Scott Pilgrim vs the Future of Comics Publishing

Publishers have always been keen to maximize the multimedia potential of their products, and are increasingly eager to make the most of the opportunities afforded to them by digital platforms and technologies. While this sort of treatment is ubiquitous for those intellectual properties belonging to industry behemoths Marvel and DC, it is unusual for those published by smaller independent presses to receive similar consideration. However, Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic book series Scott Pilgrim despite its modest, independently published beginnings, was bought by Fourth Estate and then made into a major motion picture in 2010, the release of which was accompanied by a mobile phone app. This article will explore how the consequences of commercial decisions taken by Fourth Estate and the creators of the app affect the reception of the comic, and is informed by original interviews with the publisher and app creator. It will pay particular attention to the significance of content contained within the print comics that is not contained within the app. My examination will draw on Gerard Genette's definition of the paratext and how it locates the print comic within a creative economy that privileges a DIY practice - demonstrating an allegiance, for example, to webcomic creation, a direct transaction between creator and consumer that bypasses the producer entirely. This analysis will be coupled with an investigation of how the migration of print content to app affects the reading of the comic, and is augmented by a survey of comics readers who are used to reading digital content on-screen. I argue that not only does the intervention of digital technology transform the aesthetic product, the commercial motivations of the publisher/producer are inextricable from our understanding of the comic as artefact, thus emphasizing the need for a more cultural materialist approach in comics studies as a discipline

SKAITMENINĖS LEIDYBOS KOMUNIKACINĖ GRANDINĖ

The publishing value chain has remained relatively consistent since the invention of the printing press. Robert Darnton’s influential model of the communications circuit of the book, which tracks how intellectual property circulated in 18th century France, has been a largely accurate representation of the publishing industry until the late 20th century. This article examines changes to the publishing industry, particularly as a result of the disruptions and disintermediations of the digital age, and proposes a re-drawing of the communications circuit for the 21st century. The research in this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant number AH/J01317X/1 The Book Unbound: Disruption and Disintermediation in the Digital Age.Stirling Centre for International Publishingand Communication Division of Literatureand [email protected] University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 [email protected] Leidybos vertės grandinė išliko santykinai pastovi nuo spausdinimo staklių išradimo laikų. Svarbus Roberto Darntono sukurtas knygos komunikacijos grandinės modelis, aprašantis intelektinės nuosavybės judrumą aštuonioliktojo amžiaus Prancūzijoje, gana tiksliai atspindėjo leidybos sektoriaus raidą iki vėlyvo dvidešimtojo amžiaus. Šiame straipsnyje visų pirma nagrinėjami tokie pokyčiai kaip skaitmeninio amžiaus sukelti dramatiški trūkiai (angl. disruptions) ir be tarpininkų vykstantys procesai (angl. disintermediation). Jo autorės siūlo iš naujo sukurti komunikacijos modelį, pritaikant jį dvidešimt pirmajam amžiui. Straipsnyje apibendrinti tyrimai, kuriuos parėmė Jungtinės Karalystės Menų ir humanitarinių mokslinių tyrimų tarybos (Arts and Humanities Research Council) skirtas projektinis finansavimas (dotacija Nr. AH/J01317X/1); tyrimo tema – Išlaisvinta knyga: skaitmeninio amžiaus sukelti dramatiški pokyčiai ir be tarpininkavimo vykstantys procesai (The Book Unbound: Disruption and Disintermediation in the Digital age).REIKŠMINIAI ŽODŽIAI: skaitmeninė leidyba, leidyba, Darntono komunikacijos grandinė, autorystė, skaitymas

Making Culture: Locating the Digital Humanities in India

"What is called 'making' in North America and Europe is, frankly, a luxurious pastime of wealthy people who rightly recognize that their lives are less full because they are alienated from material culture [...] All over what is called the Global South there are makers everywhere, only they are not called makers." (Csikszentmihályi, 2012; p9) The context for making in the Global South is obviously different to the West. In this article we aim to explore what critical making in India might mean, and in particular how this debate and the practices around it can contribute to the development of digital humanities, particularly in the heritage/public history sector. We consider two examples in order to demonstrate the role that design might play in helping digital humanities to take account of non-Western contexts. Firstly the Indian practice of jugaad - an indigenous combination of making-do, hacking, and frugal engineering - against the backdrop of making/DIY culture, and how local circumstances might shape intellectual explorations through critical making. Secondly we examine the case study of the design of an "Indian" videogame prototype, Meghdoot, produced as part of the interdisciplinary UnBox festival in New Delhi, 2013, which was used as an exploratory vehicle for what it means to make a culturally-specific digital game in India. We demonstrate how cultural specificity and local context, with its emphasis on making culture - as opposed to localization and globalization - can contribute meaningfully to current understandings of the digital humanities, and extend the conversation to the Global South in an inclusive and relevant manner

The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit

The publishing value chain has remained relatively consistent since the invention of the printing press. Robert Darnton's influential model of the communications circuit of the book, which tracks how intellectual property circulated in eighteenth-century France, has been a largely accurate representation of the publishing industry until the late twentieth century. This article examines changes to the publishing industry, particularly as a result of the disruptions and disintermediations of the digital age, and proposes a re-drawing of the communications circuit for the twenty-first century. The research in this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant number AH/J01317X/1The Book Unbound: Disruption and Disintermediation in the Digital Age

Copyright and Creator Rights in DH Projects: A Checklist

This checklist is an offering to the digital humanities community by participants of the Digital Humanities 2017 panel “Copyright, Digital Humanities, and Global Geographies of Knowledge.”* Do you have suggestions for improving it? Please email vzafrin at bu edu. *https://www.conftool.pro/dh2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=291&presentations=sho

Independent Publishing: Making and Preserving Culture in a Global Literary Marketplace

First paragraph: This report results from a Programme of Enquiry funded and hosted by the Scottish Insight Universities Institute (Scottish Insight), on the theme of Independent Publishing: Making and Preserving Culture in a Global Literary Marketplace. A series of events was held from June-August 2011 in Scottish Insight's premises in Glasgow, with an additional event held at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in association with Publishing Scotland in August 2011. The events brought together publishers, authors, policy makers, government, librarians, academics from multidisciplinary backgrounds, publishing students, and others with an involvement in books and publishing from Scotland, the UK and beyond. The Programme was supplemented by a series of interviews with independent publishers

Gender, Nation and Embodiment in Byron’s Poetry

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space

Gender, nation and embodiment in Byron's poetry

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo