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. The penumbral readings include some of the many brilliant pertinent readings 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 closely and be prepared to discuss in class.
In the week you lead class you should prepare all of the core and penumbral readings, and if you choose to dig into one of these topics for an assignment the penumbral readings are the first place you can start expanding your thinking.
Accessing Readings
The majority of our readings will be available online or through a digital course packet in Leganto. The first time you wish to access items from Leganto you will need to log in through Blackboard (the only time we’ll use it this semester), but thereafter the direct links in the schedule should work. If you switch to a new computer or device you may need to log in through Blackboard once.
January 9: Medium
Core:
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964)
- Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects,” from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006)
- Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter” (2008)
- N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” introduction to Comparative Textual Media (2013)
Penumbra:
- N. Katherine Hayles, “Media and Materiality” and “Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis” from Writing Machines (2002)
- Tara Brabazon, “Dead Media: Obsolescence and Redundancy in Media History” (2013)
- Mark Alan Mattes, “Media” (2018)
Lab 1: Mark(it all)down
January 16: Format
Core:
- Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books” (1894)
- (Watch) Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” (1978, about 30 minutes)
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Object” from The Book (2018)
- Meredith L. McGill, “Format” (2018)
Penumbra:
- Jane Austen, Letters to her sister Cassandra (these are in order so you can read down from the first link to the next two letters):
- 19th-Century Commentaries on Novel Reading:
- “On Novel Reading” (from The Guardian; or Youth’s Religious Instructor, 1820)
- “Devouring Books” (from the American Annals of Education, 1835)
- M.M. Backus, “Novel Writers and Publishers” (from Christian Parlor Magazine, 1844)
- Wendy Hui Kong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory” (2008)
- Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, “Afterword on Platform Studies” from Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009)
- Jonathan Sterne, “Format Theory” from MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012)
Lab 2: Illuminating the Book
January 23: Book
Meet in the Northeastern Archives & Special Collections, 92 Snell Library (in the basement)
Core:
- Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procustes” (1904)
- Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? Revisited” (2007)
- Leah Price, “Introduction” and “Reader’s Block” from How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012)
- Johanna Drucker, “Preliminary 1. Histories of the Book and Literacy Technologies” and “Preliminary 2. Bibliographical Alterities”
Penumbra:
- Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” (1982)
- Leah Price, “From The History of the Book to a ‘History of the Book’” (2009)
- Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature” (2009)
- Patricia Crain, “Reading Childishly? A Codicology of the Modern Self” from Comparative Textual Media (2013)
- Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: the State of the Discipline” (2014)
Lab 3: Into the Archives/Thinking with the Codex
January 30: Page
Core:
- Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” in Herman Melville: the Dover Reader (1855)
- Bonnie Mak, “Architectures of the Page” from How the Page Matters (2012)
- Jonathan Senchyne, “Paper Nationalism: Material Textuality and Communal Affiliation in Early America” (2017)
Penumbra:
- Lisa Gitelman, “Preface,” “A Short History of ____,” and/or “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf” from Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014)
- Jonathan Senchyne, “Rags Make Paper, Paper Makes Money: Material Texts and Metaphors of Capital” (2017)
Dead Media Poster Presentations
February 6: Press
Core:
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Chapters 2-7 or in this edition without chapters (read from pg. 14 “From a child I was fond of reading” to pg. 53 “I think this was in or about the year 1729.”)
- Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance” from Comparative Textual Media (2013)
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Content” from The Book (2018)
- Marcy J. Dinius, “Press” (2018)
Penumbra
- Elizabeth Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited” (2002)
- (Watch) Stephen Fry, The Machine That Made Us (2008) Note: This video is about 1 hour long; plan accordingly!
- Ann Blair, “Introduction” from Too Much To Know (2011)
- Elyse Graham, “The Printing Press as Metaphor” (2016)
- Matthew P. Brown, “Blanks: Data, Method, and the British American Print Shop” (2017)
Lab 4: Letterpress I
February 12 (6-9pm): Type
Note the different meeting day/time this week.
Core:
- Articles about the Victoria Press
- M. M. H., “A Ramble with Mrs. Grundy: A Visit to the Victoria Printing Press,” (1860)
- “The Victoria Press,” Illustrated London News (15 June 1861)
- Emily Faithfull, “Women Compositors,” English Woman’s Journal (1861)
- Sarah Werner, “Finding Women in the Printing Shop” (2014)
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Introduction: It Is Known” and “Word Processing as a Literary Subject” from Track Changes: a Literary History of Word Processing (2016)
Penumbra:
- “Printing” vocational film (1947) and “Learning to Set Type” vocational film (1940s)
- Donald F. McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices” (1969)
- Ellen Cushman, “‘We’re Taking the Genius of Sequoyah into This Century’: The Cherokee Syllabary, Peoplehood, and Perseverance” (2011)
- Andrew Piper, “Deleafing: The History and Future of Losing Print” (2013)
- Joshua Ratner, “Paratexts” (2018)
- Blog posts from the Kern Your Enthusiasm series.
