accessible to Spanish-speaking readers worldwide. Explore the ethical considerations, societal implications, and philosophical inquiries presented in this groundbreaking work.
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
This book draws on the life stories told by shepherds, farmers, and their families in the Andalusian region in Spain to sketch out the landscapes, actions, and challenges of people who work in pastoralism. Their narratives highlight how local practices interact with regional and European communities and policies, and they help us see a broader role for extensive grazing practices and sustainability.
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
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 Communicationsis a 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 seriespublishes 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.
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.
This book is a fitting tribute to the life and work of William Moorcroft (1872-1945), one of the most celebrated and successful artist potters of his time. […] Mallinson draws on extensive primary sources throughout the book, combining Moorcroft’s personal archive of diaries, notebooks and letters with company minutes and ledgers to give a fascinating insight into the relationships and financial realities involved in running a small pottery in early 20th-century Britain. Authorship, recognition and reputation are recurring themes presented through the lens of contemporary press coverage and reviews. Moorcroft’s project is also helpfully placed in context with the shifting debates in art and design and the work of other makers, from Pilkington’s and Howson Taylor to Leach and Staite Murray. This scholarly, detailed approach gives a strong impression of Moorcroft’s pioneering spirit […].
Florence Tyler Newsletter of The Decorative Arts Society, vol. 130, 2024.
This book arises out of a body of work that was explicitly pushing back on the Exercise paradigm, i.e., it is pushing back on perspectives such as the Acquisition metaphor wherein “knowledge” is something objectively measurable and individually held which is accrued through exercising the brain. Instead, the metaphor of “Landscapes” views learning as inherently complex, dialogic (collectivist), and cultural. [...] Landscapes are not objects. Landscapes aren’t even nouns. Landscapes are verbs: Living things, in a constant state of happening. [...] This book is not the only work to embrace the metaphor of Landscapes, but it is a fantastic collection of dialogically constructed work that centers this liberatory metaphor. [...] That this book is written and constructed in a way that will invite both newcomers and longstanding users of this metaphor to gain insight and push their understanding further speaks well to the care the Authors took in its construction.
David M. Bowers "Book Review: Landscapes of Investigation: Contributions to Critical Mathematics Education (2022) (M. G. Penteado & O. Skovsmose, Eds.)". Journal for Theoretical & Marginal Mathematics Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 2023. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10440243
By studying the complex and multifaceted relationships that people have with media technology, this book makes a significant contribution to the area of media studies. This book is an invaluable tool for researchers, academics, and students working on the subject because it draws on several different fields and creates a new framework and instrument [...] Despite the subject matter being broadened by the sheer number of disciplines used, the author does a commendable job of condensing the most relevant concepts into a meaningful body of work. Media ecology, post-humanism, complexity theory, and post-phenomenology are all properly employed in the crafting of the instrument used by the author to draw his conclusions [...] Academics in media and communication studies, philosophy of technology, and post-humanities can all find value in the arguments posed by Lewis here. The author’s style and thorough treatment of the topic add further credibility to the argument presented, making it effective in convincing readers of its validity. Alternatively, such professionals can improve their competencies by leveraging this information into actionable insight to be applied in the frontline.
Hanan Elsayed Information, Communication & Society, 2023. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2023.2252480
In this interesting book - which employs diverse sources of evidence - Morag Grant examines the song in its pre- and post-Burns contexts, and in some of its international guises (including its German reception), bringing her discussion up to the modern day. [...]This is an important study for scholars of oral transmission, as well as for those interested in the transmission of Scottish culture more generally, and Morag Grant is to be congratulated on the detailed research and analysis which underpin this scholarly yet accessible book.
Life, Re-Scaled provides much-needed rigorous analyses of the affective and aesthetic potentials of literature and performance to engage with, and attend to, the heterogenous scales of life across microbiological and planetary scales [...] What is particularly salient about Life, Re-Scaled is that it includes methodologies in which science and art are not domains that merely influence each other: the contributors explore the “cross-currents” and “cross fertilizing of imaginaries” across contemporary artistic work, cultural representational popularizations of the life sciences, and philosophy.
Dr Sarah Hopfinger Performing Arts Journal, 2024. doi:10.1162/pajj_r_00704
On an almost visceral level, we may likewise remark that states of “latency” involve downward movement, as in the case of something falling by the wayside and lying unnoticed until its presence is felt.
— Hans Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present
Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”
This work speaks to a recurrent theme in my life: namely, my pervasive sense of feeling out-of-sync with the world, or as Vonnegut puts it, “unstuck in time.” In this essay, I want to think about latency—essentially, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points—as a poignant extended metaphor for the temporal disjunctures of the present moment. Indeed, the frantic mantra of “being present,” as popularized among Western spiritualists by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now(1997), is a kind of antiphrasis, a phrase which evokes precisely the opposite thought. In this case, the power of now simultaneously diagnoses the perils of asynchronicity. And yet, perhaps there are some counterintuitive reasons why latency might be politically productive at times, as I will discuss in the sections that follow.
Fittingly, the concept of “echoic memory” suggests that the brain acts as a kind of temporary holding tank for sounds, not unlike an old wooden chest full of memorabilia. The difference, in this case, is that echoic memory is a short-term storage system. One example of this memory structure at work is when someone asks “What did you say?” only to answer their own question after a half-second, since they are somehow able to retrieve this latent information, one might say unconsciously, from the holding tank.
As a sound artist, I am interested in multiple facets of latency, from its aesthetics to its politics, and especially its psychoacoustics, the way that sound acts tangibly upon bodies and minds. This post will examine how audio latency encapsulates the paradoxical tension between the desire for sonic immanence—in the sense of longing for an immediate experience—and the frustrations of technology, its delays and disruptions. A prime example of this tension is that you and I could be seated right beside each other and still experience a laggy phone call. The paradoxical element starts to emerge when one tries to achieve zero latency, since any signal must travel through space and time, just like Achilles and the tortoise, and thus subject itself to delay.
