Janneke Adema considers the contemporary scholarly book and how it could transition from a fixed, bound object to a more fluid and evolving entity. She argues that humanities scholars should reconsider their role as authors and strive to engage with knowledge production in more open, critical, and experimental ways. Adema challenges new media scholars (such as Lev Manovich and John Bryant) and print historians (such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns) for their perpetuation of the book as an unchangeable, authored object. Adema complexifies her discussion of book history and new media by considering the importance of more radical approaches to open scholarship that do not reify the commercial control of academic knowledge production. Overall, Adema advocates for a more processual, experimental, ethical, and conscientious approach to scholarly communication in the twenty-first century.

 

Work cited

Adema, Janneke. 2021. Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.