 Well, thank you very much it's like a bit sharp Yeah, there are possibilities of lowering them a little bit. I don't know. Thank you I like to see my my audience actually if anybody makes faces I can get back at them I'd like to thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me. I'm very honored and very flattered to be here I must say this has not been the main stay of my talks recently. I've talked a lot more about open access in the Periodical area, but there are a number of things that I think I can say about this area as well all the more so that I am myself after all a humanist so-called and And we have to face the problems of publishing in fields like literature comparative literature being one of them I'm not going to speak so much about money I'm a little bit concerned about the term monograph for those although I understand that we're coming from there Because the main line of my talk today is going to be really how to forget about monographs How to go beyond monographs how to really make the great conversation of Humanists which is just as great a conversation as that of the scientist how to make it work and flow as I would say frictionlessly as possible In order to enhance our understanding of what who we are what we are and where we are going So I I would like to to do so and to do so I feel that we have to perhaps take a small step back and Look at this from three perspective, which I've called the three sociologies of ebooks, but even the term ebooks bothers me in some ways Because there is the word books in there so about documents that are in digital formats, so I Propose to go through a triple perspective sociology of documents documents being actually You might say extensions of text plus video plus audio plus everything you can imagine on top of the text Maybe when they will have taste and sensations as well, but we'll leave that aside for today The second one would be what I call the society of documents and then the last one is obviously the the obvious one The sociology to cool or knowledge of society So sociology of documents. What do I mean there? I'm not being very original. I'm not trying to be it comes from DF McKenzie's It really refers to the fact that to produce documents of any type There is a sociological context which allows the production of these of these documents from if of course it it depends on certain kinds of Technologies depends on certain kinds of techniques. It depends on certain kinds of communities There is a workflow and and then of course it also includes The the reception phase. How do you read that for what purpose? How do you make sense of it and how do you create value around it? All these things are part of what I would call the sociology of documents The society of documents is a little bit different It's how documents relate to each other in effect. In effect It's a kind of sociology of documents without humans in it It's how do how do books relate to each other footnotes Bibliographies references or illusions to other books are ways of relating to other documents links Of course are very explicit ways to relate to other documents So you have this second layer that That is of importance in our understanding of where we're going and where we're coming from and finally there is Sociology itself, which is well-known except for Margaret Thatcher. She didn't know what society was but you know she can be She can be forgiven There are people well no comment Then this is used by me to underscore something which I think is really fundamental in this And that's why the title of the conference was worrying me a little bit. I don't think it's about monographs I think it's about people who are perhaps using tools like monographs, but not essentially only monographs It's also to foreground the importance of communities at both in the sociology of documents in the society of documents and Also the fact that when you have people involved in a system like this of Communication or system a discussion system a dialogue system You end up having a co-evolution of both the Documentary layer and the human layer and I think we should always think in terms of this co-evolution of what we're doing and what we are We we where we are going just as a teaser for the future of this little talk Think of the notion of an author and author is a category of human beings. It's not eternal It did not appear on the eighth day of creation. It's not going to last forever We may have to deal with other forms of Evaluation in other forms of creation of Visibility authority and prestige in the future and it may not take the form that the author took When the print world essentially brought to the to the surface this kind of concept the authorship To summarize all this I love this picture. I've always loved that picture. I should put it over my bed it's It in effect it summarizes all I've said already It's the humanist vision of the three sociologies Witness in terms of the general sociology the gentleman keeping his hat on it's probably cold in that Locking his door. That's always amused me to see how he's totally locked and yet he's obviously doing knowledge for the whole world But that's one of the paradoxes of the Humanists but more interesting is that wheel which is like a ferris wheel on which the books are Allowing this man to move from one book to another so thereby threatening the integrity and the unity of the book by showing that they are related to each other the society of texts there is really at work and Working to create what yet another book which is going to end up on one of those shelves for another humanist in a different room Which will be just as locked and everything and you see those books piling up in the back of the room with with The shelves there. I'll leave aside the gears and the things the Renaissance was fascinated with machinery But it's also shows in the in a sort of indirect way how technical this is really deeply technical It is so when you go into the digital world in the US computers You're just reasserting the notion that it is technical in this response. So so far nothing really new here But you know keynotes are not supposed to be original. They're supposed to be I don't know what but I I'm trying my best Why is it not new well witness the following I think some of the Quotations refer to people that are in the in the room because Kathleen is supposed to be talking at some point in this conference Well, I assume she's somewhere in the room She writes very very pertinent pertinently We need to think differently about the network Relationships among our texts and among the readers who interact with them Well, if that is not what I've been saying about Society of texts on the one hand and the co-evolution