What is a Database Book?

One of the things the Database as Book and Lively Community Archive experimental book pilot project explores is what a database as book, or a databook, could be. In previous research conducted by Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group, we defined database books as:

Books where a database of resources forms the central element (i.e., not as an enhancement to a text-based book) around which the book is formed. These can be non-linear, with multiple access points, or can incorporate updates or versioning, akin to a ‘living archive’. Considers the question when is something a digital archive, and when is it a publication, or a book?’ (Adema et al., 2022)

This last question is key to the Database as Book pilot too, where the project members will need to determine how a ‘book’ will be created out of or in relation to the resources and data that will be shared on the PECE platform. This question further reflects a research question (what counts as a scholarly book, e.g., from an academic career perspective?), a technical question (how does and archive differ from a book?), and a publishing and design question (how will the book be presented, distributed, and preserved?).

Database as Book and Lively Community Archive

 The pilot project is building a ‘database as book’, utilising the Research Data Share (RDS) digital workspace (a PECE instance) and archive, which has been established to support an emergent community of critical STS scholars and practitioners in Kenya, ‘concerned about the kinds of data (especially qualitative data) and data practices needed to (re)animate critical civic engagement in Nairobi’ (Okune et al., 2024). The project team perceives of the building of this archive, and what should be preserved and shared, as very much a collaborative community engagement. They want to ‘reimagine the relationalities that constitute academic writing, research, and publishing and how to represent these relationships in non-hierarchical, less linear ways, beyond the printed codex-format’ (Okune et al., 2024). The project asks: how can a lively versioning of the proposed book be built out of the technical functionality of the PECE platform? How can a stable version of the work be ‘published’ while continuing to keep the book lively? How can a ‘record of versions; be created rather than a ‘version of record’ (Okune and Chan, 2023)? The Database as Book pilot project sets out to reimagine the relationalities of academic writing and publishing to explore how data relations can be established that are less linear, and that focus more on how data ‘builds and sustains relationships of individuals and the collective’, can ‘contribute to the development of more lateral research practices’, while exploring the kind of technical and analytical infrastructure that is needed for the ‘sense-making [of] a collaborative dataset’. 

Performing Patents Otherwise

 Similar questions were explored by Julien McHardy et al., in their reflection on the COPIM Performing Patents Otherwise pilot project (in collaboration with the POP project and Mattering Press), who write that they were ‘especially interested in the book as a dynamic conduit between archive and interpretation’ (McHardy et al., 2021). Data books then, as they perceive it, relate digital archival material and data (in the case of this pilot project, a dataset of historical clothing patents) to interpretation. This conjures up questions about where the archive ends and the book starts, and what kind of opportunities are offered by digital technologies and open copyright regimes to re-imagine this relationship, and relate the various agencies involved in knowledge production to each other in different ways. The data book then can be perceived as an interface to bring data into a shared readerly experience, ‘transforming data from disembodied information to situated, embodied, relational, and negotiated knowledges’ (McHardy et al., 2021). The pilot project’s key objective was how to perform data and archives differently, and how to explore books in this sense as experiential spaces, as lively gatherings for ‘new ways of knowing, being and togetherness’ (McHardy et al., 2021). Practically, this also involved exploring how this ‘changed the process of publishing and challenged our functions in the publishing process as coders, designers, authors, editors and publishers’ (McHardy, 2023). The project team members explored how to tell different stories about the data in the archive, through various media (including through book publication), and how to ensure other methodological lenses and theoretical understandings could be put to this dataset, in other words, how they could ensure readers and contributors could conduct and add their own explorations and narratives to the archive. How can the dataset be cleaned, curated, and structured in advance to such an extent to allow this to happen? The interface and search engine design were crucial in this pilot project as they specifically allowed for elements of serendipity and randomness to happen as part of the readerly encounter (McHardy, 2023).

Discussion

During one of the first meetings with the Database as Book project team, we discussed what makes a book, including ideas of the book as a genre and a long form engagement. We considered how we could achieve archival hospitality (beyond FAIR accessibility and towards data relationality)—one of the key principles of the PECE platform—in relation to the book form. How can we create the archive and the book as a place that welcomes people, where people want to stay, linger, and sit for a while? There is a certain temporality of ongoingness here that one would want to achieve, which in the codex book format for example is achieved through the functionality of page numbers, margins, fonts, which help us return to and recall things. In an online environment different forms of navigation are needed (e.g., numbered paragraphs). In this sense we debated how it is important to see the digital space as a form of text, and how we need to think through what we want to convey in this digital space, akin to the work a curator does. Exhibitions and installations could function as guided walks through an archive in this context, moments of selection that move a reader through the book. This is also a key consideration for publishers, as part of the peer review process for example. How do we ensure that these peers are engaged with the book? Digital affordances are again crucial here, how do we present the book as a package, as a contained entity, and how do we strike a balance here between longevity, presentation, and preservation and engagement, liveliness, and versioning (and the fact that the archive will always contain more than the book can hold). This is both a publishing AND a design challenge. We considered how some form of ‘light structuring’ might perhaps be more pertinent here, to provide some structure for readers but also to allow them to forge their own paths through the content, to allow for some ‘rabbit holes’. How do we allow those kinds of tangents to be built into the design of the book and the archive?

Databook Community Event

From a practical perspective, we discussed how for this pilot project these considerations would involve an iterative process between the publisher, author team, designers/developers, and the platform, to curate the archive and receive feedback on what forms of presentation work best. Community engagement aspects, crucial to this pilot project, should therefore also be key to the peer review process. The RDS collective will be hosting an in-person gathering on November 28, 2024 to push forward their work on this databook with the broader research community in Kenya. If you have ties to the Kenyan research scene and are interested in attending, express your interest through this form.