Managing Digital Innovation in Publishing: Collaborations and Para-organisations for Creative Change

Reflecting proactively on a growing industry “dilemma”, this book explores how publishing businesses can and do successfully experiment and innovate in digital publishing through collaboration. Many sectors of publishing are still structured around print production, with digital innovation in the consumer arena generally focused on different book formats, such e-books and audiobooks, rather than brand-new types of products. Publishers need to innovate around different sorts of content and digital formats as consumers change their media habits. However, their pricing, business and risk models, and workflows are reflective of a legacy of print publishing; and as print commands so much revenue publishers do not want to derail their main business as they experiment. Drawing on an analysis of collaboration and network theory and four in-depth qualitative case studies in different sectors, this research suggests that collaboration, particularly engaging with the wider creative sector, is key to the sustainable development of new types of products. It points to the characteristics of a successful digital collaboration and explains how to manage publishing innovation alongside the existing business, through para-organisations. Considering novel approaches to innovation, such as iterative software-style approaches and agile project management, as well as new business models, such as those employed in games development, the author shows how introducing new people – from software developers to competitors – can help instill a collaborative mindset within the organization and facilitate constructive experimentation. This is a publication that is based on PhD research

Gullible Consumers: The Contradictions of Sustainability

Contradictions of sustainability are all around us. They are referred to as contradictions because the companies that preach about their sustainable practices drive the problems. The author dives deeper into the issue and explores why we, as consumers, find these initiatives attractive. In this chapter, the author focuses on brands they have documented as contradictions; for example, fast fashion brands, attempts to reduce the amount of clothing produced by offering (both online and in-store) a donation box for shoppers to bring in unwanted clothing. The problem with many sustainability initiatives is that they are no more than buyback initiatives; such short-term decision-making is that it only diverts the problem elsewhere: far away from our eyes, to second-hand markets and landfills in countries like Ghana and Chile, where we do not know what happens. The problem with the solutions we create stems from ignoring the complexity of our world. The author further argues that we must remove the shackles of the past that determine our future by relying on the same systematic patterns that produced the previous problem and leaving them to repeat those patterns; to let go of the familiar and lay with the discomfort, the discomfort that can help imagine the world anew

On Point of View: Writing photography, violence and the self

In this talk, I discuss the process of writing my current book-in-progress, a work of experimental non-fiction about photography, violence and love. As an academic, I am tasked with understanding photography’s history, but my own experience of violence has shaken my trust in my eyes, even as I carry the authority of someone who ‘sees’ for a living. Writing involves occupying a point of view, taking a position, orientating myself in relation to the issues at hand. By extension, it means questioning knowledge itself: what it is to write ‘I see’ as another way of claiming that ‘I know’. For the past fifteen years, my research has been concerned with photography of conflict, violence, terror, trauma and loss. Behind this book is a recognition that the true connecting thread that has held that work together – the motivation underneath it all – has been their opposites: desire, vulnerability, and love. These are the reasons why photography plays such a critical role in times of crisis and despair. It is also why photographic archives are sites of such contention. I will draw examples from the chapters of my current work that are focussed on conflict and war, to pose a challenge to those writing about violence and seeing: to centre their bodies and their selves, while in turn creating space for the uncertainty of their own vision as a radical political stance

Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach To Transmedia Characters

This book defines a straightforward way to analyse fictional characters through data. It shows how a data-led approach can produce rich analyses of characters, their surrounding storyworlds, and their authors across time and different types of media. It uses the Marvel Comics’ character, Doctor Doom as its main case study, and demonstrates the advantages of this approach by comparing the results to those taken from a survey of fan attitudes. It also uses the methodology to analyse the differences between the American and British characters who share the name "Dennis The Menace". Finally, it offers a range of further uses for the tool. All datasets and tools are made available to download, so that other researchers can use the methodology and compare their own results to those generated in the book

Tableaux II: Painting as Stage

Engram Ply 1, 2014, Engram 20, 2011 & Engram 23, 2012 shown in the group show: Tableaux II: Painting as Stage Presented by Rebecca Scott and Mark Woods Curated by Dereck Harris Talk Event: Thurs 2nd May (6-9pm) With artists: Emilly Allchurch (TBC), Peter Ashton Jones, Louise Bristow, Chris Bucklow, Noemi Conan, Dan Coombs, Mick Finch, Dereck Harris, Glenys Johnson, Alison Jones, Neil Tait, Stella Whalle

We (Still) Profess

Women's Design + Research Unit (WD+RU) poster selected for touring group exhibition, 'I Profess: the graphic design manifesto', 20th Anniversary Traveling Juried Exhibition. How do graphic designers visualize their teaching philosophies, their pedagogical beliefs that are in constant dialogue with other cultural, philosophical, and disciplinary values and practices? Thirty design educators respond with 23 peer-reviewed posters. WD+RU were included in the first 'I Profess' exhibition in 2004 and this poster is an updated version of the original

Extracurricular

Extracurricular is a 4-hour performance hangout exploring the strangely social and definitively uncool phenomenon of the ‘school play’ with its collectively made costumes, props, stage sets, songs, and choreographies. The term ‘extracurricular’ often denotes creative activities motivated by an unbridled enthusiasm, which typically exceed the confines of academic study, including amateur forays into arts, dance, and theatre. You are invited to drop in, drop out.... or stay as long as you like. Extracurricular brings together students from MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and MA Post at the Art Academy of Latvia

Erotic Ecologies

Artists: Eirini Boukla, Catherine Ferguson, Rebecca Partridge, Sarah Kate Wilson The title of the show Erotic Ecologies is borrowed from Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by bio-philosopher Andreas Weber. Weber urges us to live with a perspective from ‘the inside of life’ by paying attention to the corporeal experience of being alive rather than as analysing machines standing apart from the world. The drive toward both attachment and autonomy is the fulfilment of what he calls an ‘erotic encounter, an encounter of meaning through contact, an encounter of being oneself through the significance of others’ (pxiii). Far from a straightforward or romantic idea, this is a challenging and complex relationship of opposites, which, when in “proper balance” creates sparks of “enlivenment” – enlivenment is the sign of creative breakthrough beyond the mindset of measurement and comparison. Weber’s ideas seem to resonate with processes of making an individual work, which has autonomy as a ‘work’ but only works through contact, touch, desire and the enfolding of all that is outside. We have thought about his ideas as we put our exhibition together, as we have tried to create new contacts and relationships between work, gallery space and viewer

Voices: Interviews with Women in Contemporary Publishing, Interview 8: Rathna Ramanathan

Explores the diversity of women’s work in transatlantic and continental publishing across the twentieth-century. This chapter is an interview conducted by the editors with Rathna Ramanathan. The first international edited collection to explore women’s diverse work in book and magazine publishing in the twentieth century. Specially commissioned, archivally-rich chapters from leading established and early-careers scholars, edited by an international research team. Transatlantic and European/continental in focus, going beyond the Anglosphere, and modelling the best new comparative work in global print cultures. Cuts across aesthetic divisions in twentieth-century literary history and bridges the gap in understandings of women’s contributions to publishing from first to second and third/fourth wave feminisms. Includes interviews with 8 contemporary women in publishing, plus new oral history research. Women’s creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women’s diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women’s contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures. With an international, intergenerational set of contributors using diverse methodologies, essays explore women working in publishing transatlantically, on the continent, and beyond the Anglosphere. The book combines new work on high-profile women publishers and editors alongside analysis of women’s work as translators, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, and publisher’s readers; complemented by new oral histories and interviews with leading women in publishing today. The first collection of its kind, the companion helps establish and shape a thriving new research field

The Royal Tenenbaums

Costume case study