Banff emerged as a sparkling venue for a conference of this size, not only because of the spectacular scenery and great food. The centre is uniquely committed to the promotion of artistic endeavor in Canada. As well as a fully stocked library open to text-hungry delegates, the centre’s programme of residencies for emerging artists meant that a quiet drink in the bar could be spiced up by a percussion performance, jazz guitar or saxophone solo, while live music venues within the centre provided a space for delegates to swing their theoretical cares away. By the halfway point most delegates had encountered tranquil species of deer in the surrounding grounds, eaten delightful meals looking out over the mountains, and even seen bears in the national park. We watched a male elk swim from one side of the river to another, at the same time as new areas were opening up in the field.

This open ground was marked by a shift from interpretation to action. ‘Less about “me” and more about “you,”’ as Linda Warley put it in her closing discussion. Much new work was pulling biography – and in particular biographies of the self as other – into new territory. Several scholars referenced field work in the production of autobiographical texts and their consumption, while still others focused on new media narratives, visual autobiography, the use of objects and three-dimensional representations of both individual and collective lives lived.

Rocio Davis provided the final keynote of the conference, ‘Fictional Transits: Is there an Autobiography in this Text?’ Attending to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Davis looked at the transits between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction,’ arguing that Ozeki’s signaling of creative processes illuminates a slippage that moves the reader to become the ‘you’ in the text. ‘I am writing this and wondering about you somewhere in my future,’ the narrator says at the beginning. Davis argued that Ozeki complicates our relationship with the story and with the fictive and referential universe through layering, platforms, performativity, and acts of storytelling. As one blogger put it, ‘traditional genre boundaries seem inadequate when reading texts like this one.’

A highlight of the weekend was the Life Readings Series. Sharron Proulx-Turner was generously sponsored by the journal a/b: auto/biography studies and Patrick Lane appeared courtesy of the Writer’s Union. The series brought two of the finest voices in Canadian literature into the conference fold. The first day of the conference ended with a drinks reception in the stunning Tom Crane Bear Hall of the Max Bell Building, with views of the sun setting over the glorious Rocky Mountains. Métis poet Sharron Proulx-Turner read from a series of poems including ‘A Houseful of Birds,’ before talking about sealed records and the legacy of Canada’s Residential School system. ‘There was another story there,’ she read, ‘where a girl opened her mouth and inside was the universe.’ Sharron was a compelling speaker about the impact of trauma on her own writing, her methods of using autobiographical material, and a compassionate and singular presence throughout the rest of the conference.

Patrick Lane was just as frank with his discussion of the uses of autobiography, the writing process, fear of failure and his decision to start writing. Hinting at a combination of memory, experience and affect, writing for Lane was bound up with affect: ‘I can still feel those dark mountains, they rose like morning clothes from Kootenay lake.’ Somehow the act of writing coexisted with the fear of erasure, an awareness of not being fully represented: ‘’Canada did not exist, and neither did I. I wanted to exist,’ he said.  These were powerful, intimate readings, highlighting some of the faultlines inherent in the theorization of writing about the self that would be plotted over the next two days. And, as Lane acknowledged, this was why we were there. ‘You guys are the academics,’ he said. ‘I’m just a writer.’

The multimodal nature of much scholarly criticism was perhaps summed up by the second keynote address from Canadian poet Fred Wah. Wah remains at the forefront of Canadian literature in the post-postmodern era, citing Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan as influences. He purposefully broke with academic tradition, interweaving extracts from his critically-acclaimed book of poetry, Diamond Grill, with an outline of his thoughts on the constitutive indeterminacy of the ‘biotext.’ Wah discussed the limits of representing identity through a text, talking about his own experience of growing up ‘Chinese-American’ in Canada: how he existed in the blank space after racial origin forms, ‘living in the hyphen’ between two identities. This in-betweenness features repeatedly in his work – the swinging door of his father’s Chinese restaurant in Waiting for Saskatchewan ‘continues to operate in my thinking about hybridity.’