Lab 5: Letterpress II
February 20: Assemblage
Note: Professor Cordell away: virtual class; no lab
Core:
- Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Introduction” from Writing with Scissors (2012)
- Lara Langer Cohen, “Notes from the State of Saint Domingue: The Practice of Citation in Clotel,” from Early African American Print Culture (2012)
- Browse at least 2 of the scrapbooks below:
- Frederick Douglass’s Scrapbook
- Scrapbook about Frederick Douglass
- Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911 (click on the links under “Browse This Collection” to find the books)
- Benjamin “Pap” Singleton scrapbook
- Lewis Carroll Scrapbooks
- Carry Amelia Nation diary and scrapbook
- The Scrapbooks of Molly Picon
- Willa Cather’s childhood scrapbook
- Juliet S. Sperling, “Image” (2018)
Penumbra:
- Whitney Anne Trettien, “Creative Destruction / ‘Digital Humanities’” (2016)
- Catherine Coker, “The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history” (2017)
February 27: Copy
Core:
- William Blake, “The Tyger” and “London” (For each poem, compare at least 3 editions by clicking “Objects from the Same Matrix” below the page image).
- Donald F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” from Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (orig. 1986)
- Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously” (2017)
Penumbra:
- G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Bibliographical Concepts of ‘Issue’ and ‘State’” (1975)
- Christopher Looby, “Southworth and Seriality” (2004)
- Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing” exhibit from the William Blake Archive
- Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination” (2012)
- Whitney Anne Trettien, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica” (2013)
- Martin Paul Eve, “‘You have to keep track of your changes’: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas” (2016)
Lab 6: Letterpress III
March 6: Spring Break
March 13: Circulation
Core:
- Meredith McGill, “A Matter of the Text” from American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (2007)
- Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery” (2009) Note: make sure to read each of the sections in the table of contents at the top
- Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen, “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers” (2017). Also Read “Beautiful Snow” and 2 other verses of your choosing from Fugitive Verses, looking at the example poems at the example newspaper printing linked at the top of each.
Penumbra:
- Melissa J. Homestead, “‘Every Body See the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America” (2001)
- Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode” (2006)
- Leslee Thorne-Murphy, “Re-Authorship: Authoring, Editing, and Coauthoring the Transatlantic Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge’s Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Bible History” (2010)
- Rachael Scarborough King, “Introduction” to Writing to the World : Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018)
- Electronic Literature Collection: Bots
Lab 7: Building a Bot
March 20: Text
Core:
- Jerome McGann, “The Textual Condition” (1991)
- Sydney Shep, “‘Smiley, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons & Pre-Digital Networks” (2010)
- Denis Tenen, “Computational Poetics: An Introduction” and “Metaphor Machines” from Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2018)
Penumbra:
- Michael Whitmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
- Rita Raley, “TXTual Practice,” in Comparative Textual Media (2013)
- Johanna Drucker, “From A to Screen,” in Comparative Textual Media (2013)
- Hannah Alpert-Abrams, “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros” (2016)
- Scott Weingart, “The Route of a Text Message” (2019)
Lab 8: Computational Text Analysis I
March 27: Data
Core:
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Extreme Inscription: A Grammatology of the Hard Drive,” from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
- Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer (2015)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Introduction” and “Chapter One: Bring Back the Bodies” from Data Feminism
Penumbra:
- Ellen Gruber Garvey, “facts and FACTS: Abolitionists’ Database Innovations,” from “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (2013)
- Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” (2013)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Feminist Data Visualization” (2016)
- Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning” (2016)
- 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
Lab 9: Computational Text Analysis II
April 3: Code
Core:
- Roberto Busa, “Why Can a Computer Do So Little?” (1976)
- Stephen Ramsay, “An Algorithmic Criticism” and “Potential Readings” from Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” from Debates in Digital Humanities 2016
- Annette Vee, “Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy” from Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (2018)
Penumbra:
- Lauren Klein, “The Carework and Codework of the Digital Humanities” (2015)
- Paul Ford, “What Is Code?” (2015)
- Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading” (2017)
- Richard Jean So, “All Models are Wrong” (2017)
- Alison Booth, “Mid-Range Reading: Not a Manifesto” (2017)
Lab 10: Computational Text Analysis III
April 10: Interface
Core:
- Jon Bois, “What Football Will Look Like in the Future” (2017)
- Élika Ortega, “Not a Case of Words: Textual Environments and Multimateriality in Between Page and Screen (2017)
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Idea” and “The Book as Interface” from The Book (2018)
Penumbra:
- Charity Hancock, Clifford Hichar, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Kari Kraus, Cameron Mozafari, and Kathryn Skutlin, “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday” (2013)
- Lori Emerson, “Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier” from Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014)
- Craig Mod, “Future Reading” (2015)
- Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map of Human Labor” (2018)