#12

Dušan Barok, monoskop.org

Inverse Reader

The Inverse Reader is a collection of writings, talks and conversations about shadow, independent and artists’ digital libraries. While they are associated mainly with questioning of intellectual property and struggle for access to scholarly communication and artistic expression, communities around these libraries have also been actively engaging with amateur librarianship, scholar-led publishing, the politics of search, pirate care, critical pedagogy, self-education and other things which are brought here together.

The reader contains a growing selection of more than sixty statements and texts presented at gatherings and publications over the past ten years. It is presented as a collective index of words and expressions from across the corpus. The terms are selected (semi-)automatically using a “tf-idf” algorithm [1] and linked to passages in the texts. The interface allows for adjusting the number of displayed terms and controlling the display of personal names. The list of all included texts is at the bottom (with controls to include, exclude and display the given text).

The reader has been created on the occasion of the exhibition at Panke.Gallery and is also available online at https://monoskop.org/reader

Visit https://monoskop.org/Digital_libraries for more.

[1] Karen Spärck Jones (1972) conceived a statistical interpretation of term specificity called Inverse Document Frequency (idf), which became a cornerstone of term weighting: “The specificity of a term can be quantified as an inverse function of the number of documents in which it occurs.” (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf-idf)