Hyperreadings

Research background
Reading Lists are being used as tools for contesting history, for publicly making sense of our current times, and reinventing established patterns in public thinking. Often packaged as a syllabus each performs like a 21st century version of the manifesto, a program for transformation and a provocation for the future. While corporate systems for managing lists of content are heavily centralized platforms for controlling access to property, activists and independent scholars often use a complex ecology of grassroots software and spaces.

Research contribution
Hyperreadings (2018) is an open source, peer-to-peer application for collaborating on, sharing, and archiving reading lists; a README.md document that explains the software from a technical and a political perspective; and the activation of the software through community-based archiving projects and in the context of exhibitions. The peer-to-peer application is the first functional software of its kind built with the distributed Hypercore protocol.

Research significance
HyperReadings has been downloaded thousands of times and the project was cited as a significant influence by Learning from #Syllabus (Graziano, 2019) and the Pirate Care project. It was installed in the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, MOMA, Moscow, 2018 and activated by reading groups and workshops. README.md was published in Distributed, Open Editions, 2018.