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A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited, and read in a networked environment. [1] It is also a platform for social exchange, and is potentially linked to other books and other discussions. Wikipedia can be considered a networked book. LetsAuthor is a publishing company that exclusively publishes networked books created on its platform. [2]
The networked book has four primary characteristics:
The networked book maintains an open structure during all or part of its creation. For example, Lawrence Lessig's, Code: Version 2.0 used a wiki to open the editing process for the second edition of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, in order to "draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind. Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication." In other words, at some point the book was declared finished, and closed to further input and adjustment by the community. Another example of an open book structure is the popular Wikipedia. This online wiki encyclopedia is entirely and indefinitely open.
Another example of a networked book is Turbulence.org's 2009 commissioned anthology, Networked: a (networked book) about (networked art). [3] The website explores writing, art, and culture in networked society, and explores the subject on multiple levels. In addition to the thematic matter, the initial commissioned authors were invited to submit chapters using a blog or wiki format. While seven of the authors chose the blog format (with the CommentPress plugin), artist/theorist Patrick Lichty created a wiki-formatted chapter, "Art in the Age of Dataflow", [4] which discusses literary theories of spatial narrative from its inception in the 1940s to the age of big data. Like Lawrence Lessig's text, Dataflow was intended as a propositional text from which the online community expand on the original chapter. The chapter as it existed in 2012 was captured and included in Lichty's Institute for Networked Culture book, "Variant Analyses, Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture". [5]
The networked book manifests a certain "disarticulation of the body of text" and "disaggregated/reaggregated" structure as described by Raffaele Simone in his essay, The Body of the Text. [6] "Disarticulation of the body of the text occurs when the text generated by an author is not perceived as closed to external interventions, an entity to which the author can have access only to read (or, to use an information science image, in the manner of ROM, that is "read only"), but as an open entity to which one has access—for purposes of both reading and writing. When the text is disarticulated it is perceived as an entity which can be disaggregated (broken apart), manipulated, and reaggregated (reassembled) without damaging the text per se or the author."
The networked book is a form that helps us reconstruct and understand the prolific and increasingly granular world of information that surrounds us. Moreover, the networked book sets up formats that are often designed to update continually, incorporating new information and reconfiguring the book to accommodate new content and present it coherently.
Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 [7] builds its content from RSS feeds. The piece selects the most frequently used words from the major news networks to assemble an hourly "portrait" of our world. This visualization tool represents a type of structure that we will soon see in networked books. The human editor/programmer creates the search and visualization function and the machine then collects, edits, and presents text and images according to criteria built into the program. This type of "book" format depends on granular content that can be "manipulated and reaggregated" by a tool.
Social software environments create spaces for communal authorship. They allow raw, unedited content to be collectively assembled within the nascent form of the electronic book itself, facilitating a gestational space for content to evolve from spontaneous discussion into an edited "book" according to the activity of the social network. LiveJournal [8] is a useful model for socially networked books. [9]
The multiple-author forum creates a different kind of thinking environment. Individual points of view are mediated by multiple voices. This may allow for a more democratic approach to issues and a multifaceted rendering of topics not possible in the single-author print model.
The future book will be a networked book or a "processed book" as Joseph Esposito calls it. To process a book, he says, is more than simply building links to it; processing also includes a modification of the act of creation, which tends to encourage the absorption of the book into a network of applications, including but not restricted to commentary. This "processing" creates iterations of the book: critiques, revisions and trajectories that accumulate around the original draft. The iterations of Wikipedia are a good example of this principle. The networked book, as a process-based knowledge machine incorporates the thinking process of multiple authors.
It is useful, in this case, to compare the processing of a networked book to the standard editorial procedures found in print culture. Both print books and networked books originate from an idea conceived by a senior editor or an author. However, the participatory framework of a networked book is articulated by a designer, and executed by a programmer, before the content is written or assembled, thus creating an open book structure. Paper-based books are turned over to the designer, production artist and printer after the content is finished, resulting in a closed book structure. The networked book is assembled, in whole or in part, by a community of authors according to the thesis imagined by the editor/author and within the space created by the designer and programmer. The community of contributors acts as both author and reader, which is drastically different from the single-author print model wherein, reader is audience rather than co-creator. In a networked book, content is generated and revised by the community and the various iterations of the text are often saved and can be returned to and discussed. In a paper-based book, content is generally constructed by a single author and is revised under the supervision of an editor. The readers have no part in this process and the revisions are only examined and debated in special cases, and then usually by scholars or authors, not by the general readership. After the content has been generated by the community within the framework of the network book's thesis and architecture, the reader/editor implements strategies for marking out meaningful pathways through the material using search engines and visualization applications.
Markuplanguage refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document or to enrich its content to facilitating automated processing. A markup language is a set of rules governing what markup information may be included in a document and how it is combined with the content of the document in a way to facilitate use by humans and computer programs. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of paper manuscripts, which is traditionally written with a red pen or blue pencil on authors' manuscripts.
A wiki is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
Wiki software, is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.
Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a term describing a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of creators and copyright holders, with or without their permission. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released Licenses as tools to enable remix culture again, as remixing is legally prevented by the default exclusive copyright regime applied currently on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Students for Free Culture, formerly known as FreeCulture.org, is an international student organization working to promote free culture ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of former Stanford, now Harvard, law professor Lawrence Lessig, who wrote the book Free Culture, and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. Students for Free Culture has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture is a 2007 book written by entrepreneur and Internet critic Andrew Keen. Published by Currency, Keen's first book is a critique of the enthusiasm surrounding user-generated content, peer production, and other Web 2.0–related phenomena.
The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is Lawrence Lessig's fifth book. The book was made available for free download and remixing under the CC BY-NC Creative Commons license via Bloomsbury Academic. It is still available via the Internet Archive. It details a hypothesis about the societal effect of the Internet, and how this will affect production and consumption of popular culture to a "remix culture".
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia; like Wikipedia, it is available in many languages.
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a 2010 book by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. that deals with the topic of Wikipedia and the Wikipedia community. The book was first published on August 27, 2010, through the MIT Press and has a foreword by Lawrence Lessig. The book is an ethnographic study of the history of Wikipedia, its real life and theoretical precursors, and its culture including its consensus and collaborative practices.
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative and multilingual encyclopedia website and project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has more than 48 million articles written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
Standard Ebooks is an open source, volunteer-driven project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured and accessible e-books of works in the public domain. Standard Ebooks sources titles from places like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Wikisource, among others, but differs from those projects in that the goal is to maximize readability for a modern audience, take advantage of accessibility features available in modern e-book file formats, and to streamline updates to the e-books by making use of GitHub as a collaboration tool.