Author: Mark Tebeau

Mark Tebeau is an associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the director of the Public History program at Arizona State University. Before joining ASU, Mark founded and co-directed the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. There he led the development of Curatescape, a framework for mobile publishing that seeks to make open-source, low-cost mobile tools available to scholars and curators. Curatescape has built an rss feed that enables it to produce e-books and print books on demand. Now the question is, to what end and in what form?

New Modes of Knowledge Production and the Book

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It goes without saying that digital technologies have lowered the bar to writing, printing, and publishing books. And, yet, when we think about the future of the book, too often we (historians especially) imagine the book in terms of the large commercial or academic press that follows an age-old process through which authors sit down at a typewriter and peck away at the keyboard, filling page after page of text. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I’ve come to these problems of the future of the book from a quite different point, a roundabout journey that began without much consideration of either platform or press.

The particular questions that I am presently exploring are specific. How do we deploy an e-publishing solution for mobile interpretive projects powered by Curatescape (+ Omeka)?  That problem has transformed my colleagues and partners into publishers, revealing a convergence between public humanities projects and traditional scholarly endeavors. This convergence suggests that as we sprint beyond the book, we should appreciate both the importance of the book’s unique presence as well as the ways in which the book can become enriched by new approaches to the production of knowledge.

Curatescape, the framework for mobile publishing developed by my research lab, emerged from several professional practices that have converged in the digital age.

Urban and public historians have long been curating landscape, well before the term “curation” was applied as widely as it has been in the digital age. Often emerging out of innovative community-driven teaching, these “local” historians and their students and collaborators studied neighborhoods, communities, and civic spaces. The outcomes of those works—papers, presentations, walking tours, and public history projects—frequently made their way back to the community through interactive projects, featuring dialogues between students and their key informants. That dialogue, framed by historical scholarship and primary source documents, yielded remarkable experiential learning, of the sort that produced civic engagement. This approach has become a standard feature on many university campuses through service learning and experientially-based classroom assignments. The digital age has yielded new ways to feature that work, ranging from blogs to digital archival platforms. Suddenly, we’ve moved from one-off projects to those that can (potentially) build upon one another.

The ability to create shared learning environments led innovators to create standards-based platforms and tools for publishing on the Internet. WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr are the best-known present surviving tools from this moment, becoming common blogging (or microblogging) software. In the archival world, open-source archival content management systems emerged to help librarians and curators document and share their collections—books, material culture, and photographs. In academic and library settings, tools like Collective Access or Omeka have become commonly used archival systems, emulating blogging platforms in their approach to allowing heritage professionals to engage publics about their important cultural collections.

At the turn of the century, Oral History practice underwent dramatic transformation, driven by the emergence of digital tools for collecting, processing, and archiving oral history. The results accelerated trends underway in the field, away from reliance on written transcripts to mediate what is a deeply human and aural experience. Digital collection of stories democratized oral history by allowing anyone to record narratives.  And it made those sound files more sharable than they’d ever been. Coupled with easier indexing, annotating, and archiving, oral history became malleable and could be included easily in the emerging ecosystem of digital humanities projects. Setting aside the work of filmmakers, these trends allowed scholars and documentarians for the first time to widely share human voices as part of their interpretive work. As part of a broader proliferation of interpretive multimedia, the very nature of storytelling has shifted toward layered multimedia presentation.

In 2005, as these trends emerged and I engaged them with students, teachers, and colleagues, I was asked to produce content for history kiosks that would be located along a rapid bus route in Cleveland, Ohio. Our team built elaborate multimedia stories for these kiosks, which appeared on the streets at the very moment of the emergence of the iPhone. Recognizing that such locative technologies promised to transform cities into living museums, our team adapted the kiosk project to mobile devices. Bringing together a series of convergences—in engaged-student learning, open-source content management systems, and digital oral history—our first project, Cleveland Historical, developed as a web-based mobile interpretive project that allowed our team to curate the city through interpretive, layered multimedia stories. Cleveland Historical became the first iteration of Curatescape, a broader framework for mobile curation that uses the Omeka content management system as its core archive. Importantly, we don’t call our work a “platform” but a framework that uses multiple digital tools, content management systems, and standards. We exist within a broader system of knowledge production that is both technical and conceptual.

In building our Cleveland project, as well as working with more than 30 partners to launch their projects, we’ve realized that our teams of students, communities, and scholars are curating landscape through interpretive stories. They’re also publishing rich collections of multimedia stories that engage the landscape in remarkable ways. These projects transform how we experience place, and also provide an avenue for shaping conversations about place.

Critically, our audiences and interpreters also have challenged the boundaries of our community, urging us to produce information feeds to a variety of different formats, including e-books, and even real books. They want to read our interpretive historical stories as collectives, with different sorts of connections to other interpretive projects (both inside and outside the Curatescape system).

Quite suddenly, we’ve found ourselves asking what these travelogues should look like. We’re asking about the role of multimedia, the formats, and the outputs (e-books, print, how to format the RSS feed). We’re just as interested in the use cases: is this for local urban walking tours, thematic books that feature the apps’ tours, aggregations of stories across space—about parks or Civil Rights? The questions of what this might look like, and of what it means to write a book, have challenged our sense of the book itself. What is it that we’re publishing? If it is not a book, what is it? Critically, the convergence of tools, approaches, and materials suggests to me that whatever forms emerge should reflect emerging approaches to systems of knowledge production. Hearkening back to a mythic book as a standard and goal may be the wrong question to ask as we sprint toward the future of the book.