Latency, as such, is a shifty concept. By one definition, it refers to any length of interval between impulse and response, including the time it takes to respond to a handwritten letter, or, in my case, the rediscovery of an old book after twenty-something years. By another definition, latency refers to all manner of system delays, including the quality of a network connection, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points. The term might also be familiar from biology or psychology, where it refers to anything hidden or dormant that has not yet manifested, like a disease or an unconscious desire. Another context in which the term frequently shows up is laboratory studies, measuring the delay between some kind of sensory stimulus and reaction, such as a honeybee’s conditioned response to a scent. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, “audio latency” refers to a very short period of delay that causes sound to lag behind imagery, or, ultimately, behind itself.
The latency test video above provides a helpful listening exercise. Though such small intervals of time, measured in milliseconds, are hard to conceptualize in the abstract, they are jarringly comprehensible as sound. With just five milliseconds of latency, a chorus effect is applied to the experimenter’s finger snap, which now sounds as though it has been placed inside a drainpipe. At ten milliseconds of latency, one can already hear two distinct transients, otherwise known as amplitude spikes, where the sound of the snap abruptly begins. By fifty milliseconds, a more dramatic delay effect emerges, and it sounds as though the finger snap is being pulled apart. This bifurcation process culminates at three hundred milliseconds, when the concept of “latency” begins to overlap with that of “delay,” such that there are now two distinct snaps.
Latency, then, can be both a problem and an intentional effect. If you have ever tried to record an acoustic guitar, or a vocal track, on an outdated computer, you may have encountered this phenomenon in the form of a technological issue. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, the active track in your audio workstation is armed, headphone monitoring is turned on, and you begin to strum or sing. To your dismay, the sound you hear from the computer starts to fall behind the sounds you are making in the real world. Not only does the recording sound off, and out of time, but it becomes physically impossible to play an instrument when your fingers and ears are thrown out of alignment, like attempting to ride the backwards brain bicycle.
Diagnosing and solving latency issues is another game entirely: lowering the buffer size, enabling delay compensation, or simply going rogue and recording without monitoring playback, with the hope of nudging the recording back into alignment after the fact. In a home studio, sometimes a full half of the day’s recording session will get swallowed up by these technological battles, trying to shrink latency down to smaller and smaller increments. Given the sheer number of YouTube tutorials dedicated to reducing latency, it is clear how pervasive this issue is for musicians and audio engineers.
As Mitch Gallagher suggests in the video above, some singers can detect latency as short as three milliseconds, which can significantly throw off their performance. If you have ever been in a Zoom call where you can hear yourself through the other person’s speaker, this feeling will be all too familiar. This is not unlike a less aggressive form of speech jamming, which refers to a kind of crowd-control tactic employed by the military in order to break someone’s concentration using delayed audio. Known as “acoustic hailing and disruption” (AHAD), this process makes it very difficult to speak consistently, because a live recording of one’s voice is beamed instantaneously back at the speaker with a certain length of delay, in milliseconds, as demonstrated in a 1974 piece by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, called Boomerang. As with the backwards brain bicycle, but perhaps far less benign, latency can take the form of weaponized confusion. The same principle, however, is used for positive ends in the case of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) devices which people who stutter use as an assistive technology.
Being out of sync with the present moment, in other words, can be both disorienting and orienting. Latency can mean one thing for a musician trying to lay down a vocal track, but something else entirely for a political protestor attempting to address a crowd, or someone consciously manipulating their own speech patterns.
As a form of sonic violence, weaponized latency has an ancient Greek precedent in the myth of Echo, a nymph who is cursed with repeating the last words spoken to her, such that she can no longer express herself. This archetypal figure, both gendered and pathologized, embodies a form of perpetual exclusion from discourse. Speaking to this subject, Katie Kadue underlines a pertinent quote in literary critic Barbara Johnson’s essay, “Muteness Envy”: Feminist criticism has been pointing this out for at least thirty years. But why is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?” At the same time as Echo’s curse represents a metaphorical silencing, it also signifies something else in its insistence on rhetorical conformity, denying and dislocating her from the present of her own thoughts—a “living death,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit.
If patriarchy loves the sound of its own voice, then capitalism loves the beat of its own drum, which speeds up or slows down depending on competing urgencies. Ultimately, this manufactured present moves much faster than the embodied present, moving at such a rate that one cannot even decipher the words that one is meant to repeat.
To operate outside of this temporal structure then, is to move and make sound at a tempo that does not match the dominant rhythms of hypercapitalism. To this end, Fred Moten quotes the following passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind.” Moten calls this “improvisational immanence,” characterized by “disruptive surprise.” Bringing these concepts together, Fiamma Montezemolo’s Echo (2014) is a work of video art that “disrupts and dissents from the ways that race and gender are produced and experienced through sound and listening,” to quote Lois Klassen and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. It does so by assembling an archive of earlier artworks in which women share their personal testimonies of discrimination and inequality, along with hopes for the future. Through this archive, Montezemolo helps these voices to reverberate, latently, in the present. With this in mind, one begins to hear how latency can function both as a barrier, as well as a boon, to expressivity. Especially in those cases where the original sound might have gone unheard, or was actively obstructed, there is always the possibility of a disruptive re-sounding.
In practice, audio latency can often feel like a curse, and it is difficult to see the upsides. In the recording studio, it can turn even the most fluid riff into a halting mess, interrupting creative flow with high-tech tedium. As Rebekah Wilson points out in her study of networked music performances, these technological failures have “aesthetic implications” beyond a mere computer glitch, insofar as rhythmic music is much harder to coordinate over long distances; more than anything, latency “affects time keeping and human-level rhythms” (Wilson 2020).
Must audio latency always be met with resistance, however? No doubt, such glitches could be treated as opportunities for creative misuse. What might happen, for example, were someone to treat these rhythmic glitches as an intentional musical element or a compositional technique reminiscent of a musical canon? As discussed in a previous post, Eleni Ikoniadou presents such thought experiments in The Rhythmic Event (2014), where the author asks what alternative modes of expression might arise when we are able to “twist chronology and rethink the latent tendencies of the event, outside the tyranny of the ticking clock” (68). Latency takes us off the grid and into the abstract, unquantized space of the timeline, where notes are free-floating, and other temporalities become possible, as in Ellison’s description of the jazz musician who plays behind or ahead of the beat, while still remaining “in time,” moving within a loose present that is spacious enough for jazz artists to name it “the pocket.”
