Schedule and Readings

 

Week 1 11 Jan	Introduction assigned reading Duguid, Paul. "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book." In The Future of the Book, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, 63-101. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. [Duguid - Material Matters.pdf] Drucker, Johanna, "Modeling Functionality: From Codex to E-book." In SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, 165-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/9988258; note that you can download the entire chapter as a single PDF file if you enter the page range 186-95, though you'll need to view the endnotes separately] further reading tba
Week 2 18 Jan	Theoretical Frameworks assigned reading Darnton, Robert. "'What Is the History of Books?' Revisited." Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (2007): 495-508. [http://journals1.scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/browse/14792443/v04i0003] Note: in this article, Darnton is looking back to a much earlier article he published in 1982 called "What Is the History of Books?", which became one of the theoretical foundations for the field of book history. You can find the original 1982 article here: http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/20024803. However, for students new to book history, the 2007 retrospective is a bit more accessible, and contains a figure of Darnton's "communications circuit" along with an alternative model offered by Adams and Barker. The Darnton model and its revisions will be a touchstone for our course as a whole. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, "Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: the State of the Discipline," Book History 17 (2014): 406-58 recommended reading Greetham, David. "What Is Textual Scholarship?" In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7875444] Drucker, Johanna. "Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory." Culture Machine 12 (2011): 1-20. [http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23] Dillon, Andrew. "Reading, Books, and Electronic Text." In Designing Usable Electronic Text. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2004. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/5250181] Parikka, Jussi. "Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Media Diagrammatics." Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 (2011): 52-74. [http://resolver.scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/resolve/02632764/v28i0005/52_omawemmd]; see also Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012) Erickson, Paul. "Help or Hindrance? The History of the Book and Electronic Media." In Rethinking Media Change: the Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, 95-116. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. McKenzie, D.F. "The Broken Phiall: Non-Book Texts." In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 31-54. Cambridge University Press, 1999. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/8357833]
Week 3 25 Jan	Markup Theory and Practice, Part 1 (Fundamentals) assigned reading Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7731513] TEI By Example, "Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI [Text Encoding Initiative]": http://www.teibyexample.org/modules/TBED00v00.htm recommended reading Comic Book Markup Language: http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/cbml/ Galey, Alan. "Encoding as Editing as Reading." In Shakespeare and Textual Studies. Edited by M.J. Kidnie and Sonia Massai, 196-211. Cambridge University Press, 2015. [Galey - encoding as editing as reading.pdf]
Week 4 1 Feb	Markup Theory and Practice, Part 2 (Applications) assigned readings Renear, Allen. "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality." Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, 107-26. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/8566519] McGann, Jerome. "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in n-Dimensional Space." Literary and Linguistic Computing 17.1 (2002): 61-75. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7731513] recommended reading Buzzetti, Dino, and Jerome McGann. "Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon." In Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth, 94-127. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. [online preview version: www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/]
Week 5 8 Feb	Markup Theory and Practice, Part 3 (Interfaces) first blog posting log due this week assigned reading Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "'So the Colors Cover the Wires': Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability." In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/] Liu, Alan. "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse." Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 49-84. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7700331] recommended reading Hayles, N. Katharine. "Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality." Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003): 263-90. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7766423] Alan Galey, VisualizingVariation.ca, section on animated variants David Norton, ch. 3 of A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
15 Feb	Reading Week (no class) encoding challenge assignment due this week
Week 6 22 Feb	The History and Future of the Page field trip: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library assigned reading Stoicheff, Peter, and Andrew Taylor. Introduction to The Future of the Page. University of Toronto Press, 2004. 3-25. [Stoicheff and Taylor - intro.pdf] Piper, Andrew. "Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)." In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/9975761] recommended reading Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. University of Toronto Press, 2011. Bornstein, George. "How to Read a Page: Modernism and Material Textuality." Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 1 (1999): 29-58. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7757767]
