DESCRIPTION

The COPIM project's experimental publishing work package piloted a radically new and open longform project Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium. This project (2022–2023) is an example of what the project itself categorises as a 'combinatorial book'; here authors and editors built a new scholarly work by openly remixing and annotating an existing text, in this case, an earlier theoretical text, The Chernobyl Herbarium. Ecological Rewriting was developed through a radically open workflow: the source text was uploaded to PubPub (now no longer a non-profit) and opened for annotation by invited contributors and peer reviewers; the contributors also worked in shared online text editor pads (such as the open-source HedgeDoc) to draft responses, and all these layers were then interconnected by editors. The final published 'book' is a complex multimedia object that transcribes the process of its own production: it includes the PubPub book with its inherent hypertextual web of internal and external hyperlinks, the overlay of annotations (the editors' and authors' marginal notes made visible to readers), the versioned drafts and comments from the open peer review process, and even bi-directional links between the new work and the original source text (via Hypothesis annotations on the electronic source). COPIM's 'Experimental Publishing Compendium' is a growing catalogue of practices, tools, and outputs that experiment and push against the print-based constraints of the very form of longform writing. Taking Jacques Derrida's two-columned challenge to linear reading Glas (1974) as a take off point, the compendium collects writing and reading experiences within longform scholarship that deviates from the normative singular voice of the book.

Alongside Ecological Rewriting are examples like Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook for Software Studies (published by Open Humanities Press, and 'forked' using GitLab), Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (published by Media Commons in 2011), and Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope (published in 2015 by Bottomless Pit) by Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, Jeremy Douglass. In all these cases 'Forking', 'Versioning', and 'Annotating' add a type of multivocality to monographs, offering us a conception of how knowledge could appear when it is various, dissonant, or heterogenous. By doing this they also challenge a set of assumptions that underwrite scholarly appraisal: '[a]cademic publishing and reward structures are set up to reproduce individualised, liberal humanist forms of authorship. Experiments with more collaborative forms of book authoring and knowledge production try to challenge the myth of the single author. In doing so they highlight the myriad relationalities involved in the production of research and how the publication of books has always involved collaborations between different human and machinic agencies' ('Compendium', 2020).

The multistepped process of scholarly engagement—reading a text, critiquing it, reviewing it, and incorporating the comments—is woven into the very medial fabric of monograph writing. In this sense Ecological Rewriting is a powerful example of openness in process; not only is the final product accessible on the web, but the intermediate scholarly labour (marginalia, discussions, iterations) is part of what the monograph's interlocutor experiences and encounters. Methodologically, this challenges the linear form of the conventional monograph and embraces a multi-modal and multi-authorial paradigm. However, experimenting with the 'book' form of a monograph also foregrounded challenges, particularly in preservation and attribution, which is built around the print-and-bound copy of the book. The Ecological Rewriting project needed to devise a novel archiving solution for its many components, since standard repositories would expect a single document file for attribution and persistent identification. Martin Paul Eve, cautioning open research advocates against 'cavalier' approaches to preservation at the cost of access, points however to multiple existing efforts to create a robust system of preservation for open digital books. These can be considered already on a par with print books; Eve writes 'the CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, and Portico systems are all digital preservation systems that are capable of preserving open-access books as they currently stand by distributing copies of the same book to hundreds of locations worldwide' (2012, 126). Indeed, under the rampant transformation of academic publishing by new media ecologies, such distributed or cached preservation mechanisms and principles as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) are crucial to facilitating the conduct of academic labour within the experimental paradigm (see Rigney, 2010; Rosenthal and Vargas, 2013). In other words, it is important to consider how experimental monographs are not totally free from the medial constraints imposed by preservation. It is valuable still that experimental books are written such as to be preserved as textual markup using common code and widely used protocols (CommonMark, HTML, XML, *.js); this way GitHub (or other Git-based repositories) can become powerful ways by which to version, iterate, and preserve them.

