Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies' envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies' capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field's political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies' alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field's growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities

Book culture from consumerism to control

Libro Electrónicoxii, 242 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.Ted Striphas argues that, although the production and propagation of books have undoubtedly entered a new phase, printed works are still very much a part of our everyday lives. With examples from trade journals, news media, films, advertisements, and a host of other commercial and scholarly materials, Striphas tells a story of modern publishing that proves, even in a rapidly digitizing world, books are anything but dead. From the rise of retail superstores to Oprah's phenomenal reach, Striphas tracks the methods through which the book industry has adapted (or has failed to adapt) to rapid changes in twentieth-century print culture. Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com have established new routes of traffic in and around books, and pop sensations like Harry Potter and the Oprah Book Club have inspired the kind of brand loyalty that could only make advertisers swoon. At the same time, advances in digital technology have presented the book industry with extraordinary threats and unique opportunities. Striphas's provocative analysis offers a counternarrative to those who either triumphantly declare the end of printed books or deeply mourn their passing. With wit and brilliant insight, he isolates the invisible processes through which books have come to mediate our social interactions and influence our habits of consumption, integrating themselves into our routines and intellects like never before. Tomado de [http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14814-6/the-late-age-of-print]Acknowledgments Introduction: The Late Age of Print Bottom Lines; Edges; Sites 1 E-Books and the Digital Future A Book by Any Other Name; Shelf Life; Book Sneaks; Disappearing Digits; A Different Story to Tell 2 The Big-Box Bookstore Blues Chain Reactions?; Thoroughly Modern Bookselling; Things to Do with Big-Box Bookstores; History’s Folds 3 Bringing Bookland Online “The Tragedy of the Book Industry”; Encoding/Decoding—Sort of; A Political Economy of Commodity Codes; The Remarkable Unremarkable 4 Literature as Life on Oprah’s Book Club O®; “No Dictionary Required”; “It’s More About Life”; A Million Little Corrections; An Intractable Alchemy 5 Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy Securing Harry Potter; Pirating Potter; He-Who-Must-Be-Named Conclusion: From Consumerism to Control On the Verge; From Heyday to History and Beyond Notes Inde

App Law Within:Rights and Regulation in the Smartphone Age

This article assesses the regulation of smartphone ‘app stores’. At the outset, the significance of smartphones and apps to the debate on Internet regulation is considered, and places in the context of the adoption of smartphones and apps. The importance (commercially and as a study in governance and control) of the iOS App Store (Apple) is highlighted, as is the need to explore forms of regulation that are not linked with a violation of competition law. Section ‘Developer-focused issues’ deals with the relationship between Apple and app developers; three themes of Apple’s Guidelines are identified (content, development and payments), and the ways in which control can be challenged (through jailbreaking, ‘web apps’ and regulatory intervention) are scrutinized. Section ‘Citizen- and consumer-focused issues’ considers three ways in which apps are already regulated by law. The focus is on the protection of consumers (particularly through the UK system for ‘premium rate services’), but a discussion of user privacy and the regulation of video games and video-on-demand services in Europe is also included. Finally, in the section ‘Conclusion’, the tension between comparatively ‘open’ and ‘closed’ app stores is highlighted; the problems of applying general provisions to emerging formats are emphasized. It is concluded that the emerging status of non-carrier app stores as neither retailer nor platform means that it is not yet possible to identify the form of regulation that is in operation, but that some steps are available to legislators that could shift the balance between closed and open model

Disrupting the dissertation: linked data, enhanced publication and algorithmic culture

