Aaarg

Self-portrait

The humanities are being decimated, largely through capitalist restructuring of universities and knowledge, but also through the humanities’ incapability or unwillingness to articulate a role for itself within the financialized university. AAARG plays a role inasmuch as this restructuring creates uneven distribution of access to knowledge and resources—as libraries are shut in austerity governments or books are destroyed in dictatorships, but hopefully it also plays a role in providing writers, artists, designers, philosophers, and organizers with some theoretical tools for producing the humanities that we need to confront what is to come (conceptually, ecologically, politically, etc.). (Sean Dockray, creador de AAARG, en entrevista con Jonathan Basile, en https://www.guernicamag.com/jonathan-basile-whos-afraid-of-aaarg/).

Description

AAARG, originally an acronym standing for Artists, Architects and Activists Reading Group, is a free, open access digital library specializing in academic texts with a humanities approach. It was created in the United States by Sean Dockray at the turn of the century as a para-academic way of organizing, storing and freely distributing texts frequently used in universities and other higher education institutions. Its library is built out of users contributions and is fundamentally composed of books (compilations, monographs, etc.) and articles originally published in science magazines, mostly in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. The AAARG catalogue is aimed at students, academics and humanities researchers who don’t have the resources or access to this content and need free, accessible research tools. The content is arranged in collections, reading lists (both created by community members), or alphabetically, by author. AAARG is a non-profit project. It is not financed through advertisements on its site, nor does it profit from its membership, but is sustained through private donations that help cover costs incurred by legal action it’s had to deal with (see Aaaaarghhhhh, a lawsuit!). Throughout the years, AAARG has dealt with lawsuits from publishers and authors for the illegal distribution of protected content, prompting a change in name and domain several times. Their current domain, aaaaarg.fail, was registered by Marcell Mars.

Links

URL: http://aaaaarg.fail/

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