To ensure that we can track, share and, to a certain extent, make replicable what we are developing as part of the experimental book pilot projects that were selected for funding out of Open Book Futures’ (OBF) Call for Proposals, we have been developing project-specific documentation methods for each pilot project together with the project teams. This blogpost outlines why we are doing this and how we will be documenting the ‘Database as Book’ pilot project.

Why Documentation?

Documentation of experiences and findings—of the inhibitions, barriers, and potentialities encountered when creating experimental books and/or the workflows to support them—is an essential part of our experimental book pilot projects and a key element of the support provided to the pilot projects by OBF’s Experimental Publishing Group. We aim to document the process from the perspective of those involved in the pilot projects: including the authors, publishers, developers, designers, and the platform and technology providers that are co-creating the books, workflows, and proof of concepts coming out of the pilots.

The documentation we will produce aims, first of all, to help the publishers involved in the pilot projects to establish and maintain workflows for future experimental book publishing projects: for example, we would like to explore how these kinds of books sit within their more standardised or established print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation systems. From this perspective it will be important to document how to integrate and use the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (or PECE, pronounced “peace”) as a data platform and incorporate this at key points in African Minds’ publishing workflow for the database book that will be produced out of this pilot project. In addition to creating this workflow, it will be interesting to consider how we can recreate it, both for African Minds to potentially publish other books with PECE, and for PECE to potentially set up similar integrations with other presses.

This documentation also serves as a way to share knowledge with other presses and author communities around how to publish a databook, to help others to start experimenting with this format and concept and to showcase the open source tools and technologies out there that we will be using in this project. Finally, this documentation can feed back into the research and resources we are creating as part of Open Book Futures’ and the Copim community’s experimental publishing work including the Experimental Publishing Compendium and other toolkits the project maintains.

Documentation Method

Together with the ‘Database as Book and Lively Community Archive’ project team, we have started to discuss how to document the project. One thing that came up, which both the pilot project team and the Experimental Publishing Group have previous experience with, is conducting interim interviews (e.g. every 3 to 6 months) with key project members on the progress of the project. We see these interviews as an opportunity to discuss where we are at, what lessons have been learned, what issues have been encountered, and what strategies have been developed or would be needed to resolve them. Recording these interviews will provide us with the opportunity to share the interviews as separate audio recordings that could become part of the data resources the database book is structured around. The recordings can also be interwoven with the second documentation method we want to put into practice for this pilot project: namely, a series of blog posts on the OBF PubPub documentation site that explores both the key conceptual issues that the project is concerned with (for example, What is a Database Book?) and some of the key publishing workflows that the project will need to consider and develop in relation to the publication of its experimental databook. This includes questions around the integration of the technical partner’s (PECE) platform with the publisher’s (African Minds) platform and workflows; collaborative writing environments for the different communities involved; connections between data and book; facilitation of peer review, editing, distribution, archiving and preservation etc.. We used a similar form of documentation for our previous Combinatorial Book: Gathering Flowers’ pilot project which suited the project well.

Although OBF’s Experimental Publishing Group members—in the case of the ‘Database as Book’ pilot project, Janneke, Rebekka, and Simon—will be responsible for the project documentation and will take a lead on developing, recording, and writing  it, where appropriate these multimedia blogposts will be co-written by the pilot project members. Documenting and sharing together our experiences and findings from the process of co-creating an experimental book and the workflows to support it will, we feel, be a good way to acknowledge the various communities involved in its publication.