Pondering the relationship of “latency” to the present moment, I am reminded of Boris Groys’ definition of the contemporary: “To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time.’” For the percussionist whose dexterity has been scrambled by latency issues, to be a “comrade of time,” in the words of Groys, would mean “collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” This is a counterintuitive approach, however, which does not call for latency to be fixed, necessarily, but rather to be adopted as a political and aesthetic strategy.
The laggy outbursts of latency belong to the anti-capitalist “ritual of wasting time,” in resistance to “contemporary product-oriented civilization,” which would have us chase ultra-low latency for the sake of faster sports betting and stock trading. This ritualistic rejection of capitalist time resonates with Kemi Adeyemi’s description of “strategic pattern interruptions,” in a previous article, where the author shows how “lean” (a narcotic drink consumed by some rappers) is absorbed into the slowed-down aesthetics of their music, in objection to “the demands the neoliberal state places on the black body.” In this way, Adeyemi underscores the racial politics of latencies, particularly in the way that the “dissociative pleasures controlled substances offer to black people have been historically criminalized, and radically different sentencing guidelines continue to be handed down,” depending on the drug.
Where the cocaine-fuelled algorithmic traders of Wall Street chase a asymptotic present in their attempt to reach zero latency (transfers are now measured in picoseconds), contemporary sound artists might explore more audaciously the latent present, wherein one moment, one sound, is always imbricated in the next. To quote Groys once more: “we are familiar with the critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence.”
Such absent presences are reflected in one of the secondary definitions of latency (as concealment). For instance, Alan Licht references Alvin Lucier’s famous sound art piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, as an example of a room’s latent resonant frequencies, which are amplified via a feedback loop. Aptly, room tone is also referred to as “presence” in the film industry. Lucier’s piece resonates with Groys’ model for the prototypical time-based artist: Sisyphus. Like the happy boulder-roller, Lucier commits to a process of absurd repetition, and reveals the present to be, in Groys’ words, “a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future.” In the case of Serres and Holt’s experiment in Boomerang, this rewriting is also an overwriting of thought, with latency preventing the speaker from formulating her next sentence. As if to evoke the dislocation of a time traveler, at one point Holt says, “I am not where I am.” With the undercurrent of cruelty running throughout this performance piece, the artists demonstrate the disembodying effects of latency and its potency as a metaphor for systemic threats to women’s self-expression.
Groys also mentions Francis Alÿs’ animated film, Song For Lupita (1998) in which a woman pours water back and forth between two glasses, in a gesture of anti-capitalist counterproductivity. Here, it is worth noting the discrepancy in attitudes between the tragic male heroism of Sisyphus and the cursed mimicry of Echo, whereby one is celebrated for his resistance in the face of futility, whereas the other is not often mythologized in the same way, though women working in contemporary sound art have begun to redress this representational imbalance by mobilizing the concept of subversive difference. The Alÿs animation linked above takes a similar but slightly different approach, of subversive indifference, where pointless repetition pushes back against capitalism’s intolerance of delay (unless it serves the status quo, e.g., climate inaction). Underscored by lyrics which repeat the phrase “mañana, mañana,” the score reflects this theme of deferral while also indicating that actions taken (or not taken) today might have a delayed effect tomorrow.
As I work through the second draft of this essay, I can hear the boomerang of latency returning to me, offering another chance to rethink, reformulate, reword, and re-listen. Much like how latency has the potential to alienate performers from the flow of a recording session, it can often feel to me as though I am permanently trailing behind the sonic present, caught in its slipstream, an exasperated Achilles chasing after the tortoise of time. As I type these words, I can just barely sense the time it takes the letters to leave my fingers through the keyboard and appear on screen. I think about the illusion of instantaneity, and how the typewriter was a constant reminder of this delay between the exciter of the key and the resonator of the page. Suddenly I can hear the letters smacking the screen. I feel anxiously attuned to the basic math of my estrangement, knowing that sound travels at just over a thousand feet per second.
As a matter of fact, this means that my sonic present and yours are subject to a proximity effect, depending on who is closer to the megaphone. Sometimes it can feel like one is always trying to make sense of a belated reality. And yet, old books are often showing up just when they are needed most, and it is in this way that “intense collective potentials hover as forms in the present,” in the words of Lisa Robertson. The poet reminds us that not only is every historical moment charged with the latent potential to act, but that such political actions are latent in language, surviving as poems and essays “across long durations,” ready to reach someone in a new instant.
Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and postdoctoral research fellow based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His current book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer, he has presented his work widely throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, collaborating with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Magazinist, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.
—
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On an almost visceral level, we may likewise remark that states of “latency” involve downward movement, as in the case of something falling by the wayside and lying unnoticed until its presence is felt.
— Hans Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present
Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”
This work speaks to a recurrent theme in my life: namely, my pervasive sense of feeling out-of-sync with the world, or as Vonnegut puts it, “unstuck in time.” In this essay, I want to think about latency—essentially, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points—as a poignant extended metaphor for the temporal disjunctures of the present moment. Indeed, the frantic mantra of “being present,” as popularized among Western spiritualists by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now(1997), is a kind of antiphrasis, a phrase which evokes precisely the opposite thought. In this case, the power of now simultaneously diagnoses the perils of asynchronicity. And yet, perhaps there are some counterintuitive reasons why latency might be politically productive at times, as I will discuss in the sections that follow.
Fittingly, the concept of “echoic memory” suggests that the brain acts as a kind of temporary holding tank for sounds, not unlike an old wooden chest full of memorabilia. The difference, in this case, is that echoic memory is a short-term storage system. One example of this memory structure at work is when someone asks “What did you say?” only to answer their own question after a half-second, since they are somehow able to retrieve this latent information, one might say unconsciously, from the holding tank.
