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 »