Merve RE/MIX
This website is the outcome of a research project addressing Merve Verlag’s back-catalog of 150 books, and was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2014. In the contemporary climate of rapid production and dissemination, Merve has embarked with the Data Futures project on a critical assessment and re-valuing of its back-catalog. This project investigates how digital archiving, data processing, publishing and distribution can support small publishers in this area and how the content of out-of-print publications can be re-delivered and restructured and contribute more effectively to the discursive life-cycle.
Industry pressures have left little else for digital publishing other than simulacra of the book form — notably the eBook (which degrades or completely loses the typographic and mnemonic qualities of the paper book — for example page numbering and notes essential to citation, folios, speed of browsing). This project transforms Merve’s back catalog to enable a wide range of dynamic publishing processes to be applied: rendered layout, multi-format conversion, re-mixing, translation, synchronized updates, print-on-demand and distribution, rights management, payment and particularly new forms of reading. In particular, Data Futures collaboration with leading pre-media technology company le-tex in Leipzig provides advanced multi-channel output of existing catalogs and comprehensive version control of new publications. This project is now exploring how books can be re-mixed, either by the reader-editor recompiling publications or by applying computational linguistics and analytics to create new collections and provide new types of interactions.
About Merve Verlag
Merve is an independent publisher located in Berlin Schöneberg, Germany, with a particular focus on theory, philosophy, art and politics. Merve has published about a book a month since the early 1970s; its volumes have a reputation for being critical and having a lasting effect and it was the first independent German publisher to receive the Kurt-Wolff Award, which recognizes extraordinary contributions to the literary landscape. Among the authors published are: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Blixa Bargeld, Jean Baudrillard, Nicolas Bourriaud, John Cage, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Godard, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Alexander Kluge, Jean-François Lyotard, Heiner Müller, Jacques Rancière, Michel Serres, Paul Virilio and Slavoj Žižek, as part of the International Merve Discourse (IMD) series.
About Data Futures and IMCC
The Data Futures project is based in the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC) at the University of Westminster. It was established at the beginning of 2011 to focus on factors affecting long-term accessibility of research data and in particular on the growing importance of digital collections for scholarly research in the humanities.
Now comprising a multi-disciplinary team of computer scientists and theorists in an extended group of universities and companies, Data Futures has developed new software to improve the sustainability of digital humanities projects. Its freizo migration platform enables collections to be made portable and delivered repeatedly using contemporary technologies, instead of becoming maintenance liabilities and ultimately risking loss as funding priorities change and institutions mutate. Collaborative projects with organizations including Heidelberg, Lyon and Princeton Universities and Fotomuseum Winterthur are using freizo to develop new future-proof solutions, as well as testing strategies for reclaiming existing collections that have become stranded on legacy technologies.
Contact
Merve Verlag http://merve.de/
Data Futures Project, IMCC, University of Westminster http://www.data-futures.org/
