One of the ongoing deliberations that emerged from the recent surrounded the concept of an “Unpress”–a natural outcome for an unconference, perhaps. But as the discussion continued in-person and on twitter, it became clear that there were for what an unpress might look like. Would it be a hybrid press with an open collaborative model of peer review? A space for projects seeking wider audiences? Or a venue for encouraging new types of scholarship altogether?
Unconferences offer a much needed break from the one to many model of discourse at a traditional conference. They are by their nature lacking in authoritarian or imposed structure: and so, to do justice to the prefix, an unpress must be similarly wild. The very term Unpress suggests a deconstruction of the press, and particularly a rearrangement of authority. The usage holds echoes of the unbirthday celebrations in Alice in Wonderland. The unbirthday is inclusive rather than exclusive, but still quite the party.
Books don’t need any more homes: from evolving university presses to experiments like the Kindle Singles series, codexes are alive and well. (The death of Gutenberg’s legacy was greatly exaggerated.) The allure of the Unpress could be in finding the weird of nontraditional academic work, and encourage things to go even weirder. There’s a fear of trying weird projects that stems in part from concerns about Tenure and Promotion. But there’s also a question of where a project fits. Not finding any space can be just as discouraging as the thought of work going unrecognized.
During the conversation about the goals of an Unpress, the idea of a seal of approval came up–a way to mark the scholarly value of online projects. I was reminded of website awards from the days of Geocities: animated gifs of endorsement passed from one website creator on to others deemed worthy. But upon reflection, that’s not quite the right metaphor. Another phenomenon of the days of Geocities was the webring: a tool for linking together sites with shared topics or impetus. Webrings provided a mode of horizontal topic traversal, rather like a sanctioned if truncated memex machine. Vannevar Bush’s imagined Memex machine was a solution to the problem of navigating information:
The human mind…operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. ().
Webrings were one clunky solution to creating trails of associations–a predecessor to our modern Tumblrs and a tool for navigating what we now fondly remember as Web “1.0.” The shells of many of these organizations still exist, leaving behind their logos and table navigation systems to remind us of their former significance:
In their prime, webrings provided a combination of equality, access, ease of discovery and validation of content. One of the coolest things about the project’s one week experiment was the inclusion: a range of voices in a conversation. But in form, the works were fairly similar. An Unpress could be a space to experiment with form and process–without fear. Trevor Owens commented during the proceedings that “There is an Unpress, and it is called the Internet.” The Internet is definitely the space that lends itself to experimental works, but the Internet is vast and many of its offerings go unexplored. An Unpress could serve to colonize and illuminate in the same way that the web rings once brought overlooked websites to the attention of explorers.