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 and be prepared to discuss in class.
In the week you lead class you and your partners 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.
Week 1 | January 24 | Medium
Core
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964), library link
- Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Rant about ‘Technology’” (2004), external link
- Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter” (2008), external link
- Ken Liu, “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (2012)
Penumbra
- Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects,” from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006), library link
- Tara Brabazon, “Dead Media: Obsolescence and Redundancy in Media History” (2013), external link
- N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” introduction to Comparative Textual Media (2013), library link
- Mark Alan Mattes, “Media” (2018), library link
Book Lab 1: Well That Was Illuminating
Week 2 | January 31 | 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
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Object” from The Book (2018)
- Linc Kesler, “Indigenous People and the Written Word” from The Unfinished Book (2021), external link
Penumbra
- Matthew 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”
- Browse Kit Davey’s Instagram
Book Lab 2: Rarely Reading
Week 3 | February 7 | Page
Book Lab #3 will be hosted at Fresh Press Paper. Due to materials, space, and time constraints, we cannot all attend the workshop at the same time. Instead, students will sign up for one of two sessions: one on Friday 2/11, 1-3:50 and the other next Monday during our regular class, 2/14 1-3:50. We will not have a regular class next week to accommodate this lab. If the available time slots present an insurmountable barrier, please contact me to discuss possibilities.
Core
- Jonathan Senchyne, “Introduction” and “Conclusion: Reading Into Surfaces” from The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2019), library link
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Content” from The Book (2018)
- Lisa Gitelman, “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf” from Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), GET LINK
- Fresh Press Paper, “A Case for a New Case Paper: Co-engineering Library Conservation Materials from Locally Sourced Agricultural Waste” (2019), external link
Penumbra
- Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), external link
- 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” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link
Book Lab 3a: The Old Time Rag
Week 4 | February 14 (Valentines!) | Page Continued
Book Lab #3 will be hosted at Fresh Press Paper. Due to materials, space, and time constraints, we cannot all attend the workshop at the same time. Instead, students will sign up for one of two sessions: one on Friday 2/11, 1-3:50 and the other next Monday during our regular class, 2/14 1-3:50. We will not have a regular class discussion during the week of 2/14 to accommodate this lab. If the available time slots present an insurmountable barrier, please contact me to discuss possibilities.
Book Lab 3b: The Old Time Rag
Week 5 | February 21 | Print
On Location: Meet in the Books Arts Space, West Room, CU Community FabLab (1301 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana)
Discussion Leaders: Emily Zerrenner & Tom Hardy
Core
- Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procustes” (1904), external link
- Elyse Graham, “The Printing Press as Metaphor” (2016), external link
- Sarah Werner, “Type” and “Printing” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 and library link 2
- Kandice Sharren, Kate Ozment, and Michelle Levy, “Gendering Digital Bibliography with the Women’s Print History Project” (2021), library link
Penumbra
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Chapters 2-7 (mostly skim, but focus on the sections describing the print shop), external link
- “Printing” vocational film (1947) and “Learning to Set Type” vocational film (1940s)
- Stuart McKee, “How Print Culture Became Indigenous” (2010), external link
- Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal” (2011), library link
- Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance” from Comparative Textual Media (2013), library link
- Marcy J. Dinius, “Press” (2018), library link
- Corinna Zeltsman, “Defining Responsibility: Printers, Politics, and the Law in Early Republican Mexico City” (2018), library link
Book Lab 4: Compose Yourself
Week 6 | February 28 | Text
On Location: Meet in the Books Arts Space, West Room, CU Community FabLab (1301 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana)
Discussion Leaders: Daniel Evans & Peizhen Wu
Core
- (Watch, ~30 minutes) Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” (1978), external link
- David C. Zentgraf, “What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text” (2015), external link
- Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously” (2017), external link
- Thomas S. Mullaney, “Introduction: There is No Alphabet Here” from The Chinese Typewriter: A History (2017), library link
Penumbra
- Michael Whitmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012), external 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
- Denis Tenen, “Computational Poetics: An Introduction” and “Metaphor Machines” from Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2018), GET LINK
- (browse) David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell, “A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition” (2019), external link
- choose 2 entries from the Kern Your Enthusiasm series and/or the Font Review Journal you would like to discuss in class.
