Summary
MONK, which stands for “Metadata Offer New Knowledge,” is a single digital environment of literary texts that endeavors to make “modern forms of text analysis and text mining accessible to humanities scholars” {1}. The metadata associated with any given document in the MONK environment ranges from data about individual words, to data about discursive organization, to bibliographic data. MONK offers the ability to read back and forth between these different levels of data and, therefore, to read as closely or as distantly as one wants. The current collection of texts in the MONK prototype consists of about 1200 works, including approximately 500 texts of various genres published between 1533 and 1625, alongside about 700 works of English and American fiction from about 1550 to 1923. Fundamentally, MONK assumes that operating through “coarse but consistent encodings across many texts in a heterogeneous document environment” offers significant scholarly benefit. The single environment that will bundle these operations for this large collection of texts will be housed at http://monkproject.org. (more…)

Summary
The Institute for the Future of the Book officially launched CommentPress 1.0 on July 25, 2007 as a theme for WordPress. The initial project developed in 2006 when the Institute approached Mackenzie Wark about creating an online version of his book Gamer Theory. In order to emphasize conversation about the book, the Institute departed from the typical blogging structure by placing comments next to the text rather than directly beneath the text. The online project, called GAM3R 7H30RY was so successful that it sparked similar projects, among them Mitchell Stephen’s “Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness,” and Lewis Lapham’s “The Iraq Study Group Report.” (more…)

William Warner, Professor of English, UCSB
Discussion of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
History of Reading Group Event
Thursday, April 23, 3:30 PM
UCSB, South Hall 2635

The Transliteracies History of Reading Group is pleased to announce a discussion of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, led by Bill Warner. Latour’s recent book both introduces Actor-Network-Theory and challenges contemporary assumptions about what we call the “social.” Professor Warner will lead a discussion of the following sections of Latour’s book:

Reassembling the Social

• “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency” (63-86)
• “First Move: Localizing the Global” (173-190)
• and for the highly motivated, the “Introduction” (1-17).

Refreshments will be served.

Following is a summary of Reassembling the Social from the Oxford University Press website: (more…)

Summary
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an online management and publishing system for peer-reviewed journals developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a partnership among the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. Open Journal Systems’s open source software is designed with the purpose of “making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale”{1} and provides tools to aid with every stage of the publishing process. Additionally, OJS offers a set of reading tools which can optionally be added to the journal. As of January 2009, OJS was currently used by over 2000 journals {2}. (more…)

Wednesday March 18, 4:00pm, UCSB McCune Conference Room HSSB 6020

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he was Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies from 2004 to 2008. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), which was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2003.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Renaissance Studies program and the IHC’s History of Material Texts RFG.