[-empyre-] introducing Anne Helmond and Kazys Varnelis

[Kazys Varnelis]

Thanks for the introduction and opportunity to discuss this project  
with Empyre, Anna.

Beyond the chance to work with some of the smartest people in the  
field, Networked intrigued me for two reasons.

First, it gave me the excuse to do some in-depth research into art. My  
own field is architecture, but I am currently working on a book in  
which I intend to talk about network culture as a historical moment in  
the broadest sense—by no means just architectural and certainly not  
determined by technology alone—so this offered a chance to explore  
outside of my own field.

Second, I hoped that the broader audience at turbulence would make  
this effort at a networked book more open than the ones I'd been  
involved with in the past. More below.

As far as networked writing goes, yes I've had a bit of experience  
with this. Now much discussion about networked books is too narrow in  
embracing only projects that are open to all to comment on. This  
ignores networked books that are written online by more than one  
individual, but are not open to everyone to rewrite.

AUDC's Blue Monday is an example of such a networked book. Robert  
Sumrell and I began co-wroting the book using mediawiki and then  
finished it in writely (now google docs). The wiki was an attractive  
medium for us as it allowed us to work collaboratively and to see  
revision history (this seems essential to me in any such project, at  
least for the authors) at a time when writely did not yet exist. You  
can see the wiki here: http://projects.audc.org/index.php/Main_Page.  
We opened the wiki up to public changes for a couple of weeks, but  
found that even though we specifically invited a number of people to  
make changes, only one person made one contribution, adding a period  
to a sentence that lacked one. Seeing that nobody was going to make  
changes, we closed it back down to avoid vandalism.

Once we realized that we wanted to produce a book, Robert and I felt  
constrained by our inability to assemble a lengthier project out of  
the wiki and, with writely available, used that tool to finish the  
task. Although certainly not a wiki (constructing and linking to a new  
page is not easy), the possibility for us to work together on one  
document in real time was useful. At AUDC our ability to create a  
third voice, neither Robert's nor mine, has been productive and such  
software offered it. In this sense, Blue Monday is nothing less than a  
networked book and, I'd venture that compared to single-author  
projects that are online but do allow comments, it is much more of  
networked book as the network was key to its production, not just a  
gloss on it.

Later, while at USC's Annenberg Center for Communications, I undertook  
two more projects on writely: an essay with Marc Tuters on locative  
media and the place chapter of Networked Publics with Anne Friedberg.  
All of these used writely/google docs, so again, they were networked  
writing. When both the essay with Marc and the Networked Publics book  
were drafted, we posted them for comment on the Networked Publics site  
(now at http://networkedpublics.org). We were rather disappointed that  
there were few comments, at least compared to blogs.

Since I've received many more comments on my blog at varnelis.net, I  
also decided to post the content of the book that I am currently  
working on to my site at http://varnelis.net/network_culture
Here, I used Drupal as a back-end since it already hosts my book and  
is easily capable of showing revisions and maintaining a book  
structure. So far, my method of working on the book is making it hard  
for me to post much beyond the introduction, but I've already had a  
huge number of readers and lots of mentions on other blogs, e-mails,  
but no comments.

I'd been hoping that this was just a matter of a small readership, but  
I'm not so sure. I think we're running up against a situation where  
even though the software is capable, there are still some social  
limits (information overload may very well be it) that are inhibiting  
commenting and revision.





Kazys Varnelis
kv2157 at columbia.edu

Director, Network Architecture Lab
http://networkarchitecturelab.org
http://varnelis.net

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Columbia University
Studio-X Research Facility
180 Varick St
Suite 1610
New York, NY 10014





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