Cross-media publishing with MediaWiki

Hackers & Designers’ publishing experiments intersect computer programming, art, and design, and involve the building of self-made, hacked, and reappropriated tools and technical infrastructures. In 2021-2023 H&D developed several cross-media publications using a web-to-print workflow further referred to as Wiki2Pdf or Wiki2Pdf2Web. Developing these publishing workflows is part of an ongoing collective exploration into unusual, non-proprietary, open-source, free and libre publishing tools and workflows. Such tools come with their own quirks and ask us to re-think our relationship to design tools. H&D's aim is that these publications (including the documentation of the process of their coming into being) contribute to a growing community of critical designers and developers who consider it relevant to rethink their tool-ecologies. Furthermore developing the hybrid publishing activities with every publication is also an investment into building more durable sustainable forms of collaboration on such projects. In doing so we are building on the knowledge and practices of many designers and collectives that work with and contribute to open-source approaches to designing on and offline publications. (see Tooling)

The first publication was a book published by Valiz titled "Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts". The second publication was self-published by H&D and titled "First, Then...Repeat. Workshop scripts in practice". With every publication the technical infrastructure, editing and design workflow were further developed. The design of both publications accommodated non-linear reading. Cross-references indicate connections across chapters, themes, methods and timelines.

While the first publishing process put more emphasis on the printable output, the second iteration treated on and offline output equally.

The hybrid publishing process utilizes MediaWiki (installed on H&D's server) as a central publishing and content management infrastructure, where the content (text, images, video) can be gathered and edited. In the case of the 2nd publication the two outputs: 1. printable pdf rendered in the browser ( https://wiki2print.hackersanddesigners.nl/pdf/FiguringThingsOutTogether ), and 2. the front end website ( https://firstthenrepeat.hackersanddesigners.nl/#A_Note_on_the_design_of_this_publication ) pull from the same source ( https://wiki2print.hackersanddesigners.nl/wiki/Publishing:FiguringThingsOutTogether ).

Following open-source principles, the tool ecosystem that evolved around the design of this publication is documented and published on the H&D website and git repository under the CC4r license, providing the possibility of continuation in other contexts, studying, critiquing, and repurposing.

All typefaces used in this publication are available at ‘Badass Libre Fonts By Womxn’, a repository of open source and/or libre typefaces composed by Loraine Furter and Velvetyne Libre and Open Source Type Foundry.

Collaborators: Anja Groten (editing, design) Juliette Lizotte (wiki editing, design) Heerko van der Kooij (web2print, Jinja, Pagedjs) Maisa Imamović (web development)