OpenAccess Publishing and the Multimodal Scholar:
A Mixed Media Critique
17 March 2009
Caroline E. Kelley, D.Phil. (Oxford)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Humanities
HUMlab, Umeå University
Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed.
—Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 93, 1961
The Access Principle: OpenAccessScholarly Publishing
The Access Principle. A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it. What follows on this principle, given the current transformation of journals from print to online formats, is that researchers, scholarly societies, publishers, and research libraries have now to ask themselves whether or not they are using this new technology to do as much as can be done to advance and improve access to research and scholarship.
—John Willinsky, The Access Principle
The Multimodal Scholar
The multimodal scholar explores new forms of literacy that include authoring and analyzing visual, aural, dynamic and interactive media. She also takes her cues from popular culture, imagining what it would be like to immerse yourself in a scholarly argument as you might immerse yourself in a movie or a video game. She investigates what happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring new modes of engagement from the reader/user. She takes seriously such questions as “How do you ‘experience’ or ‘feel’ an argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space?” “Can scholarship show as well as tell?” “Will representing data differently change the ways we understand, collect, or interpret it?” “What happens to argument in a non-linear environment?”
—Tara McPherson, “Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities”
PRESENTATION FORMAT
This is a nine channel video installation [57” LCD Monitors] that was exhibited in the HUMlab, Umeå University, March 2009. The project explores the open access movement from an interdisciplinary perspective. It's composed of videos I made and appropriated from online sharing sites like Vimeo, YouTube and Google Video. I downloaded the videos using open source tools like the Firefox Download Helper and converted them into Quicktime Movies that I played using the open source VLC media player.
The videos feature artists, scholars, teachers, librarians and researchers discussing open access publishing, Creative Commons, creative expression, intellectual property, social justice, and US and international copyright law. I also included a series of interviews videotaped by The National Library of Sweden-funded project Introducing Researchers to Open Access which conducted a series of seminars at Swedish universities in 2008 and 2009.
In addition to this selection of ‘found’ videos, I recorded a series of 30 short audio pieces – using the open source software Audacity. These audio pieces outline the history, idea and model of open access publishing, introduced in The Access Principle (2006) by John Willinsky. Willinsky’s document is the core inspiration for this installation – and also factors strongly in one of my projects here at the HUMlab as well as in my work as an editor at /thirdspace/ an open access journal of feminist theory and culture which uses the Open Journal Systems software created by Willinsky’s Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia.
Key phrases of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) were written on white boards in the HUMlab space. LCD monitors featured quotes by John Willinsky (UBC and Stanford) and Tara McPherson (USC), both scholars in the digital humanities. I selected open access journals and websites for participants to browse online like the Vectors: A Journal of Culture and Technology, the Open Humanities Press, and the Directory of Open Access Journals.
This mixed media installation takes the form of screens here in the HUMlab as well as being an online resource. It focuses on the subject of open access publishing and is composed of amateur and educational videos selected from online sharing sites like Vimeo, YouTube and Google Video. I downloaded the videos using open source tools like the Firefox Download Helper and converted them into Quicktime Movies that I play using the open source VLC media player.
Finally, I wanted to address the concept of the multimodal scholar -- from the title of the project -- in the approach I’ve taken here. As a multimodal scholar – or someone who’s interested in this idea – I intend to explore new forms of literacy including authoring and analyzing visual, aural, dynamic and interactive media. I consider the possibility of taking one’s cues from popular culture, imagining what it would be like to immerse oneself in a scholarly argument as one might immerse oneself in a movie or a video game. I also hope to investigate what happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring new modes of engagement from the reader/user.
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