Transitioning

This space will be inactive for a bit as I move from Ohio and the University of Akron to North Carolina where I have accepted a position as Rare Book Research Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I’ll be posting updates here in the coming months on a paper I am preparing for the Society for Textual Scholarship 2011 conference at Penn State and an update about a paper I was asked to contribute to an upcoming online issue of Dichtung-Digital.

I am very much looking forward to serving in this new role at UNC, working with my future colleagues there, and working with an excellent and rich collection within a vibrant scholarly community both at UNC and in the Research Triangle generally.

Neighbor(s)

Months ago, I started drafting an entry on Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” for the Electronic Literature Directory. In the meantime, while the draft entry languished on my hard drive, Davin Heckman already drafted an entry.

I’ve been wanting to write about Johnston’s work for some time and have puzzled over the best way to do this. But what interested me most about this particular work by Johnston is its inextricable connection, in my mind, with another work of contemporary poetry, Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor.

I added my notes comparing Levitsky and Johnston’s work to the comments field of Davin’s entry on “human-mind-machine.” View them there or after the jump.

ELD 1.0 vs. 2.0

Since a conversation started about the merits of the new version (version 2.0) of the Electronic Literature Directory and the fate of version 1.0, I thought I would outline some of the changes here. I’ve made an “Anatomy of an ELD entry” page using Bounce.

The difference between ELD version 1.0 and 2.0 is analogous to looking at a digital card catalog (a minimal bibliographical record) in ELD1.0 vs. an encyclopedic entry tied to social networking functionality in ELD 2.0. The improvement should be readily apparent:

Compare the entry for the same work in the new version (the image links to the live webpage on the ELD):

This screen shot does not show the metadata fields, “Discussion” comment feature, or tags.  For a better view see the “Anatomy of an ELD entry” page that I created for the entry on “My Body – a Wunderkammer”.

The ELD version 1.0 will be made available at a later date. The old ELD site was hacked before it was taken down and some issues related to this are apparently being resolved, though all information remains intact and is being preserved for later access. As you can see from the ELD 1.0 entry linked to the image above, these can also be viewed through the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.  It is a bit fussy and takes a bit of working with, but you can even see the development of the ELD v 1.0 over time.

A Response to a Response

More on the Electronic Literature Directory

Below is my response to Diane Greco’s response to my last post which was a response to Mark Bernstein’s post… (Are you following? Good.) I am now going to examine an uncatalogued 16th century emblem book and not think about electronic literature for awhile.

A response to Diane Greco:

I appreciate your thoughtful response to my post. I also share your concerns regarding the preservation of elit work and with ensuring that the work of the ELD 1.0 is preserved.

I am librarian. As a special collections librarian (and assistant professor of bibliography), I work daily to provide and ensure access to information (including works of literature) and to ensure that this access sustains into the distant future through the preservation and conservation of the material embodiment of this information (even if this embodiment takes the form of data on distant servers, or works of elit on CDROM). I take the responsibility of these tasks very seriously and have dedicated much of my life to both the study, practice, and critical examination of these efforts.

I would also like to address some factual errors in what you write here.

ELO_AI & RBMS10, Part 2: Mark Bernstein/Eastgate & the ELD

In a recent post, I briefly outlined the history of my involvement with the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and Electronic Literature Directory (ELD). Since December of last year, I have been actively working with the editorial team of the ELD to theorize, test, improve, promote, and populate the Directory with entries. I should also note that the ELD is still in an early phase (a redesign is in the works and functionality will continue to be tweaked and added to it as needed).

The impetus for this post came in response to a recent post on Mark Bernstein’s blog about the ELD project. Bernstein is the founder and “chief scientist” of Eastgate Systems, the pioneering publisher of hypertext fiction on portable media (first floppy disks and now mostly on CDROMs).