Book Lab 5: A Welcome Imposition
Week 7 | March 7 | Format
On Location: Meet in the Books Arts Space, West Room, CU Community FabLab (1301 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana)
Discussion Leaders: Marcella Lees & Brian Landes
Core
- Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books” (1894), external link
- Élika Ortega, “The Many Books of the Future: Print-Digital Literatures” (2020), external link
- Dennis Yi Tenen, “Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
- Kate Murray, Marcus Nappier, and Liz Holdzkom, “Fun with File Formats” (2021), external link
Penumbra
- Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, “Afterword on Platform Studies” from Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009), library link
- Jonathan Sterne, “Format Theory” from MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012), external link
- Meredith L. McGill, “Format” (2018), library link
- Tyler Shoemaker, “Error Aligned” (2019), external link
- Sarah Werner, “Format” and “Binding” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library link 1 & library link 2
- Jacob Kowall and Hillary Szu Yin Shiue, “All Hyped Up for HyperCard: Further Adventures with an Apple Legacy Format” (2021), external link
Book Lab 6: Pressing On
Spring Break!
Week 8 | March 21 | Image
On Location: Meet at Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Main Library
Discussion Leader: Caryn Corliss
Core
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Idea” from The Book (2018)
- Andrew Piper, Chad Wellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet, “The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents” (2020), 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
- Juliet S. Sperling, “Image” (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
Book Lab 7: It’ll Last Longer
Week 9 | March 28 | Network
Discussion Leaders: Elizabeth Schwartz & Brienne Hayes
Core
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning” (2016), external link
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” (2018), library link
- Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map of Human Labor” (2018), external link
- Scott Weingart, “The Route of a Text Message” (2019), external link
Penumbra
- Steven Lubar, “‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card” (1992), library link
- Sydney Shep, “‘Smiley, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons & Pre-Digital Networks” (2010), 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
Book Lab 8a: I Feel Zine
Week 10 | April 4 | Remediation
On Location: Meet in the Digital Output Lab, Room 235, Art & Design Building, 408 E. Peabody Drive
Discussion Leader: Carrie Johnson
Core
- 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
- Catherine Coker, “The Margins of Print? Fan Fiction as Book History” (2017), external link
- Browse the Queer Zine Archive Project blog and its zine archive
Penumbra
- Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery” (2009), external link Note: make sure to read each of the sections in the table of contents at the top
- 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), GET LINK
- Adam Hammond, “Books in Videogames” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
Book Lab 8b: I Feel Zine
Week 11 | April 11 | Infrastructure
Core
- Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945), external link
- Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? Revisited” (2007), library link
- Benjamin Lee, “Compounded Mediation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset” (2021), external link
- Rachel Sagner Buurma, “Indexed” from The Unfinished Book (2021), library link
Penumbra
- Donald F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” from Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (orig. 1986), library link
- Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture” (2014), library link
- Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, external link
- Barnard, Megan and Gabriela Redwine. “Collecting Digital Manuscripts and Archives” (2016), external 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
Book Lab 9: Our Feature Presentation
Week 12 | April 18 | Code
Discussion Leaders: Elizabeth Koning & Ryan Dubnicek
Core
- Stephen Wolfram, “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace” (2015), external link
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” from Debates in Digital Humanities 2016, external link
- Katherine Bode, “Abstraction, Singularity, Textuality: The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading” from A World of Fiction (2018), library link
- Rachael Scarborough King, “The Scale of Genre” (2021), 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
- Hannah Alpert-Abrams, “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros” (2016), external link
- Annette Vee, “Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy” from Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (2018), library link
- Matthew Lavin, “Why Digital Humanists Should Emphasize Situated Data over Capta” (2021), external link
Book Lab 10: Aye, Robot
Week 13 | April 25 | Interface
Core
- learn about “Agrippa” (1992) at “The Agrippa Files”
- Jon Bois, “What Football Will Look Like in the Future” (2017) Note: this is a longer read so be prepared
- Amaranth Borsuk, The Book as Interface” from The Book (2018)
- (play) AI Dungeon, external link
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
- (read or listen), 99% Invisible, “The Universal Page” (2019), external link
- Sarah Well, “The Forgotten History of the Blinking Curso▒” (2021), external link
- browse the Electronic Literature Collection: Bots
Book Lab 11: Thoroughly Entwined
Week 14 | May 2 | Memory
Core
- Lauren J. Young, Daniel Peterschmidt, and Cat Frazier, “File Not Found Series” (2017)
- Bethany Nowviskie, “Change Us, Too” (2019)
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy” (2020), external link
Penumbra
- James A. Hodges, “Forensic Approaches to Evaluating Primary Sources in Internet History Research: Reconstructing Early Web-Based Archival Work (1989–1996)” (2021), library link