By Salina Christmas

Five Minutes Interview at London Design Festival: “I’d advocate PDF. It’s amazingly flexible and an open standard”. Dr Lane DeNicola, Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at University College London, on his favourite book format. An expert on earth observation technology and geomedia, he also lectures on the Anthropology of Games and Simulation. He’s a mean data scraper and also does carpentry.

Dr Lane DeNicola, second from left, with Dr Nicolas Argenti, Lecturer, Social Anthropology, Brunel University, also a UCL alumna, at the London Anthropology Day (20 June 2011). To see anthropologists at the event, click on the image. Photos: © Salina Christmas, 2011.

Q. What do you think will become of books?

While book-related institutions (libraries, book retailers and publishers, used book stores) are clearly in the midst of real tumult, I think you have to project a fairly long way into the future to arrive at a situation where the book as a physical artefact is unfamiliar to most people, something like what has happened or is happening with the LP turntable.  There are also a significant number of projects out there that “remix” the book form in some fashion (see Daniela Rosner’s Finebinding Studio for example). I think that while the book as the cheap, mass-produced object we’re all familiar with is sure to become less ubiquitous, there’s a clear resurgence of interest in the craft of bookmaking and its untapped hybrid possibilities.

Q. What will audience learn from the event – and Digital Anthropology?

The LDF event?  Since I’m more of a patron than an actual participant, I’d only be speculating!  My understanding is that three or more of the Digital Anthropology students *are* actually participating in the event, though, and I suspect there’s will be an engaging and appropriate infusion.

Q. What is your favourite book? By author/photographer, design or publisher?

Very tough to really narrow it down, but I could perhaps say it’s a tie between Susan Buck-Morss’ “The Dialectics of Seeing”, on the basis of its style and subject, and Jeffrey Friedl’s “Mastering Regular Expressions”, on the basis of its typesetting—which is amazing—and it’s clarity in dealing with an arcane technical subject.

Q. What was the last book you read? Or published!

Hjorth and Chan’s “Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific” (2009), from Routledge.  The last book I contributed to was Snickars and Vonderau’s “Moving Data: the iPhone and My Media”, due out from Columbia University Press in early 2012.

Dr Lane DeNicola: "I'd advocate PDF overall, on the basis of it being amazingly flexible and an open standard". Photographed at the writer's photography and multimedia exhibition, One Thousand and One Nights. Photo: © Salina Christmas, 2009.

Q. Finally: Kindle, PDF, HTML – or print?

The only reasonable response is: “for what purpose?”  I think limiting the question to these formats, and the explicit split between “print” and “electronic”, makes it something of a trick question, but given just those three formats I’d advocate PDF overall, on the basis of it being amazingly flexible and an open standard.  If we’re looking specifically at eBook production and consumption, though, I’d go for EPUB or some other open standard over Amazon’s Kindle format—proprietary data formats are so turn-of-the-millennium!  Ultimately, I’d be looking for something that blurs the line between “print” and “electronic.”

Visit www.lanedenicola.name.

On 17 September 2011, Sojournposse will be presenting a new event for The London Design Festival 2011, “Whatever is to become of books?” at University College London. Tickets are available on Eventbrite. £1 of each ticket sale from this non-profit event will go towards a photobook app project which supports the Japan Red Cross tsunami drive. Please follow our updates on Twitter at @sojournposseF8, following the hashtags #LDF11 and #storyofbooks. We are also on Facebook and Google+.