It’s no wonder that both scientists and publishers love the PDF format. Thousands of these files can be stored on your hard disk, so you can get rid of piles of paper on your desk and in dusty old filing cabinets. But does the PDF really solve our storage issues?
Well, yes and no. The PDF format does get rid of the piles of paper, but instead we quickly end up with the digital equivalent of them on our computer. The ease of downloading articles only increases the scale of the problem. Our critical mistake is to think that the transition to a new format alone adequately addresses storage concerns, but this view doesn’t consider the importance of organization. I witnessed this exact problem a few years earlier with the shift from audio CDs to digital MP3 files, leading to the digital equivalent of audio CD racks in the form of folders multiplying on your hard disk.
Interestingly, iTunes solved this problem by allowing you to arrange and retrieve songs using relevant sorting information, or metadata. I figured that exactly this is needed in the digital research paper world, which is how I came to build Papers, an application that removes the hassle of handling and organizing PDF files and instead lets you focus on keywords such as paper title, author, journal title, et cetera. Papers is in many ways a non-obvious but crucial part in the successful transition to a new, digital workflow. I would even argue that these tools and the workflow around content will require more dramatic changes than those needed for the initial format transition from paper to PDF. Even more than changes in formats, in distribution methods, or even in the devices we read on, organizational tools and the workflows we create for our documents will ultimately determine the shape of reading in the future.
Alexander Griekspoor is the co-founder of Mekentosj, an independent software company that writes innovative software for researchers.
19. Non-linear Publishing – Hendrik-Jan Grievink
The books that I find interesting are more likely to be printed collections than linear stories and are also consumed as such. Traditional categories of publishing disappear, the only relevant distinction is offline or online. Or: does the story remain static or will it change over time and enter into relationships with other stories? For offline media, visual aspects are more important, the designer moves to the fore in the publishing process where he assumes the place of editor. With the Next Nature book* that I have compiled in the last two years together with Koert van Mensvoort, the traditional publishing process is turned inside out: from a small blog for publication in one’s own circle to a network with many contributors and 1.5 million unique visitors per year with a few thousand shorter and longer observations about what we called ‘nature caused by people’. The book deepens and contextualizes existing content and is made up of seven magazines glued together, each with its own theme. This compilation process has had in turn a large influence on the design and layout of the blog: the thematic approach has been implemented online, specials from the book are adapted. On the blog, connections are made through links; in the book we do that by bringing the content together thematically, whereby the image is always leading. Ten years ago, a website was conceived for every project; today, being networked is the starting-point – always linked with your public.
Hendrik-Jan Grievink is an editorial designer and co-founder of the Next Nature Institute.
Next Nature, Actar, summer 2011, 450 pp.
20. Subtitling – Ger Groot
The misconception that a picture says more than a thousand words is based on the idea that it is immediately clear what a picture means. You see a shoe, think ‘shoe’, but what do you actually see? It only becomes clear from the story around it that this is the shoe with which Nikita Khrushchev hammered the desk at the United Nations.
The presenter of the television programme tells us that and so conjures up a world of memories. Cold War , Cuba Crisis, the Netherlands hardly recovered and yet happiness was still commonplace. All this flashes through our mind’s eye as a gentleman speaking Russian shows us around the museum of Soviet reality. The man says something in Russian and we read it in Dutch along the bottom of our television screen.
With the exception of advertising slogans and instructions for use, no text has become such a natural part of our everyday lives as subtitles. Everybody reads them throughout the day, so automatically that picture and subtitle have become intertwined and Derrida seems finally to have been proven right: the whole world has become écriture.
There is another way. In many other countries, the viewer doesn’t get to hear the Russian guide, or at most somewhere in the background. A voice in the viewer’s own language is superimposed, so easily understood that it melts into the picture. And in reaction it seems as if the latter is actually speaking. Word and voice disappear in the testimony of the ‘thousand words’ that seem to be spoken to us by what we see.
And so it seems as if the picture has the upper hand over the text, as the prophets of the image culture have been telling us for years. But that demands a very high price. Filtering out the Russian by eliminating the text in the picture also has suppressed the foreign aspect that the original contained. The world in voice-over never really leaves the cosiness of the familiar. It no longer hears any incomprehensible Russian. It only ultimately knows itself.
No wonder, then, that in countries with post-synchronization, not only is the knowledge of languages at a lower level, but also knowledge of the world. That reality is larger, more spacious, and more alienating than they had always thought simply doesn’t sink in.
The classic book reader already knew that, but the subtitle reader discovers that daily. The writing beckons him out of the immediacy in which everything literally speaks for itself. The image is layered thanks to the doubling of the text, which suggests a whole universe between legible writing and foreign voice.
No image speaks for itself and no voice is simple enough to coincide with this. Without text, the visible remains enclosed within the horizon that can be scanned with the eyes. It only becomes meaningful thanks to the word; cosmopolitan thanks to the writing. Looking by itself is, after all, a somewhat narrow-minded activity. Only when the world becomes legible and something can be deciphered in its image can it be freed from the restriction of the look. Only then is there really something to see in its image.
Ger Groot is a writer and teaches Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and Philosophy and Literature at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
21. Ambient Scholarship – Gary Hall
Today knowledge and information are increasingly being externalized onto complex, multilayered, distributed systems of computers, databases, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, video-sharing sites, and other kinds of social networks.
What are the implications of this prosthetization of knowledge for the scholars of the future?
Will the men and women of learning who emerge from the current generation of students continue to internalize particular branches of knowledge by means of extensive, and intensive, reading and study?
Will they still be expected to master their field?
Will scholars not come to concentrate more on developing their specialist search and retrieval skills – confident in the belief that, if they need to know something, then they can find the relevant information quickly and easily using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, as well as a host of open access, open education, open science, and open data resources?