Digital Bibliography

Archive for the ‘Book Histories; Book Futures’ Category

(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 »

(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 »

Max McGee, over at The Millions (blog) has an interesting post about “the deckled edge” as proof of people’s fetishizing “dead-tree” books. (Or nostalgia-ing, what’s this word, folks?) I especially like his characterization of how physical, paper-print books might be perceived someday (especially, I think, by a born-digital generation):

In a sleek, shiny, distant future, books may feel old and impossibly large, with too much physical mass and all these fussy pages put to use for the simple task of storing a tiny amount of data, data that is not searchable or copy and pasteable or malleable and interactive in the ways we expect of our data. These devices, one imagines, might seem incredibly blunt to our future selves, unitaskers in world where our gadgets and machines can do all.

I love how he captures an attitude simultaneously quaint, like you’d think of your grandmother trying to learn the Wii, and impatient, like… well… like trying to explain the Wii to your grandmother.

Here’s the thing, this is pretty much already how I feel about physical books. I’m starting to lose patience with them. Well, sorta. Read the rest of this entry »