Digital Bibliography

I’ve been busy lately. Like everyone else out there who reads this blog, most likely. Grading. Prepping. Teaching. Reading. Researching. Adds up, I know. You know. So today, and maybe for at least the next couple of weeks, I’ll be pointing at some things with a bit of commentary. Hope you like it enough. Here’s the first of several…

I am in love with this animation. (I don’t think it’s stop-motion. Most likely CGI, given the smoothness of the transitions and other clues. Maybe.)

What strikes me first is that the video emphasizes the close connection between the words on the page and what we construct out of them in our heads. Language is certainly material. Paper, ink, printing presses, glues, etc. And it’s representational as well. And it’s more complicated than that, of course. The details of those clarifications are not what’s important to me about this. What’s important is the idea of construction. Texts as constructed objects. Texts as constructed experiences. This video seems to be working on either eliding those two concepts or highlighting just how much they have in common.

Let me explain. I first want to foreground and then get to the other side of the concept of the physical book as a constructed object (see above). It’s got pages, a cover, title page, inks, fonts, etc. And the form of the book (the codex…) is social constructed as well. A quick look at this history of binding technologies and textual circulation will point out that there are all sorts of forms for textual organization possible. The book evolved socially along with the technologies we use to preserve and circulate our texts. So… I’m going to move on to a different sort of construction.

I’m thinking of the difference between the work and the text that Roland Barthes makes (see S/Z, From Work to Text, and Theory of the Text for a nice long discussion and realization of that distinction). In “From Work to Text,” Barthes offers an alternative to the decoding practices he worked out in Mythologies, to the linear chain of significations articulated by Derrida. Instead of a single center, Barthes suggests that “the text is plural… it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible… plural. … it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers” (“From Work” 159). Any reading of a text must be understood as one of an infinite multitude of possible readings. Thus meaning and infinite signification no longer contradict each other. But fundamental to such a theory of the text is the advent of the reader in the meaning making process. Barthes, likening the text to a musical score, writes that “the text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work? … Nowadays only the critic executes the work” (163).

Basically, as I read his work, he defines the text as the work of the author in constructing the arguments, images, references, and linguistic styles which appear on the page. And it is the reader who, effectively, repurposes these assets into a meaningful experience/object for themselves. In this way, writing and reading have very close meanings. And they are both obviously activities of construction.

Which is what I think is so amazing about this particular video, the way that it foregrounds the “constructed” nature of reading a book. What’s ironic, and refreshing, is that it uses the material assets of the book to do so… in a way that Barthes’s work, by focusing only on the semiotic, fails to recognize.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books as material instantiations of negotiated interests. That’s the short version, of course, but it’ll do for now. I’ve been especially interested in how specific interests (like readers, authors, publishers, genre expectations, etc) affect a book’s physical form.

This morning, I ran across this blog entry from Charles Stross. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. What it lacks in documentation and research, it more than makes up for in clarity and first-hand author experience. His reflections and speculations range from the historical impact of supermarket wire racks, to differences between binding conventions (hardcover/softcover) in the US and the UK, to reading habits related to plot structure. Stross overtly and explicitly reminds his readers that his entry is only intended to apply directly to fantasy and/or sci-fi fiction. Here’s a quotation that represents the entry pretty well:

The mass market for paperbacks prior to 1991 was dominated by wholesalers who supplied retail stores — not bookshops, but local supermarkets with wire-mesh book racks. The wholesalers knew their markets intimately, and would match mass-market titles to the supermarket customers on the basis of their clientelle — SF/F was popular near technical schools, for example. When the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s forced publishers to raise their cover prices, the distributors pushed back and demanded that if the product cost more, it had to be bigger — not taller or wider, else it wouldn’t fit the racks, but fatter.

But as I read it, I kept wondering how his piece might inform my own understanding about the length of scholarly texts. I’m specifically thinking about journal articles, edited collections, and scholarly monographs in the humanities (most interested in Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship, though). Read the rest of this entry »

At tomorrow’s pedagogy workshop here on campus (2.17.10), we’ll be reading and discussing Mariolina Salvatori’s College English article “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” (1996). While acknowledging that I’m oversimplifying, I want to mention four important points in the article, and think through them (now, 14 years later) in terms of pedagogy inflected by digital writing tools. Salvatori herself describes the project of her article as “an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using ‘reading’ as a means of teaching ‘writing’” (441). Within this frame, she works through several related ideas; I’d like to think though the following four:

1. One of the activities she often asks students to work through is to reflect on their own mark-making practices as active readers of a text, and then to consider what those marks – the nature of the marks, what gets marked, what doesn’t–might reveal about knowledge-making practices, reading, and writing.

2. Another activity she asks her students to engage in is to describe and analyze the difficulty that certain texts present in reading. What moves are difficult to engage, what types of knowledge or warrants are challenging, etc. Then students can reflect on their process by sharing it with other students/teacher and offer a more concrete, specific strategy for reflecting on reading and writing practices. Read the rest of this entry »