Perhaps the life writing text – looking forward as well as back – always embodies Wah’s swinging kitchen door, a then as well as a here and now, a transit between one way of being and another. What came out of IABA 2014 was a call for a new set of tools to talk about selves and identities in constant movement, at risk of being drowned out, forgotten or erased. Transits, binaries, orbits, hyphens, poetry, animals, ethics, theory on the front line – IABA 2014 reaffirmed the status of auto/biographical theory and practice as the preeminent mode of scholarship for our time. As Rocio Davis put it in her keynote, quoting Ruth Ozeki: ‘Life is full of stories – or maybe life is only stories.’

With thanks to the ‘Tweetbots’: Kate Douglas, Anna Poletti, Emma Maguire, Terri Tomsky, Julie Rak, Candida Rifkind, Liz Rodrigues, Aimee Morrison, Sarah Carson, Miriam Novick, and Linda Warley.  

Visit the IABA website here.

What life writing scholarship means in the field, and how scholars engage with both texts and subjects was a key area of concern. Laurie McNeill presented a valuable critique of one university’s pedagogy of decolonization in relation to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission directives, asking whether we could encourage an ethical awareness for students to productively engage with these issues. How can instructors create awareness without allowing testimonies to be simply consumed? This was a practical, as well as an ethical concern. In the panel on ‘Liminal Memory,’ Sidonie Smith, Janice Hladki and Bina Freiwald all used autobiography and visual biography to explore notions of shadows and border-crossing, as well as desolation and betrayal in the lives of their subjects. Smith’s account of the “State of Exception Exhibit,” became a text written on the bodies of those involved through the use of tattooage. Bina Freidl’s work on Jewish Women’s writing demonstrated how stories of collective identities could subsume individual identities. In her presentation on Kent Monkmann’s video art, Janice Hladki raised important questions about memory and affect, with Monkmann’s video interrogating the ways that countermemorial artworks can reclaim/recast dominant narratives of nation-state celebrations of white settler histories.

Leigh Gilmore’s paper ‘Getting a Handle on Pain’ crystallised a repeated scholarly preoccupation with ethical methodologies of reading. Looking over her shoulder at Sontag, Gilmore complicated verbal-visual interactions in the graphic novel. What meaning takes place in a text and where? How do verbal and visual texts instruct us in interpreting pain? What does paratextual imagery in memoirs of illness actually do? Questioning the use of metonymy to invite the reader to identify with the source of pain, Gilmore ended with a call to look at the methodologies and critical tools we use in our encounters with auto/biographical texts.

This deconstruction of the verbal-visual matrix echoed Miller’s injunction to scholars to think visibly (vis à vis the selfie), while pointing forward towards Julia Watson and Candida Rifkind’s separate papers in ‘Comics and Justice.’ Rifkind’s paper on ‘Graphic Biography and the Half-Lives of Robert Oppenheimer’ encapsulated some of the key themes that we were beginning to see develop, with Rifkind arguing that ‘atomic graphic biographies’ open up new ways of seeing a familiar scientific context with their ‘triangulation of instability.’ Julia Watson – ‘always at the cutting edge of method,’ as one blogger tweeted – asked us to think about how we read and how we are engaged by texts. Creating a taxonomy of the first person in comics, Watson reinterpreted narrative tropes in Parsua Bashi’s Nylon Road, arguing that the auto/biographical act becomes an occasion for evaluating who the narrator is across national borders. Watson went on to consider the opportunities provided by multimodal auto/biographical acts. What are the affordances of comics for holding disparate moments in productive tension?

A sense of tension holding together ideas and selves – of the text as an arena in which things simultaneously do and do not fall apart –was echoed in John Zuern’s  paper on US memoirs written after the economic crash of 2008. Pinning down the idea of post-crash memoirs as transitory texts, Zuern highlighted the transits of the memoirist’s self into pre-written narrative modes, and argued that austerity had led to a ‘precarization of the self’ in which the centre does not hold. In Emily Hipchen’s paper on the construction of Steve Jobs in Walter Isaacson’s memoir of the same name, Hipchen commented productively on the ways in which Jobs’ life is narrated in orbit by his status as hyper-capable human, traumatised adoptee, and ‘supercrip.’ There was a lightbulb moment in the discussion between Hipchen and Craig Howes when the relevance to the Superman story was noted. This was the kind of electricity of which the best intellectual discussions are made.

This blog post is part of a four-part series by Seraphima Kennedy that will be continued in the following week. Visit the IABA website here.

‘I’m going to let you finish,’ wrote one IABA 2014 delegate on Twitter, ‘but #IABA2014 literally has the best people of all time.’ I could write another piece about the high quality of the papers presented, the cutting edge explorations in the field, the barnstorming presentations and top-of the-Richter-scale scholarship served up over the course of three days at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 29 May – 1 June 2014. Or I could write about the staggering mountains, elk, deer, the excellent experience created by the Banff Conference Team, the amazing facilities (including pool, jacuzzi, queen-sized beds), the jaw-droppingly-delicious three course meals. Most of it would sound like an exaggeration and none of it would do justice to the actual experience, or do much to evoke the dynamism and friendliness of the scholars present.  What I can say is that IABA 2014 is likely to go down in auto/biographical scholarship history not only as the place with the best view, best banquet and best wildlife, but also as THAT conference where THAT theory was first propounded. ‘IABA has ruined me for future conferences,’ wrote one of the delegates to me in an email a week after the event. She was not just talking about the buffet.

What made this different from other conferences? The welcome of the organizing committee for one, headed up by the wonderful Julie Rak (author of Boom!), Laurie McNeill, Eva Karpinski (author of Borrowed Tongues) and Linda Warley (contributor to Tracing the Autobiographical). The approachability of eminent scholars and the absence of academic hierarchies, coupled with a focus on improving skills for new scholars and graduate students through a dedicated workshop run by some of the biggest brains in life writing scholarship. The awareness that life stories are valuable, subtle areas for dynamic research into theory and practice. This was reflected in the choice of readers and keynote speakers: Carolyn Miller, Rocio Davis, Fred Wah, and poets Sharron Proulx-Turner and Patrick Lane.

The opening words from Elder Tom Crane Bear, Caretaker of the Land and a member of the Siksika Nation, highlighted that we were there to investigate a particular form of creative scholarship: ‘We came up through the southwest where the chokecherries grow,’ he said, speaking about the history of his people the Blackfoots. What may have been a consciously novelistic turn of phrase felt like an acknowledgment that in Canada, and in particular in the land on which we were standing, one narrative is always laid crossways over another. How and why we pay attention to these narratives, and how we can respond to the stories of others were the questions on the minds of assembled scholars.

Yet this was a conference as much about looking forward as back. There were panels on Theorizing Human Rights, Representing Islam, Digital Futures, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Narratives, Neoliberal Stories, and Comics and Justice, among many others.  In her keynote address ‘Memoir, Blog, and Selfie: Genre as Social Action in Autobiographical Representations,’ Carolyn Miller treated the audience to a history of the self-referential portrait, linking genre expectations, social structures and Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’ with James Frey, Oprah, and the ‘fifteen types of selfie.’ Could selfies be seen as a form of life writing? A lively debate set the tone for a stimulating and at times controversial three days, while the Twitter-sphere saw the emergence of a new kind of selfie – the ‘IABA 2014 selfie.’ This proved a popular genre among assembled scholars, and provided much entertainment over the course of the conference (look for #iaba2014selfie on Twitter, or scroll through #iaba2014 to see some of the best of these).

IABA 2014 was also marked by a burgeoning interaction with technology. For the first time, a committed cohort of bloggers (codename: ‘Tweetbots’) took over the Twittersphere,  blogging to interested followers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia (among other places), with some scholars following the conversations for many hours and contributing questions directly to panel discussions. This created an intriguing, private-yet-public meta-IABA, with information being shared across panel sessions in a virtual web of intercultural reference.

