Marcello Vitali-Rosati: On Editorialization: Structuring Space and Authority in the Digital Age (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, authority, digital media, editing, editorialization, media, open access, public space, space, web, writing
“In this book Marcello Vitali-Rosati examines how authority changes in the digital era. Authority seems to have vanished in the age of the web, since the spatial relationships that authority depends on are thought to have levelled out: there are no limits or boundaries, no hierarchies or organized structures anymore. Vitali-Rosati claims the opposite to be the case: digital space is well-structured and material and has specific forms of authority. Editorialization is one key process that organizes this space and thus brings into being digital authority. Investigating this process of editorialization, Vitali-Rosati reveals how politics can be reconceived in the digital age.”
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2018
Theory on Demand series, 26
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 9492302209, 9789492302205
114 pages
Memory of the World (ed.): Guerrilla Open Access (2018)
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · book, copyright, free software, knowledge production, open access, piracy, publishing, shadow library
“In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyrights, where free software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive.
As the contributions to this pamphlet indicate, the terms of struggle have shifted: not only do we have to continue defending our shadow libraries, but we need to take back the autonomy of knowledge production and rebuild institutional grounds of solidarity.”
With texts by Memory of the World, Christopher Kelty, Balázs Bodó, and Laurie Allen.
Publisher Post Office Press, Rope Press, and Memory of the World, Coventry, 2018
Radical Open Access II series
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
34 pages
Joe Karaganis (ed.): Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, digital library, knowledge, library, open access, piracy, publishing, shadow library
“Examining the new ecosystems of access that are emerging in middle- and low-income countries as opportunities for higher education expand but funding for materials shrinks.
Even as middle- and low-income countries expand their higher education systems, their governments are retreating from responsibility for funding and managing this expansion. The public provision of educational materials in these contexts is rare; instead, libraries, faculty, and students are on their own to get what they need. Shadow Libraries explores the new ecosystem of access, charting the flow of educational and research materials from authors to publishers to libraries to students, and from comparatively rich universities to poorer ones. In countries from Russia to Brazil, the weakness of formal models of access was countered by the growth of informal ones. By the early 2000s, the principal form of access to materials was informal copying and sharing. Since then, such unauthorized archives as Libgen, Gigapedia, and Sci-Hub have become global “shadow libraries,” with massive aggregations of downloadable scholarly materials.
The chapters consider experiments with access in a range of middle- and low-income countries, describing, among other things, the Russian samizdat tradition and the connection of illicit copying to resistance to oppression; BiblioFyL, an online archive built by students at the University of Buenos Aires; education policy and the daily practices of students in post-Apartheid South Africa; the politics of access in India; and copy culture in Brazil.”
Contributors: Balázs Bodó, Laura Czerniewicz, Miroslaw Filiciak, Mariana Fossatti, Jorge Gemetto, Eve Gray, Evelin Heidel, Joe Karaganis, Lawrence Liang, Pedro Mizukami, Jhessica Reia, Alek Tarkowski
Publisher MIT Press, Cambridge/MA; International Development Research Centre, Ottawa; and The American Assembly at Columbia University, New York, 2018
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262535014, 0262535017
313 pages
PDF, PDF (8 MB)
EPUB (added on 2018-5-31)
HTML (added on 2018-9-23)
See also Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, 2011.
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