For the last couple of years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with finding examples of early printed books that aren’t available as open-access digital facsimiles. Why have I been thinking about this? It started off with some frustration that we have a slew of digital copies of (ahem) Shakespeare’s First Folio and of the Gutenberg Bible (25 copies!). Why do we have so many of those and none of…. of…. um…. And so I started looking. The more time I spent looking, the more frustrated I grew about what wasn’t available. How could it be that there were no open facsimiles of Sidney’s ridiculously important sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella? Or Tottel’s miscellany? Or one of the most popular English plays, Mucedorus? These are foundational works in the development of their genres. In some cases, they survive in only a very small number of understandably restricted copies. Shouldn’t…
Year: 2017
book history questions and digital facsimiles
Last weekend I attended a wonderful conference at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the History of Digital and Print Culture, “BH and DH: Book History and Digital Humanities.” It was a great gathering of people who live at the same intersection I’ve been stomping around. And it gave me a chance to think again about digital facsimiles of early printed books. As I said in my talk, book historians think about digital facsimiles mostly in terms of what they show (“hey, cool book! why is it using that funky typeface?”). But what if book historians were to ask BH questions of digital facsimiles—what if we were to treat them as objects to be studies instead of (transparent) objects of objects to be studied? Because I was part of a very fun roundtable, I could mostly ask questions and not insist on answers (best format ever). So here, without answers,…
what do digitized first folios do for us?
Last August, Emma Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio was published and I was and am delighted to have a piece in this one-stop-shopping introduction to F1. My contribution, to the surprise of no one, is on digitized copies of the First Folio. It’s a bibliographical and cultural-materialist inflected examination of what is available, how they present themselves, and what we might learn from them. “Digital First Folios” is a piece that I’m proud of and that I think is a useful contribution to conversations about digitization projects. And so I’m really happy that not only can you read it as part of the Companion, but that I can share it with you here on my site. You’ll have to read the piece for the details of my argument, but as a lure, here are some of my key points. Digitized F1s are presented nearly completely without any information about…
books won’t save you
In the wake of what has been for many in my circles a devastating election repudiating all sorts of values we hold dear—diversity, inclusion, equity, feminism, respect, coherent sentences—there have been a lot of statements along the lines of “if people read more books, this wouldn’t happen!” This is obviously such bunk I can hardly be bothered to deal with it. There’s nothing inherently good about reading; the act of reading books doesn’t make you a better person. Shouldn’t that be obvious? It’s not reading that saves you, but the doors that reading can open and your willingness to walk through them. If you only read books that reinforce what you already believe, you won’t learn anything new. If you only read books to pass the time between being awake and being asleep, you won’t engage with new ideas. If you only read because you think you’re supposed to, if…