As a sound artist, I am interested in multiple facets of latency, from its aesthetics to its politics, and especially its psychoacoustics, the way that sound acts tangibly upon bodies and minds. This post will examine how audio latency encapsulates the paradoxical tension between the desire for sonic immanence—in the sense of longing for an immediate experience—and the frustrations of technology, its delays and disruptions. A prime example of this tension is that you and I could be seated right beside each other and still experience a laggy phone call. The paradoxical element starts to emerge when one tries to achieve zero latency, since any signal must travel through space and time, just like Achilles and the tortoise, and thus subject itself to delay.
Latency, as such, is a shifty concept. By one definition, it refers to any length of interval between impulse and response, including the time it takes to respond to a handwritten letter, or, in my case, the rediscovery of an old book after twenty-something years. By another definition, latency refers to all manner of system delays, including the quality of a network connection, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points. The term might also be familiar from biology or psychology, where it refers to anything hidden or dormant that has not yet manifested, like a disease or an unconscious desire. Another context in which the term frequently shows up is laboratory studies, measuring the delay between some kind of sensory stimulus and reaction, such as a honeybee’s conditioned response to a scent. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, “audio latency” refers to a very short period of delay that causes sound to lag behind imagery, or, ultimately, behind itself.
The latency test video above provides a helpful listening exercise. Though such small intervals of time, measured in milliseconds, are hard to conceptualize in the abstract, they are jarringly comprehensible as sound. With just five milliseconds of latency, a chorus effect is applied to the experimenter’s finger snap, which now sounds as though it has been placed inside a drainpipe. At ten milliseconds of latency, one can already hear two distinct transients, otherwise known as amplitude spikes, where the sound of the snap abruptly begins. By fifty milliseconds, a more dramatic delay effect emerges, and it sounds as though the finger snap is being pulled apart. This bifurcation process culminates at three hundred milliseconds, when the concept of “latency” begins to overlap with that of “delay,” such that there are now two distinct snaps.
Latency, then, can be both a problem and an intentional effect. If you have ever tried to record an acoustic guitar, or a vocal track, on an outdated computer, you may have encountered this phenomenon in the form of a technological issue. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, the active track in your audio workstation is armed, headphone monitoring is turned on, and you begin to strum or sing. To your dismay, the sound you hear from the computer starts to fall behind the sounds you are making in the real world. Not only does the recording sound off, and out of time, but it becomes physically impossible to play an instrument when your fingers and ears are thrown out of alignment, like attempting to ride the backwards brain bicycle.
Diagnosing and solving latency issues is another game entirely: lowering the buffer size, enabling delay compensation, or simply going rogue and recording without monitoring playback, with the hope of nudging the recording back into alignment after the fact. In a home studio, sometimes a full half of the day’s recording session will get swallowed up by these technological battles, trying to shrink latency down to smaller and smaller increments. Given the sheer number of YouTube tutorials dedicated to reducing latency, it is clear how pervasive this issue is for musicians and audio engineers.
As Mitch Gallagher suggests in the video above, some singers can detect latency as short as three milliseconds, which can significantly throw off their performance. If you have ever been in a Zoom call where you can hear yourself through the other person’s speaker, this feeling will be all too familiar. This is not unlike a less aggressive form of speech jamming, which refers to a kind of crowd-control tactic employed by the military in order to break someone’s concentration using delayed audio. Known as “acoustic hailing and disruption” (AHAD), this process makes it very difficult to speak consistently, because a live recording of one’s voice is beamed instantaneously back at the speaker with a certain length of delay, in milliseconds, as demonstrated in a 1974 piece by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, called Boomerang. As with the backwards brain bicycle, but perhaps far less benign, latency can take the form of weaponized confusion. The same principle, however, is used for positive ends in the case of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) devices which people who stutter use as an assistive technology.
Being out of sync with the present moment, in other words, can be both disorienting and orienting. Latency can mean one thing for a musician trying to lay down a vocal track, but something else entirely for a political protestor attempting to address a crowd, or someone consciously manipulating their own speech patterns.
As a form of sonic violence, weaponized latency has an ancient Greek precedent in the myth of Echo, a nymph who is cursed with repeating the last words spoken to her, such that she can no longer express herself. This archetypal figure, both gendered and pathologized, embodies a form of perpetual exclusion from discourse. Speaking to this subject, Katie Kadue underlines a pertinent quote in literary critic Barbara Johnson’s essay, “Muteness Envy”: Feminist criticism has been pointing this out for at least thirty years. But why is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?” At the same time as Echo’s curse represents a metaphorical silencing, it also signifies something else in its insistence on rhetorical conformity, denying and dislocating her from the present of her own thoughts—a “living death,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit.
If patriarchy loves the sound of its own voice, then capitalism loves the beat of its own drum, which speeds up or slows down depending on competing urgencies. Ultimately, this manufactured present moves much faster than the embodied present, moving at such a rate that one cannot even decipher the words that one is meant to repeat.
To operate outside of this temporal structure then, is to move and make sound at a tempo that does not match the dominant rhythms of hypercapitalism. To this end, Fred Moten quotes the following passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind.” Moten calls this “improvisational immanence,” characterized by “disruptive surprise.” Bringing these concepts together, Fiamma Montezemolo’s Echo (2014) is a work of video art that “disrupts and dissents from the ways that race and gender are produced and experienced through sound and listening,” to quote Lois Klassen and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. It does so by assembling an archive of earlier artworks in which women share their personal testimonies of discrimination and inequality, along with hopes for the future. Through this archive, Montezemolo helps these voices to reverberate, latently, in the present. With this in mind, one begins to hear how latency can function both as a barrier, as well as a boon, to expressivity. Especially in those cases where the original sound might have gone unheard, or was actively obstructed, there is always the possibility of a disruptive re-sounding.
In practice, audio latency can often feel like a curse, and it is difficult to see the upsides. In the recording studio, it can turn even the most fluid riff into a halting mess, interrupting creative flow with high-tech tedium. As Rebekah Wilson points out in her study of networked music performances, these technological failures have “aesthetic implications” beyond a mere computer glitch, insofar as rhythmic music is much harder to coordinate over long distances; more than anything, latency “affects time keeping and human-level rhythms” (Wilson 2020).
