WLU Press Blog http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog Events and news from Wilfrid Laurier University Press Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:14:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 Conference for the International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA) Auto/biography in Transit (Part 1) http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2731 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2731#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:14:20 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2731 By: Seraphima Kennedy

‘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.

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National Poetry Month – Steve McCaffery http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2725 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2725#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:19:27 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2725 The Dangers of Poetry

(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

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The Cultural Myth of Hockey in Canada http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2698 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2698#comments Thu, 27 Feb 2014 15:46:02 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2698 Here’s a quick recap of how I spent last weekend: Friday afternoon we all went to Moose Winooski’s in Kitchener to watch the Canada/U.S.A. Olympic hockey game, after the victory I drove down to St. Catharines to play in a Friday night pickup hockey league, on Saturday we were back in Kitchener for a round of outdoor hockey (after scouring the city’s rinks for suitable ice), then on Sunday we were up at 6am for the glorious gold medal Canada/Sweden hockey game, which we watched from the same comfortably crowded Moose Winooski’s we were in on Friday (by 6:30am, every seat in the house was taken); wearing our Team Canada jerseys we set out to celebrate the win with even more outdoor hockey (that’s called shinny, by the way) until we were all so wiped we had to call it quits, so I went home and took a mid-afternoon snooze, because I had to get my energy back up for the Sunday night hockey league I play in.

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

I had a hockey weekend.

nicks_sloniowski“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:

Sloniowski_v3.indd

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:

nicks-grantCovering 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

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One Big Blog Post http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2684 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2684#comments Fri, 31 Jan 2014 17:54:43 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2684 On January 14th, I invited you to share a journey with me; an adventure deep into the heart of metadata. I told you a bit about the history of metadata and how it’s used for books, that time the printing press changed everything and, after that, when the internet changed everything again. And then I made a promise that the following week I’d be back to share more metadata history with you. I broke that promise.

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 3rd 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.

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The Evolving Elements and Uses of Metadata http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2678 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2678#comments Tue, 14 Jan 2014 20:07:05 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2678 So it’s been quite a while since our last blog post. When we wrapped up #NaBloPoMo, we took a (well-deserved!) break. Then we were shut down for a little while over the holidays. But now we’re back with our first post of 2014, and it’s all about…

metadata bookMetadata!

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.

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#NaBloPoMo Highlights http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2672 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2672#comments Sat, 30 Nov 2013 21:48:48 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2672 #NaBloPoMo has been pretty wild. This month we’ve blogged about the Kitchener-Waterloo area, our latest books, staff members here at WLU Press, the future of the scholarly book and our interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities series (to name a few!).

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!

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Press Profile: Heather Blain-Yanke http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2632 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2632#comments Fri, 29 Nov 2013 15:26:44 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2632 When Heather Blain-Yanke was first hired as a Layout Assistant, almost 40 years ago, WLU Press was known as Academic Publications and printed about 10 books a year. Today, she’s the Production and Editorial Projects Manager and oversees the 35-40 titles we now publish annually.

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:

delisle

 

 

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.”

 

 

 

 mason

 

 

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.

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Marketing Skills You Need to Make it in Publishing http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2585 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2585#comments Thu, 28 Nov 2013 16:27:43 +0000 Darren http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2585 I recently read this Forbes article that lists the three skills you need to make it in the publishing industry, as overheard last week at the FutureBook conference in London.

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
it will never respect you*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI Getting Finance, Marketing and Advertising onto the Same Planet David Rutherford and Jonathan Knowles

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.

“Every few years, business is galvanized by a new concept. Accountability is the latest idea in the spotlight. It’s a huge topic, and in the broadest sense embraces ethics, corporate governance, and all the issues spawned by the recent spate of business scandals. Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI deals with a more pragmatic aspect: the accountability behind the question ‘Are our investments in marketing and advertising sensible and successful, short and long term, from a business point of view?’”

 

 

 

 

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

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The Memory Effect http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2586 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2586#comments Wed, 27 Nov 2013 21:20:01 +0000 Clare http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2586 In April 2011 The Department of English and Film at Laurier welcomed international scholars for a conference titled Memory, Mediation, Remediation: An International Conference on Memory in Literature and Film, part of the celebration of Laurier’s 100 year anniversary. The conference was hugely successful, and WLU Press was there with many of our titles, especially those of our Life Writing series, the books of which draw heavily on memory in their narrative.

We’re thrilled to say that out of that conference came a book, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, edited by Eleanor Ty and Russell Kilbourn, professors in Laurier’s Department of English and Film who also organized the conference. The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. In separate sections, contributors examine literature and its relation to cultural memory; autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history; cinema and its intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history; and individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.

The texts examined span the century, with one chapter examining British propaganda in the First World War and another looking at Dionne Brand’s latest book, Ossuaries. Visual media examined ranges from the 1940s film Casablanca, to Canadian Heritage Minutes on television, to contemporary series such as Tremé and Saving Grace.

The book can be purchased on our website or ordered from any bookseller, online or bricks and mortar. If you think you might use the book in your teaching, or review it for a publication, you can request a copy here.

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Blaire Blogs: Ode to KW http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2579 http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2579#comments Tue, 26 Nov 2013 19:52:12 +0000 Blaire http://nestor.wlu.ca/blog/?p=2579 It’s been one year since I joined the WLU Press team and I have learned much about the world of academic publishing (for example, Congress is not a political reference). But what about KW (Kitchener-Waterloo)—my new home away from home? It’s a magical, mysterious place with many trade secrets. And I’ve started taking notes.

If you live in KW, you:

  • Are a musician. (I think it might be required to live here.)
  • Will give me directions without ever actually naming any streets.
  • Might actually live in Cambridge (but that’s a touchy subject).

If you are in KW temporarily, you:

  • Are a student.
  • Are a musician.
  • Are a student musician.
  • Might just be here for the beer.
  • Will get lost.

Remember:

  • Highway 85 is known only as “the expressway.”
  • Every street has a north, south, east, west, northwest, southeast, and northy-southish counterpart.
  • There’s a food truck around here somewhere.

KW is a seriously charming place. From an independent bookstore to a farmers market to a pub that miraculously has dozens of craft beers on tap, there are a ton of fun things to stumble upon here. They host amazing public events like Word On The Street, Oktoberfest, the festival of lights, and the blues festival. (Kitchener, in particular, is a little festival crazy.) They have incredible theatre, both amateur and professional, and they are minutes away from the glorious St. Jacob’s market. Getting a job in publishing was a career dream come true, but working for WLU Press here in lively KW has been a life experience I can’t imagine having missed. So if you’ve never been to KW, start thinking about planning a visit. There’s a pretty good chance you’ll run into a festival and several musicians. And hey, we’re here too!

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