Dear All,
It’s been ten years of the first edition of the SC Book; thank you to all who contributed and to all who bought it, read it in a university library, or took it to the top of Everest in the name of art.
MIT Press have now given us permission to develop a second edition. We’re hoping to do this in the next year and are writing to update you all about this.
Many of the original chapters will stay (with small updates), but we are anticipating some structural changes to reflect the large development in platform and GUI capabilities in the last decade. We are writing to individual chapter authors alongside this email concerning these matters.
Here, we wanted to re-iterate the open call we made some months back. Now is the time to let us know if there is some chapter about SC you think really should be in the new edition (and whether you are proposing you write it!).
As well as more standard chapters, there will also be some shorter artist statements from SC practitioners (like the shorter features in the Processing Book, or the artists’ statements in the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music). We hope to make these as diverse as possible, and happy to hear any suggestions, whether self nominations or those you think we should reach out to. Similarly, we are hoping that the second edition will reflect the increased and growing diversity of the SC community, and welcome proposals from the widest range of potential authors.
The deadline for any new materials will be the end of 2021 for draft material, before a back and forth with the editors in early 2022.
In order to keep things manageable for establishing the contributor list for the second edition, please get in touch with Scott as lead editor by July 14th in order to be considered. (s.d.wilson@bham.ac.uk) If you are proposing a chapter, a short (say 100 word) summary of the chapter setting out the proposed contents would be helpful. Bear in mind that one important consideration is usefulness to others, so if you want to write about an obscure bit of code used only in a personal project, this is less likely to be picked up than discussing a more general library or facilities. Similarly, if your chapter overlaps with an existing topic, do consider proposing co-authorship rather than duplication.
We apologise in advance that we will be working within a limited word budget, and whilst the second edition will be a bit larger than the first, we won’t be able to feature everything proposed.
All going well, we hope to get SC Book 2.0 with MIT Press in the first half of next year, and given MIT Press reviews and publishing delays, this probably means 2023 at the earliest for the actual book. But if we can move quickly, we do hope to do this much faster than with the original text (which took 5 years to go from proposal to print).
btw, the code examples for the second edition will move to a github repository, and we’ll update people about that in due course.
Best wishes,
Scott and Nick