The use of technology allowed us to chart simultaneous currents in auto/biographical theory and practice, but it wasn’t only in cyberspace that scholars were throwing out new lines of enquiry. There was a growing awareness of auto/biographical writing outlets produced by new media, visual cultures, memes, blogspots, video and data-driven forms of life writing analysis.  Meg Jensen (University of Kingston) discussed the complexity of human rights work in semi-autobiographical texts, closing a discussion of paraeidolic life writing with a discussion of meme. Anna Poletti opened up new ground by querying the role of the life writing text in zines about suicide. Over in ‘Self-Branding,’ questions of gender and agency came to the fore as K.J. Lee explored memoirs by Canadian women writers, Emma Maguire looked at the video blogs of Jenna Marbles, while the use of science, cognitive sciences and memory also pointed the way to Liz Rodrigues’ later paper on ‘Life Writing as a data driven form.’

Testimony remained a complex and potentially dangerous business: speaking for others or attempting to bestow rights through articulation was as fraught as ever. Cynthia Franklin (University of Hawai’i Manoa) problematized Dave Eggers’ use of the story of Zeitoun, and queried whether Eggers’ narrativisation underscores rather than challenges the stereotypes it seeks to disturb. Terri Tomsky (University of Alberta) presented a fascinating investigation into memoirs of lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay inmates. Her rich analysis complicated the ways in which legal narratives unpick the ‘us vs. them’ dyad, yet somehow still legitimate ‘us’ as beholders of rights that can be bestowed on others.  Janice Williamson (University of Alberta) continued with the theme of justice, habeas corpus and the law in ‘Life Story Versus Law story: Omar Khadr’s Imprisonment 2002-14,’ concluding with a discussion of proxy narratives and life writing structures that both help and hinder academic inquiry into real life narratives.  In ‘War and Human Rights,’ Kate Douglas looked at narratives of child soldiers through a paper on ‘Trauma, Young Lives and Ethical Reading,’ asking questions about ethical reading and ethical scholarship. As our resident poet Sharron Proulx-Turner put it, ‘The way to meet cultures is to witness the culture rather than manipulate for a western ‘I’.

Interdisciplinary work was a significant preoccupation, with several scholars calling for new methodologies of reading, looking outside of the arts and humanities and using new methods to place the body within the text. Great emphasis was placed on ‘multimodal’ life writing narratives – on comics, digital objects, the visual and the sonic. The focus was international, with most papers examining forms of intercultural exchange, highlighting the ‘mobility and transit of texts and scholars’ (Linda Warley).

This blog post is part of a four-part series by Seraphima Kennedy that will be continued in the following week. Visit the IABA website here.

(for Italo Calvino)

Maybe you don’t like this poem or perhaps you don’t want to read it perhaps you should do something else like wash last night’s dishes or watch TV if I were you I’d try reading a good book or even start to write one but perhaps you haven’t stopped reading this poem just yet while you’re wondering what else you could read or perhaps your interest in this poem has miraculously changed maybe you’re enjoying it or finding it a challenge or perhaps you’re simply thinking it would be a waste of precious time having read it so far to not read it to the end or perhaps there’s nothing you can do because perhaps this is a class that you can’t get out of or the start of a conference you’v paid a lot of money to attend or perhaps it’s a punishment prescribed in a minimum security prison you’re now in for five or even ten years or perhaps reading this poem has induced paralysis and you can’t move not even to blink your eyes or perhaps you believe it can’t get worse but it does get worse and you think all these thoughts again and then compare this poem to the start of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and that the two might be related perhaps you think that this poem was actually written by Calvino under the pseudonym of Steve McCaffery and then you think that this might be the poem Calvino didn’t write but wished he had and by this time an entire week has passed and you’re still at you desk at the office because you never went home and perhaps you couldn’t have anyway because a friend called to tell you that your house burned down and all your pets and family burned to death because you were still reading this poem.

—From Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009

The word “hockey” makes seven appearances in that opening paragraph.

I had a hockey weekend.

“If hockey is just a game in Canada, then the Rockies are just hills in the prairies,” writes Neil Earle in “Hockey as Canadian Popular Culture: Team Canada 1972, Television and the Canadian Identity” from Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture, Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski, editors.

Slippery Pastimes takes a look at popular culture in Canada that’s vital to the body politic, and to “what it means” to be Canadian as interpreted by the culture we collectively consume. Sixteen essays tackle everything from rock and roll, advertising, tourism, and, of course, sport. The essays come from all sorts of perspectives—and I recommend picking this book up and checking them all out if you’re at all interested in Canadian culture—but it’s Earle that presents the timeliest case study, that of the 1972 Canada-Soviet Series.

