Digital Bibliography

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 »