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…
Tag: reading
information overload
This is the time of year when I often feel assaulted by information overload: there are new books and articles being published in both of my fields of research, I’m behind on my New Yorker, novels are piling up by my bedside, and then don’t forget all those blogs and websites to check in with! Sitting down and constructing my syllabus exacerbates all this. There are too many new works to read that I might want to include, and even worse, I can’t always remember where I read that fascinating study that absolutely needs to be included. Didn’t I read something in that gigantic book that will help us understand the mise-en-page of printed Bibles? But where? And has it been eclipsed by something more recent that I haven’t gotten to yet? Information overload. It often comes up as the bane of the electronice age, something that the email…