#mla12 #47

That’s right: the program for the MLA 2012 convention is now online! Right up there on the first day, Thursday, January 5th, is the roundtable I organized, “Old books and new tools.” A description of the session is up on my site; the listing in the program can be found here.

today’s post is brought to you by the letters k and e

Do you ever get the feeling that something’s just not quite right, but you’re not sure what it is¿ If you’re curious what the other screensavers are on the new Kindle, scroll through the twenty I snapped. They’ve clearly moved on from the book illustrations and author themes they had in earlier models to writing implements. I’m not sure what larger message I’d want to draw from this, but they’re mostly very pretty. I just wish those turned letters didn’t bother me so much. Is it artsy or just wrong? I’m all for artsiness and playfulness. But I can’t help suspect it’s just wrong, or at least, less about art and more about a fear that people will fail to recognize the “kindle” embedded in the picture.

fetishizing books and textualizing the digital

For some time I’ve been perplexed by the way both pro-digitization and pro-book people talk about digitizing books. A crude characterization of the ways in which the two sides depict the argument as having two sides might look like this: pro-digitization: Look, I can access all these wonderful old materials without leaving my armchair! pro-book: Those aren’t books; you can’t feel the paper and breathe in their smell! pro-digitization: But we can create a universal library! pro-book: You’re not creating a library, you’re destroying libraries! pro-digitization: Nyah nyah! pro-book: Pfft! And there you go. The digitization folks talk about access and the book folks talk about being in the presence of the object. Neither side tends to present a more nuanced sense of how they might each have something to offer the other, or to recognize that there might be other considerations and uses at stake. Lest you think I’m…

quick iPad roundup

As you are undoubtedly well aware, Steve Jobs unveiled the newest Apple money-suck toy product on Wednesday: the iPad. The most immediate response was to its tone-deaf name. I don’t actually find feminine hygiene products to be disgusting, but it’s hard not to laugh at jokes about iTampons or iKotex. That last joke really works best with medievalists; for everyone else, you need to spend so long explaining what a codex is, that the frog has been dissected and dead long before they know what to laugh at. But even aside from menstrual jokes, the best joke I’ve seen comes from a medievalist. Tom Elrod’s blog post, “Introducing the iCodex,” captures the breathless adoration of Steve Jobs’s fans and the rediscovery of reading technology. This image from the blog captures what’s smart and funny about it, as does this excerpt: With the iCodex, people can now store multiple items in…

early modern mash-ups

In my last post wondering about important book history tools developments of the last decade, I got some interesting suggestions about what else to consider. For me, they came together as part of a way of remembering how advances or shifts in technology enable different ways of studying and creating knowledge and arts. In response, I’ve been thinking about mash-ups. Peter Friedman commented on my post that a reconsideration of authorship has been developing in part as a response to new technological tools. I’m not sure I see the correlation quite like that, at least in the field of literary studies, as opposed to his field of law. But I do agree that the availability of powerful computing tools to shape and reshape preexisting creations does reshape notions of authorship as individual ownership. EMI’s anger over Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (the 2004 mash-up of the the Beatles’s White Album and…