How can independent publishers manage speed, quality, and positioning to better respond to contemporary urgencies?
Making Public was a two-year-long research project led by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with 1001 Publishers, Amateur Cities, Amsterdam University Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Hackers & Designers, Mind Design, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Open!, Open Set, Puntpixel, Studio BLT, Valiz, and Willem de Kooning Academy.
The project delivered prototypes of new tools and methods to deal with bottlenecks in the publishing process titled Urgent Publishing Toolkit. Existing tools and platforms were also analyzed according to the criteria that are most important to the publishing sector. The toolkit contributes to the creation of new work processes that will better enable (self)publishers to take up a position in the public debate.
What strategies are available to publishers in the cultural and research domains to conceive, produce, and position their contents in an urgent way?
Urgent Publishing Toolkit: three tools
The project comprised three groups: The Periodicals Group, The Platforms Group, and The Stand Alone Group. Each of them contributed a different tool to the collective toolkit.
Parazine, developed by The Periodicals Group, is a tool that allows you to recontextualize existing academic content. It scrapes the content from an online academic journal of your choice and allows you to create a ‘zine’ from this content. You, the source journal and the tool all provide certain inputs. The resulting publication needs to be printed to be readable. You can make a publication for yourself but also consider creating it for others (e.g. as a reader).
Platform-2-Platform, developed by The Platforms Group which Amateur Cities was part of, is a tool that combines an algorithmic matching system and human editorial expertise to create relevant recommendations for further reading across a network of independent publishers.
Upside Down Inside Out, developed by The Stand Alone Group, is a manual for authors and editors who are fairly new to the possibilities of digital publishing and is meant to guide them in exploring the relational potential of their content.
Conference
As a part of Making Public between 15–17 May 2019, the Institute of Network Cultures, ArtEZ University of the Arts, and Willem de Kooning Academy organized Urgent Publishing: New Strategies in Post-Truth Times, a 3-day event with discussions, explorations, and experiments about publishing strategies in post-truth times. Recordings from the conference are available here.
More about Platform 2 Platform
You can learn about our contribution to the project in the following blog posts: Platform 2 Platform: the Matching Algorithm by André Fincato, Clickbait Revisited by Silvio Lorusso and Ania Molenda, Making Relationships Public by Jorinde Seijdel, Parasitic Collaboration by Inte Gloerich, Governance and Scalability: Circles of trust and federated platforms by Cristina Ampatzidou & Irina Shapiro, and Platform 2 Platform by Inte Gloerich, Silvio Lorusso and Niels Schrader. More on the work of this group and the entire project can be found in Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing, a publication that concludes and documents the project