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,…
Author: Sarah Werner
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…
researching while unaffiliated
It’s been just over a year since I left my job to become an independent scholar/freelance writer/humanist at large/wow this terminology is bad. I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s possible and not possible in this gig. One huge shift was rethinking how I got access to all those library databases that make my research possible. I’ve really been pretty fortunate, given that I could easily not have access to anything I need (more on that after the break). But it’s a bit of a hodge-podge and there are still things I don’t have access to. So for the curious, here’s a list of what resources I use and how/if I have access to them. The specifics of the list come from my particular research interests (at the moment, early modern printing practices), but the general strategies and obstacles should resonate well beyond my particular niche. One point before I get started. This…
more than seven jobs
There’s been a meme going around Twitter of listing your first seven jobs. It started with Marian Call, but of course spread across all sorts of folks, including academics. It’s been interesting—some folks have jobs that in retrospect lead exactly to the job they have now; others have a range of early jobs that I never would have guessed. But the academic ones often depress me. Many of the ones I saw seemed to quickly lead to being teachers, a few noted things like, “I haven’t even had seven jobs!” It wasn’t until smart woman and fellow scholar Kirsty Rolfe tweeted something about this that it occurred to me that maybe I was reacting to something more systemic than my individual annoyances. Thinking about #firstsevenjobs and what its use by academics says about academia and class (think it’s a bit more complex than it appears) — Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) August…