The Ed Techie

Some thoughts on the book writing process

(The printout of my book) 

I submitted the manuscript (well the Word files) of my digital scholarship book to the publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, a couple of weeks ago. It should be out in September, with an online OA Creative Commons version as well as the printy touchy feely one.

So now is a good time to reflect on the process. In the following posts I'll suggest a number of reflections on the process. Overall it's been rewarding, and a useful exercise, but I couldn't have done it without this blog. Whereas many authors create a blog to accompany a book, I think I have created a book to accompany the blog. 

I'm not sure if this is one long post or several small ones, but I'm breaking with my usual style of long (ponderous) posts and trying some shorter, pithy ones focusing on one element, because, well, because I can, which is the joy of it. So over the coming week I'll do a post a day on this subject.

And you thought you were in for a dull week...

 

An unbundled publishing business proposal

For my digital scholarship book I have been reading about the tenure process a lot (I'll blog it soon). One of the issues that arises is that peer-review is always perceived as the gold standard. Promotion committees in universities, faced with the complexity of judging research in highly specialised fields, revert to using peer-review publication as a proxy. This is becoming problematic in the humanities in particular where the academic book is seen as the main evidence of excellence in research. Such monographs were often published by university presses. But in financially straitened times, many presses are closing, and if they are staying in business then they need to make publishing decisions with very strong financial incentives - they're only going to publish those books which they can be sure will be profitable.

Now, I think we should be finding new ways of achieving what peer-review provides for us, but in the meantime here is a business proposal. Publishing a book is easy - anyone can do it without the need for approval from a publisher using services such as Blurb and Lulu. But in academia we still want the peer-review filter prior to publication.

So here's my publishing business proposal - a service which sits on top of an online publisher such as Blurb. The model would work something like this:

1. The author pays a modest fee (let's say £100) for peer-review which is organised by the company. They then either pass the book, get modifications or reject it. 
2. Once accepted the author publishes via Blurb (or other service), using the publishing company's style sheet to mark it as approved, and with a set price.
3. An additional proof-reading service can be provided by the company, for a fee.
4. The author gets to keep all profits from the sale of the book, hopefully recouping the cost of the initial peer-review process, and making more than they would through the small percentage from traditional publishers.

What is missing is the distribution channel into libraries and book stores here, but that might be an additional service that the author could again opt for at a fee.

What this model does is unbundle the various functions of a publisher and allow authors to pay for them selectively, but to keep all of the profit from the book. At the moment these services are all bundled together and the author pays by only getting a small percentage of the royalties. The unbundled model allows greater flexibility and also means that an author can take a risk if they really want to publish something but it may be unprofitable. In the current model we have conflated academic worthiness and profitability - when you review a book you are really passing a judgement on how well it will sell, not on how academically sound it is. By separating out these elements this model brings clarity (I think) to the process, and still allows academics the peer-review filter they cherish.

Is someone already doing this and if not, anyone want to fund it?

Kindle & the iTuning of book purchasing

Probably my favourite app on my iPad is, errm, Kindle. Yes, getting my £600 device to behave like a £100 one is where it's at.

That aside, what is interesting about the Kindle is the way it is beginning to alter my book buying behaviour. In short it is iTuning my purchasing behaviour, in that I am tending to buy more on impulse - a recommendation or thought comes to me, and I don't add it to a wishlist, I buy it. This means I am adopting a more exploratory approach, buying books I wouldn't do otherwise, or ones I know I only want a section from.

But this behaviour is hampered by the publishers and arcane pricing policies. iTunes had the advantage that music (in the form of CDs) was evenly priced, ranging from around £3.99 to £13.99. This meant that getting consensus from recording companies on a set price of 99c for a track was relatively easy. Books on the other hand (and particularly academic books) range wildly from £1 to £100. Reaching agreement on a uniform price is therefore more difficult. But, for the sake of the industry itself, it is essential. At the moment the Kindle version is usually the same price as the physical one - and laughably, sometimes it is more expensive.

