A Note on the Schedule
Each week there are readings listed under Core and Penumbra. The core readings are just that: central to the week’s discussion and lab. Everyone should read these closely and prepare to discuss them as described in the “Class Preparation” assignment. The penumbral readings try to capture a broader set of brilliant, pertinent readings to each week’s theme that I could not require because time is, sadly, finite. Each week you should choose (at least) one of the penumbral readings, based on your own interests, to read and be prepared to reference as a means of expanding our conversation together.
Week 1 | January 19 | Medium
Core
- Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Rant about ‘Technology’” (2004), external link
- Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects,” from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006), library link
- Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter” (2008), external link
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Object” from The Book (2018)
Penumbra
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964), library link
- N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” introduction to Comparative Textual Media (2013), library link
- Tara Brabazon, “Dead Media: Obsolescence and Redundancy in Media History” (2013), external link
- Mark Alan Mattes, “Media” (2018), library link
Book Lab: A Machine to Think With
Week 2 | January 26 | Remediation
Core
- Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously” (2017), external link
- Jessica Riskin “Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence” (2016), external link
- Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map of Human Labor” (2018), external link
- Benjamin Lee, “Compounded Mediation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset” (2021), external link
Penumbra
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” from Debates in Digital Humanities 2016, external link
- Tyler Shoemaker, “Error Aligned” (2019), external link
- Gerben Zaagsma, “Digital History and the Politics of Digitization” (2022), library link
- Vicki Boykis, “Everything I Understand About ChatGPT” (2022), external link
Book Lab: Amanuenses to AI
Week 3 | February 2 | Book
On Location: Meet at Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Main Library
Core
- Hannah Alpert-Abrams, “Archaeology of a Book: An Experimental Approach to Reading Rare books in Archival Contexts” (2016), external link
- Sarah Werner, “Part 1: Overview” and “Part 3: On the Page” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 & library link 2
- Linc Kesler, “Indigenous People and the Written Word” from The Unfinished Book (2021), external link
- Clive Thompson, “A Search Engine that Finds You Weird Old Books” (2022), external link
Penumbra
- Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? Revisited” (2007), library link
- Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: the State of the Discipline” (2014), library link
- Johanna Drucker, “Preliminary 1. Histories of the Book and Literacy Technologies” and “Preliminary 2. Bibliographical Alterities”
Book Lab: Reading, Rarely
Week 4 | February 9 | Text
Core
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Chapters 2-7 (mostly skim, but focus on the sections describing the print shop), external link
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Content” from The Book (2018)
- Sarah Werner, “Type” and “Printing” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 and library link 2
- Riley Cran, “Custom Fonts for Pentiment” (2022), external link
Penumbra
- “Learning to Set Type” vocational film (1940s)
- Sydney Shep, “‘Smiley, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons & Pre-Digital Networks” (2010), external link
- Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal” (2011), library link
- Kandice Sharren, Kate Ozment, and Michelle Levy, “Gendering Digital Bibliography with the Women’s Print History Project” (2021), library link
Book Lab: Compose Yourself
Week 5 | February 16 | Page
Core
- Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), external link
- Meredith L. McGill, “Format” (2018), library link
- Jonathan Senchyne, “Introduction” and “Conclusion: Reading Into Surfaces” from The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2019), library link
- Andrew Piper, Chad Wellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet, “The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents” (2020), library link
Penumbra
- Bonnie Mak, “Architectures of the Page” from How the Page Matters (2012), library link
- Jonathan Senchyne, “The Whiteness of the Page: Racial Legibility and Authenticity” from The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2019), library link
- Sarah Werner, “Paper” and “Format” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 & library link 2
- James Dobson and Scott Sanders, “Distant Approaches to the Printed Page” (2022), external link
Book Lab: A Welcome Imposition
Week 6 | February 23 | Press
Core
- Browse the Poets and and Poetry of Printerdom (1875), external link
- (Watch, ~30 minutes) Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” (1978), external link
- Corinna Zeltsman, “Defining Responsibility: Printers, Politics, and the Law in Early Republican Mexico City” (2018), library link
- Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne, “Introduction: Infrastructures of African American Print” from Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019), library link
Penumbra
- Donald F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” from Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (orig. 1986), library link
- Stuart McKee, “How Print Culture Became Indigenous” (2010), external link
- Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance” from Comparative Textual Media (2013), library link
- Elyse Graham, “The Printing Press as Metaphor” (2016), external link
- Matthew P. Brown, “Blanks: Data, Method, and the British American Print Shop” (2017), library link
- Marcy J. Dinius, “Press” (2018), library link
Book Lab: A Pressing Matter
Week 7 | March 2 | Image
Core
- Lisa Gitelman, “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf” from Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), file on Canvas
- Juliet S. Sperling, “Image” (2018), library link
- Jacqueline Goldsby, “Book Faces” (2021) from The Unfinished Book, library link
- Caroline Wigginton, “An Indigenous Pipe Bibliography” from The Unfinished Book library link
Penumbra
- Aaron Kashtan, “Introduction: Comics, Materiality, and the Future of the Book” from Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future (2018), library link
- Sarah Werner, “Illustration” and “Part 4: Looking at Books” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 & library link 2
- Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing” exhibit from the William Blake Archive, external link
- Barbara Heritage and Ruth-Ellen St. Onge, “Bookbindings Before 1800, “Bookbinding Tools, Stamps, Dies, Leather, and Cloth,” and “Bookbindings After 1800” from the “Building the Book from the Ancient World to the Present Day” Exhibition, external link
