futureofthebook.com

remanence

It takes a jolt of forensic imagination to visualize electronic text inscription. Just such a shock of explanation is provided by Matthew Kirschenbaum in his book Mechansims New Media and the Forensic Imagination. This is a work of compilation of disciplines as a literary scholar with command of digital technologies and media history maps the integration of material qualities of electronic text.

The exposition is grounded across all textual display through correlation with its storage media. Such correlation and strategies for persistence and erasure of stored data makes this book essential for the preservation librarian. The preservation librarian with the specialty’s skills of material sciences and understanding of library resource management will perhaps find Kirchenbaum’s Mechanisms more immediately understandable than humanist scholars for which it is intended.

For all it is an essential tutorial, elegantly expressed. Of particular utility is a proposed structure of formal and forensic materiality that bridges all documentary formats. It turns out that formalized paratextual features pervade every inscription format even those mediated by layers of encoding transaction, automated access and screen drawing. At the same time forensic trace of inscription is likewise continuous across media even at the nano-scale of magnetic charges.

This is a transformative reading experience that will confirm any wider suspicion that the digital revolution is not disruptive of the fundamental miracle of inscription of concepts and the resilience of book transmission.

diorama

(2) “From Wunderkammer to Museum 1599-1899” has been described as a “blockbuster”. It is an exhibit about the history of exhibits revealing the deep interplay of artifacts and their representations, of originals and copies. Books and prints are the mediators.

(3) A historical trend toward displacement of artifacts in exhibits to create dioramic arrays is apparent. (Diorama “An imagined succession of brilliant scenes or episodes imperceptivity merging one into another like a pageant in miniature.” Websters Dictionary , 1968)

(4) Captions, photographs, sounds and a menagerie of installation methods have displaced simple arrays of artifacts. Happily the appeal and instructional richness of exhibits has intensified. Behind the curtain of exhibit production conservators are workers of fantasies.

(5) Complex mediations are used. Recently display extractions from electronic database now play a visible, material role of interpretation.

(6) Such extractions obscure authentication and disguise the original and copy transformations.

(7) Among the various specialists at work in exhibit production conservators are well positioned to clarify disruptions and displacements of authentication and transformations of artifacts.

thread

The whole SHARP thread “Re: Digital Publishing Revolution” has inadvertently depicted partitions that inhibit discussion of just such a broad topic. Book studies specialists, special collections managers, conservators and reading cognition investigators each understand the routines and objectives of their professions. Lacking only in discussion of a digital publishing revolution is mediation between these disciplines and at the end of the thread a domination of the SHARP book studies agendas is still apparent.

We should also not overlook others overlooked and also needed in a more complete discussion. These specialties include those of book artists and crafts persons, technologists of current and emerging book production methods, book publishers and book store managers, literary studies specialists and a variety of library and informatics scientists. Such specialists and others could, theoretically, advance a mediation forum and compile understandings.

Another possible action item would play to SHARP talents. This would be compilation of a bibliography of the monographs, white papers and on-line forums from specialist enclaves that bear directly on the resilience of book transmission and on knowledge base displacement. Of particular importance may be identification of any studies that compile and narrate the interdependence of disciplines suggested by a topic such as a “digital publishing revolution”. Just such synthesis can be a new specialty.

monkey

A test of sustainability, or reliable projection, of a research service is the sustainability of its rationale. Digitizing Special Collections is a research service in search of a sustainable rationale. While findings confirm the enthusiasm for Special Collections digitization the activities are dispersed and users nebulous, and maintenance costs could overtake proliferation and growth. Volatility appears predictable.

Adaptive strategy is perfectly suited to management of digitized Special Collections.
Resilience features continual adjustment and occasional reversal of action in quick response to changing circumstance. Systems ranging from cultural transmission to wildlife ecologies resist sustainable agendas. Such systems are resilient and suited to resilient management and that resilience can be observed and measured.

• What, in your estimation, are/should be SHARP’s points of distinctiveness?

History of authorship, reading and publishing. What is interesting about this history trilogy is that the sub-sets are isolated by different disciplinary foundations. Authorship has focus on creative rights and artistic careers, reading has focus on cognitive skills, linguistic skills and instructional agenda and publishing has focus on economic incentives.
So what kind of trilogy is this?

• How can we make SHARP a truly international organization?

