media transitions

This is a post I put together as part of an ongoing conversation with a group of folks who aren’t early modernists but are interested in media. I thought I’d look back at some examples of early print that disrupt our sense of what was typical. In the back of my head I was thinking about Matt Kirschenbaum’s work in Mechanisms and the sorts of tensions between how we perceive media and how it manifests itself—I’ve written about some of those ideas here, too, in my continuing curiosity about the distance between how we imagine early print and how it was experienced. But I’ve not added to that writing here, and have instead just collected some pictures of things that struck me (well, I did include captions). So let your imagination run wild in exploring what we might see or not see in these things. Use the slideshow to navigate through the…

multivalent print, or, learning to love ambiguity in three easy lessons

Below are the slides for and the approximate text of a talk I gave at the 2013 MLA convention as part of a panel on “Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital” organized by Alex Mueller and Mike Johnston. I spoke ex tempore, so my text here won’t precisely line up with what I said at the MLA, but the gist should be the same. I’ve indicated where the slide changes are and after each change have inserted a footnote linking to source and, where available, a link to the image. I’ve also indicated my indebtedness to other scholars, particularly Jeffrey Todd Knight and Adam Smyth, in the notes. [slideshare id=16206922&doc=multivalentprintslides-130127165552-phpapp01] I want to talk today about how early print complicates any trajectory from manuscript to digital, focusing on some common mistaken assumptions that are made about early print. The first assumption we make is that print replaced manuscript,…