Now that Nicholas Carr has declared the ebook revolution over, it’s time to get back to thinking about the interactions between print and digital media and how they mutually influence one another. A few years back I wrote a piece about digital companions that accompanied a website I created to …
I’m reading Susan Dackerman’s Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe right now, one of the more beautiful illustrated books I’ve picked up in a while (with two hands, very heavy). It was produced in conjunction with an exhibit I saw at Harvard’s Sackler Library and it …
A new journalistic recipe is afoot: find once ubiquitous technology that is on the wane and write about its quirky history. The latest exhibit at the LA Review of Books: the phone booth. Ah, the phone booth, haven of bacterial infestation, coin-operated dysfunctionality, and cinematic obsession. We’ll miss you. Of course …
For the first time, I have to admit that my conviction of a commingled print-digital future has seriously begun to wane. Over the course of the past 10 years, I have tried to argue against the either/or nature of the debate, both for practical reasons (I think this would be …
One of the bigger challenges facing the humanities today with the changing nature of our reading interfaces is the problem of technical opacity, what goes by the colloquial name of the black box. Do we need to know how computers or computation work to understand an electronic text? Or can …
This past week 22 researchers from 3 different countries gathered together in Montreal to continue collaboratively writing a book on the history of print. The “multigraph,” as we’re calling it, is an experiment in seeing what happens to our ideas when we change the way we write and work together. …
It seems like this is going to be one of those debates that will be rehearsed over and over again, but here’s a quick response to the scuffle caused by the recent LA Review of Books piece on “literature is not data.” The general resistance to electronic reading (aka digital humanities) …
In a recent piece on the Chronicle, writer Jennifer Howard suggests that we need to “ditch the monograph.” Her answer, along with many others, is to go short and go electronic. Here’s why her argument is wrong on all counts. 1. The first problem is the long versus short binary. …
When I returned to school last month, two things had changed noticeably on my campus. First, my department was gone. The department of German literature and culture, in which I had been a professor, was the latest victim in the so-called decline of the humanities. (To be fair, we weren’t …
A wonderful exhibit currently running at the Foley Gallery in New York called “Beautiful Evidence,” one that brings together a profound sense of the scientific and the whimsical. Books don’t seem to tell us the truth here, but make us wonder. These are curiosities in the Renaissance sense of the term.