Bootleg Library Session: Notes on Texts
The *bootleg library* is a particular, situated social infrastructure that operates from the understanding that the library is a collection of texts and readers. A reciprocal, self-reflexive relationship between the texts the readers produce, and the readers produced by the collection drives the sociability of the library. The bootleg library celebrates idiosyncrasy, and resists the singularity of the text.
A bootleg is an unauthorised copy of a source publication; bootlegging is a strategy by which texts acquire multiplicity of form and informal distribution methods, representing readers and connecting them with each other.
Abstract of session
*Notes on Texts* is a session that annotates a library. It understands reading and writing to be fundamental library practices, and asks how new reader/writers may participate in producing texts that both describe the collection and represent themselves. This session will be centred around the *bootleg library*, a shared digital and physical collection
of republished texts. Bootlegs; unauthorised copies of source publications that represent ourselves, our multiplicity and our shared interests. A library; a collection of texts and also the readers collected around them.
Previous *bootleg library sessions* have been moments to meet in various spaces with the people who frequent them, discuss things we read, add to the collection, and offer each other contingencies through the texts we share.
For this session we'll meet online in a web conference, in the digital bootleg library, and in a realtime collaborative text-editing environment. We'll explore how being together in- and out of sync and the mediums and techniques we use will shape the texts we share.
You are invited to experiment with annotation to produce texts by new readers (and writers), imagining ways that we can guide each other towards the things we read. What type of contingencies can we offer each other at our meeting and throughout AMRO2020, using the particular, situated social infrastructure the *bootleg library* maintains? How can we enrich texts through our annotations, and what kind of new texts can we produce through our notes?
