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…
Author: Sarah Werner
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…
inaugural bibles
I can’t resist an update to my last blog on the Bibles being used for the Inauguration of President Obama. First, two pictures of that moment with President Obama’s hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: (photo taken by Elise Amendola for the AP Pool) (photo was taken by Chuck Kennedy; more photos of the Inauguration can be found through the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture–the page will take a few moments to load.) Together, these two photos give a wonderful sense of the moment–Barack Obama’s hand on the Bible, his family with him all beaming with joy. Of course, what the pictures can’t show are the words being spoken. Words that, as we all know, were not exactly as they should have been and that had to be repeated, “out of an abundance of caution,” the following day. There’s a lot that could be said about oaths and speech act theory….
bibles for historical occasions
When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, he will be using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration in 1861. Much has been made of the symbolism of the moment, and of the many connections between the two men from Illinois, the one who freed the slaves and the one who will be our first African-American President. The physical presence of Lincoln’s Bible is key to making that connection explicit. It’s not a physically imposing bible, as you can see from pictures. It’s easily held, bound in burgundy velvet with gilt edges. What I find the most interesting about it is that although it holds a great deal of significance to us, it did not for Lincoln. Lincoln’s own family Bible was still en route to Washington with the rest of his belongings, so Supreme Court Clerk William Thomas…
learning to be wise
It’s that time of year again: another semester and more learning and teaching to be done! In honor, once again, of all of us involved in those activities, here’s a look another book that will help us “learn to be wise.” Last fall, the book with which I started off the semester was a copy of Lily’s Grammar, the standard Latin textbook of the period. I’m not sure if that book will exactly help you to be wise, although it was certainly used to help you master your early modern Latin. This time, the book I’m focusing on is Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus, or, A World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures. Comenius’s book, first published in 1658 in Latin and German, is often described as the first children’s picture book. His intent was to teach children not only how to read, but how to be…