The Light Commodity of Words: Digitizing the Material Book
Lamb, Jonathan
Lamb, Jonathan
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Abstract
This talk will explore the issues that arise when material objects are converted into digital form. Although such questions have received much attention from a throng of scholars, librarians, and computer scientists, I wish to address them from the perspective of a ‘domain scientist’ of literary and textual culture—a user perspective, as it were. Taking as my subject the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, along with EEBO’s newish Text Creation Partnership (TCP) full-text tool, I will argue that book digitization makes possible (and necessary) a material-digital dialectic. Such a dialectic, which privileges neither material nor digital artifacts but allows a researcher to jump like a spark between the two poles, becomes especially visible and productive when studying books from the early modern period (1500-1700). Each domain (i.e., the digital and material) offers medium-specific forms of resistance and friction, and each therefore provokes new insight with respect to the other. The talk will feature a multitude of examples and only light theorization, no prior knowledge of EEBO or EEBO-TCP is required.
Description
Digital Humanities Seminar, University of Kansas—Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities & Hall Center for the Humanities, September 5, 2013: http://idrh.ku.edu
Jonathan Lamb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas.
Date
2013-09-05
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Keywords
Digital, Humanities, Digitizing (Project Focus), Material Book, Book, University of Kansas