Eve also observes that 'the economic structures for monograph production are tightly bound into editorial and gatekeeping functions, yielding a high cost to reach first copy' (2014, 136). Experimental monographs offer an opportunity to offset some of these costs by spreading out the process of production, making publication iterative, and being more intentional or adamant about a non-traditional route to publication. Much of this is carried out by reflective practices around the production of the book. OHP's Living Books about Life series of OA books are a great example, as each title was reproduced online using a collaborative Wiki platform; Gary Hall noted that these made them 'living or 'open on a read/write basis for users to help compose, edit, annotate, translate and remix' (Hall, 2012). Multiple mainstream academic publishers like MIT Press, University of Chicago Press, and Cambridge University Press are also drawn to the collaboratively authored, multivocal, or combinatorial books, even when their ultimate form or presentation is not atypical. Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, 'jointly authored using [...] Wiki software', was published by University of Chicago Press in 2018. These monographs raise a few questions about the 'agency' of the technological media that facilitates their production, which are no doubt intensified by the rapid rise of agentic Artificial Intelligence models, challenging our earlier notions of creative agency and authorial attribution (see Bassett, 2024; Blumenthal & Hengstebeck, 2025). A good case study for this is Montgomery et al.'s Open Knowledge Institutions, published by MIT Press. It was a book written over a technologically mediated 5-day writing sprint, incorporating work in real-time by 13 scholars connected over a network. The Compendium describes it as an experiment that entailed a collaborative book sprint method to 'socialize the process of knowledge creation' and to facilitate a 'collaborative process that captures the knowledge of a group of experts in a single book'.

Lastly, closedness and openness are not merely a matter of the content of academic practice, but also form and method. Practices, institutions, and discourses, of course, feed each other, and the generic, structural, typological, and modal form of the academic monograph leads to sedimented ideas of what our fields or disciplines of study are. An intuitive example of this is the 'placeness'—or the primacy of 'place'—in ethnography-based disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology, where the ethnographic book becomes a proxy or a stand-in for a physical place inside a classroom (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Another example is the dominance of vanguardist literary movements or 'teaching canons' within literary historiography; an explanation for this, in part, is the traditionally tripartite nature of the literary monograph, which has contributed to the view that literary movements have identifiable vanguards and are more consolidated than they actually were (Siskin, 1986; Moretti, 2000). Whilst these approaches are better viewed as extant—or those circumscribed by tradition—they can and often do result in powerful forms of closure that are relevant to the humanities, reproducing the need for monograph-length work by ingraining monograph-length questions within HSS disciplines. In subverting these constraints and conventions, experimental monographs—consider here The Ferrante Letters (2020) or Ordinary Notes (2023)—can be seen as 'opening longform scholarship' by altering stubborn expectations around what a monograph is, and encouraging both writers and readers to reimagine its form on the page, in the hands, in its voice, and its memory.

References

Blumenthal, R.A., and Hengstebeck, E. (2025). 'Does Writing Have a Future in the Age of AI?' Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 81.1, 83-119

Clifford, J., and Marcus, G.E. (eds). (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press

Cota, G.M. (2023). Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

Eve, M.P. (2014). Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Cambridge UP

Ferrante, E. et al. (2020) The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism, ed. by A.C. Ford, trans. by A. Goldstein. Public Space Books

Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. MediaCommons Press. https://mcpress.media-commons.org/obsolescence/

Hall, G. (2012). Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. University of Minnesota Press

Marder, M., and Tondeur, A. (2016). The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness. Open Humanities Press

Montgomery, L. et al. (2021). Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities. MIT Press

Moretti, F. (2000). 'Conjectures on World Literature.' New Left Review, 1, 54–68

Pressman, J. (2014). Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Columbia UP

Pressman, J., Marino, M.C, and Douglass, J. (2015). Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope. Bottomless Pit

Rigney, A. (2010). 'When the Monograph is No Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age', History and Theory, 49.4, 100-117

Sharpe, C. (2023). Ordinary Notes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Siskin, C. (1998). The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830. Johns Hopkins UP

Soon, W., and Cox, G. (2020). Aesthetic programming: A handbook of software studies. Open Humanities Press. GitLab. https://gitlab.com/aesthetic-programming/book