Keynote by Dr. Winnie Soon (Course Leader at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, Associate Professor (on leave) at Aarhus University, visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University)

The term "computational publishing" has emerged in recent scholarship and is used specifically to describe books as dynamic and computational objects that are open to re-versioning. Within this specific genre of computational publishing, this presentation focuses on characteristics and common approaches like free and open source software, community practices and programmable processes by discussing three examples. They are related to a Git repository, collaborative publishing software and a DIY book to explore the possible computational extensibility that is oriented more toward collective interventions, actions and practices. These examples examine a parallel between writing and coding that blurs the boundary between books and software, arguing that writing (publishing) a computational book is like writing (publishing) a piece of software.

Full keynote panel with an introduction by Prof. Gary Hall, introductions by Simon Bowie, keynotes by Dr Winnie Soon and Prof. Paige Raibmon, and a response by Dr. Lozana Rossenova.

Digital Space as Indigenous Territory, Scholarly Writing as Relational Practice: Reflections from the Collaborative Production of an Open Access BookKeynote by Prof. Paige Raibmon (Department of History, University of British Columbia (UBC)).

As I Remember it is an open access digital book that shares teachings presented by the ɬaʔamɩn Elder and knowledge keeper Elsie Paul with wide-ranging audiences.  Paul collaborated in order to produce this work with two of her grandchildren, Davis McKenzie and Harmony Johnson, and myself, a historian based at the University of British Columbia.  In this talk, I share discuss our multi-year, collaborative process in which we strove to design a digital book whose form aligns with the meanings embedded within the its content (i.e. the teachings as shared and remembered by Paul).   Principles of relationality, respect, and humility were central to our methodology and helped us navigate the potential promise and pitfalls of bringing Indigenous knowledge into an open access digital space.   Using a range of means, we visibly and interactively embedded ɬaʔamɩn authority over ɬaʔamɩn knowledge into the book.  We invite readers to approach the book as guests of a ɬaʔamɩn host; and to consider the website itself as ɬaʔamɩn territory.  Thus, this digital book attempts to do something quite different than simply sharing information about Paul’s life. It challenges wide-spread assumptions about scholarly method, production, authorship, expertise, and copyright.

I invite and encourage people to explore the book before my talk at: ravenspacepublishing.org/as-i-remember-it/

Workshop with Simon Worthington (NFDI4Culture @Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover)

Computational publishing was developed in the life sciences and STEM subjects to allow publishers and authors to embed executable code, visualisations and advanced media objects alongside conventional text in a document. This hands-on workshop demonstrates one way how humanities scholars might use computational publishing.

During the workshop, we will auto-compile catalogue publications for exhibitions or publication listings from multiple open data sources; and show how such compilations can be published multi-format: web, PDF, ebook, etc. A series of exercises, using Jupyter Notebooks for code and the Quarto platform to wrap up the notebooks for multi-format outputting, will give participants a practical introduction to some of the tools, possibilities and concepts of computational publishing.

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata claims to act as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource...). While browsing this structured data, one can encounter gaps related to different world views and imaginaries. The notion of more-than-human, for example, is absent.

At the beginning of this workshop, Z.Blace will propose queer methodologies that can help to find the gaps, fill them, and play with them. Next, by means of a series of writing exercises with and without code, we will create Wikidata-structure-like poems about more-than-humans inspired by Alison Knowles’ House of Dust. If everything evolves according to plan, we will then generate a poem by que(e)rying Wikidata using SPARQL.

Keynote by Dr. Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Department of Philosophy) with a response by Rebekka Kiesewetter (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)

Cristina Rivera Garza’s theory and practice of desapropiación has inspired numerous rewriting experiments in the Mexican context, among them the rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium by graduate students and early career researchers in collaboration with COPIM. Desapropiación is a poet(h)ics of rewriting that Rivera Garza theorizes in the collection of critical essays Los muertos indóciles (2013), and later performs in the hybrid work Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2017). The latter is an experimental rewriting of Juan Rulfo’s fiction as well as a historico-philosophical exploration of his life’s archive as a worker for the Mexican state that calls into question the role of literature – both material and symbolic – in the legitimation of Mexican sovereign power and its continued responsibility for the violent consequences of economic modernization.

But how does desapropiación work? First, desapropiación takes a step back from appropriative strategies that de-contextualize and exploit experiences of oppression and violence for the sake of aesthetic experimentation. Second, desapropiación sets out, instead, to bring forth a fundamental relation with language that capitalism has captured. If all language is borrowed, all writing is already re-writing, and desapropiación renders this fact palpable in each case. Third, desapropiación is not only critical or negative but also creative. By emphasizing heteronomous reading as a literary work’s condition of possibility, it not only interrupts the Romantic tendency to disembodied thinking and symbolic exploitation of the other, but also generates temporal and spatial conditions for ethical awareness. One could easily reduce desapropiación to an example of a feminist ethics of care, a communitarian morality or even a liberal concession to the moral rights of underrepresented authors/cultures/languages.

While Rivera Garza does invoke a communitarian ethics of care and recognition in her praxis of desapropiación, I suggest in this talk that it is possible and desirable to posit other levels, register, or scales at which desapropiación works. Such is, at least, the lesson I draw from the experience of re-writing The Chernobyl Herbarium in the context of an academic collaboration with COPIM. In this keynote, I translate Rivera Garza’s questioning of Literature into a questioning of Academic Writing as an Institution, with the help of Ivan Illich’s thoughts on ‘de-schooling society’ (1971) and on reading as a spiritual practice (1993).

A roundtable conversation with Dr. Janneke Adema (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Simon Bowie (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Joana Chicau (Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London), Prof. Gary Hall (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Dr. Kat Jungnickel (Goldsmiths, University of London), Dr. Julien McHardy (COPIM), Dr. Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Department of Philosophy), Rebekka Kiesewetter (COPIM, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University), Simon Worthington (NFDI4Culture @Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover)