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dw(-h): darren wershler's web projects.Here are all of the online projects in which I've played a significant role. Click on each title to take you directly to the site in question.
portals
bpNichol.ca: An Online Archive for bpNichol
bpNichol.ca is an online public archive of the works of bpNichol and his collaborators. The site includes an extensive selection of audio, digitized print materials, photographs, links and critical articles. Video and curated exhibitions will follow shortly. The site was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with Ellie Nichol, as an accompaniment to The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, and is designed as a not-for-profit community initiative. It is intended as a showcase of what will eventually become the the Artmob Drupal distribution: a highly usable, aesthetically pleasing version of the popular content management system that will focus specifically on the implementation of tools designed to resolve issues over the provenance of digital objects. The site itself is only the start of what will be an ongoing online archiving process, hopefully one that will take many years and many contributors to complete. If you have material that you would like to contribute to the site, or if you have an idea for an exhibition of bp's work, we encourage you to read our submission guidelines and contact us at your convenience. (launched April 2008)
Laurier Communication Studies [online courseware system]
This is the home of the websites for all of my current online courses, including syllabi, reading lists, and so on. It's not much to look at because it's currently still skinned with a plain-vanilla Drupal theme, but in early summer 2009, I'm planning to deploy some version of the templates we've been developing at Artmob out of the very successful bpNichol skin (see above). After that, if I can raise some interest from the various granting bodies, we'll see if the platform is robust enough for wider use by other Laurier faculty members and their students (I'm betting the answer is Yes). (launched September 2007; work in progress)
This is the home page for Artmob, my CFI- and SSHRC-funded research project with Dr. Rosemary Coombe. Artmob is a multisectoral initiative designed to build large, accessible online archives of publically licensed Canadian art, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws. Part of what makes Artmob unique is that a Canadian legal and cultural perspective has guided its direction from its conception. We take into account the specific concerns of Canadian users and rights holders working with digital media objects. While there are certainly other Canadian open source development projects, none address the specificities of the Canadian legal and cultural environment in the same way. We are working with Canadian arts groups at a high level of technical sophistication; Artmob research is unique in its mandate to make resources and opportunities available to Canadian arts and cultural groups that are normally outside of their reach. Our flagship project, bpnichol.ca (see above) continues to do well; work with the Scream Literary Festival is ongoing, and a new project with VideoCabaret is in the works. Artmob's approach to questions of arts policy is also singular. Canadian law reform is accelerating rapidly without any public input to inform the direction of policy development. Our digital infrastructure will facilitate the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data that will assist Canadian and International scholars and policymakers in addressing the technological, pedagogical, social, cultural and legal questions that publishing arts material in a publicly licensed open-source environment poses. (launched September 2006)
Circulars was founded in the early days of 2003 by Brian Kim Stefans as a locus for the activities of poets and artists in response to the impending invasion of Iraq by the USA. Brian and I did a lot of the initial conceptual work together, and much of the early posting, but we were soon joined by a large group of writers from the US, Canada and England, including (but not limited to) David Perry, "Alfred Schein," Angela Rawlings, Jonathan Skinner, Patrick Durgin, Ron Silliman, Carol Mirakove, Maria Damon, Thomas Melodia, and many others. Circulars was always conceived of as a short-term project, and is currently dormant but preserved for archival reasons. During its active period, which has been documented by Brian and me in an essay and accompanying dialogue published in Adalaide Morris and Thom Swiss's New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), the site achieved something unexpected, as Brian details:
In the face of an apparently endless and failed (from any perspective) war, it's hard to conceive of Circulars as a success, but it was, at least, for many writers who might not have done so otherwise, a place to begin talking. (launched January 2003)
You're soaking in it. The oldest record of activity at alienated.net on The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is 1999, but the first real content that they've captured (basically text which has been stripped by archive.org's bots of graphics and styling) showed up by December of 2001. This first incarnation of alienated was as a forum for the innovative poetry community, envisioned along the lines of Slashdot, and built in PostNuke, the PHP-based CMS of choice at the time. During the firsat couple of years, the site saw a lot of traffic, and it ran hard until some time in late 2003/early 2004. Back then, there was nothing else like it for Canadian poetry, but it was exhausting to maintain, and eventually fell into disrepair. The second version, short-lived version of alienated, which went live in 2004, was a Movable Type-based blog, but I replaced it with the current, Drupal-powered site by summer 2006. I am in the process of loading as much of my own primary content into alienated as possible, and will use this site as both a set of personal pages and as a hub for aggregating material about other web-based projects. (launched 1999-2001ish)
Between 1997 and 2002, I was the Senior Editor at Coach House Books. During that period, Coach House became the first press in the world to simultaneously publish full-text editions of its entire frontlist online and in paper. The original site design was by Chris Bolduc, the first Coach House Web Editor; the second version was built by damian lopes, who became Web Editor at the press at the same time as I started my tenure there, and shortly before the current Senior Editor, Alana Wilcox, joined us as Fiction Editor. The current version of the site, pictured here, is by my frequent collaborator Bill Kennedy. Under my editorship, Coach House published over 70 online books — an achievement that was radical enough that the publishing world still hasn't caught up with it yet. As I've detailed in FREE as in speech and beer (see below), Many of the Web's greatest hits have based their business models on the gift economy: Google, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and the entire Free Software and Open Source programming movement all give away what we used to describe as their core products for free and make their money in other ways (such as providing service, customization, or selling related products). Conceived before the advent of the Creative Commons licenses, the Coach House online editions represent an attempt to develop similar model for literary publishing, based on the premise that these online books wouldn't hurt sales, but would rather generate interest in Coach House Books as an organization, and that that exercise in audience building would result in a long-term increase in sales. The project's artistic and cultural success is undeniable; it still generates an enormous amount of web traffic. And, though the online publishing program generated as many headaches as laurels, Coach House regained its role as a leading Canadian small press in large part due to this work. (launched 1996-1997)
ebooks: media theory and history
The FREE as in speech and beer website was designed as an online companion for my book from Financial Times Press, FREE as in speech and beer: open source, peer-to-peer and the economics of the online revolution. Because of the book's subject matter, it seemed only appropriate to place the entire text online (a gesture that was possible because of a sympathetic editor and some clever contractual phrasing). Further, when I began teaching in Communication Studies in 2002, the book was already in regular use as a textbook, and I wanted to make it available to as many students as possible. Under the direction of Kevin Muise, the first Artmob information architect, the website was designed and constructed in a very early version of Drupal by Derek Lee, one of my senior students at York. It remains an excellent example of what a talented, motivated student can accomplish in a fairly brief period of time, and of the robustness of even early instances of the Drupal platform. (launched winter 2004)
I can trace most of the moral and intellectual framework for my writing on new media back to this project: Commonspace, a book that Mark Surman and I wrote together at the turn of the millennium. In retrospect, I think it's a very good book, despite its occasional stylistic excesses; it anticipates many aspects of what we now call Web 2.0 technologies, and it's driven by the same ethos that culminated in the founding of the Free Culture movement. That Mark is now the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation suggest that we were definitely on the right track. The book is now out of print, but its entire contents are available on the Commons Group website. One day (in all my spare time), I'd like to do a "Commonspace 2.0" article, but in the meantime, the original text will do nicely. (launched 2005)
e-poetry and conceptual writing
status update was commissioned by the Kootenay School of Writing for their POSITIONS Colloquium, held at the VIVO Arts Centre in Vancouver in August 2008. Part of my ongoing investigations into the status update or "tweet" (which is, as far as I can tell, an entirely new literary form), status update is also a kind of sequel to apostrophe. (Like the latter work, status update is a collaboration with Bill Kennedy.) The website works by merging my Facebook RSS feed with Bill's, eliminating redundancies, then swapping out the names (many of whom are writers already) for the names of dead poets, parsed from the Wikipedia list of poets. Each dead poet's name is also a hyperlink that leads to the individual status update for that dead writer (the page pictured here belongs to Khalil Gibran). You can even subscribe to it as an RSS feed. Later improvements will likely include some form of authorial image, and some explanatory text. In the meantime, the site is busily writing our next book for us. (launched August 2008; work in progress)
It's true that Bill Kennedy and I conceived of the apostrophe project, but it's equally true that the writing was done by five robots and everyone on the Web. The site where the robots live is called The Apostrophe Engine. We built a working version of the engine for the e-poetry 2001 conference at SUNY Buffalo, but it lived on a private server for the next five years, and only appeared on the open web in 2006. When a reader/writer clicks on a line, it is submitted to a search engine, which then returns a list of Web pages, as in any search. The Apostrophe Engine then spawns five virtual robots that work their way through the list, collecting phrases beginning with “you are” and ending in a period. The robots stop after collecting a set number of phrases or working through a limited number of pages, whichever happens first. Next, the Apostrophe Engine records and spruces up the phrases that the robots have collected, stripping away most HTML tags and other anomalies, then compiles the results and presents them as a new poem, with the original line as its title ... and each new line as another hyperlink. At any given time, the online version of “apostrophe” is potentially as large as the Web itself. The reader/writer can continue to burrow further into the poem by clicking any line on any page, sliding metonymically through the ever-changing contents. Moreover, because the contents of the Web is always changing, so is the contents of the poem. The page it returns today will not be the page that it returns next week, next month, or next year. Like the tapeworm foundry (see below), the larger apostrophe project was conceived of as a switching node: node an end in and of itself, but a means to the creation of other art. Thus, it's immensely satisfying that the project has spawned offshoots as interesting and as varied as apostrophe: means of production, a short film I did with Mishann Lau, Sarah Kenvyn and Darren O'Donnell for the LIFT Poetry Projections series, and the title story in Dave Bidini's The Five Hole Stories, which also led to the production of a play by One Yellow Rabbit called Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica ... William S. Burroughs was right: art is viral. (private launch 2001; public launch 2006)
Anansi published the print edition of the tapeworm foundry in 2000; maybe 1500 people bought a copy. /ubu editions brought out a digital version in 2003, and many, many times more have been circulated (and hopefully read) by audiences that the print edition would never have reached. One of the happy outcomes of the digital availability of this book was TAPEWORM: a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination). You can read all about it here. (launched 2003)
NICHOLODEONLINE is a digital Coelacanth. I designed this site in 1997 according to the web standards of the day (final version 1998) as the online version of my first book, NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs, and it's still chugging away. Rick/Simon, one of the designers at the Coach House, used to say that this project was like a coral reef, because it kept accreting material. He's right: there's all sorts of stuff on the website that's not in the print book. If I hadn't become the editor at Coach House shortly after finishing the first version of this monster, I'd probably still be adding to it. (launched 1997; final version launched 1998)
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Darren Wershler (aka Darren Wershler-Henry) is the author or co-author of ten books, most recently, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (McClelland & Stewart, Cornell UP), and apostrophe (ECW), with Bill Kennedy. Darren is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program. alienated.net is the most visible part of Darren's brain. links: status update
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