Week 7 29 Feb	E-Books, Part 1 assigned reading Maxwell, John W. "E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 51, no. 1 (2013): 29-47. [http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/bsc] Simon Rowberry, "Ebookness," Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies [pre-print; no vol/no assigned yet] (2015): 1-18 recommended reading Pierce, Jennifer Burek. "E-Books for Young Readers: a Historical Overview of Interdisciplinary Literatures." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 51, no. 1 (2013): 105-29. [http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/bsc]
Week 8 7 Mar	E-Books, Part 2 assigned reading Trettien, Whitney Anne. "A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: the Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica." Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html. Galey, Alan. "The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination." Book History 15 (2012): 210-47. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7690636] Note: this author can be long-winded, so we'll limit our focus in class mainly to section 2 ("Digital Texts as Bibliographical Objects") and section 4 ("Reading an E-Book's Expressive Form"). recommended reading Ray Murray, Padmini, and Claire Squires. "The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit." Book 2.0 3, no. 1 (2013): 3-23. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/10171334] Kenna, Hilary. "Touching the Text of T.S. Elio's 'The Waste Land': a Critical Discussion of Interactive Design and Screen Typography for an iPad E-Book." Book 2.0 1, no. 2 (2011): 207-238. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/10171334] Benton, Megan L., "Typography and Gender: Remasculating the Modern Book," in Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 71-93
Week 9 14 Mar	Books and the Prehistory of Digitization: Sound and Image assigned reading Ruberry, Matthew. "Canned Literature: the Book After Edison." Book History 16 (2013): 215-45. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7690636] Mak, Bonnie. "Archaeology of a Digitization." Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology 65, no. 8 (2014): 1515-26. [http://simplelink.library.utoronto.ca/url.cfm/492440] recommended reading FirstSounds.org Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864 manuscript book), digitized by the British Library Toronto Review of Books, "Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A": http://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/2012/01/chris-stevens-on-alice/ Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: the Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press) Auslander, Philip, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008)
Week 10 21 Mar	Copyright, Digital Rights Management, and the Book guest speaker: Bobby Glushko, Head of Scholarly Communications and Copyright, U of T Libraries assigned reading Johns, Adrian. Ch. 1, "A General History of the Pirates" and ch. 17, "Past, Present, and Future." In Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, 1-15, 497-518. University of Chicago Press, 2009. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/9985679]; Note: you can download these two chapters as separate PDF files. Click the link provided here, and open any one of the chapters. Once you can see the reading interface open, look at the bottom and you'll see a link that says "Export to PDF." The pagination for exporting doesn't match the pagination shown in the book, but you can export these two chapters if you enter the range 10-24 for chapter 1 and 506-27 for chapter 2.] recommended reading Striphas, Ted. "Bringing Bookland Online." In The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, 81-109. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. McGill, Meredith L. "Copyright and Intellectual Property: the State of the Discipline." Book History 16 (2013): 387-427. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7690636] Benkler, Yochai. Introduction to The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/5865188; open-access version: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/]
Week 11 28 Mar	Digital Narratives and New Media Experiments assigned reading Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. "Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First-Generation Electronic Objects." Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 14 (2002): 15-51. [http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/30227991] Wendler, Zachary R. "'Who Am I?': Rhetoric and Narrative Identity in the Portal Series." Games and Culture 9, no. 5 (2014): 351-67. [http://gac.sagepub.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/content/9/5.toc] recommended reading Duncan, Alex. "That Wasn't Supposed to Be a Choice: Metafiction and The Stanley Parable." The Animist [blog], posted 27 January 2014, https://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/that-wasnt-supposed-to-be-a-choice-metafiction-and-the-stanley-parable/ [NOTE: make sure to play the game itself at least a few times before reading] if you have played Portal to the end half-life.wikia.com/wiki/ApertureScience.com half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Portal_ARG once the course is over and your final assignment is submitted, play Portal 2 and The Stanley Parable if you have not played Portal to the end visit the former ApertureScience.com website, now preserved by the Internet Archive: web.archive.org/web/20071030080002/http://aperturescience.com/ at the prompt, enter "LOGIN"; then enter a username of your choice; then enter the password "portal"; then enter "APPLY" and follow the instructions from there play Portal, at least until you get to that major thing that happens (you'll know) if neither of the above: yhoo.it/NuAYGJ
Week 12 4 April	Books of Futures Past second blog posting log due this week final papers due this week assigned reading Uzanne, Octave. "The End of Books." Scribner's Magazine 26 (July-December 1894): 221-31. [Uzanne - End of Books.pdf] Asheim, Lester. "New Problems in Plotting the Future of the Book." Library Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1955): 281-92. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7731130] recommended reading Harding, Robert Coupland. "A Hundred Years Hence." Typo 8 (27 January 1894): 1. [http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-typo.html]