This GitHub is an open-source repository of my academic writing on cinema and space in Latin America. It is also an experiment in applying the concepts, and some of the technology, of the open-source movement to academic writing. Practically, I aim to use it as a space to compile my academic writing into a trilogy of books on this overarching theme. The first of these is a book on the representation and production of urban spaces in Latin American film.
The work in this repository is my own, but like all academic work, it is in dialogue with and relies on the work of others. All writing is, in this sense, “open-source”. I therefore welcome the opening of issues and any pull-requests (contributions, suggestions), no matter how minor. The work in this repository is deliberately split into small chunks, which are section-length. This is by design, as it allows me to work on the trees without losing sight of the wood. I do not expect all the chunks to coalesce fully until the final stages of compilation, and not all chunks will form part of a completed project.
Usually, the sources and process of academic writing are hidden, sometimes even jealously guarded by academics who are afraid that others might use or copy their work before it is published by a print publisher. I believe that the writing process is in fact a form of bricolage, to use the term Jacques Derrida adopted from Claude Lévi-Strauss.1 This repository aims to make the bricolage process explicit, not in order to indulge in an illusion of the transparency of writing as technē, but so that the ever-growing entanglement of text, texture and technē can be brought to the surface instead of lying hidden behind the polished pages of the final book or article. These “new” properties of writing – distributive, collaborative, multi-temporal and multi-spatial – are in fact very ancient properties of writing systems that have always shaped the forms and modes of textual production. But they have been emerging with a new intensity over the last several years, through Wikis and blogs, forums and repositories, seemingly autopoietically. Texts, with the intensity of a “new” paradigm, build and organize themselves, rather than being inspired by one mind, in much the same way that complex organisms emerge from entangled molecular structures and through their interaction with other organisms.
I welcome enquires or debate about the technology used in this and similar endeavours (GitHub Issues can be used for this). I aim to use open-source software wherever possible, reserving proprietary technologies such as Microsoft Word for the final stages of compilation of the source text. The basis of the ability to transform documents into open-source formats is the universal document converter Pandoc. Its lingua franca is the lightweight document markup language Markdown. The beauty of markdown is that it can be edited in almost any editor that can handle plain text. I am currently using, mostly, the Zettlr editor, which is an open-source document composition software focusing on researchers in the arts and humanities. Citation capabilities are provided by Zotero.
The source text for my projects is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, which means that you are free to use it, build upon it and share it, so long as you attribute your use of it, and that you share your resulting work in the same way. This does not in any way affect your established right to use my work through citation, paraphrase and attribution, as academic writers have always done, and such use is not subject to the licence. The licence applies to the source text on this repository (i.e., everything on this GitHub). Compiled versions for publication will inevitably be subject to the copyright conditions of the respective publisher.
Footnotes
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Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2005 [1967]), pp. 351-70 (360ff). ↩