Amazon is probably the only player big enough to push this through. Publishers are proprietary and closed by instinct, so want to believe e-books are just another outlet but with higher profit margins. There are two reasons why I think they need to alter their behaviour:

i) iTuning buying behaviour leads to greater sales - if the standard price for a Kindle book was sufficiently low, say £1.99, then it leads to higher sales, particularly in the long tail. Brynjolfsson, Hu & Simester (2007) demonstrate that when a product moves online the concentration of sales becomes more distributed: “the Internet channel exhibits a significantly less concentrated sales distribution when compared with the catalog channel, even though these two channels offer the same products at the same set of prices.” Being online encourages a more ‘long tail’ oriented set of behaviours. They further argue that as search costs reduce, then so sales concentration becomes more skewed towards niche products. This means selling more of those special interest books, but only if the price is sufficiently low to encourage 'I may as well' purchasing behaviour. Maintaining the price point artificially high loses the benefits they might gain from this new channel.

ii) Resentment breeds piracy - by maintaining physical object prices, buyers become irritated at what they perceive as both greed and a lack of understanding around the new channel. Music piracy was driven partly by getting something for free, but also out of frustration that music companies were either ignoring the internet or treating it just like an infinite shopfront. One of the reasons Apple got agreement for iTunes was the fear of Napster. By repeating these mistakes publishers will drive potential customers into piracy, and then spend ages trying to lure them back. This is a key moment for book purchasing, they shouldn't ignore the very recent lessons history has to teach them. I want my book purchasing behaviour to be iTuned, don't turn me away now.

Bellow's Law

 

In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. 

In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also:

there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. 

It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences, but I think the element of neighbourhood it adds is useful. We are seeing the liberation (that is obviously a term with positive connotations, but let’s go with it for now) of a number of activities that are facilitated by the digital, social network. These include the removal of filters, freedom to publish and broadcast, the ability to share easily, establishing peer networks without the need for travel, creating communities of interest around diverse subjects, etc. It is why attempts by many industries to control what is liberated ultimately fail. You can't simply say we will liberate the music track from the whole album or from its physical format and expect record companies to stay the same. If you liberate one then others will follow.

In digital scholarship an example might be seen with publishing - once we have removed the filter to publish through blogs and other outlets then the neighbouring practices cannot remain unaffected: academic journals as the main source of knowledge sharing; the tenure process and what it recognises; research and dissemination; the granularity of research outputs and activity; course content. All of these begin to change because the pressure on one element in an interconnected system has been removed. It's not entirely unpredictable, but it may be one element in the sort of emergent behaviours Scott is interested in.

If you want to know what practices will be influenced by new technologies, then a good place to start is to consider what elements have been liberated by them, and then map the neighbouring practices, sure enough you'll see an activation across these soon. 

And we don't have enough laws named after great novelists. 

Everyday I write the book

I put together a proposal before the summer, for a book on digital scholarship. It's part-polemic and part academic monograph. I want to explore the changes to academic practice brought about by three key characteristics: digital, networked and open. 

I wanted to find an open access publisher, so I'm pleased to say that it's been accepted by Bloomsbury Academic. Their model is that they give away a free HTML version, you can buy a standard hard and paperback version, or you can buy a version that also gives you access to additional online content. I don't know how much this additional content line will work, but kudos to them for trying a new model.

Before I embark on the writing, a couple of thoughts:

i) Much of the book will be adapted from blog posts here. In this sense I've already been writing the book for four years. Lots of writers do this - Shirky's books always feel as though I have already read them because you know so much of his output. This is one possible downside of writing continually in the open - a book will seem a bit familiar to many readers. As I go along I'll be blogging bits of it as well, for instance the recent pregnant widow post. My apologies in advance then if this means that when you read the book (you will read it won't you?) you have a sense of deja vu.

ii) Why write a book at all? There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I like to write and a book gives you more space to explore ideas. And the second is that it is a nice way of bundling together content in a way that is both recognised and easily shareable.

iii) Why not just self-publish? I considered this, it would mean I'd get to keep more of the money (but then keeping a small amount or a large amount of not very much still gives you not very much). But there is a sense of legitimacy in having a publisher accept it. They also hopefully provide some services such as copy-editing and have a distribution channel which may help it get out there. And I particularly wanted to explore what it would be like to publish with an open access approach.

