Network Ecologies: Designing Scholarly Rigor in Innovative Digital Publication Environments
The project began five years ago, funded by a Graduate Digital Scholarship Initiative grant from Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute, in conjunction with Duke’s PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, with an online forum where invited scholars created a ‘network’ of content by posting prepared provocations and commenting on others. The next year, these scholars, along with a few impressive additions, met in-person for an exciting two-day symposium at Duke University. Presentations included contributions from an architect, a data scientist, a media philosopher, a multimedia artist, a classicist, a speculative lab performance group, and a pair of game designers, and were followed by a keynote media theorist Jussi Parikka with a response from media theorist Mark BN Hansen. Following the Symposium, I released a new call for projects so that we could ‘network’ the initial online and in-person conversations with new scholars. Each accepted essay underwent a ‘networked’ peer review process wherein each of our authors anonymously reviewed another of the accepted pieces. During this process, we also asked the reviewers to submit publishable comments which we’ve included in the publication as annotations. This review system facilitated cross-talk, which was often added directly into the essays during revision, and even resulted in an entirely new collaboration which you’ll find in the Exhibitions Coordinate.
The first three stages were designed not only to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarly communication but also to create and gather content for a ‘networked’ digital scholarly publication. Once ready to begin designing the publication, I recruited Florian Wiencek to be my publication design partner. We spent a great deal of time on design considerations, and we live-blogged much of our process on our Network Ecologies website. Together we brainstormed methods for tracking and tracing the data threads from the previous stages in order to produce a digital publication using the Scalar publishing platform.
Along the way, an on-site gallery exhibit, Network Ecologies: Arts in the Edge, of interactive transmedia art at Duke University found its way into the project as I worked through methods for visualizing our artistic publication contributions. Two of our submitted essays were authored by visual artists and I reasoned that if we wanted to really push the limits of a ‘living’ publication, we might try doing so by having a live—augmented by AR elements—exhibition of their works. I owe many thanks to the Duke FHI, Duke PhD Lab, and Duke Digital Scholarship Services for being open and generous when I asked them to let me curate a gallery exhibition and opening.
We set out to create a 'networked publication' and we believe we've done just that. We have content ranging from text-based essays to a visual art video/scanning documentary project that was created specifically for our publication. You'll find transmedia essays on art, technics, data visualization, book-making, theory, mentorship, architecture, network engineering, gaming, and capitalism. You'll find tweets, videos, text, and tools. You’ll even find a garden gnome or two lurking throughout.
Grounded by way of ‘Coordinates,’ the publication is organized into four sections—Positions, Tools, Provocations, and Exhibitions. Though distinctly named, the sections deliberately merge (or network) into and out of each other.
Positions loosely take the form of the essay. Provocations began as blog posts during the first stage of the Network Ecologies project. Invited scholars and artists conversed there by way of posting and responding to each others’ provocative arguments. Our Tools section now only features one, but we hope in the future will feature many, innovative textual networking tools. In Exhibitions you’ll find Network Ecologies: Arts in the Edge exhibit as well as a video gallery of our Ecology of Networks Symposium. Here too you’ll find a collaborative artwork created when the artists from the Edge Exhibit decided, at the Exhibit’s opening no less, to shape a new piece that would creatively capture the Exhibit itself.
We’ve activated Hypothes.is as a referential overlay that opens, and links, the published content to public comment and collaboration, and we encourage users to extend the network we’ve started here by joining the conversation in the margins. With Hypothes.is, you can comment at the line, paragraph, and individual word levels. Groups can also use Hypothes.is to generate shared comment threads centered around individual textual elements. Please see Scalar's helpful introduction and how-to for its Hypothes.is feature. The books is also already annotated by the authors themselves. Many chose to submit reflections, critiques, and intertextual comments that we've included as interlinking annotations within each article. You'll find too points of linkage that I've designed into the pages to allow readers to slip, either deliberately or accidentally, into other articles and media content throughout the book.
The very point of this project is for each of us to bring our own research—developed and delivered in our own unique disciplinary vernaculars—together to converge around a shared concept. The assumption is that through transdisiplinary co-mingling and collaboration, both our individual research projects and the Network Ecologies publication, as a living research hub, can gain new dimension. We hope that by putting diverse minds in dialogue with each other, we can facilitate a more robust understanding of the network by way of merging and (re)mixing multidisciplinary understandings.
I want to thank my design partner, Florian, for his insights, energy, and expertise as we worked together to craft this publication. I would also like to thank Chris Chia and the FHI, as well as the PhD Lab, for support, both financial and otherwise. We owe a debt of gratitude to The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, particularly Craig Dietrich who lent a hand (and some code) more than once throughout our project, for authoring the Scalar platform. Many thanks, too, to the authors—all brave souls willing to go along with this experiment—and to all of those who contributed behind the scenes along the way.
Amanda Starling Gould, 2016
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