Publishing the History of Radical Science in a Time of Digital Capitalism

This paper investigates publishing as a practice in the history of science. It firstly provides an experiential account of building a DIY-inspired publishing venue for collective, source-based narration. The venue used the possibilities of digital publishing to apply, rather than simply refer to, a very striking aspect of radical science in the 1970s and 1980s: its media techniques. Secondly, the paper shows how source material itself is now embedded in digital capitalism by way of digital rights licensing agencies. Critiques of digitalization in academic publishing have primarily and importantly focused on the adoption of Open Access as a profitable business model by publishing conglomerates selling access and aggregating user data. But conglomerates also capitalize on historical material created by other, bygone publishers by assetizing their backlists. Furthermore, these backlists are now part of a new ownership regime. The paper brings these experiential and infrastructural inquiries together as a way to explore processes of digitalization in humanities publishing, concluding that the manner in which publishing is organized has not only financial consequences for scholarship, but epistemic ones.