the affiliation of unscrunched and _______________.

this afternoon tim, astrid and i met with gabrielle gardener from the uts library. the background to the meeting was essentially the need to make a decision about whether our on-line “journal” was going to be housed within the uts e-press universe, or not. uts e-press is part of a global institutional library movement – no, not to publish michael moore books, but – to house material produced in universities.

huh?

well, as gabrielle told us, universities pay for research done within their walls, and then that research gets published in journals which are then sold back to the university library for insane amounts of money. like really ludicrous amounts of money. so the crafty librarians are using open source digital technologies (what they call Open Journal Systems (OJS)) to “publish” or “retain” the material that they produce so that they can avoid fronting huge fees to the journals. pretty clever idea.

anyhow, that may or may not impress you, but what it means for us is that unscrunched is really part of a journal management system, which has pros and cons. pros are that its open source and networked into scholarly databases and so is plugged into a global academic network. also its archived permanently, which is really good. cons are that we can’t make it look good or dynamic and maybe we don’t give a brown one about the ‘global academic network’, full as it of tired old academics and their tired old practice.

so we went into this meeting assuming that our aims were probably too divergent to fit into OJS, wondering if we might make them two different projects (given that we will have a good deal of material to draw from), or perhaps find some way we might be able to be affiliated, or related. as it turned out, it was a really good discussion and we found a way to be both independent and affiliated.

in essence, we have our own web-space which looks and acts in whichever way it pleases us, with whatever content we please. and then, secondarily, we have this ongoing archival space of unscrunched where we can also deposit work (concurrently with our own web-space or after the event). and there the work will sit for ever more, or until the digital universe destroys itself (most likely coinciding with the destruction of the rest of the world).

but where is “there”?

well OJS has this aspect to its archival space that they call a ‘community of practice’. this is what interests us, in that each work we submit to unscrunched is a ‘digital object’, independent in its own right, but part of a ‘community’. the great advantage of this is that we can dispense totally with the notion of a ‘journal’ or ‘issues’, etc, and just put work up that we think is good enough, whenever we want to.

this recasting of stuff as a ‘digital objects’ in ‘communities of practice’ is very interesting i think. it immediately makes me wonder whether we should not treat our independent web-space in a similar fashion. why think of this as a ‘journal’ – on-line or otherwise – that comes in ‘issues’? if we want to be as dynamic as we say we do, then shouldn’t we really plug a smaller number works weekly, fortnightly or monthly, engaging exposure and response to those works, and then moving on to the next set? we can keep work in our own web-space for as long as we want, or as long as we have space, and then move it to unscrunched. i mean, i’m just throwing this shit out there, but it makes sense to me. thoughts anyone?

i should say, for people wondering about copyright and publishing issues, gabrielle said that ‘a very small number’ of journals (mostly prestigious and thus obnoxious journals) want stuff removed from OJS if they publish it, but not many. technically, the ‘digital object’ is considered either ‘pre-published’ or ‘post-published’ and thus can exist in the OJS and be published elsewhere. the libraries will fight tooth and nail to keep work on the system, once it goes there, since they are trying to store knowledge, as is their want.

and quickly, to answer briohny’s comment and to clear it up generally, unscrunched & _____________ is not really, or rather, not only a dkdc thing. it’s just that we can use and abuse it as we want to promote ourselves (a lot of whom have been and are involved in dkdc stuff). so there is not necessarily an imperative to exhibit work by people who have no channels to get their shit out. the greater imperative is too make something good with work in it by people we like. ‘we’ in this case being the initial ‘editors’ tim, asti, fred and myself. if anyone else wants to be involved in an editorial role, then by all means, please do so. our editorial policy thus far has been to not make a call for submissions, but to source work from our wider uts cirlce, and also from people whose work ‘we’ admire and would like to be involved in.

lastly, as the title of this post suggests, now that we have a separation of powers, i assume we will leave unscrunched named as it is. that’s fine and dandy, but what will we call our independent web-space? _________________?

love, peace, hate & war,
nick.