As the countdown to 2024 begins, here's a recap of some of the books #openhumanitiespress has published in 2023. Beginning with this from January:

Data Farms, ed. by Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter.

Like all OHP books, Data Farms is available #openaccess:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/data-farms/

What's at stake in naming #datacentres as #datafarms. These installations are essentially hangars packed with #computers. They congregate #servers, switches and wires that facilitate the storage, processing and transmission of #data in high volumes and at fast speeds. Data centres present a scale of operations, potentially planetary in scope, that intensifies and multiplies the productive and extractive capacities of #digitaltechnologies.

The economic advantages to parties with servers in these installations derive not only from opportunities for networking but also from inputs to client machines that may be situated at vast distance. Yet data centres have precise locations...

Nice surprise to find a lengthy profile of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in today's Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/13/ngugi-wa-thiongo-kenyan-novelist-profile-giant-of-africa-literature

If you're up for more, as well as the novels and the classic Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, his Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir is well worth a read.

Ngũgĩ was one of the founding members of the Open Humanities Press editorial board. That was way back in 2006/2008, when few people in the humanities were familar with open access, certainly not as it could apply to books as well as journals. (You'd be surprised how many people at the time told us a press for books that were free for readers to read and authors to publish just wasn't going to be possible. Yet here we are almost 20 years later...) So we'll always be grateful to Ngũgĩ for taking a chance on us like that.

#openhumanitiespress #OpenAccess
#guardian
#decolonisation
#novels
#africanliterature

Can't wait to have one of these AI auto-audiobook narrators for Open Humanities Press. (It's exhausting recording them all ourselves. Honestly, where is Martin Jarvis when you need him?)

It'd have to be a free, open source, non-evil, non-surveillance capitalism version, though.

#openhumanitiespress #ai #OpenAI #narration #openaccess #opensource #books #book #surveillance #capitalism #publishing

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/05/why-ai-audiobook-narrators-could-win-over-some-authors-and-readers-despite-the-vocal-bumps

Electronic Book Review have just published Manuel Portela's Writing as a Life Form: A Review of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: A Biography (2021).

Extract: 'For Fernando Pessoa, as for the roughly 600 texts that make up his Book of Disquiet, and the estimated 136 homonyms that Pessoa inhabits in his own writing, there "is life, and there is writing, and they must remain immiscible." ...

What is it like to live non-narratively?... Not necessarily through the chaotic dissolution of a unified consciousness, but through a surplus of subjectivity, by a relentless multiplication of possibilities.'

#book #books #literature #writing #subjectivity #biography #ebr #openhumanitiespress #pessoa #modernism #bookreview

http://electronicbookreview.com/