It is already international. Other issues may be inequities of representation or disconnection from global authoring, reading and publishing strategies and their media.

• What should be SHARP’s educational mandate?

SHARP is well positioned to advance and maintain the status of humanist studies in universities. Specialist research can neglect this agenda and, for example, shy from issues such as defense of the continuing role of physical collections in a context of their screen delivery.

• Given our field of study, what should be included in SHARP’s digital vision?

There is no binary divide. SHARP should focus on the resilience of knowledge transmission. Specific issues such as knowledge displacement from narrative to database format should be positioned in a larger context of resilience of transmission.

• What should be SHARP’s priorities in 2020?
Somewhat the same as those suggested above.

showmanship

The continuing intensification of the surrounding environment of graphic media is an obvious trend. Less appreciated is the evolution of this trend from a near-zero beginning. That history is complex. It crosses social, political, economic, aesthetic, and technical stage settings. This whole, huge pageant can be experienced at the International Printing Museum in Carson California.

For absolute rarities look over here at prowess and agony of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s prototype for the production machine. The square base from the “blower” has been cold chiseled for mounting the classic assembler, caster and distributor in its first working mechanism still without a full cam set automation. “His hands are all over this.”, said Mark.

So this “printing” museum in the narrow sense of letterpress is fabulous, filled with mythic rarities and interpreted by charismatic specialists, but there is also a larger fabulousness. This is the presence of the lives of printers across five centuries. The working demonstrations and the instructional programs interrupt and pause our own connectivity. There is a momentary space and a taste of materiality and presence.

futureology

“I appreciate that many SHARP members are specialists in earlier periods of book history. I am myself: my PhD examined reading habits in Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And I also appreciate that many SHARP scholars are focused on print and bibliographic history, including books as physical objects to be studied. Yet we are living through a reading and publishing revolution, and I believe that this is one that SHARP as a group should engage with. Indeed it is enormously important that this happens.” Viv Dunstan

The SHARP-L (listserv) is currently building a thread on the “digital publishing revolution” and an apparent disinterest in the topic. The future of the book was more popular in SHARP about 12 years ago and there may be reason to revist every decade or so.

There was the SHARP session, “Futurist Visions of the Book”, University Center, at the three century old College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, from 8:00-10:00 am, on Friday, July 20th, 2001. The premise was that futurology is an authentic sector of book study; that the history of the book is inherently futuristic and that the study of the book necessarily flings us forward past the present. The book is peculiar in this regard due to its role in the trajectory of ideas. Just as the date of the end of the world must always be migrated forward into the future, likewise the future of the book always needs to be migrated backward toward the previous mechanisms of the projection.

A morning thread on SHARP-L is opening a door between book studies and cognitive science of reading. (Re: digital publishing revolution) The mapping precept reported is useful to convey affordances of print. It also clarifies transaction of book studies with cognitive science. The mapping precept from brain neurology (see for example, Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind) is only part of the reading circuit and again cognitive science is an opened door. The cognitive contribution of haptic pathways of the hands prompting the mind is also at work. Here book studies opens out to discover the recent migration of screen reading from keyboard to touch navigation.

glass

”Developers, however, are already cracking the limits of Glass. One created a small sensation in tech circles last week with a program that eliminated the need for gestures or voice commands. To snap a picture, all the user needs to do is wink.” NYT

Media mediation, the zone between at the intersection of observer and the observed, is widening. What was once a bionic skill set is now mediated by recording tech. But the extension is not that momentous. The genie emerged with language and infiltrated with writing and its media.

Glass derived books will be published….

brave, persistent librarians

The New Republic, April 29, 2013, has a great item complete with center spread: “The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu, how a team of sneaky librarians duped al Qaeda and saved some of the Ancient World’s greatest artifacts”. Any library preservation worker will appreciate the details of cunning and planning used in a dangerous situation.

ran roy rule

Roy has a great piece on the premise of resilience of libraries. It’s a witty and funny riff on Ranganathan rules. It is also provocative and it may be useful to consider the efficacy of books and libraries together as a larger humanist agenda lurking in the similarities of the two. Super-sessionists and techno determinists never mention the mortal flaw in their premise that they too would soon be toast.

cover art

Have a look at Susan’s blog post on cover poeisis. This extends the the role of the cover abbrieviated in screen formats. You will not discover the spine poems of those thumbnails.

eerie

Nice narrative of FotB’s Eerie Complementary Fit and a good projection of the post digital book.

