Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture

Kyle Bean, The Future of Books

In late 2010, I was privileged to be part of the the Sustaining Digital Scholarship for Sustainable Culture Group (lead: Susan Brown; other members included Di Brandt, Andrew Bretz, Lynn Copeland, Patricia Demers, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Daniel Fischlin, Dean Irvine, Ashok Mathur, Hannah McGregor, Robyn Read, Susan Rudy, Stan Ruecker, Chantal Savoie, Ray Siemens, Stephen Slemon, Robin Sokoloski, Ron Walker, Ann Wilson and me). With the help of a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis grant, we wrote a report called Lasting Change. That report is now available.

The report reflects the growing concern in the scholarly and cultural communities, and beyond, regarding the sustainability of Canada’s digital knowledge and heritage. Canada’s digital advantage is only of value if it can be carried into the future. Canadians must meet the challenge of preserving and enhancing scholarly and artistic knowledge production and our culture in a digital environment. Therefore, the report reviews the current state of knowledge about the sustainability of digital scholarship and related cultural activity in Canada and identifies research opportunities that emerge from consideration of the literature.

Both an executive summary and the full report (as a PDF) are available for perusal.

(Image by Kyle Bean: “The Future of Books.”)

The Ethically Incomplete Intellectual

In between all of the baby-feeding and the moving and the new-job-starting, I made a little art. “The Ethically Incomplete Intellectual” is a broadside that was commissioned by the 2010 Scream Literary Festival (for their “Agents Provocateurs” theme) and designed by Andrew Faulkner and Leigh Nash of The Emergency Response Unit. The image is from a collaboration between RM Vaughan and Jared Mitchell. The text is the weaponized version of a paper that I wrote on the subject of that collaboration … a paper which will shortly be in print in Open Letter.

UPDATE: Print copies of this broadside are once again available from TERU’s Etsy Shop, but they won’t last forever. Which is sort of the point of making literary ephemera, anyway. I’ve attached a PDF of the highest quality version in my possession to this post (link below), which will look good on your screen, but doesn’t hold a candle to the genuine item.

The Ethically Incomplete Broadside