Must audio latency always be met with resistance, however? No doubt, such glitches could be treated as opportunities for creative misuse. What might happen, for example, were someone to treat these rhythmic glitches as an intentional musical element or a compositional technique reminiscent of a musical canon? As discussed in a previous post, Eleni Ikoniadou presents such thought experiments in The Rhythmic Event (2014), where the author asks what alternative modes of expression might arise when we are able to “twist chronology and rethink the latent tendencies of the event, outside the tyranny of the ticking clock” (68). Latency takes us off the grid and into the abstract, unquantized space of the timeline, where notes are free-floating, and other temporalities become possible, as in Ellison’s description of the jazz musician who plays behind or ahead of the beat, while still remaining “in time,” moving within a loose present that is spacious enough for jazz artists to name it “the pocket.”
Pondering the relationship of “latency” to the present moment, I am reminded of Boris Groys’ definition of the contemporary: “To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time.’” For the percussionist whose dexterity has been scrambled by latency issues, to be a “comrade of time,” in the words of Groys, would mean “collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” This is a counterintuitive approach, however, which does not call for latency to be fixed, necessarily, but rather to be adopted as a political and aesthetic strategy.
The laggy outbursts of latency belong to the anti-capitalist “ritual of wasting time,” in resistance to “contemporary product-oriented civilization,” which would have us chase ultra-low latency for the sake of faster sports betting and stock trading. This ritualistic rejection of capitalist time resonates with Kemi Adeyemi’s description of “strategic pattern interruptions,” in a previous article, where the author shows how “lean” (a narcotic drink consumed by some rappers) is absorbed into the slowed-down aesthetics of their music, in objection to “the demands the neoliberal state places on the black body.” In this way, Adeyemi underscores the racial politics of latencies, particularly in the way that the “dissociative pleasures controlled substances offer to black people have been historically criminalized, and radically different sentencing guidelines continue to be handed down,” depending on the drug.
Where the cocaine-fuelled algorithmic traders of Wall Street chase a asymptotic present in their attempt to reach zero latency (transfers are now measured in picoseconds), contemporary sound artists might explore more audaciously the latent present, wherein one moment, one sound, is always imbricated in the next. To quote Groys once more: “we are familiar with the critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence.”
Such absent presences are reflected in one of the secondary definitions of latency (as concealment). For instance, Alan Licht references Alvin Lucier’s famous sound art piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, as an example of a room’s latent resonant frequencies, which are amplified via a feedback loop. Aptly, room tone is also referred to as “presence” in the film industry. Lucier’s piece resonates with Groys’ model for the prototypical time-based artist: Sisyphus. Like the happy boulder-roller, Lucier commits to a process of absurd repetition, and reveals the present to be, in Groys’ words, “a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future.” In the case of Serres and Holt’s experiment in Boomerang, this rewriting is also an overwriting of thought, with latency preventing the speaker from formulating her next sentence. As if to evoke the dislocation of a time traveler, at one point Holt says, “I am not where I am.” With the undercurrent of cruelty running throughout this performance piece, the artists demonstrate the disembodying effects of latency and its potency as a metaphor for systemic threats to women’s self-expression.
Groys also mentions Francis Alÿs’ animated film, Song For Lupita (1998) in which a woman pours water back and forth between two glasses, in a gesture of anti-capitalist counterproductivity. Here, it is worth noting the discrepancy in attitudes between the tragic male heroism of Sisyphus and the cursed mimicry of Echo, whereby one is celebrated for his resistance in the face of futility, whereas the other is not often mythologized in the same way, though women working in contemporary sound art have begun to redress this representational imbalance by mobilizing the concept of subversive difference. The Alÿs animation linked above takes a similar but slightly different approach, of subversive indifference, where pointless repetition pushes back against capitalism’s intolerance of delay (unless it serves the status quo, e.g., climate inaction). Underscored by lyrics which repeat the phrase “mañana, mañana,” the score reflects this theme of deferral while also indicating that actions taken (or not taken) today might have a delayed effect tomorrow.
As I work through the second draft of this essay, I can hear the boomerang of latency returning to me, offering another chance to rethink, reformulate, reword, and re-listen. Much like how latency has the potential to alienate performers from the flow of a recording session, it can often feel to me as though I am permanently trailing behind the sonic present, caught in its slipstream, an exasperated Achilles chasing after the tortoise of time. As I type these words, I can just barely sense the time it takes the letters to leave my fingers through the keyboard and appear on screen. I think about the illusion of instantaneity, and how the typewriter was a constant reminder of this delay between the exciter of the key and the resonator of the page. Suddenly I can hear the letters smacking the screen. I feel anxiously attuned to the basic math of my estrangement, knowing that sound travels at just over a thousand feet per second.
As a matter of fact, this means that my sonic present and yours are subject to a proximity effect, depending on who is closer to the megaphone. Sometimes it can feel like one is always trying to make sense of a belated reality. And yet, old books are often showing up just when they are needed most, and it is in this way that “intense collective potentials hover as forms in the present,” in the words of Lisa Robertson. The poet reminds us that not only is every historical moment charged with the latent potential to act, but that such political actions are latent in language, surviving as poems and essays “across long durations,” ready to reach someone in a new instant.
Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and postdoctoral research fellow based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His current book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer, he has presented his work widely throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, collaborating with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Magazinist, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.
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Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge, is the series editor of Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures, an open access book series published by Open Book Publishers. He first delivered this post as a talk at a seminar co-hosted by CRASSH and the University of Cambridge’s Research Culture Team on 28 November 2023: 'Should I consider publishing my monograph open access?'
This is published by Open Book Publishers in collaboration with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Cambridge. The collaboration with a Faculty of the University consists in the fact that the editors are members of the university and in the fact that the series is partially funded by Trust Funds in the Faculty.
The aim of the series is to publish, in open-access form, monographs in the field of Semitic languages and the cultures associated with speakers of Semitic languages. This series includes philological and linguistic studies of Semitic languages, editions of Semitic texts, and studies of Semitic cultures. Titles in the series cover all periods, traditions and methodological approaches to the field.
Four of the titles in the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series
I established the series for several reasons.