Make Haste Slowly

Aldus Manutius is my favorite printer. When I first started at the University of Akron, one of the great pleasures on one of my first days was going through the uncataloged rare books and unearthing a slim octavo in a limp vellum binding and seeing the dolphin and anchor that told me I had discovered a late Manutius. Late, indeed. It was printed after Aldus’ death, when his son was running the shop. Anyhow, I took this as a sort of house warming jesture from the book gods. The great Italian humanist was here. All was okay.

Today, I was looking at the NYTimes online. In the style section, I found an article about Tipoteca Italiana, a typography and printing museum forty miles north of Venice. But then I read this: “Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), a typographer and the first publisher of printed books.”

So I had to write a comment. I was fortunate to attend lectures by Martin Davies on the early Italian book while studying the history of the book in London. My hand was forced. I had to write a corrective comment, though now I notice they have not published any comments dated after July 7, 2010 the date the article appeared. So I now leave it here and all of this is indebted to Davies and his inimitable knowledge, except of course any errors I have introduced, those of course are all mine…

ELO_AI & RBMS10, Part 1: An Overview & Introduction

June was a busy and productive month. I presented at both “Archive & Innovate,” the 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization held at Brown University in Providence, RI, and “Join or Die: Collaborations in Special Collections,” the Rare Books and Manuscript Section Preconference (of the American Libraries Association) held in Philadelphia, PA (home of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)). Both conferences were exceptionally good and deepened my engagement in my career as a special collections librarian and as a scholar interested in “media change” and the history of the book.

I intend to unpack some of my own thinking and summarize some of the more interesting presentations, discussions, and concepts brought up at both of these conferences. This will happen over a few posts titled, “ELO-AI & RBMS10.”

The Book Work

Or… The Rise to Prominence of the Book Work

The book is now being clarified.  The work to illustrate this does not yet exist. Or there is only an initial fraction of the work to be. The corpus of work defining the “book work”, in this manner, is under way, but only in the earliest stages.

The book has not yet been fully liberated from its primary function. The book is to be read. The book exists for reading: textual and pictorial.

These are the last days when image-text belongs to the book. Or the last days when it primarily belongs to the book in the contemporary context. The image-text has already moved beyond the book. But where, where has image-text taken up residence?  We can draft a list, but the book remains the home of image-text. Because a new home cannot be simply conjured, it is not a manifest thing. But a new home will be found. A new mode or modes will be established. The book will become quaint.

This is when the book work will emerge.  This is when the book form will reach its apotheosis. The book will not be dead. It will be born anew.

We must be better attuned to the early book works hinting toward the clarified book to be.

{Image: Anselm Kiefer’s “Book with Wings” (1992-94) via  www.artslant.com }

The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print

I’ve been busy working on two writing projects and haven’t posted in over a month.  I recently finished my paper for the Electronic Literature Organization Archive and Innovate conference at Brown University, which starts next week.  I thought I’d post some of it here.  This paper has its origins in several earlier posts about the works on this blog.  In what I’ve posted here, I’m getting straight to my core claims and the discoveries I made while writing this, and cutting the descriptive and analytical bits specifically about Tomasula’s VAS and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (which will appear in the full paper; ellipses indicate cuts).  I think a publication of some sort is planned following the conference, so the entire essay will be available there, hopefully, at a later date.  I welcome feedback in advance of the conference.

The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland

In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual digital novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. This calls attention to what I will call a dual dualism, a circuit of interaction between mind and body and the literary work and its interface (most commonly a printed book), wherein it is envisioned that body engages with book to facilitate the mind engaging with the literary work. Patchwork Girl and VAS problematize this dual dualism as their authors simultaneously exploit it for literary effect.

…

The Possible Book

Traveled to Oberlin tonight to see a lecture by Johanna Drucker and an artists’ books show. I came home to work, was flipping through my notebooks hoping to resurrect some idea, and came across this quote from D&G (cut down to my liking):

A book…is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent god to explain geological movements… There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made… As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages… A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation… of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. — and an abstract machine that sweeps them along?

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus