OuNuPo

Special Issue 5

The XPUB practitioners are currently working on OuNuPo: the 5th Special Issue with and around bookscanner culture. XPUB is the Experimental Publishing master at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Wednesday March 28, 19:00, Worm - Boomgaardsstraat 71

Audio of the Pre-Launch at Varia:

Special Issue 5 - OuNuPo

XPUB, Varia and WORM invite you for an evening of book scanning, short presentations, discussions and software experiments in the context of text digitisation and processing. 28/03/18 - 19:00 at WORM

OuNuPo, Ouvroir de Numérisation Potentielle, the workshop of potential digitisation

From January until the end of March 2018 the practitioners of the Media Design Experimental Publishing Master course (XPUB) of the Piet Zwart Institute, in collaboration with Manetta Berends & Cristina Cochior (Varia) and the WORM Pirate Bay, have set sail on the vast sea of DIY book scanning, feminist research methodologies, constraint writing, algorithmic literature and the cultures of text digitisation and processing.

The term OuNuPo is derived from OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), founded in 1960. OuLiPo is a mostly French speaking gathering of writers and mathematicians interested in constrained writing techniques. A famous technique is for instance the lipogram that generates texts in which one or more letters have been excluded. OuLiPo eventually led to OuXPo to expand these creative constraints to other practices (OuCiPo for film making, OuPeinPo for painting, etc). Following this expansion, XPUB launches OuNuPo, Ouvroir de Numérisation Potentielle, the workshop of potential digitisation, turning the book scanner as a platform for media design and publishing experiments.

In the past three months, the XPUB practioners have used the OuNuPo as a means to reflect on several topics: how culture is shaped by book scanning? Who has access and who is excluded from digital culture? How free software and open source hardware have bootstrapped a new culture of librarians? What happens to text when it becomes data that can be transformed, manipulated and analysed ad nauseam?

To answer these questions, the XPUB practitioners have written software and assembled a unique printed reader, informed by critical and feminist research methodologies and that explore the themes of the digital transfer of cultural biases, Techno/Cyber/Xeno-Feminism, orality in the context of knowledge sharing, shadow libraries, database narratives, gender and future librarians. The content of the reader will be scanned by a DIY book scanner built in the past months, and processed by different software processes and performances written by the XPUB practitioners, from chat bots to concrete poetry generators and speech recognition feedback loops.

Inside the workshop of potential digitisation:

To approach the workshop of potential digitisation, the following strategy was adopted: two book scanners were built using a variation of the Archivist Book Scanner, a 2014 public domain (CC0 licensed) hardware design developed within the DIY Book Scanner community. Next to that, a unique reader was put together in the form of 6 books on scanning cultures, edited, designed and produced by the XPUB practitioners. Each book is a compilation of 5 to 10 annotated texts addressing a specific question, or topic, relevant to the practioners. The 6 books are wrapped in an Ouvroir, a scarf embroidered automatically, and folded according to the Japanese art of Furoshiki. Finally, instead of using the book scanner as a mere text scanning and PDF creating apparatus, each XPUB practitioners wrote their own text processing software to echo, reflect upon, or explore further their reading material as a means to articulate through code the two levels of textual interpretation and dissimination: the human and the machinic. Using the book scanner and the software they wrote, they will scan and make public the reader, not as one-to-one digital copy like a downloadable PDF file, but as the output of a series of software experiments.

Chapter 1 - Alice Strete

Techno/Cyber/Xeno-Feminism / + carlandre & overunder

output/carlandre.txt: ocr/output.txt
      cat $< | python3 src/carlandre.py > $(@)

	output/overunder: ocr/output.txt
	python3 src/overunder.py

The Intimate and Possibly Subversive Relationship Between Women and Machines Reader explores topics from women's introduction into the technological workforce, the connection between weaving and programming, and using technology in favour of the feminist movement. One major concept that appears throughout the reader is an almost mystical connection between women and software writing, embedded deep in women's tradition of weaving not just threads, but networks. Does software have a gender?

Echoing to her selection of texts, Alice proposes two software based transformation of her reader: carlandre and overunder. carlandre is a program that generates a pattern inspired by the concrete poetry of Carl Andre, it creates a vertical wave of words whose lengths go from ascending to desceding and so on. overunder is inspired by the relationship between weaving and programming, this interpreted language written in Python translates simple weaving instructions into a digital interpretation of weaving on text.

Chapter 2 - Joca van der Horst

Who is the Librarian + Reading the Structure

With Who is the Librarian: The gendered image of the librarian and the information scientist, Joca explores two frequent gender stereotypes: librarianship as a job for women and information science as a male-dominated field. The selection of texts in this reader elaborates on the origin of these stereotypes and the different social status of these professions. This could be the way to answer the question: Who do we want to be the librarian in the future?