“In the case of digital, those strengths include connectedness, ubiquity, unlimited and near-instant supply, multimedia capabilities, multiple input possibilities via digital devices, shareability and the option to include near-constant updating of information, thereby emphasizing the fragility of “the fact.” As for print, its strengths include presence, physicality, lack of compatibility issues, complete ownership of the object, the unchanging and private act of reading, personalization and the inclusion of smell and touch as part of the experience. These are complementary functions of existence.” Andrew Lowsowski

definition

The definition of the book is the flux and resilience of its definition. Add to that a capable length since an essay, memo, pamphlet or Tweet is not a book. The flux and resilience is confirmed in assimilation of reflexive narrative and distributed database anatomies.

The book genres of narrative and database or print and screen are frequently considered binaries, but they are only genres of a single transmission method. The authentic taxonomy is apparent in reading behavior where book use is cohesive enough to assimilate all inter-reference and interplay of genres.

Beginning with a lively definition the book is not everything. It is only one species like our own in a wider ecology. Like our own species the book is moving and tumbling in transition from a wild state to a domesticated circumstance and from there to feral behaviors. Steam Punks would be an example or electronic literature or hypertext.

Outright displacement of paper books by screen books or narrative format by database format is hubris. On the one hand print books continue to be published even as some reference books or serial romance have migrated to screen formats. On the other hand, database readership appears to require narrative transaction and extraction. It may yet prove that an interdependence on both print and screen books is needed.

“Utimately I hope to persuade you that setting these two forms of thought and expression into a mutually critical relation – encouraging each to interrogate and explore each other – is probably the most fruitful thing we could do right now.” Jerome McGann, “Visible and Invisible Books”, Future of the Page, 2004.

authoring paratext

Bibliographers tend to partition authors from publishers. This frame segregates creation of content from book production. The divide dissolves if we concede the authoring of the material content. Publishers and their printers deserve recognition for creation of the conceptual work. From the beginning of printing to the advent of digital literature, the producers create content.

Evidence of a wider conceptualization of the content of a book is provided in John Johnson’s curious work Typographia or the Printers’ Instructor, 1824. These little volumes minutely verbalize, down to individual motions of the body, the steps and thoughts needed to produce a book. The roles of print shop foremen and warehousemen evidence the authoring of paratext in daily management of production, proofing, correcting and inventory management. Conceptualizations were needed, minute-to-minute, as tracked in Press, Check, and Job book logs. Readers, compositors and pressmen imposed the house styles and paratext apparatus. The choreography and discord of the workmen is vividly detailed by Johnson.

Publishers create the mystique and provoke desire and they know it. Producers conceive books behind a curtain that hides the drama.

recto-verso

The improved wooden press of the turn of the 19th century pictured here must be the one in Alderman Library. It is missing the head block that sockets the nut and conceals the spindle exposed in this VQR picture. (The Richard Nash article on the role of the publisher is excellent.)

There is another omission here. Note an iPad is locked up on the stone. This should be locked up as a pair, side by side, in the opposite orientation. Such imposition would simulate the impression coverage of the wooden press platen that was only one half of the form. The two pulls needed were reduced to one by the more rigid and powerful iron press.

A suggested implication of a double iPad imposition would be that screen books typically display only a single page and not the codex spread of two facing pages. This implication provokes another that the codex reading pace accounts for the recto remaining behind below the verso page on the left with the recto on the right awaiting with its own verso poised below.

Just one more thing; the first page is always an odd recto on the right. All the following odd rectos have a kinship while all the even left (evil, sinister) pages lurk beside these.

see attachment

“The staplers still have a magazine, a spring, a pusher and an anvil, and they still make a satisfying metallic sound when you press down on them, signaling that work has been done.” NYT

What a succinct expression of the commodity product as derived from the function of bookbinding. The stapler figures right up there with the bone folder. But most satisfying is the commodification of the sheets into a collated work and the conclusion of a conceptual work, conducted through an arduous process, done with a conclusive hand gesture. Always align the staple with the left margin, never diagonally at the left corner.

abstracts pending

An uncertainty, an ambiguity, an apparent cognitive absence can automatically provoke a Google search. In a sentient maneuver the Google engines identify key word sources in abundance yet the reason for the question has not been resolved.

about not

The take home for me was from Carrier (p.35) when he says that the new media pop-up suddenly but then it takes a long time to discover proficiencies of their use. This speaks to the resilience of book transmission as the usefulness of long form narrative is advanced by long processes of discovery. The extraction of narrative or story from database displacements will certainly take long and may not succeed in the way we can now imagine.