of the documentary system and humanity We have it here. So my conference is over The second one is we want to examine how digital changes the process of Making a book as well as what we do it with its afterwards and that's in the the little Not so little actually but the the book or book a futurist manifesto that some of you may have seen coming out of O'Reilly Now nothing new therefore, but all the same I'm trying to retrieve and save myself here The way we think about books Magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers We have used for centuries to transmit information and that's by Brian O'Leary You can see that between Fitzpatrick and O'Leary. I do have a liking for Arlen the the This this quotation shows us already that we have to think beyond that little Parallel epiped that really is the form of a codex and which we are perhaps too used to to to familiar with so Let's continue in this regard O'Leary I think very rightly suggests in his article in that book that Context really trumps content and context comes first and context is really the society of text and the sociology of text or documents if you want to extend it beyond texts So what is context for him? Well, he defines it as a mixture of elements But I'm going to go further than that He refers to it as tags the research around the text footnotes other links sources background metadata all this in all sorts of formats and I think that's a good beginning we're going to have we're going to need to go further than that and Now I'm going to give up on slides because I forgot to tell you I hate slides and I Is as I said simply too constraining and too orderly in this kind of thing and I like to be art You know a bit an archic and and disorganized The content in this case. I think kills the context. Let me go on. Let me go on so We are in a situation where we use to a very fixed system of production And that's very familiar to all of you. We have let's take for example the process of a thesis a Thesis the trajectory the poor fellow the poor lady is working labor in your way generally very alone especially in the humanities On the thesis and then the thesis is defended. It's finally a doctorate She's a doctor or he's a doctor and then comes the track towards the publication phase so you go to a publisher publisher tells you immediately a thesis is not a book and You start going back home and start rewriting to make it more palatable reduce the footnotes reduce the BBR Well, you know all that okay, and then by chance you've got a grant or something the book is accepted the manuscript is accepted the book is then considered to be a Assumable risk by the press We've heard about courageous presses a moment ago So with courageously the press takes on that study of Zulu land and and puts it into paper format Second and then the book is distributed physically around and then it's sold in libraries in the bookstores And of course distributed through libraries and all this is extremely Well-defined in a series of very very Stepwise kind of things my argument is that with the digital world all this is going to in a sense The first fit away and then being reversed done entirely differently. Why the thesis person writing alone that thesis is Actually emerging out of a context where a lot of the ideas were first discussed in seminars with friends in bars or on a beer With parents family with everybody and the slowly the ideas mature and transform themselves into writing and and Because of our author obsession We still stick to the idea of having just one person Involved in all of this but actually that person is trying to aggregate and assemble and reorganize Remix as the language goes nowadays And to all sorts of sources in order to create a new argument a new perspective a new Thesis and then we go through the steps of materializing this thesis Through the printing and publishing process in the present digital system And that's why my word my my concern with the word monograph arises Essentially what we're trying to do is do that the same thing but digitally we try to go through the same steps We don't try to observe as Kathleen Fitzpatrick in our excellent book I want to render homage to this book which really raises some fundamental questions We don't look at the how a book works. We look at its form. In fact the tenure and promotions committee more or less look at how thick it is and what the name of the publishing price is and That's about it, you know, so this is not exactly a very very Reliable form of evaluation, but that's what is at work right now. I Would argue that it would be nice to continue to continue the work of Of the seminar that started in grad school to use that particular line of investigation and Perhaps have communities of young young researchers working on Conducted topics beginning to work discuss their thesis without, you know, hiding in a corner in writing without to hope They don't know what I'm writing about because they might steal my ideas See the notion of ownership is also know of authorship is also a notion of ownership There's a very famous book by Rose called authors and owners I think it puts the finger on one very fundamental problem of our present way of publishing So you're going to you're going to a world in which the the thesis Candidate the doc doctoral student could start working in communities and develop his ideas Exchanging more or less freely with others the great conversation again with comrades with friends with Colleagues and developing in this fashion His or her thesis One might even say what is it so important to have just one author to a thesis Why? Really if you do a good piece of work You need more than one brain and it might be a much better work if two or three or four people had Collaborated together and put their brains together and put together a an interesting piece of work exactly after all as People do afterwards when they write articles more and more in science there are very few articles that are written by just one person and more and I Suspect that the same is going to happen in the social sciences and the humanities as time goes on This is a natural trend and the thesis should not run and resist that kind of trend. There is nothing wrong with working together There's nothing wrong in fact one of the paradoxes about universities is to train people to work in a way that they'll never work When they go in real work, which is where you have to collaborate with others and do Elaborate or create teams of research teams and work together. It makes it makes no sense at all, but that's the way we do it We have already examples of that the the French review.org offers a thing called Hypothesis where people can provide in fact the basic landmarks of