FAQs
As far as new books for the series are concerned, what are you looking for in terms of length, style and authorship?
We're flexible about length. The electronic mode of publication means we don't have the same kind of restrictions placed upon us regarding length and word count that we would have if we were dealing with a print-on-paper publication. So it's a question of what suits your text really.
When it comes to subject matter, Culture Machine is known for operating somewhere at the intersection of media and cultural studies and cultural theory and the related fields: new media, visual culture, communication studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and so on. But within that we're pretty open.
We're also relatively open regarding questions of style and authorship. We'd have to be with a project of this kind.
Do you have any suggestions regarding the length of chapters?
Is thinking about the word count in advance of the actual process of writing something more suited to the print-on-paper mode of academic production? We don't have an answer to this question: we just raise it as something to consider.
For example, if you are thinking of writing a liquid book one idea would be to write and publish your chapter and/or book section by section (rather than as a completed whole). You could then see what the response and reaction is to the different sections of the book as they emerge, and take that into account (or not) as you progress through the writing of it. This would be somewhat akin to what McKenzie Wark did with his Gamer Theory - the difference being that Wark's project really just involved a form of peer-commentary, whereas Liquid Books will allow a whole community of interested others to get involved in the actual shaping and writing of 'your' text.
Another idea would be to produce a Liquid Book that had something of a hybrid form. So it would consist of text you have written. But then that could be combined with material from some of the thinkers you refer to. As in the first book in the series, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, the latter could consist of extracts from books, pages, snippets, references, annotations, links, tags, podcasts, YouTube clips and so forth.
Can the number of characters in the 'Add a Comment' sections can be increased?
Apparently, it's a feature of the design of the particular wiki tool we're using, PBworks, that it cannot. However, the number of characters in the pages themselves does not have the same kind of limit. So one solution we've come up with as far as the discussions on The Post-Corporate University are concerned is to put them on a special Post-Corporate University: Discussion page. Anyone can post a message on this page using the 'Edit' tab above. This enables people to post longer messages.
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