Courses/Essential tools for digital publishing

Course Description

Titel

Essential Tools for Digital Publishing

Instructor

André Castro,

= other instructors

Arjen Suiker

Lucia Dossin

Station

Publication Station

About

Wikis form a family of web applications, dedicated to collaborative content creation. In a Wiki, anyone can easily become an editor and start creating content. Compared to other content management systems, Wikis impose little rules on its users, allowing them to develop workflows and structures based on the necessities and specificities of each project. This course will be based on the experience of devising a hybrid publishing workflow for the Beyond Social magazine, centered around a Wiki. The tools, methods, and protocols employed in Beyond Social will be revealed and explored, with the intention of finding ways in which they can be applied and extended to other hybrid publishing projects, within WdKA.

Planning

During three sessions, we'll focus on:

• getting to know Wikis: Wikis origins, goals, and relevance in todays web; But also its syntax, structure,
• converting Wiki pages into other formates, using Pandoc: website(HTML pages), EPUB, ICML(inDesign project)
• Mediawiki API - access content through Mediawiki API, and in conjunction with Pandoc develop scripts which automate publishing tasks; Experiment with retrieving and applying normally hidden information, such as a page's history.

References

• Interview with Ward Cunningham - inventor of the first wikis
• Koren, Yaron. 2012. Working with MediaWiki. San Francisco: WikiWorks Press.
• Cramer, Florian. 2011. “A Brechtian Media Design: Annemieke van Der Hoek’s Epicpedia.” In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 221–26. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-point-of-view-a-wikipedia-reader/

For whom

Graphic Design students and anyone else who wants to become familiar the tools necessary for the creation of websites and e-books.

Course Goals

By the end of this course participants should have:

• developd an understanding of wiki as flexible, customizable and open (read-write) publishing environments on the web.
• familiarized themselves cultural context in which Wikis developed, as well as the motivations that led to their development and popularity.
• familiarized themselves with the conventions of wikis, such as syntax, pages' structure, revisions, categories, namespaces.
• understood and explored the wiki as an inherently hybrid publishing environment, by:
  • comprehending syntax as a structured language - a markup language - compatible to HTML and other markups, which results in the easy and lossless translation to many publishing formats and forms: websites, EPUBs, paper (through Scribus/inDesign), visual maps (SVG).
• exploring the possibilities of the wiki's API, as a way to programmatically access information from the wiki, opening up the possibilities for creating generative wikis, which are constantly informed by updates on the wiki.