their research and In fact at the same time staking some ground for their way of looking at things But also calling for people to intervene and bring in bringing in things The second thing that we have to think about is that and I think they're Kathleen Fitzpatrick has said a lot more than I will say this morning is to Assume that when you publish or write something. It's not the end of the world It's quite a piece of hubris to say what I've written about this topic is the end of things Maybe you find that extremely reassuring about yourself Personally, I would find that very disquieting because I know I'm saying very stupid things and And I wouldn't want that to remain the eternal legacy of humanity I mean that would be imagine that going into outer space and being met by intelligent aliens. Oh my god And so let's let's let's be honest and modest We are writing what we can about the topic we know a bit about and we're trying to bring our stone to this edifice Which is human knowledge That's the essence of the exercise the essence of the exercise is not to produce objects called books with authors And they will have rewards like a promotion No, this is a kind of currency and system of an economic symbolic economy Which has nothing to do with the essence of the project, which is really how do we do the research work? How do we communicate together better to create good? Research which is good for the common good for humanity for all of us and for our own work so we move in this direction with the idea that the text should be obviously a Man a mandible. It could be transformed changed It could be corrected added to and so on could be commented of course and leading in this fashion to the creation of not Not a thing but a community So you come from a community you work through that community to create a current of discussion That current of discussion feeds back into this community And of course it reshapes the community and then this kind of back-and-forth movement between the flow of ideas and the flow the flow of the people involved remains like a Just one stream in the long big river of thought of humanity. I Think that's far more exciting than our very clumsy I'm looking for the English word for the French sake a day if someone knows the word in English Please shout it. It's you know, it's sort of a step-by-step and in a very boom boom boom manner you have the You have this system of your producer book takes for many years Then it takes many years to be really assimilated by others and then it takes many years for someone to say No, that doesn't work. I'll give another interpretation to that and then everybody gets excited Oh, new Michel Foucault has just just undermined the whole of history whoopee and and And then someone comes along so well, you know, Michel Foucault is full of your dot dot dot and But in a very like this, it's not a discussion It's like everybody's saying look how beautiful I am look at what a big peacock I am and let's see who can shoot me down Doesn't make sense to create knowledge or I don't think that's a very good incentive to the creation of knowledge So let's move on to this notion that perhaps the texts should be On the course on the trajectory and that in a sense begins to resolve the issue of publishing a publication Maybe the kind the quality of the dialogue going on Would then lead to questions like what is the best form for that discussion because it starts being really Damn interesting for much more than that little community. It's starting to extend to more people Maybe more people should get involved So how do we move from this level to that level to that level in other words? What I'm saying is that if you want to create a book rather than taking it as the starting point and then you know doing everything to do it digitally in the best possible way and Putting again content over over context as O'Leary says Maybe it would be more interesting to raise the following question at what level of the discussion Between a number of interested people should we go to the form of Publication that traditionally we've called the book does it have its place in that particular conversation if so in what Kind of circumstances does it make sense to do so? If you're writing about Zululan It might be much better because it's indeed very expensive to produce a book might be much more interesting to start having the 20 scholars getting together and Really putting together everything they know about Zululan and there again You know it would solve another problem which has been alluded to in the introduction The question of the relationship between what is published and the data that's behind the publication Right now and I've witnessed that many times Archaeologists art historians or whatever They have collections of photos of objects and so on they sit on them. That's their treasure trove They have to exploit that the physicists do the same with their measurements The chemists the same and they sit on that and they try to exploit that to the hilt And meanwhile no one can look at it no one can verify it and we are getting interpretations of all that from one team or one person and it's Obviously a very flawed way of producing knowledge had these known data had these these issues Being solved in terms of publishing them. I think we would get to a better a better result for the production of knowledge Yes, but there is one big problem in all of this. I'm going back to the author We have a way to reward people symbolically and Then there was symbolism is translated into other things, you know, like my being here today It's nice translation of whatever fame I may have acquired in doing whatever stupid things I've done in the past and So we like that We have a we have an economy of prestige and economy of reputation Which of course works for us and what I'm talking here is on the ideal plane in the utopian mode of thinking is something that really looks good, but What kind of entity? What kind of social entity do we have to create to make this kind of system work? I'm going back to the notion of author at this point And we may have to rethink that notion of author very very deeply. I Don't have good answers on that But I think that's what we should be working on without provide at least the beginning of a possible model I'm fascinated and I've been long fascinated by the way free software has been working and evolving for the last Last 20 years 30 years to 30 years actually if we can go back to Stallman's early early interventions and What I find in that is when you look at the source code of software, you know who did what You know who did what you don't know who you don't have generally or sometimes you do But most of the time you don't have the list