Mastodawn

Gary Hall Dec 27, 2023

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...

Open Humanities Press– Data Farms

A scholar led open access publishing collective

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Gary Hall Dec 28, 2023

In May Open Humanites Press published Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/articulating-media/

To ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations?

Contributors consider media technologies not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address.

Articulating Media includes contributions from Bernhard Siegert, Caroline Bassett, Emma McCormick Goodhart, Melle Jan Kromhout and Jussi Parikka.

Open Humanities Press– Articulating Media

A scholar led open access publishing collective

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Gary Hall

May 2023 also saw the publication by Open Humanites Press of Steven Connor's A History of Asking:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-history-of-asking/

Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as the single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, a great deal of care must be taken with the ways in which asking occurs and is responded to.

A History of Asking is the first attempt to grasp the unity and variety of the technics and technologies of asking, in all its modalities, as they extend across a spectrum from weak forms like begging, pleading, praying, imploring, beseeching, entreating, suing, supplicating and soliciting, through to the more assertively and even aggressively self-authorising modes of asking, like proposing, offering, inviting, requesting, appealing, applying, petitioning, claiming and demanding.

Open Humanities Press– A History of Asking

A scholar led open access publishing collective

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Gary Hall Dec 30, 2023

In June, OHP published Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/

Edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota, Ecological Rewriting is authored Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes, Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga Villamil and Carolina Cuevas Parra.

Supported by the #COPIM project, Ecological Rewriting is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. This group of (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-chernobyl-herbarium/

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Gary Hall Dec 31, 2023

Last one...

In October OHP published OA The Rubble of Culture: Debris of an Extinct Thought by David A. Collings:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-rubble-of-culture/

'Humanity now faces the possibility it will become extinct over the next few decades. This is not simply a reality about the biological fate of the species; it also raises the prospect of thought’s own extinction.

Thought’s possible disappearance shatters the assumption, at work across all the institutions and disciplines of the West, that one version or another of thought is enduring and will survive. As it turns out, no familiar practice rests on a secure ground; under the sign of the terminus - the prospect of humanity’s extinction - each one is shattered and undone. The cultural legacy becomes a field of rubble.

The Rubble of Culture moves through this field... from German idealism to deconstruction, from psychoanalysis to queer theory, from decolonizing theory to Afropessimism, and from the critique of ideology to speculative realism.'

Open Humanities Press– The Rubble of Culture

A scholar led open access publishing collective