This article explores how the three aspects of Striphas’ notion of algorithmic culture (information, crowds and algorithms) might influence and potentially disrupt established educational practices.  We draw on our experience of introducing semantic web and linked data technologies into higher education settings, focussing on extended student writing activities such as dissertations and projects, and drawing in particular on our experiences related to undergraduate archaeology dissertations. The potential for linked data to be incorporated into electronic texts, including academic publications, has already been described, but these accounts have highlighted opportunities to enhance research integrity and interactivity, rather than considering their potential creatively to disrupt existing academic practices. We discuss how the changing relationships between subject content and practices, teachers, learners and wider publics both in this particular algorithmic culture, and more generally, offer new opportunities; but also how the unpredictability of crowds, the variable nature and quality of data, and the often hidden power of algorithms, introduce new pedagogical challenges and opportunities

Postdigital Dialogue

This article is a multi-authored experimental postdigital dialogue about postdigital dialogue. Fourteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors were invited to reflect on Petar Jandric’s book Learning in the age of digital reason (2017) or to produce completely new insights. The article also contains a summary of book symposium on Learning in the age of digital reason held at the 2017 American Educational Research Conference (AERA). The authors are tentatively confident that this article produces more knowledge than the arithmetic sum of its constituent parts. However, they are also very aware of its limits and insist that their conclusions are not consensual or homogenous. As traditional forms of research increasingly fail to describe our current reality, they present this article as an experiment and a possible starting point for developing new dialogical research approaches fit for our postdigital reality

Schoolbooks and textbook publishing.

In this chapter the author looks at the history of schoolbooks and textbook publishing. The nineteenth century saw a rise in the school book market in Britain due to the rise of formal schooling and public examinations. Although the 1870 Education and 1872 (Scotland) Education Acts made elementary education compulsory for childern between 5-13 years old, it was not until the end of the First World War that some sort form of secondary education became compulsory for all children

Reading and Ownership

First paragraph: ‘It is as easy to make sweeping statements about reading tastes as to indict a nation, and as pointless.’ This jocular remark by a librarian made in the Times in 1952 sums up the dangers and difficulties of writing the history of reading. As a field of study in the humanities it is still in its infancy and encompasses a range of different methodologies and theoretical approaches. Historians of reading are not solely interested in what people read, but also turn their attention to the why, where and how of the reading experience. Reading can be solitary, silent, secret, surreptitious; it can be oral, educative, enforced, or assertive of a collective identity. For what purposes are individuals reading? How do they actually use books and other textual material? What are the physical environments and spaces of reading? What social, educational, technological, commercial, legal, or ideological contexts underpin reading practices? Finding answers to these questions is compounded by the difficulty of locating and interpreting evidence. As Mary Hammond points out, ‘most reading acts in history remain unrecorded, unmarked or forgotten’. Available sources are wide but inchoate: diaries, letters and autobiographies; personal and oral testimonies; marginalia; and records of societies and reading groups all lend themselves more to the case-study approach than the historical survey. Statistics offer analysable data but have the effect of producing identikits rather than actual human beings. The twenty-first century affords further possibilities, and challenges, with its traces of digital reader activity, but the map is ever-changing

Whose domain and whose ontology?:Preserving human radical reflexivity over the efficiency of automatically generated feedback alone

In this chapter, we challenge an increase in the uncritical application of algorithmic processes for providing automatically generated feedback for students, within a neoliberal framing of contemporary higher education. Initially, we discuss our concerns alongside networked learning principles, which developed as a critical pedagogical response to new online learning programmes and platforms. These principles now overlap too, with the notion that we are living in ‘postdigital’ times, where automatically generated feedback never stands alone, but is contested and supplemented by physical encounters and human feedback. First, we make observations on the e-marking platform Turnitin, alongside other rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. When generic (but power-laden) maps are incorporated into both student and staff ‘perceived’ spaces through AI, we surface the aspects of feedback that risk being lost. Second, we draw on autoethnographic understandings of our own lived experience of performing radically reflexive feedback within a Master’s in Education programme. A radically reflexive form of feedback may not follow a pre-defined map, but it does offer a vehicle to restore individual student and staff voices and critical self-navigation of both physical and virtual learning spaces. This needs to be preserved in the ongoing shaping of the contemporary ‘postdigital’ university