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first thoughts about the january 07 retreat 
01.03.2007, 11:54 AM
here are some notes from me about what we're hoping to accomplish with the retreat. this is inevitably a partial answer, offered here to try to tease out the rest of the story and set the context as usefully (and interestingly) as possible. please weigh in here and/or start your own threads.
the elevator pitch on the institute is that our raison d'etre is to understand (and influence) how intellectual discourse is changing as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. we like to believe that we are good at combining theory with practice; i.e. we don't only think about things, we also test out our ideas in the real world. the concept and various iterations of the networked book is our most important (and identifiable) contribution to date, but we've also gathered some respect for the breadth of our interests relative to the "future of the book" and at times the unpredictableness and offbeat sensibilities of our collective vision.
to the extent that we've created something interesting over the past two years, it's thanks in large part to the unrestricted grant from the macarthur foundation which trusted us to, "do something interesting."
success however has brought it's own significant pressures.
some of the questions we've investigated during the past two years have led us to projects which feel much more like full-productions rather than experiments. to go down this path would require significantly more funding and a quite different measure of success. for example, the question of academic blogging brought us indirectly to mediacommons, a wildly ambitious plan to found a new academic press, based on the radical idea of returning the press to its original purpose of encouraging discourse. another example is our inquiry into the question of why there is still no credible (networked, electronic competition for the print textbook) has put us in a position to collaborate with people in american history, rhetoric and composition, spanish, music etc. to create open source texts of unimagined power -- if only we had the resources.
other questions we've considered, have placed us in the center of significant policy issues. for example our considerable concerns about google's role as archivist and gatekeeper of our collective culture have led us to try to pull together a movement aimed at encouraging the creation of a public trust (in opposition to google and other private, for-profit entities). and this in turn raises huge questions about the socio/political context for everything we're doing. how political can we/should we be, and in what way?
then of course, our experiments, particularly Gamer Theory and the Iraq Study Group report have yielded much deeper questions than the ones we started with. for example:
-- we now understand that one way to think about what we're doing, is that we are expanding the boundaries of the book to include, not just the content at a moment, frozen in time, but the process that created the content and the conversation it engenders. think of "without gods" as foregrounding the process of creation; think about gamer theory or the Iraq Study Group report as exploring the possibiltiy of extended asynchronous conversation taking place within the context of the book itself. but the further we go with these experiments the more we realize the necessity of inventing radical new forms which are capable of dealing with complexity in useful ways. increasingly it seems that two dimensions aren't sufficient. what would it mean to reconceive the book as a three or four dimensional (social) space.
-- our work on the networked book has made it stunningly clear that the traditional roles of authors and readers are undergoing substantial changes. what experiments
are necessary to take this strand of inquiry to the next stage.
-- if it's true that the "history" of a wikipedia article or other many-authored work is as important as the "last version" how do we present the history in a useful way.
-- the more we consider new forms for the book, the more we realize the importance of the related questions of how knowledge is, archived and retrieved. we define "books" rather broadly -- for our purposes, it's the vehicle humans use to move big ideas around. if we were to define libraries just as broadly -- the vehicle humans use to store and retrieve knowledge, could we, should we be the institute for the future of books and libraries -- asked figuratively rather than literally.
Sophie may be a viable tool in the next several months. Is Sophie promising enough for us to really get behind it and push, or should we abandon it for web-based alternatives. if Sophie is something we should support, to what extent should we be planning a "publishing program" around Sophie to explore and show-off it's potential.
we've just gotten a second grant from macarthur but it only covers three salaries and basic expenses for this year and only half that the year after. we've either got to scale down our ambition substantially or else gear up for significant fund-raising. if we go for expansion, the question is how do we do that and not sell our souls for funding. if we opt to stay small and lithe how do we concentrate our efforts so that we continue having an impact. can we achieve our goals (whatever they are or should be) within the context of the institute or is it time to consider another structure?
Posted by bob stein at January 3, 2007 11:54 AM
Comments
It seems to me that the retreat is about the overlap between the future of the institute and the future of the book. The two are not synonymous because not all ideas worth pursuing yield the kind of work that the Institute staff wants to do. Most of us are happiest with work that we believe has real value in the world. Because the kind of world matters as much as the ideas the Institute is trying to move around in it, I'd make the case that the Institute should be political. It would be ideal to pursue questions good enough to keep people awake at night that also further a political agenda.
In that category, encouraging the creating of a public trust for our collective culture is a humdinger. It's gaining currency (see the re-Public: re.imagining democracy site; http://www.re-public.gr/en/). And it dovetails in some powerful way with the idea of the Institute for the Book and the Library: a three-dimensional space for three-dimensional books; a place where networked works challenge conventional notions of authorship and intellectual property, a digital commons designed by a virtual Rem Koolhaas . . . . And what would line the shelves? Viz the quote in yesterday's NYTimes from the owner of an independent bookstore in Princeton on its last legs: "Logan Fox can't quite pinpoint the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people like to talk about, at dinner, cocktail parties, at work."
About finances: shouldn't it be possible to come up with ways to contract out the Institute's expertise on a for-profit basis without selling its collective soul?
I'm also keenly interested how the roles of author and editor are changing, commingling, and challenging proprietorship.
Posted by: Ashton Applewhite at January 4, 2007 6:39 PM