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Professor of Politics and Society, | Professor of Politics and Society, | ||
University College London | University College London | ||
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'''Newsletter No 3 - 7 April 2016''' | |||
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Dear Author, | |||
I am delighted to inform you of the progress of the Global Informality project. | |||
'''Number of entries:''' The editorial team has made terrific progress and we are happy to | |||
report 121 completed and fully edited entries. We have completed our 2015 target of 100 | |||
entries and expect a steady flow of new entries in 2016. | |||
'''Publication:''' We are happy to report signing a contract with the UCL University Press. UCL | |||
University Press is a new publisher and the pioneer of open access publishing (simultaneous | |||
online and paper copies). They will provide open access to our Encyclopaedia and make | |||
paper copies affordable. Publication is due to take place in 2017. As part of the contract, we | |||
have waived royalties and taken responsibility for acquiring copyright for images. We are | |||
allowed 60 colourful images. All authors are invited to submit colour images to accompany | |||
their entries. We will email out further details once we have the Press’s requirements (file | |||
type, minimum resolution, instructions for seeking copyright permission etc.) | |||
Our proposal received extremely encouraging feedback. One of the anonymous reviewers | |||
stated: | |||
<blockquote>The proposed book will provide a broad academic and interested audience with a fascinating, in fact unique and durable collection of descriptions and analyses of informal practices from all over the globe. As far as I know no such venture exists. I strongly support the publication. The value that will be added by this project to existing research in the area is threefold: | |||
''First'', it will give the academic and broader interested audiences insights into the great variation of informal practices, their institutional, social and cultural embeddedness, path dependencies and interactions with formal rules. At the most basic level the encyclopaedia will make accessible specialist knowledge about a widespread but often hard-to-grasp social phenomenon; | |||
''Second'', in the same way, the collection will offer very useful material to researchers of informality, but also to those studying institutions and socio-economic development who might want to compare different practices in different contexts and time. The collection will allow them to overcome the limitations that usually accompany ethnographic and other qualitatively oriented empirical work on social practices, which usually focuses on a few cases only. Hence, the encyclopaedia will be useful for theoretical and comparative research on the subject since it presents excellent research material for further elaborations – a feature that is quite unusual for a text collection. | |||
''Third'', the book will be able to be widely used in seminars and lectures because of the uniqueness of the collection, and will thereby also inform new theoretical and comparative considerations.</blockquote> | |||
We will be working on the critique as well. | |||
'''Online version:''' Since December 2016, the development of the online version (using | |||
searchable, WIKI software based) has been maintained by Dr. Philipp Koeker, the FP7 | |||
ANTICORRP Postdoc Fellow, to whom we are most grateful for updating the database. In | |||
April, we will be selecting new interns from the UCL Digital Humanities, and plan to appoint | |||
a new images editor and a web designer in order to be able to open the website to the | |||
authors and to explore possibilities of crowdsourcing for new ideas of practices and of | |||
finding ways of assessing them: visibility, familiarity, frequency, ambivalence, and impact. | |||
Once done and tested, we should be able to open up the website to a wider circle of | |||
contributors. We plan to release the online version of the Encyclopaedia in 2017 alongside | |||
the publication of the print version for maximum impact. | |||
'''World Map of Informality:''' The map continues to develop thanks to the help of Philipp | |||
Koeker, who keeps adding dots to mark submitted entries. This function works on the basis | |||
of the Google Maps software. We are wondering whether we can actually make the map | |||
crowdsourced as well. If any of our authors have experience with such software, we would | |||
be interested to hear your ideas. The map has been an important visualisation tool and my | |||
students on the Informal Practices MA course are likely to further contribute to the map. | |||
'''FRINGE:''' as part of the FRINGE Centre | |||
(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre), the | |||
Global Informality Project has been housed at the | |||
new UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. On 17 March | |||
2016, the editorial team launched the In- | |||
formality.com website with a dissemination event at | |||
the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. The World | |||
Map of Informality can currently be viewed on the | |||
website. Encyclopaedia entries are being uploaded | |||
but will not be publically viewable until launch in | |||
2017. We would like to make entries viewable by our | |||
authors prior to the public launch, so you can use | |||
them as a resource in your own teaching and | |||
research, but we are still looking into what is | |||
technologically possible. We will keep you updated on | |||
this. | |||
Alena Ledeneva<br> | |||
7 April 2016 | |||
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