1. As far as I could see there is no other series that covers such a wide range of aspects of the field of Semitic languages. Existing series tend to focus on linguistic and philological studies, or on historical studies. I regarded it as important to have a holistic series including crucially the publication of primary data in the form of text editions and descriptions of languages, as well as analytical studies. It was also important for the series to cover all periods, from ancient to modern. Traditionally these various aspects of the field of Semitic languages and cultures are compartmentalized into different series, which in my opinion was impoverishing the field through over-specialization. This was the key academic case for setting up the series.
2. I wanted the series to be open access since I was acutely aware that books in my field that were published by traditional publishers behind a paywall had very unsatisfactory dissemination. Crucially, they were being bought almost exclusively in wealthy countries by libraries of wealthy universities. I wanted the books to be accessible by everybody who had an interest in them, by those in universities in all countries and also by people who have an interest in acquiring scholarly knowledge but are not formally attached to an academic institution.
3. The field of Semitic languages and cultures, which I have been researching and teaching for several decades, involves the study of languages and cultures of living communities. This applies both to studies of modern languages and cultures and also to studies of pre-modern languages and cultures, since they are part of the heritage of living communities. In the past, the typical practice of academics was to do fieldwork among living communities or to research the history and heritage of living communities and then publish their work in expensive academic books. As a result, the communities whose cultures the academics described could not themselves get access to these descriptions of their own culture. To put it bluntly, it was a form of depredation and asset-stripping that benefited the career of academics but had no benefit for the communities themselves. Open-access publishing is the solution to this immoral practice, since it allows the work of academics to result in a meaningly benefit for the living communities, by ensuring that all members of the communities have access to research of their cultural heritage.
... the communities whose cultures the academics described could not themselves get access to these descriptions of their own culture. To put it bluntly, it was a form of depredation and asset-stripping that benefited the career of academics but had no benefit for the communities themselves.
4. The reason I chose Open Book Publishers as the host of the series was their maximalist approach to open-access publishing. As we all know, nowadays most major academic publishers offer authors the opportunity to make their publications open-access by paying a fee. This is still, however, a very restrictive approach to open-access publishing. Typically only academics with a research grant or substantial departmental research funds can make their book open-access in this way. As a result, many books published by such traditional academic publishers remain behind paywalls and inaccessible to many scholars and inaccessible to most members of living communities whose cultures the books describe. A more satisfactory model is a maximal approach, whereby all authors have the opportunity to publish open access even when they do not have funds to support it. This results in the enrichment of research by disseminating the knowledge of all publications in the series.
The results so far
So far 21 books have been published in the series.
Several of them have received international book prizes.
They have all been downloaded thousands of times.
They are downloaded across the world, not only in wealthy countries with wealthy universities, but also across poorer countries. What has surprised me in particular is the fact that they have been downloaded in many countries where there are no institutions supporting the study of the subject, as far as I am aware. This indicates that there are hundreds, indeed thousands of people across the word who are not in academic institutions but are hungry for academic knowledge.
For example, one book on the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew has been downloaded over 13,000 times across about three quarters of the countries of the world, including a large proportion of the countries of the Global South.
Measured usage on three platforms for The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1Global readership map for The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1
This shows the role a university can have in feeding the world knowledge and offering the opportunity for intellectual enlightenment and education to all inhabitants of the world, irrespective of their personal wealth or the institutional infrastructure of the countries they live in.
I have been approached by dozens of academic authors who want to publish books in the series. It has become clear that there is a massive demand for open access publishing by academic authors but only about half of these can offer funds to support the publication of their books. So, only about 10 of the 21 books published so far in our series have received financial support from their authors. The dissemination of knowledge in the field would have been severely diminished if only those books whose authors have funds were allowed to be published.
Challenges
Finally, I would like to say a few words about the process of production of books in the series, the funding of the series, and various challenges.
Process
Authors who wish to submit books for publication are asked to follow our style guidelines. Then their books undergo a peer-review process, with their books being reviewed by two reviewers. A decision is then made by the editors as to whether the book should be accepted. After acceptance and revision by the author, the book is sent to one of our copyeditors, who not only copyedits the book but also prepares a camera-ready PDF. This PDF is then passed onto the production team at Open Book Publishers, who take care of the last stages of the publication of the book.
Funding
As I have said, the costs of some books are covered by the funds of authors. Open Book Publishers contribute some support from the funds they acquire from their Library Membership Programme. The remaining required funding is paid from Trust Funds in my department and from donations.
It is clear that the key elements in funding the series in its maximal open-access format is the Library Membership Programme and university departmental Trust Funds.
The challenges include:
1. Finding suitably qualified copyeditors to handle the increasing number of publications. Our copyeditors have to have knowledge of Semitic languages and Semitic scripts.
2. Financial planning of the future beyond my retirement in 2025. In the current model we need continuity of the key sources of funding, i.e. the Library Membership Programme and departmental Trust Funds.
Desiderata
1. Greater institutionalization of the funding of the series through the School of Arts and Humanities in the university, and beyond, including national funding bodies.
2. Recognition by funding bodies of the importance of supporting open-access series that offer publishing opportunities to all authors and not only to selected authors who have research grants or who belong to wealthy academic institutions.
I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.
Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsongwhich allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:
Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.
Of course, I had to know more. Although the board game was originally designed using information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird.org website, Wingsong derives its recordings from another free database, xeno-canto.org. A quick search of the website revealed the following statement:
Some species are under extreme pressure due to trapping or harassment. The open availability of high-quality recordings of these species can make the problems even worse. For this reason, streaming and downloading of these recordings is disabled. Recordists are still free to share them on xeno-canto, but they will have to approve access to these recordings.
Though Xeno-Canto does not give specific details about each recording, the Wingspan card offers a clue in italics at the bottom: “Habitat for these birds was a topic in logging fights in the Pacific Northwest region of the US.”
The unexpected incursion of such politics into a board game is startling, especially given the limited information in the initial message. As such, the restriction of Spotted Owl recordings on Xeno Canto, and by extension Wingsong, suggests complicated issues relating to the ownership and distribution of sound, censorship, and conservation.
