Tue 4 November 2008 at 5.00 pm

Dr Simone Murray: ‘Remix My Lit: Towards an Open Access Literary Culture’

Publishing Research Seminar Series, Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies in assocation with the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research

Taking Place: Buckley BG10/11 in Semester 1 2008

The publishing buzzword of 2008 has undoubtedly been ‘open access'. But typically this has referred to scientific journal publishing, only recently expanding to include humanities research. This paper goes further in asking what might an open-access literary culture look like?

Developments around online publishing, electronic-books, print on demand and digital libraries see publishers facing challenges on every side. How might publishers' traditional role as gatekeepers of literary culture be similarly usurped in an environment characterised by networked books, wiki-novels and fictional ‘rip and burn' practices? Outlining three exciting recent experiments in open-access literature, Simone Murray's illustrated talk investigates what the digital future of literature might look like, and what its impact will be on writers, publishers and readers.

Dr Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Her research focuses on the interface of the book with other communications media, particularly via digital multiformatting of content. Her book Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (Pluto Press UK) was awarded the 2005 SHARP DeLong Book Prize for the best book on print culture published during 2004. In 2007 she won the International Award for Excellence in the Development of the Book for her article ‘Books as Media: The Adaptation Industry'. Her current research focuses on the industrial substructures of book-to-screen adaptations of literary prize-winners, and how such research can combine book history, print culture and media studies perspectives. She is currently engaged in a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery project on the adaptation industry, titled ‘Books as Media: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation'. The monograph arising from this research, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation, is forthcoming from Routledge US in 2011.

PDF of the Powerpoint presentation is available here (8.5mb)