I've got some ideas for things I might try out for the book, including getting input from my network, so be prepared to find excuses. In the meantime, here is Elvis Costello with the title of this post:

Living in pregnant widow times

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov>

For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote

“The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and amongst society in general. We can see what is passing, but what is forming is still unclear. Clay Shirky, talking about newspapers puts it thus:

"So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

We can think about some general directions of travel, we can make some guesses, and most of all, we can experiment. My interest is what the changes mean for scholarly practice, how will academics perform research, what will education look like twenty years from now, how can we best be engaged in public debates? We have a very well established set of methods for all of these currently, but it is unlikely that any of them will remain untouched by the impact of digital, social networks. And as with other industries, trying to find ways to preserve them as they are, or with a digital veneer, won't be sufficient when other find innovative ways to achieve the same ends using the new tools. If you accept the argument that we are living in such a period of change, then what academic wouldn't be interested in observing this change in any field, let alone that of their own practice.

As Amis puts it in his novel, "it was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you what stays, you see what comes."

What goes, what stays and what comes - each of element of this trio is significant. Often we concentrate on 'what comes', but it's just as interesting to consider what stays. This reveals what is important to us (will journalism stay? Will universities stay?), or at least what is so ingrained culturally or commercially as to be immovable. The QWERTY keyboard has stayed thus far in the digital age, despite being an analogue solution, not through any sense of value, but because it was too entrenched to overthrow. 

What goes is equally revealing, because it demonstrates that practices and values we may have seen as unassailable are suddenly vulnerable because the assumptions they are based upon are no longer valid. The scarcity, rivalrous nature and distribution model of many goods and content is one such example. When they became abundant, non-rivalrous and freely distributed whole industries began to look weak. The 'what goes' element may also reveal to us what was important and not so important after all.

We generally assume that after a peaceful social revolution the resulting practice is an improvement for the majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't occur. Unless the revolution is imposed upon the people, then the general direction will be towards a utilitarian improvement. But this doesn't mean the post-revolutionary world will be better for everyone. There are those whose profession and identity will be strongly allied to the existing practices. There will be practices and values that are lost that we find we did in fact hold dear, but which were too closely attached to the older methods to survive. In short, there will be winner and losers. A revolution may be bloodless, but is rarely painless for all.

Which is why we see scare stories about games damaging kids health, or social networks ruining the nature of friendship, or piracy killing artistic endeavour, or the fabric of society being damaged irrevocably by the addiction to computers. We are learning what role these new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, over-use and correction. For example, many people reported something resembling an addiction to social networks when they first started on them, but these have since settled into a more controlled, regular place in our lives.

We are living in pregnant widow times, and we can see what is going, but we don't yet know what is staying and what is coming. And that's kinda fun isn't it?

Thoughts on digital scholarship

I am giving a presentation on digital scholarship tomorrow at the OU, but in order to save people you know, actually turning up, here is the slidecast.

I'm putting together a book proposal around digital scholarship which will build on some content from this blog and explore some of these ideas, so the presentation was really a way to start exploring some of these ideas. The audio is a bit quiet but the slides are reasonably self-explanatory anyway. This is really an amalgamation of other bits, so not a lot new here, but it's a bit more than old wine in a new bottle.

What I'm interested in is whether the views we have of scholarship now, and particularly Boyer's definition hold true for digital scholarship. Put bluntly is it a case of doing the same things differently or are we starting to do different things?

I've characterised the digital scholar as being open, digital & networked. These are terms we use so frequently that they seem trite, but actually the combination of all three marks a very significant alteration, and potential for changes in scholarly practice.

Here is the slidecast:

Thoughts on Digital Scholarship

View more webinars from Martin Weller.

BTW - I'm also playing with Wallwisher, so may use this to stick ideas on, feel free to stick stuff up there too, we can make it a general space.

Montaigne, the Godfather of blogging

 

I am reading Sarah Bakewell's marvellous 'How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer'. She uses Montaigne's essays as the basis for a biography and also to extract a number of lessons, such as 'Don't worry about death', 'Be convivial' and (my favourite) 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted'.