Spotted Owl Recordings
The status of the Spotted Owl was a major issue of public debate in Oregon of the 1980s and 90s, where I grew up. As Dr. Rocky Gutiérrez, the “godfather” of Spotted Owl research, wrote in an article for The Journal of Raptor Research, “Conservation conflicts are always between people – not between people and animals” (2020, 338). In this case, concerns about the impacts of logging in old-growth forests, thought to be the primary habitat of the Spotted Owl, pitted loggers and the timber industry against conservationists. On both sides, national entities like the Sierra Club and the Western Timber Association helped turn a regional management issue into one with implications for forest protection, wildlife conservation, and economic development across the nation. Forty years later, it is still a hot button issue for scientists, industry, and the government, now with added complications of fire control, climate change, and competing species like the Barred Owl (Strix varia).
Xeno-Canto uses a Creative Commons license, meaning that users can access and apply to a wide variety of projects without explicit permission of the recordist, but it also offers tools for contacting other users. I wrote to two recordists who uploaded Spotted Owl calls to Xeno Canto: Lance Benner and Richard Webster, both recording in southern areas where the Spotted Owl’s conservation status is slightly less dire than in Oregon. Benner is a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, whose recordings have been used in scientific research projects, at nature centers, in phone apps, and notably, in a Canadian TV show. Benner told me via email that he agrees with Xeno-Canto’s restriction on the Spotted Owl recordings to the public, writing
I used to play spotted owl recordings when leading owl trips but I don’t any more now that the birds have been classified as “sensitive.” There have also been multiple attempts to add the California Spotted Owls to the endangered species list, so if I find them, I’m not sharing the information the way I used to….
Webster, on the other hand, offered a slightly different perspective:
There are enough recordings in the public domain that restricting XC’s recordings probably will not make a difference. However, some populations of Spotted Owl are threatened, and abuse is quite possible…
As Webster points out, numerous recordings of Spotted Owls are readily available, including via The Cornell Lab of Ornitology’s Voices of North American Owls and other audio field guides. The concern with such recordings, Gutiérrez told me over Zoom, is that anti-Spotted Owl activists might use the recordings to “call in” Spotted Owls – essentially a form of audio catfishing historically used in activities like duck hunting. In the case of Spotted Owls, the concern is that activists might deliberately harm the birds. However, it can also be a dangerous practice when used by birders who simply want to get a closer look: birds may abandon their nests, leaving chicks vulnerable and unprotected.
From a sound studies perspective, “calling in” underscores questions of avian personhood. Rachel Mundy contends that audio field guides are structured by people in ways that highlight animal musicianship. Yet when we consider the practice of “calling in,” it becomes clear that birdsong recordings are not only designed for human ears, but also avian ones.
Spotted Owl Spotted in Medford, OR by the Bureau of Land Management, CC BY 2.0 DEED
Nonetheless, while birds are considered intelligent enough to recognize a call from their own species, they are not believed to be able to identify the difference between a recording and a live performance. The bird’s sensorium is short-circuited by the audio recording, tricking it into thinking a mate is nearby. Not only does this recall the interspecies history of the RCA Victor label His Master’s Voice, it highlights distinctly human anxieties about the role of recording and its ability to dissimulate. Restricting access to such recordings, then, revives deep-seated ethical questions that require a nuanced application.
Whether or not Spotted Owls are able to differentiate between a recorded call or the call of a live mate it is likely to be of decreasing concern, however: Gutiérrez suggests that Northern Spotted Owl populations are so small that anyone attempting to call one in would be unlikely to actually find one.
Immersion, Conservation, Reflection
App developer Marcus Nerger conceptualizes Wingsong as part of an immersive augmented reality experience, one that situates the game player in a more realistic soundworld. In the world of board games, parallels might be drawn to audio playlists used in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, or to the immersive soundscape design used in video games.
Via Zoom, Nerger and I discussed the importance of sound in bird identification, which is arguably more significant than vision given birds’ general fearfulness of humans, branch cover, and the physical distance bird and observer – a separation underscored by the pervasive use of technologies like binoculars. Wingsong is not simply immersive because it connects the player to the real bird species, but because the experience of birding relies as much on hearing as it does on sight.
However, the Spotted Owl restriction message provides a provocative interruption to the immersive bird song experience provided by Wingsong. It is a jarring contrast to the benign experience of listening to recorded bird song, reminding the player of both the artifice of game play and the consequences of environmental actions. It suggests that the birds in the game are not hyper realistic Pokémon to be simply collected, but rather living animals embedded in environmental and political histories. The lack of information provided in the “restricted” message leaves the player wanting more – and subsequently, with a bit of searching, unearthing the mechanics behind the app, the politics of bird song recording, and finally, the specific histories of the species contained there, the ghost in the machine irrevocably unveiled.
—
Featured Image: by author
—
Julianne Graper (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on human-animal relationality through sound in Austin, TX and elsewhere. Graper’s writing can be found inSound Studies; MUSICultures; forthcoming in The European Journal of American Studies and in the edited collections Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (2023); Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID (2023); and Songs of Social Protest (2018). Her translation of Alejandro Vera’s The Sweet Penance of Music (2020) received the Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.
Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsongwhich allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:
Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.
Of course, I had to know more. Although the board game was originally designed using information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird.org website, Wingsong derives its recordings from another free database, xeno-canto.org. A quick search of the website revealed the following statement:
Some species are under extreme pressure due to trapping or harassment. The open availability of high-quality recordings of these species can make the problems even worse. For this reason, streaming and downloading of these recordings is disabled. Recordists are still free to share them on xeno-canto, but they will have to approve access to these recordings.
Though Xeno-Canto does not give specific details about each recording, the Wingspan card offers a clue in italics at the bottom: “Habitat for these birds was a topic in logging fights in the Pacific Northwest region of the US.”
The unexpected incursion of such politics into a board game is startling, especially given the limited information in the initial message. As such, the restriction of Spotted Owl recordings on Xeno Canto, and by extension Wingsong, suggests complicated issues relating to the ownership and distribution of sound, censorship, and conservation.