Then moving from human interpretation to software interpretation, Joca presents a software, Reading the Structure, that attempts to make visible to human readers how machines, or to be more precise, specific software implementation of text analysis, interpret texts. Computers read a text differently than we do. One of the common methods for software to analyze a text, is to cut the sentences into loose words. Then each word can be labelled for importance, sentiment, or its function in the sentence. During this process of structuring the text, the relation with the original text fades away. Reading the Structure is a reading interface that brings the labels bag in the original text. Does that makes us, mere humans, able to read like our machines do?

Chapter 3 - Zalán Szakács

From DIY Book Scanning to the Shadow Librarian + ACCP - Analogue Circular Communication Protocol

Zalán's reader, From DIY Book Scanning to the Shadow Librarian, traces back the beginnings of the shadow libraries starting from the Soviet era of Russia and explores its impact on comtemporary academic publishing. Amongst other things, the text selection Informs the reader about activists in this field such as Aaron Swartz, the writer of Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub.

Where does the message start? Where does the message end? The user is challenged by the coding tool ACCP to discover the rules behind the circular decoding system and decipher the message. Through the programming language Python and the software DrawBot the textual input such as words is processed and mapped into a spatial graphical system. The 26 characters of the alphabet and the 10 numbers are arranged in a radial manner around the circle. While analysing the graphs the user examines the physicality of the words and discovers hidden patterns of the content. While placing the radial stencil toolkit in front of the radial system – suddenly the message becomes decryptable. This project established from an exploration of alternative possibilities of translating textual input into different visual mediums, while keeping correlation to the original source.

Chapter 4 - Natasha Berting

How Bias Spreads from the Canon to the Web + Erase / Replace

Natasha's contribution explores the politics of selection, transparency and as Johanna Drucker said, "calls attention to the made-ness of knowledge". Her selection of texts explores how human biases and cultural blind spots are transferred from the page to the screen, as companies like Google turn books into databases, bags of words into training sets, and use them in ways that are not always clearly communicated.

The texts will be processed by the Erase / Replace scripts, which are two experiments that question who and what is included or excluded in book scanning. In each script, what is first scanned affects what is visible and what is hidden in what is scanned in a second stage, so on so forth. The scripts learn each page's vocabulary and favours the most common words. The least common word recede further and further away from view, finally disappearing all together or even replaced by the more common words. Every scan session results in a different distortion, and outputs the original scanned image, but with the text manipulated.

Ultimately these texts and scripts are tools for thinking about how knowledge is mined and presented online, how bias spreads from the Canon to the web, finding opportunities to break open this process.

Chapter 5 - Alexander Roidl

Scanning the Database + chatbook

chatbook: ocr/output.txt
      python3 src/chatbook.py

In Scanning the database, Alexander offers to navigate in and out of database narratives. His reader looks at how databases are structured and formed, and how the data they hold are classified, and how such structuring and classification leads to bias. It shows how important it is to question the authorative dimension of databases, by looking closely at what is being scanned, how it is stored, organized and selected.

In reponse to these questions, Alex proposes an alternative interface to such database, by creating a chatbot that enables the user / viewer to explore the content of scanned material by chatting with the bookscanner. By adding an explicit layer of software mediation, the experiment questions how knowledge is built and mediated in the age of machine learning.

Chapter 6 - Angeliki Diakrousi

From Tedious Tasks to Liberating Orality + ttssr-> Reading and speech recognition in loop

      ttssr-human-only: ocr/output.txt
      bash src/ttssr-loop-human-only.sh ocr/output.txt

Angeliki's collection of texts From Tedious Tasks to Liberating Orality- Practices of the Excluded on Sharing Knowledge, refers to orality in relation to programming, as a way of sharing knowledge including our individually embodied position and voice. The emphasis on the role of personal positioning is often supported by feminist theorists. Similarly, and in contrast to scanning, reading out loud is a way of distributing knowledge in a shared space with other people, and this is the core principle behind the ttssr-> Reading and speech recognition in loop software. Using speech recognition software and python scripts Angeliki proposes to the audience to participate in a system that highlights how each voice bears the personal story of an individual. In this case the involvement of a machine provides another layer of reflection of the reading process.

Credits

OuNuPo was produced as part of a collaboration between XPUB and WORM. The project was developed by the XPUB practitioners (Natasha Berting, Angeliki Diakrousi, Joca van der Horst, Alexander Roidl, Alice Strete and Zalán Szakács) with the support from Varia special guests (Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior), the WORM Pirate Bay (Wojtek Szustak and Frederic Van de Velde), diybookscanner.eu (Mark Van den Borre) and XPUB staff and tutors (Delphine Bedel, André Castro, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Leslie Robbins and Steve Rushton).