The best solution, in my view, is to use a combination of digital and print media.
Social media and digital media generally are indispensable for interactivity, expanding the knowledge created by the text being responded to. However, they are not always easy to organise and present in a way that enables ease of access.
People like Toyin Falola in his book In Praise of Greatness and Pius Adesanmi in one of his books have gone further to organise their digital media essays into books. Oluwatoyin Kole's PhD published as a book, is on the demonstration of Nigerian identity through social media,if I recall correctly and, I expect, uses extensively the archives of various Yahoo and Google listserves..
In publishing those essays of his first published in digital media, Falola, however, operates in terms of the traditional textual model in which the visibility of interactivity with the text does not exist in the same space as the text, e.g. the conference on the book and book that will come out of the conference do not occupy the same platform as the book, unlike social media, blogs and other interactive media where comments are visible on the same page as the text that inspires these comments.
A search on the USA-Africa Dialogues Series site where a number of the essays in In Praise of Greatness were first written shows the rich responses those I have found received, responses not present in the book, responses whose presence in the published text could have assisted Falola amplify the ideas he develops in the book around modes of knowledge development, of cognitive interactivity, and, if one might add, of conjunctions between classical African performances and their call and response dynamic and the collaborative knowledge creation represented by digital media.
Adesanmi's Facebook and possibly his Twitter pages, complementing his writing on other platforms, such as The Nigerian Village Square, Sahara Reporters and Chat Afrik, are very rich demonstrations of these interactive dynamisms, particularly on account of the huge following he gained after winning the inaugural Penguin prize on African writing and his subsequent decision, I think, to amplify his Facebook activity. The same wealth of value would hold for the social media accounts of various prominent figures, represented in Nigeria by such a persn as the controversial and outspoken politician Femi Fani Kayode and the social critic Charles Ogbu . These are information goldmines on various social developments and other issues that motivated those posts and responses.
Taking advantage of these platforms requites mapping them, providing access to them and publishing them, ideally using explanatory contexts as to their significance, as Falola does with his essays in In Praise of Greatness.
Taking advantage of these platforms requites mapping them, providing access to them and publishing them, ideally using explanatory contexts as to their significance, as Falola does with his essays in In Praise of Greatness.
I have created such a mapping for the philosopher Eunice Oviawe-Jones' Facebook posts and have self published published two books from my own and others' Facebook writings, although the books are purely digital texts. I am creating Facebook pages for saving information from particular Facebook accounts and organising the information into essays, the latest being "Exploring the World of Olabisi Silva, Great Curator and Scholar" and the essay "Can Biblical Figures be Black?:Jude Onah's Christian Art and the Politics of Racial Representation : Bisi Silva in Dialogue".
I also intend to create websites mapping and navigating the Facebook posts and their threads. The next thing would be to move to digital and print publication, in the latter of which one can choose between print on demand, self driven publishing in which one is responsible for everything without paying as with Amazon or paying to outsource the polishing of the work to professionals, which Amazon also does or pay nothing while the publisher polishes and produces the work at their own expense, these options coming with their advantages and disadvantages.
Even the bastions of traditional print publication, such venerable academic publishers as Oxford UP and Cambridge UP, have realized that the digital revolution must be embraced and now make their books available in both digital and print copies. They use such social media as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in advertising the books and attracting traffic to their main websites where one can buy them, although Amazon remains the best source, in terms of their superb reader reviews-although academic books do not often seem to attract Amazon reviews, with such exceptions as Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language- and price ranges, for all kinds of books
thanks
toyin
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 at 01:58, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:
"New platforms do not always move your stuff."(TF)
Yea,they do not always do that, but they would, if they consider the stuff valuable.
I am of the opinion that in the next 100 years and beyond, historians would not dig the grounds for historical materials, they would rather "dig" the "cloud" for such materials.
Be well sir.
CAO.
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