CREMS Brown Bag lunch: The Futures of Book History

Dear All

This is the second of two informal brown bag lunches, starting at 1pm, to talk about topics that we hope will be of interest.

In this session we want to talk about our interests in and frustrations with the field very unsatisfactorily known as 'book history'. What have we found useful in research on the history of the book and the materiality of the text? What are the blind alleys or problems of the discipline? And what might new work on books and/as objects look like? As for our Collections session, there is no required reading, and a large part of our purpose is to bring together a variety of ideas and approaches. For those who would like to share some common reading, however, we are suggesting:

Extract from Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England
Johanna Drucker, 'Performative Materiality and Interpretative Interface' (http://www.johannadrucker.com/pdf/performative_materiality.pdf)
Carla Nappi, 'Surface Tenion' (an essay on Chinese ginseng, which we're nonetheless keen to explore in the context of the page)
Andrew Piper and Mark Algee-Hewitt, 'The Werther Effect I: Goethe, Objecthood, and the the Handling of Knowledge' (an example of the recent proliferation of digital humanities work in this field - for debate, not because we necessarily like it! http://piperlab.mcgill.ca/pdfs/WertherEffect1.pdf)
Extract from Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology

We'll be making these available in a dropbox folder - please email Helen if you would like access.

We hope many of you will come along, and look forward to a lively discussion.
Bring your own lunch, CREMS will provide tea and coffee.

All best wishes

Emma Molin and Helen Smith
(helen.smith@york.ac.uk)