The understanding of bibliography and its various pedagogies is a crucial component to discovering, preserving, and understanding the complex implications that a book endures in order to be looked at retrospectively. From The Bibliographical Society of America website, George Thomas Tanselle says, “Bibliography is the branch of historical scholarship that examines any handwritten and printed book as physical objects”, and “What links all bibliographical pursuits is an understanding of the significance of book as tangible products of human endeavor.” Books are longtime tools with enriched histories that can be ambiguous. The technicality of papermaking, book designing, typesetting, etc. matter tremendously in conjunction with the social and historical context with which they are made from. In order to account for the history of a book requires a broad familiarization with the culture and time period with which it began and has travelled through.

There is an immense amount of effort that goes into understanding the traditional bibliographical approaches and applying the required scholarly research to critically link histories in an attempt to understand a single book. It is an arduous process that rewards the human species, in hope that the interpretation of a book’s life can spark the intuitiveness of another being. As students of the book, it is important to think critically about the materials, records, and circumstances which shroud the history of the primary medium which we are learning about. From our modern perspective as well, I wonder how digital literature differs in terms of tracing the ecology from which they derive from, and am excited to apply the same scholarly research in that direction.