Full Description
This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.
Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword: Intermediate Horizons by Matthew Kirschenbaum
Introduction
by Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha
Section I. Approach
1 Benjamin Franklin's Postal Work
by Christy L. Pottroff
2 Linking Book History and the Digital Humanities via Museum Studies
by Jayme Yahr
Section II. Access
3 Material and Digital Traces in Patterns of Nature: Early Modern Botany Books and Seventeenth-Century Needlework
by Mary Learner
4 Opening the Book: The Utopian Dreams and Uncertain Future of Open Access Textbook Publishing
by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright
5 Books of Ours: What Libraries Can Learn About Social Media from Books of Hours
by Alexandra Alvis
Section III. Assessment
6 Whose Books Are Online? Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Online Text Collections
by Catherine A. Winters and Clayton P. Michaud
7 Electronic Versioning and Digital Editions
by Paul A. Broyles
8 Materialisms and the Cultural Turn in Digital Humanities
by Mattie Burkert
Contributors
Index
