I’ve been thinking about the digital landscape of special collections recently (hi, RBMS16!) and while I have lots of thoughts on how I come across and use the digital incarnations of rare books and manuscript libraries, I’m curious about what other people do. When I think of the digital landscape of these libraries, I’m thinking of everything from social media (institutional and personal accounts) to digital collections and exhibitions to user-generated websites and projects. How do you encounter and interact with that landscape? Are you looking for specific images? Are you browsing for pretty pictures? Are you following social media feeds for entertainment? Are you researching specific topics? Are you bored? Are you inspired to create your own work from it? Does it never, ever occur to you to look for or look at special collections online? I’d love it if you wanted to share your thoughts in the comments below, whether…
Tag: social transactions
books with friends
In the last few years I’ve started to keep track of what I’ve read. I don’t do anything fancy: I have a google doc and I write down the author and title of each book I’m reading and some quick notes on it, keeping track of the months as they go by. I do it partly because I was jealous of other friends’ lists and curious to know what I really read—not what I remembered reading, the low and high points, but what I’d really spent my time reading. I also do it so that when someone asks me for a recommendation, I have notes on what I liked and disliked and said meh to. (My 2015 book list is here, cryptic notes and all.) What I had not appreciated until recently, however, is that my list helps me remember my friends as well. When I look back at the…
socializing
I’ve been thinking about the social ties that connect us to our scholarship. Last week I was at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting (or #shakeass13, as it was lovingly hashtagged), a conference that I’ve been going to every single year since (have mercy on me) 1994. ((Ok, I missed one year, in 1995, when it was held in Los Angeles and I was living in London, but I’ve been every other single year always.)) It’s a great conference, in part because it is organized around seminars: the bulk of the work of the meeting happens in seminars in which participants circulate papers in advance; there are also paper panels, with only two or three happening concurrently. The result is a conference with a lot of room for active participation and common conversations. It’s invigorating, and that’s one of the reasons I keep returning. Another reason is that I…
the serendipity of the unexpected, or, a copy is not an edition
My last post focused on my frustration with the assumption that digitization is primarily about access to text: But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. Let’s use digitization not only to access text but to explore the physical artifact. I spent the remainder of that post brainstorming some suggestions about what digitization might enable other than access to text, and there were some great comments about the ramifications of textualizing the digital that I’m still mulling over. In this post I want to offer some examples of why we might want to…
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…