A year on from the publication of the ‘Paying Attention‘ theme issue of Culture Machine, the excellent Open Humanities Press published journal, I’ve been poking around the various linked websites and stumbled on the Living books about life site, which is really interesting.
The JISC-funded, OHP published website offers 24 open access ‘living books’, curated by a range of innovative scholars to ‘bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences’:
All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.
In the series there’s a Bioethicsâ„¢ book, curated by Joanna Zylinska, with a range of open access readings thematically organised, ‘biomanufacturing and biopatenting’ for example, as well as some artistic reflections in video and text form. There are also living books curated by David Berry on ‘Life in code and software‘, Steven Shaviro on ‘Cognition and decision‘ and Claire Colebrook on ‘Extinction‘. There’s lots to explore and I would encourage people to take a look… perhaps there should be one on ‘attention’?!
They are indeed an interesting set of resources…
That said, they’re effectively a collation of links to useful online materials with an introduction to tie the topic together…
It wouldn’t be hard to create something similar on the subject of attention, or to find people to collaborate on it with 😉
Yes, I agree Sy – it would be a good thing to do at some point!