Montaigne seems to me to have many of the characteristics in his writing which today we associate with good bloggers. Although, as Bakewell points out, every generation finds their own interpretation of Montaigne, so this is really more a reflection of my interests than perhaps some truth about him, so for instance William Deresiewicz uses Montaigne to justify his anti-social network rant.

I'm not the first person to link Montaigne to blogging, via Lorcan Dempsey I found this piece by Andrew Sullivan called 'Why I blog' in which he says:

"Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links"

For me Montaigne shows the way for good bloggers through the following practices:

• Honesty - you really can't blog if you've got a hidden agenda. People have too much choice and so what you are after is some form of connection and this comes from people having good ideas, but also from connecting to them as an individual.
• Openness - as Sullivan points out in the quote above, one of the endearing qualities of Montaigne was his willingness to think out in the open. This is what bloggers do well, they put forward ideas, take criticism and comments, and develop those ideas partly in conjunction with their readers. They don't work quietly for three years and then release a finished masterpiece (this is a good way of working for some writing, maybe novels, but not for blogs).
• Relaxed style - Montaigne really developed that chatty, informal style which is a lot harder than he makes it look. This is definitely the style that works best in blogs, because, to reiterate the point, part of what makes a good blog is a connection to the author.
• An element of the personal - Montaigne's essays are famously rambling and rarely connected to the title. This approach doesn't always work in blogs, which tend to be shorter posts focused on a particular point, but what does carry over is the way he brought in personal elements to back up and reinforce wider points, which a good blogger does without making it a boring shopping list.
• Reflective and questioning - good bloggers (and when I say a good blogger, I probably mean 'bloggers I like reading') seem to me to adopt Montaigne's reflective approach, questioning themselves, and others. One of the delights of blogging is that it has no commercial masters to please and so bloggers tend to dig around a story, analyse it in detail and question every aspect of it (unlike many journalists who accept the PR from a company to fill space).
• Playfulness - I like bloggers who toy with ideas, mess around with media and inject some playfulness into their posts. Blogs liberate us from the considerations of many formal publications and I like people who embrace this.
• Owning a vineyard - oh, okay that one doesn't apply.

7 conversation starters

In a post about how twitter had changed my ALT-C experience I commented that we needed to find new social behaviours for when we meet people face to face who we know well on twitter. And Jim Groom is always saying how it's the personal element that makes blogs meaningful. So, in the spirit of those '7 things you didn't know about me' memes, although hopefully less annoying, I thought I'd give 7 conversation starters for occasions when I might meet people I know virtually, and we don't want to talk about blogging or twitter. I think everyone should have a social crib sheet, particularly with the advent of mobile devices now - if you're on your way to a meeting with someone, call up their conversation starters page and you instantly have grounds for a social connection.

