NYPL librarian and author of Bibliocraft: Using Library Resources to Jumpstart Creative Projects will be the guest of honor at this event on Monday, October 27th. See the UCLA Library calendar for more information: Bibliocraft @ UCLA
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On June 3rd we will co-host a talk by Alan Liu; please join us!
“This is Not a Book: Long Forms of Attention in the Digital Age”
Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara)
Tuesday June 3, 11:00-12:30,
Location: UCR INTS 1113
Co-sponsored by Critical Digital Humanities
This talk is free and open to the public.
A common response to an electronic book or other digital media is that, while it may be better or worse than a book, “this is not a book.” But digital media has the uncanny effect of making us realize that physical books themselves were never truly books–if by “book” we mean a long form of attention designed for the permanent, standard, and authoritative communication of human thought or experience. This talk will outline methods for discovering and tracking socially repeatable and valued “long forms of attention” whether in books or other constellations of materials, in the past or the digital present.
The talk will conclude with a look at the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) created by a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, directed by Liu.
The Material Cultures of the Book Working Group at UC Riverside is pleased to present:
“Women’s Revolutionary Translation: British-German Books in the 1790s”
Alessa Johns (UC Davis)
Thursday May 8, 1:00-2:30, in HMNSS 2212
If you have any questions, please contact Rebecca Addicks-Salerno (raddi001@ucr.edu).
This event is free and open to the public!
From Andrew Stauffer and Nines.org comes a new project to find unique copies of 19th and early 20th century books on library shelves that are at risk from digitization initiatives. Many of these books are not marked as ‘rare’ or ‘unique’ and are in danger of being discarded as copies. As the site’s home page says:
Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left notes, pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them because many are in danger of being discarded as libraries go digital. Books printed between 1820 and 1923 are at particular risk. Help us prove the value of maintaining rich print collections in our libraries.
The site also looks to be a fascinating archive of marginalia and the ephemera of literary culture in the making. Check out the examples already up at booktraces.org and submit your own examples. All they need are a few pictures and a basic description. Be a book history superhero, armed with no more than a smartphone!
The Material Cultures of the Book Mellon Group, along with the Department of English, are pleased to announce an upcoming talk by Carla Mazzio! This talk is open to the public.
The Trouble with Numbers: Calculation and Humanism from the “How-To” Book to Hamlet- A Talk by Carla Mazzio.
This lecture, part of Mazzio’s book in progress, Calculating Minds: The Drama of Mathematics in the Age of Shakespeare, explores the affective and dramatic dimensions of mathematical discourse in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.
Tuesday March 11, 2014 (4pm)
UCR Department of English
HMNSS 2212
Snacks will be served!
BIO
Carla Mazzio, Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, specializes in early modern literature in relationship to the history of science, the history of the body, and the history of language and the material book. She the author of The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (awarded the 2010 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize) and co-author of Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 (2005). She is also the editor of Shakespeare & Science (2009) and the co-editor of three books, including Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (with Douglas Trevor) and The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (with David Hillman, awarded the English Association Beatrice White Book Prize). Mazzio, currently the co-director (with James Bono) of the “Humanities, Science and the Arts” Research Workshop at UB, will be speaking with us about her book in progress, “Calculating Minds: The Drama of Mathematics in the Age of Shakespeare,” under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.
UCR’s Critical Digital Humanities and Medical Narratives Mellon research groups are hosting a Lunchtime Lightning Talks Event, Transgressive Research Methods: What Happens when the Humanities Engages with Science? on October 24, 2013 from 11:30 – 1:00 in HMNSS 2212. This event is open to faculty, graduates, and undergraduates, and lunch will be provided.
This Discussion-Based event will take the form of 5-7 minute “Lightning” talks, presented by faculty and graduate students. These quick interventions will focus on the ethics, values, limitations, and possibilities of interdisciplinary research methods, with the goal of generating inquiry, reflection, and discussion among the participants around the following, and other related, issues:
What features characterize “truly interdisciplinary” research?
How does the blend of methodologies, topics, and questions from across humanistic and scientific disciplines both limit and/or expand our notions of Research?
What are the ethical considerations involved in cross-disciplinarity?
How do we assign (or reject) value to work that straddles disciplinary borders?
How does the future of the disciplined academy and academic work appear, as grants and honors become more available to work that claims “interdisciplinarity.”?
We look forward to your participation at what promises to be a lively, critical, and thought-provoking event! If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Lozier at slozi001@ucr.edu or Kyle Harp at kharp001@ucr.edu.
Sincerely,
The Critical Digital Humanities and Medical Narratives Mellon Workgroups
Please join the panel discussion this Wednesday, October 16, 3:30-5pm (History Library) on “Media in the Archives: Libraries, Popular Culture, and the Digital,” moderated by UCR History Professor Randy Head and featuring Dr. Dan Lewis (head of manuscripts and Dibner Senior Curator of Science, Medicine, and Technology), Jessica Taylor (NBC Universal Archives and Collections), and Dr. Brian Geiger (UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research). Note that all of these organizations have a track record of hiring UCR grad students and have paid internships.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
An exhibit of extra-illustrated books is currently running at The Huntington. I visited the exhibit, “Illuminated Palaces,” last week and it was wonderful as well as a little frightening.
The process these books have undergone is called “grangerizing,” a method through which prints and other desirable portions of books are extracted and pasted into other books for collection.
The frightening part is that many books were destroyed or at least vandalized, their pages ripped, cut, and torn in order to yield the prints and images so sought after by collectors.
Some collectors added prints to extra-illustrate their books, while others added postage stamps, playbills, postcards, or handwritten letters of correspondence. In the end, many of these books resembled something of an academic scrapbook, with hidden links and connections between the pasted-in objects only the book’s creator could acknowledge.
Once many prints were pasted into the extra-illustrated book it could be difficult to close, forcing the book to be rebound. A single extra-illustrated book could suddenly divide itself into two volumes, akin to the cellular process of meiosis.
Although the desecration of possibly valuable books makes modern scholars cringe, I have to admit that I found the whole process fascinating. It became something of an obsession to find “heads” or portrait prints of famous individuals, and autographs were pasted alongside printed text. The urge to collect, collate, and organize printed materials was necessarily one of destruction, but it was also accompanied by a new creation, a remixing of knowledge and information.
“Illuminated Palaces” exhibit webpage at The Huntington:
http://huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary_02.aspx?id=11542
The video below shows the process of extra-illumination, which is definitely not a practice any scholar or conservator would engage in these days. Without the panels cut into each page, the pasted-in images would cause the book to bulge in the middle: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2013/07/stopmotion-inlay/
The Edward Dean Museum in Cherry Valley is opening a new exhibit on print culture and books on September 14th. Rebecca will be hosting an informal gathering for Material Cultures of the Book Working Group members and guests after the exhibit opening, so let her know if you would like to attend!
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Edward-Dean Museum presents a new exhibition, Secrets in the Script This exhibit examines the impact and beauty of printed words and images from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Visit to see how coffee houses became the meeting places where all could gather over a “cup of brew.” Pick up a free cup of coffee to enjoy while you view prints and rare books from the Edward-Dean Collection.