Earle argues that mass communication (as was sufficiently developed by 1972) was able to transform the sport into a “form of collective drama,” claiming that the medium of television, with its peculiar abilities, cemented hockey as cultural identity firmly in the Canadian psyche. See, hockey is particularly well-suited for television, with its quick action, swift line changes, and the proximity of its fans, who line up against the very boards players careen each other into. Cameras and microphones pick all this up, transmitting it into the homes where the families who have gathered to watch are essentially transported right there onto the ice, sharing the reactions of those fans cheering behind their favourite players.

Earle likens hockey to the Greek and Shakespearean drama:

“As noted, the audience is very much involved. Add to this the distinctive pacing and ‘rhythm’ of a hockey game, the changing mood and psychological tempo created by the switches in focus from the team to the individual player and back again. This makes for a superb aesthetic spectacle.”

That still doesn’t quite explain the almost-juvenile enthusiasm everyone packed into that Moose Winooski’s was buzzing with on Sunday, though. Hockey, asserts Earle, evokes the “paradisiacal myth of the boy inside the man,” with its powerful “imaginative hold” over Canadian males. The hold itself is fortified by the medium that carried it into Canadian homes. “The alchemy of electronic technology thus made possible in televised hockey a synchronization of the mythopoeic and the mechanical. A flooded driveway became a locus of myth.”

Broadcasting hockey gave us all that little voice that pops into our heads whenever we take up a stick and play the game. Whether you hear Don Cherry, Joe Bowen, or Foster Hewitt is irrelevant. Thanks to mass communication, when you break out, split the D and wind up on a shot, you can hear the play-by-play, the audience roaring, and the excitement exploding in your ears.

That’s hockey as cultural myth, working its mystic magic on your imagination:

“This is the romance of hockey: play as idyll. The mysterious bonding of millions of Canadian males to ‘the game’ traces back to the pond, the slough, the indoor rink, to the iced driveway, to the time when they, in their youthful fantasies, were Gordie Howe or Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky. Here is hockey’s spiritual core, the central explanation for its mystical attraction for prime ministers and pipefitters, for Nobel prize winners and new immigrants.”

Just like our 1972 counterparts, last Sunday Canadians across the country were watching a broadcast from distant Russia, involved in “something deeper than sport.” We cheered together and we held our breath together, connected by nothing save that we were all Canadians watching Canadians play a game we had long ago managed to stake our claim on. To be in that Moose Winooski’s was to take part in the cultural myth of our national pastime. And just like in 1972:

“…Canadians heard that voice say they were the best in the world at the game of hockey. It was a unique Canadian epiphany. A Soviet coach commented years later: ‘We do not have the spirit to draw on that these Canadians do.’ To him, the Canadian players had ‘a light that cannot be put out…you defeat them sometimes, but you discourage them never’ (Beardsley 36). What was the source of that light? Was it money and commercialism? Was it male physicality and exclusiveness? It was something much deeper. It was being caught up in the rapture of a collective myth as enhanced by electronic technology.”

Earle’s essay is one of many in this book that examine Canadian identity as presented in our popular culture, and Slippery Pastimes is the next from-the-archive book on my reading list. If you’ve ever wondered why hockey has the hold it does on so many of us, or why Stompin’ Tom Collins was such a big deal, this book is for you.

Good job boys:

And let’s not forget this beautiful winning goal from our women’s team, who celebrated their fourth straight Olympic gold medal last Thursday. Hockey isn’t all about the guys these days, but that’s a story for another blog post:

New from Jeannette Sloniowski:

Detecting Canada

“Writers of Canadian crime fiction have learned to gird our loins when we are asked a question that is as irritating as it is inevitable: When are you going to write a real novel? By offering not simply an overview of the history of crime fiction in Canada but thoughtful essays on the themes Canadian crime writers explore and on the roles played by landscape, gender, class, race, and community in our works, Detecting Canada answers that question decisively. Canadian crime writers are writing real novels, and Detecting Canada offers solid evidence to prove the point.”

