Digital Bibliography

Whew. I’ve been on the road now for almost an entire month. I’m exhausted. And it’s got me thinking about the role patience plays in working with new media.* In this post, I’m going to try to think about it from the role of someone who produces new media scholarship.

I’m teaching at DMAC again this summer, and we’re into the home stretch with the visiting participants’ projects. We began the institute by introducing people to two software packages: Audacity and iMovie 9 (part of Apple’s iLife suite, and only available for Macs). After two days of really intense introductions to these software, and asking the participants to put together two small practice texts (which Scott and Cindy call “finger exercises”) we started to introduce participants to an emerging software package called “Sophie.” (Click here for details about the Sophie Project developing the software).

I’ll skip the sordid details, but I it’s safe to say that Sophie wasn’t yet ready for prime time. Read the rest of this entry »

Working through some readings about “the history of the book” this afternoon. Stumbled across a fascinating selection from David Erman about William Blake’s Illuminated manuscripts. Obviously, it’s awfully reductive to suggest that Blake was a precursor to contemporary new media authors or even bloggers, but the following passage is rich with some interesting ideas:

“The fact that William Blake wrote, printed, illustrated, and published his own poems by ‘a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet’–with no assistance but that of his wife Catherine–guaranteed the direct communication of the author’s original and final ‘invention’ and ‘illumination’ to the fortunate reader and spectator of each original copy of his ‘Illuminated Books.’ No other English poet has had the power to invite his audience so fully into the particular shapes and colors of his images of wonder.” (Erdman, 107)

What I find most interesting about this passage isn’t the jack-of-all-trades-and-songs that Erdman projects onto Blake. Instead, I’m interested in that last sentence: “the particular shapes and colors of his images of wonder.” This phrasing gets me thinking about two related ideas. The first is a traditional (albeit waning) Western tendency toward privileging the subject. And by subject I mean a thinking entity separate from its context, and in some thinking, separate from the body (also waning). This passage reveals an assumption that somewhere inside Blake these crazy and beautiful and genius visions resided. Not necessarily AS Blake, but at least belonging to Blake. In this sense, the tools of typography and printing that Blake had at his disposal were merely mechanisms in the service of somehow prying these images/ideas out of Blake with as much veracity as possible. The ideas, then, must come before their instantiation in a medium. The medium and processes are evaluated in terms of how little they distort the original images in Blake’s head. Those ideas seem a little dated now, sure, but I think Erdman is opening up an interesting discussion about what happens when one person (or at least the fewer the better) has control over large, continuous portions of the production process. Read the rest of this entry »