So after my last post, I’ve been thinking about what it means to make digital early modern books available in the sort of democratic access that Darnton hopes for in an Digital Republic of Learning. My final point, in that post, was that when my students are first confronted with early English books, they don’t know how to make sense of them. Here’s one example of the sort of book that might perplex them: Just looking at the page opening brings up some of the details that estrange us from early books: the catchwords at the bottom of the page, the signature marks, the fists and marginal comments. None of those are details that we are used to seeing in how today’s books are laid out. And then there’s the text: This is a pretty straightforward and easy-to-read example. But even so, there are the long s’s that look like…
Month: February 2009
navigating the information landscape
Robert Darnton has, again, written a thoughtful account on “Google and the Future of Books” in the February 12, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books. Prompted by Google’s recent settlement with the authors and publishers suing it for copyright violation in its vast digitization project, Darton wonders, “How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view?” For Darnton, the key forward is, unsurprising, through the Enlightenment, both in its ideal Republic of Letters and in its less democratic pratice of who had access to that Republic. As Darnton argues, the high ideals of the Enlightenment turned, in time, into the professionalization of knowledge and subsequently degraded to our current undemocratic world in which scholarly journals are produced through the free labor of professors and sold to libraries at insanely high prices. That’s an information landscape through which we cannot continue…