Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that. “Where material book culture meets digital humanities” Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have…
Month: April 2012
book dealers’ descriptions and catalog records
Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law Library) wrote a great post about his practice of adding dealers’ descriptions to catalog records of rare books; Jeremy Dibbell included it in his link roundup; John Overholt tweeted about it; and then the conversation began. I’ve storyfied it and embedded it below (you can also go straight to Storify to see it). I wanted to capture the conversation, but we all also wanted to hear a wider range of responses and have a longer conversation about the value and potential pitfalls of this practice. It’ll end up on the EXLIBRIS-L listserv as well, so I’ll include a link to all that when it happens (thanks, John!) but in the meantime, read and comment: [<a href=”http://storify.com/wynkenhimself/adding-book-dealers-descriptions-to-catalog-record” target=”_blank”>View the story “adding book dealers’ descriptions to catalog records” on Storify</a>]
infinite reading
http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/99434066914459648 As those of you who follow me on twitter might recall, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for some time now (since the beginning of last August, to be precise). http://twitter.com/wynkenhimself/statuses/102045479528972289 For all of my nervousness that I might not finish it, ((I got a bunch of responses to that tweet from people who said they never made it through the book, which confirmed my sense that this was a real danger.)) I’ve made good steady progress and—much more importantly—I’ve really enjoyed the book. I love DFW’s writing and the characters and the loopy plot. I find that I think about them all when I’m not reading the book; they live in the back of my head and I carry them around with me as I go about my life. That’s the most I could ever ask for in a book. And few books come close to…