1. As a child I was a bit koumpounophobic - I had a fear of buttons. Couldn't stand them being separate, or to touch them. If someone said 'I've lost a button' then that room became a no-go zone. I was also not very keen on jewellery. Of course it doesn't bother me now, I can do up a shirt with the best of them. Interestingly, although I've never mentioned or displayed it, my daughter doesn't like buttons either and won't wear clothing that has them if she can help it. This is, to me, an example of the strange subtlety of genetics.
   So I'm happy to talk about childhood phobias, genetics, nature versus nurture, etc.
2. I like most non-offal based foods and am constantly amazed at how fussy a lot of grown-ups are. But I have never been able to stomach baked beans and hate the insidious way they infect a whole plate of food. And celery of course, but then no-one really likes celery do they?
   We can chat about the nightmares of organising a dinner party with a range of fussy eaters, food dislikes, disgusting things you have eaten, etc.
3. My favourite authors are Graham Greene, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Dickens, William Boyd, Nabokov, Conrad. The sharp ones amongst you will have spotted that this is an entirely male list. This is not the result of a deliberate policy - it's not as if I boycott women writers. I read and like a lot (Margaret Atwood, Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, Zadie Smith are all good, although Austen and the Brontes don't do much for me) but my favourites are all men. This can't just be coincidence can it? There must be something in their writing that appeals to me. So if we discount blatant sexism as the reason for my tastes (of course, you may not), it might be interesting to consider why this is so? You could maybe convince me away from my male preference in literary tastes.
4. I grew up in the age of the home video-player, and this was probably the most significant technology in my formative years (far more than early computers). As a teenager there was a group of us who used to occasionally bunk off school and go to someone's house to watch a range of video nasties: Driller Killer, I Spit on your Grave, Rollerball (game scenes only), The Thing, Quadrophenia (we were mods), Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine. These were the staple diet, and yet I didn't grow up a disturbed individual and later went onto be a fan of 'nicer' cinema (I cry at It's A Wonderful Life every year), so we can talk about the impact of violence in films, influential technologies, etc.
5. I like to drink tea, beer and wine, not necessarily at the same time, and probably in that order of preference. I have a vague mistrust of people who drink 'flavoured tea'. I have the potential to become a beer bore. I once had an exchange with Alastair Campbell on the merits of tea over coffee (we were in agreement). I don't like spirits, except gin and tonic naturally. I thought when I reached 40 I would suddenly develop a taste for whisky. Recently someone poured me a very fine whisky but I had to concede defeat - every minuscule sip made me want to gag. I fully accept this proves I am a wimp.
6. The first gig I went to was The Beat at the Rainbow Club in London. I was thirteen and it was full of burly skinheads. When The Beat came on it erupted and the whole floor was bouncing. I had grown up in the suburbs and found it both exhilarating and frightening. I spent about 4 years going to lots of gigs after that, but now I don't get much from them. Martin Amis once commented that at some age all men stop going to football games. I disagree with that, but I do feel that about gigs - I don't want to stand at the back and clap politely and I certainly don't want to be down the front anymore, so I'm not sure I see the point in them. Good bands I saw in that period: The Jam, New Order, Happy Mondays, Echo and theBunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Billy Bragg, The Cure. Embarrassing acts: Ultravox, Toyah, King.
7. I once won a film review competition judged by Mark Kermode. I wrote a critical piece on Rodriguez' Sin City. My argument was that people loved it because it was 'stylish', but for me it wore its style too obviously. Martin Scorsese once complained that the Oscar for Best wardrobe or similar always went to a costume drama, but as much detail went in to a film set in the 1950s. I think the same is true of Sin City, other films have better style, it's just not as blatant. I also argued that Hollywood continues to make the mistake that graphic novels make good films because they have similar elements - strong visual style, linear narrative, often based around good vs evil, etc. But the results are nearly always poor, maybe because as with traditional novels, the differences between the mediums are underestimated, or because graphic novels are a bit rubbish to start with (ducks).
   Happy to discuss Sin City, novel adaptations or to have you defend graphic novels.

If none of those work for you, pick one from: Spurs, running, Wales/Cardiff, daughters.

Be a debaser

It's a boring truism that nearly every new technology is decried by certain parties (certain newspapers, self-appointed guardians of social mores, etc) as fundamentally undermining the fabric of society. From the first wave of communication and broadcast technology - radio, television, and telephones all had their dystopian critics. From my generation the social evil was the home video recorder. What havoc it would wreak, our juvenile minds rotted by video nasties, and our social skills stunted by spending all our times in front of screens. And of course come the PC and internet we've had enough scare stories about games, social networking, and hell, the internet as a whole, to leave us in no doubt that we used to have a Camelot and then naughty technology came along and rent us asunder from it.

The underlying theme to all these stories (pick any recent Twitter scare story as an example) is technology debases us. Debase = 'To reduce from a higher to a lower state or grade of worth, dignity, purity, station, etc'. The obvious flaw in this argument is that we don't measure the 'higher' state often enough to know if any 'lowering' has actually occurred. But even if this were so (say we measured a lowering of literacy rates, lower book sales or some other measure), what it never captures is the transformative effect on society - the new ways we develop for communicating, and if humans are anything they are communicators.

What this is leading to is that perceived debasement from supposed higher states is a precursor for significant change. In education we hold on to the arguments of quality and academic reliability, which although surely important, become obstacles to any change. I am reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote, which gave the title to John Kennedy Toole's excellent novel: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." 

For technology this would be rephrased something like "When significant technology appears in society, you may know it by this sign, that the guardians will call it a debaser." So, the next time someone raises an objection about your use of technology that they are concerned about quality, or standards, thank them heartily, for you will know you are on the right track.

Debasers, I salute you!