Digital Bibliography

Posted a “test-drive” yesterday of the new Anthologize tool developed, conceptualized, built, hyped (positive connotations-only, please), and released by the “One Week | One Tool” institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It’s a very good tool. Still evolving. With bugs. With hope. Structured to grow. For what it’s worth, I’m impressed.

So is that all there is to say about it? Nope. There are three reasons I’m paying attention to this tool. I’m a blogger. I’m a humanities scholar. I care about the future of the book.

As a blogger, this is a great tool. The more tools we have at our disposal, the better. I can’t wait for people to start using Anthologize for all sorts of things it wasn’t intended for. I’ve already fielded questions about this “sort” of technology at the Louisville Conference on Lit this past February. I was giving a paper on Barthes, Blogging, and Authorship. The  most interesting question: Am I going to turn [my] blog into a book eventually? (I don’t want to mis-represent the context of the question. He was asking because he wanted to turn his own blog into a book, not because he wanted to read mine as a book.) I told him that I thought that would be a nice tool, but I didn’t really see the use or necessity. But that was because I hadn’t really thought about it. But I have since. Why would I want to make a book out of my blog? Read the rest of this entry »

Trouble sleeping lately, so I’ve been taking to reading before I go to bed. A novel. To take my mind out of the scholarship, historical, analytical mindset in which I’ve been immersing myself these dissertating days. Cory Doctorow’s new novel: Makers. (You can download a free copy here.) So far, it’s about what I’ll call “tinkerers”. Maybe I’ll go into tinkerers later, but for now, it’ll suffice to say that it’s about people who like junk, who like to figure out how stuff works, how to take stuff apart and put different pieces of different machines together to make a sort of hybrid machines. Oh, and they’re cool. Like iPods, tight t-shirts, fixies, messenger bags, and Lady Gaga cool. Commodified, definitely. Commercial, optional. Junk. Gadgets. Soldering irons. Circuit boards. Geek chic.

I’m about 50 pages into the novel. The story is dull. Sort of a ghost-of-Ayn-Rand-in-the-machine sort of thing. Compelling ideas, though. Lots of exposition. (An journalist interviewing a pair of tinkerers.) But it’s a blast to read. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading Landow’s Hypertext 3.0 this morning, working through some of his ideas about the future of the book and my own inquiry (yes, I’m looking at you, dissertation) into the future of the digital scholarly text. As I’ve been reading, I’ve started to come to understand the basic genre of the book as a multipurpose machine. Maybe even little engines started, fueled, throttled by our own reading practices. (Taken too far, the analogy gets cumbersome, though.) So I find myself especially interested in Landow’s assertion that:

“We find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the books as unnatural, as near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human. We have, to use Derridean terms, decentered the book. We find ourselves in the position, in other words, of perceiving the books as technology. (46) … “Books… are teaching and communicating machines.” (49)

I’m not so much interested in machines as a figurative approach to conceptualizing books. Instead, I find that books literally operate as semiotic machines. Books have an internal machinery operating as systems of tables-of-contents, indices, page numbers, headers. Any given book itself also operates as an object in a multiplicity of social, cultural, academic,and economic systems (and more). In one sense, machine; in another sense, black box. For the sake of this post, I’m more interested in the mechanistic model. Read the rest of this entry »