I had a little tinker after last year to focus more on digital culture and less on traditional bibliographical methods. Readings are also updated in places, since, as ever, innovations in digital culture wait for no one.
Learning Outcomes
(a) Demonstrate proficiency in skills necessary to analyse traces of the production and reception of texts in a variety of formats, both print and digital.
(b) Have a sophisticated understanding of how a single text may exist in many different formats and how this may fundamentally alter the reception of the text.
(c) Show an advanced awareness of contemporary techniques for analysing texts using digital tools.
(d) Critically evaluate interdisciplinary data available digitally.
Module Structure
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Literate, Oral and Tactile
Key terms: oral, literate, modality, tactile
Rubery, M. “Canned Literature: The Book after Edison.” Book History 16.1 (2013): 215-245.
Week 3: Signs & Symbols
Key terms: writing systems, Unicode, typography, punctuation, emojis
Selections from Houston, K. 2013. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks. New York: W & W Norton
Coulmas, F., 1989. The writing systems of the world, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chapter 2
Week 4: Cryptography (and poster workshop)
Key terms: code, cracking, information theory, cipher
Excerpts from Kahn, D., 1996. The codebreakers: the story of secret writing. New York: Scribner.
Week 5: Book History
Key terms: publishing, reception, materiality
Darnton, R., 2007. “What is the History of Books?” Revisited. Modern Intellectual History, 4(03), pp.495–508.
Anderson, B., 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Revised., London: Verso. Chapter 3.
Week 6: Born digital
Key terms: hypertext, code, platform, software
Barnet, B., 2012. Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6(2).
Week 7: POSTER SESSION
Week 8: Digitization workshop
Key terms: Facsimile, scanning, OCR
Mak, B. 2014. Archaeology of a digitization. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65: 1515–1526.
Spend at least 30 minutes acquainting yourself with one or more of these resources: HaithiTrust, NYPL Menus, Project Gutenberg or EEBO
Week 9: eBook History
Key terms: eBook, formats, updatability
Maxwell, J. 2013. E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better. Papers Of The Bibliographical Society Of Canada, 51(1).
Week 10: Social Texts
Key terms: annotation, marginalia, reception
Find one or two annotated books in the library/your own collection or the Harvard Views of Readers, Readership and Reading History collection
Sherman, W.H., 2008. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Introduction & Excerpts (LN)
Jackson, H.J., 2002. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Chapter 3
Week 11: Artists’ Books (case study workshop)
Key terms: book-as-object, form vs. content, artists’ book
Excerpts from Drucker, J., 1995. The Century of Artists’ Books, New York: Granary Books.
Week 12: Automated reading & writing
Key terms: searching, automation, bot
Rosenberg, D., 2014. “Stop, Words.” Representations, 127(1), pp. 83-92.
Semester 2, Week 1: Case Studies Due