Traveling the Landscape of the Book

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Here is what I want to ask: Books provide us paths through the world. Can the world provide us paths through books? Or, more appropriately, what can the world itself tell us about how we should sprint beyond the book?

So let me digress with a comment on reading and books as sensory experiences. Books are read; text is visual. Nearly every assumption built into the imaginary of books depends on reading and sight. Too often we often fail to appreciate the breadth and depth of books in terms of their sensory evocation, much less how we might experience what is within. Of course, books themselves are tactile. Old books, in particular, have a certain smell—for the historian, opening an old book is akin to the experience of that new car smell. Ahhh, yes, the mustiness of an old library. I fondly recall the reddish hue of the archives that adhered to my white gloves. More typically, we think of the senses in terms of the sensory experiences evoked by a book, a petit madeleine, chocolate, or the smell of baked bread in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Do these evocations go only one way, from the book to the imagination to the senses? Can we reverse that path, bring the physical experience—of the senses, of the material, to the book? Wouldn’t that enhance our experience? I am thinking presently of how a sound historian has used the digital humanities to evoke the auditory sensibilities of early 20th century New York City. Our senses might offer entirely new paths into and through literature, allowing us to move beyond the book, envisioning a multisensory experience.

Likewise, reading itself is not just a literal act of moving eyes over text and processing that text, but it has become a metaphor for the production of knowledge itself. We do more than read text. We also “read” landscape, images, and environment. And yet, this imagining still elevates reading above not only the senses but also above the material world with all its depth and expressions. Of course, books have never been isolated from the world, but discussions of the book usually imagine them as knowledge systems all but closed from anything outside the human imagination. I would argue that imagination is shaped by social and historical experience. Rather than imagine books as blazing paths through our minds, perhaps we should look to social and historical experiences—to the materiality of everyday experience—to find ways of imagining paths through books themselves.

Consider how the landscape can be exposed, confronted, and expressed to create a path through a book, one where the materiality of space helps us find the logic of a book, or perhaps the materiality of experience—perhaps the work of an aged craft iron worker, whose voice and talents reveal narrative. What about hyper-textual approaches to the book, where links structure our reading—connections to the material, the ephemeral, the momentary?

I want a world of non-textual paths, generated by the materiality of the world, that structures our paths through individual books, libraries of books, or literatures. I don’t want to abandon the narrative, the story, the text, the argument in favor of the archival. Rather, I want a connectedness between book and materiality of experience that transforms not only our reading of the world but also our reading of the book.

As we sprint beyond the book, let’s not race toward the book as an individuated form (and I’m not advocating abandoning authorship) without connection to other books or to the materiality of experience. Rather, lets build something that is interlaced with the world, with the materiality of experience, including especially a richer sensory experience. Let’s create books that are meta-analytical and meta-experiential.

Performing the Book

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As a scholar, I’ve long been inspired by Julio Cortazar’s comments that great writing is like Jazz—improvised, in the moment or “the take” (Tebeau 2011). The best public history and digital humanities, I’ve argued, are performative, like Cortazar’s best writing—like the best books.

Of course, books are performative—written, read, engaged—but that quality is rarely discussed when we mull the future of the book, with our focus being mostly on form, publishing, and preservation. As digital technologies have exploded publishing, they’re allowing us to recognize (once again) the performative aspects of the book as a knowledge system.

Digital technology, especially the emergence of mobile technologies and cloud computing, mean that books can now be performed—produced, experienced, and engaged—more fluidly and in more places. Of course, we could always read and annotate our dog-eared edition of Ulysses while walking the streets of Dublin, drinking in a local pub. But, now we can “read” Ulysses hyper-textually in Dublin (or in a pub anywhere) with comments and annotation, as well as video, audio, and other media expressions. We can fully experience literature.

As digital innovation has democratized writing, it also now allows communities to not just experience literature, but also to produce it. This production occurs in multiple contexts, with producers building communities through open-source technologies that publish in a variety of fashions: aggregation, multimedia, micro-blogging, long-form journalism, and mash-up. The work has redefined narrative and storytelling, and built communities of professionals, experts, amateurs, and crowds. These communities not only engage story and narrative, they transform text through their engagement. This is conceptually apparent in crowdsourced projects, annotation, and social media sharing.

Additionally, the emergence of smartphones (and now tablets) has allowed (coupled with cloud computing) for new publishing forms to become part of and to engage the physical landscape. Indeed, locative media allows us to explore narrative and stories in place. The landscape becomes hypertextual because it allows us to connect a book—or, for that matter, multiple books, annotations, links, and media—to a particular geography, structure, and physical context. That landscape moves from the object of narrative to part of the text itself. It evokes space, identity, landscape; it helps us individually and collectively to remake “place.” Perhaps more importantly, for us, the book becomes a space of play, a play space, a place of itself.

In accentuating longstanding qualities of books—their fluidity and interactivity and portability—the digital has reemphasized books as performative. Digital knowledge systems and the future of publishing books demand that we engage the dynamism of books as living performances.

cross-posted at urbanhumanist