Book Lab: A Total Fabrication
Week 8 | March 9 | Surface
Core
- Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procustes” (1904), external link
- Leah Price, “Introduction” from How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), library link
- Paul Erickson, “The Business of Building Books” (2017), external link
- Meredith L. McGill, “Books on the Loose” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
Penumbra
- Sarah Werner, “Binding” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link
- Charity Hancock, Clifford Hichar, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Kari Kraus, Cameron Mozafari, and Kathryn Skutlin, “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday” (2013), external link
- Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, Isaac Record, and Matt Ratto, “Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns” (2017)
Book Lab: Bound for Glory
March 11-19 SPRING BREAK
Week 9 | March 23 | Experiment
On Location: Meet at Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Main Library
Core
- Catherine Coker, “The Margins of Print? Fan Fiction as Book History” (2017), external link
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Idea” from The Book (2018)
- Élika Ortega, “The Many Books of the Future: Print-Digital Literatures” (2020), external link
Penumbra
- Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books” (1975), external link
- learn about “Agrippa” (1992) at “The Agrippa Files”
- Adam Hammond, “Books in Videogames” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
- Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing” exhibit from the William Blake Archive, external link
- Browse Kit Davey’s Instagram
Book Lab: This Is Not a Book
Week 10 | March 30 | Collage
- Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Introduction” from Writing with Scissors (2012), external link
- Zine Librarians’ Code of Ethics (2015), external link
- browse the “Love Letter” to Viral Texts (2016), external link
- Browse the Queer Zine Archive Project blog and its zine archive
Penumbra
- Lara Langer Cohen, “Notes from the State of Saint Domingue: The Practice of Citation in Clotel,” from Early African American Print Culture (2012), library link
- Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen, “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers (2017), library link
- Emily C. Friedman, “Amateur Manuscript Fiction in the Archives: An Introduction” (2020), library link
Book Lab: I Feel Zine
Week 11 | April 6 | Memory
Core
- Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Software, It’s a Thing” (2014), external link
- Kate Murray, Marcus Nappier, and Liz Holdzkom, “Fun with File Formats” (2021), external link
- Sonya Donaldson, “The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of Discord” (2021), external link
- Klint Finley, “What We Can Learn from Vintage Computing” (2022), external link
Penumbra
- Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945), external link
- Steven Lubar, “‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card” (1992), library link
- Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas , Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, “Introduction” to 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2013), external link
- James A. Hodges, “Forensic Approaches to Evaluating Primary Sources in Internet History Research: Reconstructing Early Web-Based Archival Work (1989–1996)” (2021), library link
- Jacob Kowall and Hillary Szu Yin Shiue, “All Hyped Up for HyperCard: Further Adventures with an Apple Legacy Format” (2021), external link
- Ryan Cordell, “Material Cultures of the Digital” (2022), external link
Book Lab: A Routine Operation
Week 12 | April 13 | Data
Core
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning” (2016), external link
- Bethany Nowviskie, “Change Us, Too” (2019), external link
- Matthew Lavin, “Why Digital Humanists Should Emphasize Situated Data over Capta” (2021), external link
- Derrick R. Spires, “Order and Access: Dorothy Porter and the Mission of Black Bibliography” (2022), library link
Penumbra
- Michael Whitmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012), external link
- Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, external link
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” (2018), library link
- Barnard, Megan and Gabriela Redwine. “Collecting Digital Manuscripts and Archives” (2016), external link
- Molly O’Hagan Hardy, “‘Black Printers’ on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Data Structures of the Early American Book Trades,”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, external link
- Rachel Sagner Buurma, “Indexed” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
Book Lab: Speed Data-ing
Week 13 | April 20 | Code
Core
- Katherine Bode, “Abstraction, Singularity, Textuality: The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading” from A World of Fiction (2018), library link
- Sandeep Soni, Lauren F. Klein, and Jacob Eisenstein, “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers” (2021), external link
- Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism” (2021), external link
- James A. Hodges and Ciaran B. Trace, “Preserving Algorithmic Systems: A Synthesis of Overlapping Approaches, Materialities and Contexts,” Journal of Documentation (2023), library link
Penumbra
- Roberto Busa, “Why Can a Computer Do So Little?” (1976), canvas link
- Stephen Ramsay, “An Algorithmic Criticism” and “Potential Readings” from Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (2011), library link
- David C. Zentgraf, “What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text” (2015), external link
- Hannah Alpert-Abrams, “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros” (2016), external link
- Richard Jean So, “All Models are Wrong” (2017), library link
- Rachael Scarborough King, “The Scale of Genre” (2021), library link
- Melanie Walsh, “Where is All the Book Data?” (2022), external link
- Gabi Kirilloff, “Computation as Context: New Approaches to the Close/Distant Reading Debate” (2022), library link
Book Lab: The Communications Circuit
Week 14 | April 27 | Interface
Core
- Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books” (1894), external link
- Amaranth Borsuk, The Book as Interface” from The Book (2018)
- Dennis Yi Tenen, “Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
- Choose 2-3 works from the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 (2016) or Volume 4 (2022) to read and share with the group
Penumbra
- Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination” (2012), library link
- Lori Emerson, “Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier” from Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), library link
- Craig Mod, “Future Reading” (2015), external link
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy” (2020), external link
- Sarah Well, “The Forgotten History of the Blinking Curso▒” (2021), external link
- (play) AI Dungeon, external link