A great story in The New York Times (from the AP) on the recent “discovery” of 22 million missing emails from the Bush administration. 22 million. Oh, yeah, here they are. The story of course fits in nicely with the larger narrative of the fragility of digital records (not to …
Gesagt, getan! as we say in German. No sooner do I complain that the Library of Congress should have been the engine of digitalization (and not Google) and voilà! (sorry), France decides to digitize its own books. $1.5 billion earmarked for the project. Now we’re stuck with Google because anything …
The latest by Robert Darnton on the Google Books case and the future of digital collections. Like the U.S. healthcare debate, this issue seems to boil down to a remarkably simple issue. Digitizing books is of tremendous cultural (and monetary) value. We have left it to a corporation to oversee …
The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas …
Help! I’m lost in cyberspace. In a library. And my avatar looks really stupid. I finally made the plunge to create an alternative me — Piper Untermeyer — and the first thing I did, geek that I am, is go to the library. First to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (and definitely …
Returned from a trip to New York City for a conference. I was stunned by the beauty of the work of Paul Sietsema on display at MOMA. It engages with the history of the printed word through manipulating and recording formats like travelogues, manuals, and catalogues. His imagery is remarkably …
A rash of recent work on individuals’ libraries. First we had Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library (Vintage). Then there is Robert Kusmirowski’s recent recreation of the Unabomber’s Hut, that includes a selection of books he owned. Also James Benning’s replica of hut and library (is a hut with a “library” anything …
“Books are the new magazines,” says Tina Brown during a recent interview on the occasion of the Daily Beast’s first birthday. I have posted before on the shifting temporalities surrounding book production and book reading (and again). Critics of the internet often suggest that we don’t read long enough when we read …
Why economists should not be able to write about [fill in blank]. In this case the answer is books. Tyler Cowen has given us yet another narrative of replacement therapy — browsers will kill books. In Cowen’s universe it is good, in Sven Birkert’s bad. Either way there is a …
I thought I would post a summary of the panel I was on for the GSA in Washington DC this weekend. The panel was called, “Graphs? Maps? Trees? New Directions in the Sociology of Literature” and was designed, as you can tell from the title, as an explicit engagement with …