Digital Bibliography

The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[via @trauman] The first half of this book focuses on the co-evolution of the physical/material form of the book (from tablet to scroll to codex) and the way Western culture has fostered access to this form. They evolve in tandem. Really informative. Very clearly written. Should be great resource for my dissertation: shows how objects must evolve in conversation/tandem with their cultural/material contexts. Really expands the notion of what sorts of things might be considered "book technologies."The second half of the book is also really interesting in that it shows how the architectural design of libraries has been almost entirely dependent on two factors: the value of individual manuscripts housed in the building (pre-printing press / post-printing press) and the availability of suitable reading light (sunlight/candle/incandescent/etc.) View all my reviews

A thoughtful discussion introducing some of the major obstacles facing digital scholars. How to deal with the web as a source of data. Websites aren’t always in flux, but scholars certainly can count on them to be very stable. Sure a URL or a DOI might last for years, but it’s much harder to argue that the content, at which readers arrive once they follow that link, is unchanged since the citing-scholar’s relevant visit. The Internet Archive (of which I’m a HUGE fan for so many reasons, which I’ll cover in a later post) offers at least a start to the discussion of how scholars might begin to address these issues…

Many scholars, while struggling to find and patch together the surviving fragments of historical documents, have probably longed for a time machine. In the era of Internet research, they might finally get their wish. Sort of.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded in 1996, has provided libraries and other institutions with the tools to preserve “the ephemera of the Web” — websites and their various documents, images, videos, and links — not just by caching a snapshot of the “landing page,” but by copying and preserving entire domains that researchers can navigate just as they would have at any point in the site’s history — even if the site moves, changes, or disappears. (News: Archiving the Web for Scholars – Inside Higher Ed)

This being one of our first, “spotlight” posts, the details of the story are less important than the fact that the Internet Archive is a fundamental resources for C&W scholars engaging in the discussions of archives, ephermerality, citation, and other issues regarding digital research. Go the the site. Spend some time there. Figure out how it’s important to you scholarship. Trust me. It is. And be prepared to reference this bad boy when it comes time to enter into discussions about archives and digital research.

I ran across this recently, and can’t stop thinking about it. Although I think the questions proffered by the talk itself are interesting in their own right, that’s not what makes it interesting for this blog. I’m interested in just how much MORE compelling a good idea can become when paired with relevant and engaging visual images. RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts) has been working on a whole series of these sorts of animations.

What I find so compelling about these videos is their simplicity and intelligence. Black, white, red. Marker, whiteboard. Digital video and audio recorder. Editing software. You could make this video with relatively inexpensive equipment. You could easily buy everything retail (software included) for less than $300. FlipVideo ($125), USB mic ($75), Adobe Premiere Elements ($69). Not cheap, but then you’d be set for all sorts of other projects you might want to do.

But this isn’t to say that everyone could make this kind of a video. It takes two skills/characteristics that take a long time to acquire/cultivate: insight and patience.

Insight. Because it’s one thing to be a smart person. It’s another thing to know enough about something to at least recognize the work that needs to be done. And it’s an entirely new sort of work to be able to contribute knowledge that you know fits into a conversation and to articulate it clearly and concisely enough to

Patience. I’m sure that it took dozens of hours to get that drawing right. Several drafts. Storyboarding. Mistakes.

But insight and patience, I think, are two characteristics that can be taught/learned/acquire/cultivated. And so I see this video as incredibly inspiring. And now I’ve got to get back to work so as to make enough time in my schedule for more creative endeavors like these.