— Gail Bowen, author of The Gifted, the latest in the Joanne Kilbourn mystery series

Also from Joan Nicks:

Covering Niagara

“Covering Niagara will finally bust loose a secret that’s been all too well concealed from all too many people: because of its unique geographical position, as a kind of radar dish picking up influences from all compass points, both sides of the border and the myriad backgrounds of the millions who have settled there, it’s a pop cultural torrent.”

— Geoff Pevere, broadcaster, author, and critic

I gave you up, I let you down, I ran around and deserted you.

To make up for it, I’m going to share (almost) everything I’ve learned about metadata over the past two weeks.

Metadata: the data we use to describe other data, like books, films, photographs, and websites 

A Recap:

Metadata has been around ever since we started collecting large volumes of books in one place, beginning with the Library of Alexandria in the 3^rd Century BCE. Librarians used the Pinakes system to keep track of things like the author’s name, his educational background, where he was from, the title of the work, what it was about, etc. Whether all you’ve got is a list of titles on your bookshelf or a comprehensive catalogue covering everything from the writer’s birthplace to the number of words in the manuscript, you’ve got metadata.

The Elements of Metadata (Most Commonly) in Use Today:

In the tradition of the librarians of Alexandria, we still collect data like title and contributor, and we sort our titles according to subject (usually). But since so many books are now published each year, we’ve created industry standards that help keep everyone involved—publishers, vendors, retailers, libraries, etc.—on the same page. The most integral element of modern metadata is the ISBN—the International Standard Book Number. See, books are products like any other object manufactured and sold, and they require an ISBN to be identified among the multitudes of other products that make up the book marketplace. ISBN is assigned by a regulatory agency, and allows publishers and retailers to monitor inventory and efficiently identify specific products during business transactions. A similar and less known standard is the ISTC—the International Standard Text Code. The ISTC identifies the work of a book. For example, take a look at one of our backlist titles, Onward to the Olympics. The work of the book, being the manuscript itself and its actual contents, would have one ISTC, while each edition of the book (hardcover and paper) has its own ISBN—because each edition is a separate product.

(An aside on ISBN:

This 13-digit code need not frustrate or intimidate you. There’s actually a method to this madness, you just need to get to know it a little better. The 13-digit ISBN is made up of five separate elements:

1. Prefix Element: The first three numbers of the ISBN insert the code into the global product ID system. Right now there are two prefixes available, 978 and 979.
2. Registration Group Element: This number refers to the country, geographical, or language area of the publisher.
3. Registrant Element: These five numbers identify a particular publisher or imprint. Some publishers may have more than one registration element.
4. Publication Element: This element refers to a specific title.
5. Check Digit: The check digit completes the ISBN, serving as a secondary error check for systems using ISBN and is automatically calculated by the preceding digits of the ISBN.

[Worth noting: ISBN in Canada is assigned by the Standards Council of Canada, in the US by the American National Standards Institute and in the British Commonwealth by the British Standard Institute.])

Still with me?

Other metadata points typical on our books’ pages include:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Contributors
• Contributors’ roles
• Price
• Format
• Edition
• Page length
• Description
• Contributors’ biographies
• Review
• Cover art

…You get the idea.

Electronic communication in the book business necessitated not only a need for rich metadata for books, including the abovementioned ISBN, but it also created a need for a standard way of communicating metadata from the publisher all the way to the end user (you, you amazing book reader).

Say hello to ONIX.

ONIX is not a Pokémon. What it is, is an XML-based international standard for representing and communicating book metadata electronically, usually using FTP (file transfer protocol). ONIX allows for global communication across languages and boarders of book product info, using ISBN as a match point for reference. It enables various systems to interact and engage with each other, using a shared language with common grammar, definitions and structure.

ONIX is a product of EDitEUR, an international organization started in 1991 to coordinate the development of infrastructure standards for selling books, serials and e-books online. Thanks to ONIX, manual file processing is reduced, accuracy of data transmission and interpretation is improved, and processing speed quickens. We could go pretty deep down the ONIX rabbit hole, but we won’t. Let’s just say that thanks to ONIX, a huge amount of metadata pertaining to thousands of books finds its way to the screens of many a consumer.

