media publishing

My video-book goes live today on the MIT Press website. I hope you will take a look, contribute a texteo, and share it with others who might be interested (handy promo here: juhasz flyer). With nothing to buy, sell, or hold, it will be interesting to see how the work fares. Please let me know what you think (by authoring on the vbook). ... read more »

Virgina Heffernan’s recent article on the joys of the “vook—a software application that combines video and text”—brings to mind what MIT and I are calling my video-book (to be released online February 7), “large scale online writing that depends upon video, text, design and architecture for its meaning-making.” I like her effort to differentiate vooks from ebooks: writing in sentences, paragraphs and chapters that has been wedged onto a digital screen (allowing for both search and easy p ... read more »

I’m in the final stages of editing and readying my video-book, Learning from YouTube, for “publication” or perhaps, better said, official presentation by the MIT Press. Given the unique nature of the product (virtual and free) it’s been yet another scholarly publishing challenge to invent the terms of its release. ... read more »

For anyone out there interested in digital academic publishing, I am quite pleased to report that the slow and complex negotiations to create a useful and meaningful contract with MIT Press for my “video-book” are at last complete. And I have the paper to prove it! I have hoped that sharing these fruitful if hard conversations with the innovative editors at MIT who have been open to re-thinking what counts as a book, and how we might all gain from new forms of writing and its publishing, especially about digital content, would be useful for others who are also wrangling their way on this awkward, and usually unsupported trek, and I thank the editors at MIT for agreeing to let me make this public. ... read more »

I’ve published an article in a special issue on YouTube of the on-line journal, Enculturation (A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture). The editors, Geoffrey Carter and Sarah Arroyo explain the issue’s focus: ... read more »

I am currently negotiating my contract with MIT Press to “publish” my “video-book” about YouTube this Fall. ... read more »

While I mostly blog on media culture, this is my second effort in a matter of days that reviews a book. If anything, I’ve probably always been more of a reader than a media-buff. However, I turned to film and videos in college, as an academic/political choice, given that I deduced that work in this realm would be where the real cultural action would take place during my professional/activist life. I haven’t looked back.

However, I’ve been thinking more about writing these days (here) because of my in-the-wings all-digital scholarly YouTube publication (three positive reviews from the Press, Yes!, awaiting a contract…) and the questions it raises about moving scholarly projects to other forums and the tough connected issues of vernacular, audience, translation, form (discussed in my previous blog on Praxis.) ... read more »

This is most of my talk for an upcoming Symposium, New Media: Theory, Practice, Power for Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Arts and Society focusing on creating fuller interaction across the arts and humanities (the pages I will show at the talk from my YouTube publication, currently under review so also under wraps, are not included in this blog entry). ... read more »

You could say I “read” David Shield’s Reality Hunger over the weekend, but as my first nod to the worthy successes (and ballsy failures) of his argument-through-form, I actually skimmed it in less than an hour. As is true of any good manifesto, he clocks or locks a feeling in the air, something already everywhere, familiar but not fully formed (although, of course, snippets from centuries of completely finished arguments about the representation of reality are the over-rife reality condition he considers, and uses, proving the thing and its opposite as he is most wont to do). ... read more »

I was pleased to be informed by a staff member that Learning from YouTube was chosen as one of the “ten coolest college classes” by none other than the Huffington Post. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that this honor proved to be in the spirit of CollegeHumor only, but I would have thought better of the HP as CollegeHumor already successfully mocks stuff, it doesn’t need a grown-up knock-off. ... read more »