There is a commentary on the book at Text Technologies. This book is fun all they way through. Other books can be perturbed at different paces, beginning or advancing well or not for the reader. I am half way through one of the Toronto studies in book and print culture. It is getting better and better and I wonder how it will end within the bounds of my own meanings. Its all about contextualizing forensic evidences within bibliographic behaviors and not the other way around. Its also a great book. (Joseph Dane, Myth of Print Culture)

emotional dread

“From the time I started public library work in the late ‘70s, there have always been small but influential cadres of early adopters whipping at the public library community to adopt the latest new stuff or die. There is an ingrained fear that public libraries will wither away if we don’t stay hip and current and offer the best of every new trend. In the ‘70s it was Charlie Robinson and best sellers, then computer catalogs, then videos, CDs, DVDs, etc. etc. etc. Public librarians will do almost anything to distance themselves from their natural constituencies (children, parents, and committed readers) and instead identify with high-profile popular trends, because public library leaders judge those natural constituencies to be a political liability.

I’m actually finishing up a blog post that touches on this phenomenon of invoking impending library doom as a rhetorical strategy: “The Library is dead, long live our library.” I think the research function of academic libraries may insulate academic librarians from some of this emotional dread, but it’s a pervasive undercurrent among public library movers and shakers. What I’ve sent you is only the tip of the iceberg.” Roy

What is all this hyperventilation over public library ebook access and lending? Postings suggest that the dysfunctions need to be overcome immediately. I don’t get it. Public libraries have never worried about the currency, popluarity, patron angst or enduser device access for audio or video collections, so why get perturbed over ebooks? Ebooks and their devices are shopping fulfilment systems…not even remotely public library material.

ligature

A research foundation for early book conservation features a fabulous scope of projects. Visit Ligatus.

binary default

The digital divide assumes a connected advantage and a disconnected disadvantage. That assumption, however fulfilled, is just too binary. What can be made of advantages of disconnection? One possibility is an exercise of native intelligence and a sensible resolve to use logic first. Search term selection and query formulation will be focused by a moment of reflection. Google last.

It is also possible to read and imagine off-line. Googling can be very distracting and inefficient if you are actually working out an ambiguity or understanding a layered phenomenon or parsing a taxonomy.

There is also a possibility of connectivity disadvantage. This is not necessarily that, as Nicholas Carr suggests, internet addition dements us. There is another issue as on-line involvment becomes bionic off-line time with some disregard for health awake and asleep. Darker still is a possibility of loss of social skill, incrementally, stressing a much larger fabric of local community health. Paleo skills of gesture and expression conveyed meaning and live authentication of friends and adversaries can atrophy.

Nothing is black and white except perhaps in letterpress and there the skillful printer is looking exactly between.

ozone

“If the ‘tone of voice’ of a typeface does not count, then nothing counts that distinguishes man from the other animals. The twinkle that softens a rebuke; the scorn that can lurk under civility; the martyr’s super-logic and the child’s intuition; the fact that a fragment of moss can pull back into the memory a whole forest; these are proofs that there is reality in the imponderable, and not only notation but connotation is part of the proper study of mankind.” Beatrice Warde

The ozone and static charge of the copier centers appears to have dissipated as a side effect of conversion from photo to digital capture. Some composite of paper transport, file driven imaging, drum charging and toner fusing must account for the new absence. I miss the smell. It was a legacy link with the volatiles of offset printing and the grease smells of wet ink printing. Those smells were also a stimulant.

One shift yet to occur is from the domination of the volume of black work to color work. If not in revenue, the copier works still churn out black text. This can’t be true of on-line publication with its infusions of color composition including color-tinged text, but it is the case with paper copier work. It is as if paper copy is flourishing as a black & white TV broadcaster. Or another metaphor could be black textual literacy and color visual literacy. And then there is an entire range of grey between these zones.

homestead

You will not find a cleaner piece of journalism or a quicker expression of living a life you make for yourself. (visit)

no problem

Richard Nash has an essay on the resilience of book transmission. He describes the resilience of publishing and long form text business and effectively sidelines the overt struggling of formats, literary agendas and authorships.