Wait, screens?

The driving force behind the creation of all these standards and practices was the rise of internet bookselling. Before Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Apple, book data transmitted electronically was mostly used for business transactions, inventory management, etc. The really meaty data, which you find on our book’s pages here on our website, was still largely being communicated by print.

When retailers started selling books online, they needed rich metadata from publishers in order to create their “digital shelves.” And to stay competitive in a disruptive market, retailers began displaying metadata directly to consumers. For the first time, metadata was a direct component of the consumption process, essentially becoming the browsing and discovery experience for anyone who shops online, and changing the way publishers had to craft their metadata.

Today, when you find a book online it’s because of the metadata. Retailers like Amazon use sophisticated algorithms that rely on metadata to decide which books to show to who, so publishers have to be more conscious of how they construct it than ever before. It has to have the right keywords, it has to appeal to a consumer, it has to have the correct structure for that particular retailer, and it has to be accurate.

So that’s where we’re at with metadata right now. It really is every publisher’s favourite thing to love hating, but without it you’d never find our awesome books.

What will metadata look like in the future? It’s tough to say—the thing is you never know what you need until you need it, so the rule of thumb is to collect as much as possible. That being said, it isn’t inconceivable to imagine a future where entire works are mined for data, including elements like style, voice, tone, keyword density, etc. And it isn’t that hard to imagine an evolved metadata environment, taking the “upstream/downstream” model (metadata predominantly flows from the publisher, “upstream” to the consumer, “downstream”) and turning it on its head, allowing publishers to use retail/vendor metadata to inform future business decisions. We might even get real-time metadata analysis, with publishers split-testing different elements to see what works best online.

But that’s just speculation, and this has been a very long blog post about metadata.

Metadata!

Metadata has been used to organize and describe ideas as early as the 3rd Century BC, when the Pinakes system was used in the Library of Alexandria to keep track of roughly 500,000 manuscripts. At the time, metadata collected included the book’s title, the author’s name, his father’s name, his birthplace, his educational background, any teachers he studied under, and lastly, a brief biography. Sometimes they also recorded the first line of the work, a summary of its contents, and information about its origin. The manuscripts were then stored in separate rooms according to subject.

The librarians of Alexandria must’ve been onto something, because elements of the Pinakes system are still in use today, and were the norm for centuries.

Until the printing press.

Prior to the printing press, books were kept in libraries and monasteries and were more or less exclusive to the wealthy elite. But when the press created a boom of book production, and the number of books printed per year exploded, things started to change.

As books became more accessible, private presses flourished and demand grew. Printed catalogues were the most effective tool publishers had to get word out about their new and forthcoming titles. Libraries found themselves housing more books than ever before, and they came to rely on the likes of the Dewey Decimal System, subject headings, and specific rules for entering bibliographic data in order to organize their shelves. Information about publishers themselves came to be included in a book’s metadata as well.

In the 1970s—a newly computerized world—electronic record keeping and electronic transfer of bibliographic data influenced publishers and libraries. Libraries developed Online Public Access Systems for consumers, and publishers started using the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) to manage bibliographic data as well as their inventories for libraries and retailers. The data publishers stored electronically was relatively brief, since printed catalogues were still the primary vehicle to disseminate rich information about titles.

Then the internet showed up.

Websites like Amazon began their ascension, and for the first time consumers were interacting directly with publisher metadata. Thanks to new technologies like ONIX, which allowed for a streamlined standard for communication of data from publishers to distributors, metadata now includes rich descriptions of text crafted to speak directly to consumers. And as sites like Amazon and Google continue to craft more intelligent algorithms, metadata is being designed with discoverability and search engines in mind, to help titles stand out against the millions of other books published every year.

The elements and uses of metadata are still evolving for both libraries and publishers. But this short history solidifies efficient metadata, like title, author, subject and summary as being the most useful way to store and organize the ever-growing volume of published books in the world.