Spotted Owl Recordings
The status of the Spotted Owl was a major issue of public debate in Oregon of the 1980s and 90s, where I grew up. As Dr. Rocky Gutiérrez, the “godfather” of Spotted Owl research, wrote in an article for The Journal of Raptor Research, “Conservation conflicts are always between people – not between people and animals” (2020, 338). In this case, concerns about the impacts of logging in old-growth forests, thought to be the primary habitat of the Spotted Owl, pitted loggers and the timber industry against conservationists. On both sides, national entities like the Sierra Club and the Western Timber Association helped turn a regional management issue into one with implications for forest protection, wildlife conservation, and economic development across the nation. Forty years later, it is still a hot button issue for scientists, industry, and the government, now with added complications of fire control, climate change, and competing species like the Barred Owl (Strix varia).
Xeno-Canto uses a Creative Commons license, meaning that users can access and apply to a wide variety of projects without explicit permission of the recordist, but it also offers tools for contacting other users. I wrote to two recordists who uploaded Spotted Owl calls to Xeno Canto: Lance Benner and Richard Webster, both recording in southern areas where the Spotted Owl’s conservation status is slightly less dire than in Oregon. Benner is a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, whose recordings have been used in scientific research projects, at nature centers, in phone apps, and notably, in a Canadian TV show. Benner told me via email that he agrees with Xeno-Canto’s restriction on the Spotted Owl recordings to the public, writing
I used to play spotted owl recordings when leading owl trips but I don’t any more now that the birds have been classified as “sensitive.” There have also been multiple attempts to add the California Spotted Owls to the endangered species list, so if I find them, I’m not sharing the information the way I used to….
Webster, on the other hand, offered a slightly different perspective:
There are enough recordings in the public domain that restricting XC’s recordings probably will not make a difference. However, some populations of Spotted Owl are threatened, and abuse is quite possible…
As Webster points out, numerous recordings of Spotted Owls are readily available, including via The Cornell Lab of Ornitology’s Voices of North American Owls and other audio field guides. The concern with such recordings, Gutiérrez told me over Zoom, is that anti-Spotted Owl activists might use the recordings to “call in” Spotted Owls – essentially a form of audio catfishing historically used in activities like duck hunting. In the case of Spotted Owls, the concern is that activists might deliberately harm the birds. However, it can also be a dangerous practice when used by birders who simply want to get a closer look: birds may abandon their nests, leaving chicks vulnerable and unprotected.
From a sound studies perspective, “calling in” underscores questions of avian personhood. Rachel Mundy contends that audio field guides are structured by people in ways that highlight animal musicianship. Yet when we consider the practice of “calling in,” it becomes clear that birdsong recordings are not only designed for human ears, but also avian ones.
Spotted Owl Spotted in Medford, OR by the Bureau of Land Management, CC BY 2.0 DEED
Nonetheless, while birds are considered intelligent enough to recognize a call from their own species, they are not believed to be able to identify the difference between a recording and a live performance. The bird’s sensorium is short-circuited by the audio recording, tricking it into thinking a mate is nearby. Not only does this recall the interspecies history of the RCA Victor label His Master’s Voice, it highlights distinctly human anxieties about the role of recording and its ability to dissimulate. Restricting access to such recordings, then, revives deep-seated ethical questions that require a nuanced application.
Whether or not Spotted Owls are able to differentiate between a recorded call or the call of a live mate it is likely to be of decreasing concern, however: Gutiérrez suggests that Northern Spotted Owl populations are so small that anyone attempting to call one in would be unlikely to actually find one.
Immersion, Conservation, Reflection
App developer Marcus Nerger conceptualizes Wingsong as part of an immersive augmented reality experience, one that situates the game player in a more realistic soundworld. In the world of board games, parallels might be drawn to audio playlists used in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, or to the immersive soundscape design used in video games.
Via Zoom, Nerger and I discussed the importance of sound in bird identification, which is arguably more significant than vision given birds’ general fearfulness of humans, branch cover, and the physical distance bird and observer – a separation underscored by the pervasive use of technologies like binoculars. Wingsong is not simply immersive because it connects the player to the real bird species, but because the experience of birding relies as much on hearing as it does on sight.
However, the Spotted Owl restriction message provides a provocative interruption to the immersive bird song experience provided by Wingsong. It is a jarring contrast to the benign experience of listening to recorded bird song, reminding the player of both the artifice of game play and the consequences of environmental actions. It suggests that the birds in the game are not hyper realistic Pokémon to be simply collected, but rather living animals embedded in environmental and political histories. The lack of information provided in the “restricted” message leaves the player wanting more – and subsequently, with a bit of searching, unearthing the mechanics behind the app, the politics of bird song recording, and finally, the specific histories of the species contained there, the ghost in the machine irrevocably unveiled.
—
Featured Image: by author
—
Julianne Graper (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on human-animal relationality through sound in Austin, TX and elsewhere. Graper’s writing can be found inSound Studies; MUSICultures; forthcoming in The European Journal of American Studies and in the edited collections Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (2023); Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID (2023); and Songs of Social Protest (2018). Her translation of Alejandro Vera’s The Sweet Penance of Music (2020) received the Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Né d’échanges entre des enseignant·e·s du Québec et d’Haïti suscités par un partenariat entre le Cégep de Rimouski et le Collège La Sainte-Famille des Gonaïves, cet ouvrage rend hommage aux personnes qui relèvent chaque jour le défi d’entrer en relation avec les autres pour les soutenir dans leurs apprentissages.
Malgré la crise en Haïti et la pandémie mondiale, le coordonnateur pédagogique du CSF, Jean Noé Alcéus, et la formatrice, Annie-Claude Prud’homme, ont voulu poursuivre leur dialogue sur l’interculturalité et l’éducation, entamé depuis 2018, en posant à leurs collègues la question suivante : « Quelle expérience d’apprentissage vécue dans votre enfance, votre adolescence ou votre âge adulte, à l’école ou à l’extérieur de l’école, a eu une influence sur la personne que vous êtes devenue? »
Les récits recueillis constituent le cœur de ce livre. Ils permettent d’aborder des thèmes comme le respect de soi et de l’autre, la relation pédagogique, le rôle de l’erreur dans l’apprentissage, jusqu’à une prise de conscience commune : toute relation a le pouvoir de se transformer et de transformer, s’il y a aveu partagé de sa fragilité.