Rather than besieged by barbarians, the long form book is the barbarian flourishing through infiltration and bang for the buck. Link from Roy.

sharp thread

Perhaps this is a discussion of de-bossing of the lamina of the codex not unlike paper impression of wire and felt or relief printing itself. Keeping to that constraint there will also be impressions of action over time beginning early and ending in the future of the volume.

In the era of 1500-1700 I have noticed a de-bossing of endpapers. Wooden board bindings were plowed out of boards and untrimmed slips of the sewing supports were caught in the cheeks of the lying press. These impressions clearly show how thongs were darted to lace into the boards. Well known are the sweeps of adhesive and captured bristles of brushes de-bossed into endpapers. Use of binders’ tools is evidenced as printing set-off from miss-strikes of the beating hammer or you can observe chattering of plow blade on edge trimming. Crenellations of hammer backing come in later as induced by saw kerfing. The chronology of resewings in earlier books is clearly depicted by the variety of knife cuts, awl or needle piercings and saw kerfings of the progressive sewing stations. A forensic of library practice is also impressed including later bindery tooling of spine panels or distortions and abrasion of vertical shelving or debossing of pencil writing on underlying leaves or vandalisms. The strikes of the conductor’s baton or seeds blown into the gutter produce a dimple or pimple. This is just scratching the surface of possible interpretations of physical impressions.

creative commons

(link)

future of the book by Gary Frost is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

sequester

There is a wider connotation to sequester. What of a sequestration of knowledge as information is migrated away from physical media? Such a displacement is occurring and it mimics other such hand-offs as migration from manuscript to print books or from print to screen display. This current migration from narrative to database has the curious feature of displacing physical media as a knowledge base and uncluttering the world around us.

Note the illustrations of scholarly clutter on the covers of Johns’ Nature of the Book and Blair’s Too Much to Know. Are these images the precursors of the purge to come? If so we are beginning an epistemological era more devoid of physical media and physical transmission of conceptual works. We are also adventuring into non-narrative libraries that require computer access and machine synthesis. The world will feel a bit more primeval in this era with life experience more episodic, mimetic and mythic. There is more to the Paleo fad than diet.

The looming uncertainty of this peculiar sequester (from use of physical media) is not so much the stability of research databases going forward, but the inscrutability of database users. Librarians will no longer be able to decipher research needs or fulfillments or transact mediations. (See the report; “Appraising Our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries”, ARL/Ithaka S+R, 2013) As libraries become uncluttered with physical collections they could become empty of an engaged user base.

displacement

What are longer range implications of a more complete displacement of physical media? Perhaps as knowledge and information migrates to database transmission any material witness of conceptual works will dissipate. Such a de-materialism could be considered a natural trend since conceptual works are conceptual.

But unintended consequence can lurk in database curation and access. The consequences can certainly include atrophy and deterioration. Although such atrophy is unlike familiar deterioration of physical media, the consequence can be real loss and that loss can be very binary or not gradual.

Another consequence of knowledge migration to database transmission is the possibility of coercive or malicious change. Such bias can be introduced without corollary evidence of physical media witness. Burnings of physical books must be overt.

A final mention of implication can be projected. What of unintended de-tethering of bionic reading and its cognitive transactions with physical media? We won’t necessarily miss physical books and their libraries but our cognitive connections with information and knowledge must shift from transactions bred out of our evolution. To make this shift we will need computers for more than business efficiency.

medium rare

Preservation officers of the CIC universities in the central states are discussing a middle zone of print collections. This emergent category will now be withdrawn from circulation and preserved in storage. The category includes items more than a century old, those in fragile or rare condition, discontinued serials and those with unusual circulation issues. Taken together this category departs where special collections leaves off and expands into the massive category of circulating print collections.

Of interest is how expansive the non-circulating medium rare print can become. Another question is what useful research roles it can play within its new status. It can grow in both retrospective and prospective directions and the roles can also expand to into support of screen-based library resources and services. The support of on-line services can expand directly with on-demand reformat and indirectly through back-up, re-mastering and authentication function. The medium rare collections can also come to prefigure the continuing role of all physical media in comprehensive library mediation.