Come back next week to learn how the move from in-store to online bookselling has been further changing metadata post-1995.

For the big finish today (and we’re all so sad to say goodbye) I dug through our archives to select some of my personal favourites. Here are the very best blog posts from #NaBloPoMo at WLU Press:

Blaire wrote this ode to the KW area. I’m pretty new around here myself so I got a kick out of this one.

Philip McTaggart, our Financial Administrator, reflects on spending a year in the life of academic publishing.

I wrote a profile on Lisa Quinn, our acquisitions editor.

Clare made this big connection between Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and one of our books.

She also wrote about Israel Unger’s celebration at the Senate earlier this month.

Jasmine Derr asked, “Does format mater?”

Dr. Cheryl Lousley contributed a spotlight on our Environmental Humanities series during University Press Week.

And lastly, for the aspiring novelists out there, I found three books of ours that can help you write your next (or your first) masterpiece.

We’re not going to stop blogging, but we will be toning the frequency down a bit. Thanks for following along, everyone!

Heather’s seen big changes come to the publishing industry. Her earliest responsibilities included the laborious duty of printing out camera-ready copy, manually changing the typesets on the printer where different fonts and sizes were required. After revisions, she would use a light table and an x-acto knife to superimpose corrections onto the original script. And when it was finally ready for printing, she would have to individually inspect printer-supplied negatives for dust spots to make sure the finished product came out properly.

It isn’t hard to imagine why we only published 10 books a year.

Heather’s process has changed considerably since then. After a book is acquired, Heather launches workflows, monitors the editorial process, establishes budgets, manages freelance designers and compositors, and works with printers, juggling many deadlines along the way. When a book is ready for production, she supplies designers with cover design elements and suggestions. “There’s such a satisfaction when you see a book come into print,” she beams.

If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.

As technology has evolved and enabled WLU Press to publish more and more books, Heather’s job has gotten more and more, well, crazy. “You learn quickly in this job that you have to be very organized,” she explains. One of her tricks? Perhaps counter-intuitively, Heather uses printed documents and schedules to keep herself organized. But most of all, she’s just one of those fast-thinking, fast-moving doers who knows what she likes when she sees it, and seems to be wired perfectly for the multi-tasking role she’s mastered. “I can talk fast,” she fires out, then catching herself, “I have a pretty busy brain.”

As our conversation wound down I asked Heather to select some of her favourite designs from our more recent books. Here’s what she said:

The Newfoundland Diaspora

Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration

Jennifer Bowering Delisle

“I love the cover design and the use of gloss spot varnish is a nice touch. The chapter opener design treatment has played off the dots on the cover, which I think is quite clever.”

Ornithologies of Desire

Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay

Travis V. Mason

“It’s just a gorgeous cover design. I’d like to pet that bird. The interior design is very clean and tight.”

Avatar and Nature Spirituality

Bron Taylor

“I’m drawn to the beautiful colour of this book. It has a very calming effect.”

Heather’s busy brain gets its downtime after hours, when she likes to read fiction and spend time on her boat. Maybe her quirkiest quirk? Heather is a design and layout junkie who actually prefers her printed work sans serif. “It’s more modern,” she says.

The three skills:

1. Understanding mark-up language
2. Working with data
3. Mastering workflow

But those aren’t the only skills you need…

I present the other list of necessary skills to make it (as a marketer) in (academic) publishing. The list you need to be on the inside to know:

Rule No.1: Smile! You’re in the publishing industry

But don’t let having your copy edited by a real copy editor do this to you

There are three essential types of meetings you must master:

1. Transmittal Meetings

1. Cover Meetings

3. Marketing Meetings

Your position on the “death of print books” is

Netgalley and Edelweiss are your new best friends

But there’s always a new opportunity somewhere out there…

And this should always be you when a new book comes out

BONUS: Establish dominance with Booksonix immediately, or
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Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI
Getting Finance, Marketing and Advertising onto the Same Planet
David Rutherford and Jonathan Knowles

Think you’re ready to be a marketer? Read Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI by David Rutherford and Jonathan Knowles to learn how accountability applies to a marketer’s role in an organization.

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*No lions were harmed in the making of this post.