of all the people that introduced something into the code But when you look at the specific piece of code, you know who did what and you don't you know who did what for two reasons Visibility of course with prestige and authority and all that but also Responsibility that is to say if you put that code into the thing and it really creates, you know a disaster in Whatever this software is supposed to do You end up you end up having to know who was responsible for that when we create knowledge We have to be responsible for that knowledge. So we should be identified actually. That's how names appeared in printed books at first By the way, that was the reason for that that in the very first reason for the production of authors or authors names People that were responsible in front of the king for whatever content was in there, but at the same time it was also transmuted into Visibility authority prestige so we have to I think rework very carefully the whole notion of value the whole notion of Visibility for those who intervene in that and I think again in that and I will quote again Or I'll refer again to Kathleen Fitzpatrick's book. I think her way of entering into the whole problem by Really examining the peer review process is really one way to tell us that we have Really have to rethink the way we create value in Research right now we do it as you all know through books prices and The logo effect of all these things We have to rethink that and we have to find a way to reward The individuals that will intervene into this field and I think that's that's our big real big issue It's not a question of finding which kind of format to do the interoperability issue is important the DOAB is a wonderful tool and I will sing its praise until whatever I can do it and The all this is all this is very very Real and we have to to think about all these very very pressing questions that are around us But if you look about the midterm and even more the long term it is how this new system of communication Which is made? possible by the digital age is going to fit within our society and Within the sociology of texts and of course what kind of society of texts or documents It's going to create and these were the thoughts. I wanted to share with you this morning. So thank you very much Take a few questions Thank you so much and we've got a few minutes for some questions and points for the floor. So anybody would like to Come in with a comment Don't be shy. I don't bite. Yes. Go ahead Well, I mean, it's a constant law of nature that the most fragile are also the most conservative that's it's there is no way to escape that and for example in the issues about publishing in open access and and Trying to find ways to to to really reconcile your practice with the demands of the ground conversation People are for example in my age are from much much better Much better situation than a young scholar. So I think it behooves to the likes of me the old farts of the academe it's really to really confront that and Certainly not encourage our younger our younger colleagues to risk their career on this thing if we want to modify the tenure and promotion Processes of our universities if we want to change the way we create symbolic value around research if we want to define otherwise in different ways the notion of prestige and authority It is for people who are securely in the system and who understand that the system doesn't work well Especially now that it is being anyway It's being challenged by the very nature of the new technologies coming into play One more before we go on top Thank you There you're raising an issue where we may have some real differences between us For those who are on the business side and those on the academic side I am a firm believer that the grand conversation as I like to call it is parts and parcel of the research process research Processes Excuse me are supported largely by public money a lot of the research is supported by by public money in the case of the humanities we shouldn't be fooled by the Notion that the grants are much lower than in the in the sciences and technology We also have of course all the acquisitions Books and journals by the libraries which are really our lab laboratories I mean we we should think in those terms so if we put if we put the The research in that perspective as the publication phase in that perspective as part of the research process And if we understand there is that the research process has never been sustainable in the commercial sense of the word It's being subsidized at least ever ever since Charles II in Britain with the Royal Society But probably way before that when Rudolph the second in Prague was subsidizing a bunch of alchemists He was already doing a strange form of subsidies for for science, but he still was doing that If we believe that then I my answer is that then the research Publication phase should be subsidized like the rest, you know, and then it says something which Of course may not be to the liking of more commercially oriented people Which is then the the university presses and the libraries together as it's coming Happening now for example at Michigan in the United States How are in the perfect position to team up? They have the complementary skills essentially to to produce these steaks and make them evolve on the kind of Way of the cross, you know You go through all the different steps until you're you're you're rich some sort of catharsis at the end of the Of the process, but what I'm mean by joking like this is that text can improve evolve and at some point reach perhaps certain plateaus of Significance long-term stability kind of text that could be invented as it is done in the software world Which could be the equivalent of the monograph, but a monograph that would be very clearly Marked as being a transitory plateau not as an object, which is fixed rigid and forever So, you know from that perspective I have very little to say to commercial publishers, but if commercial publishers Want to enter that game? Because they like those fields. They are courageous people. They want modest gains from it You know and do it do it in what I would call broadly speaking in the honorable way Not a predatory way as some publishers do Wonderful because I think the commercial publishers in this kind of field Have one advantage over publishers academic prices in libraries. They may have more of an incentive to try innovating So that would be the kind of you know Pushing of the thing to make the the machinery move forward a bit better a bit faster and so on But I keep my eyes focused on the ground conversation its objectives the people involved and then the tools to make it work Ancillary to that very very basic task Thank you