Digital Bibliography

(This entry is a response I posted to Alex Reid’s post, “Atemporality in the Digital Humanities” on his blog Digital Digs. He’s responding to Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality and the Creative Artist” as well as Alex Halavais’s post on “worn technologies.” I re-post it here because it helps me think through some of the ways that book-futurists historicize the currently fluid and volatile changes in book-technologies. Mostly, I’ve been coming to understand that most book futurists, like Bolter, Lanham, and Landow, among others, to some degree argue that the long histories of the book don’t yield much in the way of understanding (not to mention participating in) the near or far-reaching future of books. Hopefully, I’ll make those arguments more specifically in (much) later blog posts. For now, though, in the following post, I try to come to terms, as generously as I can, with an alarming tendency to argue for un-historical approaches to understanding the future of the book. Here’s my comment on Alex’s post…)

You know, I’ve always been kind of off-put by the "get-it" sort of rhetorical snicker like the one Sterling drops. I’ve always felt that it creates a cool-kids/nerds binary or a paying-attention/oblivious binary. And when I don’t fully ‘get-it,’ I feel a bit condescended to. I only mention this to foreground some of my own resistance to Sterling ideas. My most strenuous attempt to ‘get’ the ‘it’ of what he’s saying suggests he is arguing for an un-historical (as opposed to an ahistorical approach). One that rejects the usefulness of historicizing contemporary problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

Digital Bibliography needs to evolve, I think. Maybe I’m restless. Maybe I’m too ambitious about the work I think a blog can do in our disciplines. Maybe I’ve got a growing appetite for connecting people whose connections can be productive and generative and critical and human. Or maybe I sense that the best way for these kinds of things to happen is for this blog to become less about me and more about us. Yeah, I realized I don’t know who most of us are. That’s powerful to me. First, I’ll explain a little. Then I’ll offer a couple of ideas that I’m starting with. Then I’ll ask for your help. Let me back up…

I’ve been reflecting a lot, lately, on my goals for this blog. Old. Current. Future. Also evaluating some of the ways this blog functions. And some of the ways that it doesn’t. I’m not going to post here an entry about how great this blog is. I didn’t create the blog so it would be “good.” I created it to “do” things. Read the rest of this entry »

(If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably here for the good digital stuff we keep in the back. Don’t worry. I’ll take you back there in a minute. For now, we’re going to spend a few paragraphs in the dusty archival stacks and white-cloth gloves.)

Been working a lot on the dissertation lately. Future of the book. History of the book. Really, there are so many amazing projects out there to read.  Focused on just the book. As a cultural object. Some histories work to trace the origins of the book way back before the form it current, overwhelming inhabits now: the codex. That is printed sheets, folded, trimmed, bound, glued, and set in a cover. When I’m talking about “the book,” this is generally what I picture in my head. But you nobody traces the history of anything only back to its first appearance. Histories need to cover the history of emergence, too. (Or in some cases, invention and development, I guess.) Following the book’s history back past the codex (risking an obvious, blog-necessary reductiveness) we find the antecedent to books in the scroll. (Between which there are unbound quartos, pamphlets, etc.) And before the scroll, sheets, and of course clay tablets, bone, wood/bark, and so on. Pretty tough to say where, exactly, “the book” emerges here. Read the rest of this entry »