Author Archives: Janesa Brosnan

Week 6-Bibliographies and Books as a Living History

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If you had asked me before starting this class what a bibliography was, I would’ve said it’s a research trace of a project, but it doesn’t add any value to the project. It’s just there to insure we did thorough research, and our work is truly ours. But now I see what fully encapsulates that research trace. The Bibliographical Society of America state that “as a field of inquiry, bibliography examines the artifactual value of texts – including books, manuscripts, and digital texts – and how they reflect the people and cultures that created, acquired, and exchanged them.” By making a bibliography, you are making an imprint of your actions caused by thinking impacted by social and cultural systems. What search engine you use could come up with different results first and that engine put onto your computer could indicate what model and make you have, which you chose from the impact of cultural and economic influence. Our own bibliography tells a story of how we made the choices and thoughts from outside influences that got us to our research conclusion.

I did not consider before this class that physical objects or anything but a project or paper for school could have a bibliography. It is fascinating to me how much information about the world books hold. A book tells us about accessibility, culture, value, place, and time. A books bibliography and books as an object, is a living, breathing, history about humankind. W.W. Greg states in “Bibliography – A Retrospect” (1945), “For in the ultimate resort the object of bibliographical study is, I believe, to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word. As an extension of this follows the investigation of the methods of production in general and of the conditions of survival.” (27) The history of a book and creating a bibliography for it crafts the intimate life and history of that book. Through bibliographers piecing together parts whether it be what material it’s bound in, where is it regionally from, is the making of it a cultural or period specific practice, are putting back a piece of history for us to be able to understand the past and people. A book is an imprint made by putting parts of different lives together and then is untangled and translated by bibliographers in the future for those lives and customs to continue on.

Worshiping the Book Through Annotation- Week Five

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Borsuk in the second chapter discusses the intimacy of the book, of reading it, of having something uniquely made. Printshops designed “printer devices” to make their shops stand out, with a book uniquely theirs, tied to them. My question is do we have that same intimacy and relationship with books as readers to the makers and writers?

I covet it, sometimes I think I might worship them. Even as a kid, I hated writing in books. I still don’t unless I am deliberately instructed to do so with annotations and highlighting. I internally cringe when someone dog tags a book page. On my bookshelf, you will rarely find a book of mine to be fully annotated. While I don’t usually annotate as I’m reading as it brings out of my state of focus on what I’m reading, if I do, I use sticky notes and page markers to make point of things. I can’t will myself to write on pages because I feel I am ruining the art of the delicate paper and letters that the printer compiled. I think have this intimacy for books, but I am really just coveting it and not allowing myself to have an actual relationship with the words and pages?

I had this question when I went to bible study last week and everyone had written and highlighted in their bibles. They had a chorus of words in all the margins or wherever they could fit to describe their thoughts on the passage. They have bibles now that have space for notes on the each page to write down your thoughts. By writing down everything, they have a personal relationship with their bible book which gives them a stronger understanding of the text and of God. And that is the point, to get something out of the book, to create an understanding with the book. By annotating it, it increases their importance to them and everyone that made that book.

Annotating and writing in the book creates a personal connection to the authors and the makers of the book. If we sanctify a text so much where we can’t touch it, do we lose part of the connection we have with it or making it stronger by giving it this mystical and powerful presence?

Week 4: My Story with The Book of Kells

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When I was 13, I went to Ireland and Scotland with my family. My dad’s half Irish so we wanted to explore our family roots and culture as it was important to my Grandparents to go, experience, and see other places. While we went to many places during our two-week trip, a city we all enjoyed was Dublin.

As my cousins, siblings, and I, were all teenagers at the time, we didn’t necessarily appreciate the constant walking tours of tombs, ruins, churches, and museums. And I, especially didn’t like that we stopped at least once a day to go to a bar. I got so mad one day that I made my family stop on the side of the road and go pet goats and sheep as penance. But Dublin, we all enjoyed.

One stop we made was Trinity College, where we did a tour of The Old Library, holding volumes and stacks of old books. One such book we saw on the tour included with The Old Library was The Book of Kells, mentioned in Borsuk’s The Book Chapter 1. I didn’t quite understand the importance of it at the time, and I wasn’t in my book fascination and fetishization phase yet, but I can tell you that it is a beautiful book and a beautiful library. I was at the time intrigued with the images and manuscript drawings that weren’t in modern books.

After my siblings and I finished the tour walk-through quite quickly as we didn’t see the importance of seeing a random library, we were heavily scolded by our tour guide that waited outside. She stated “Education has been wasted on you. History has been wasted on you.” And while we didn’t understand her words and ignored her judgement at the time, I did get it years after.

What we ignored was history. We didn’t understand the importance of a religious book because we have millions now. Why would it be important? We didn’t understand the weight that manuscripts hold to the accessibility and history of knowledge and information sharing. That library and what it contains, is the history of the Church, it’s spread and power of information, which leads us to where we are now. It also shows how intricate details and drawings woven into writings has mostly been lost to time and aren’t used anymore.

She was right. We didn’t appreciate that we got to see a piece of history, literature, and culture, and a part of the system that helped the accessibility to knowledge because of Christian texts and copying.

I very much want to go back to see that library and book with the appreciation I do now. I think now I would be in there for hours admiring the work and sacredness of the texts and the beauty of the library. Every old piece of paper or writing or drawing isn’t just that, it’s a piece of history and one of the reasons we have the knowledge and critical thinking that we do now.

Week 3: Romanticizing Old Media 

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In « Old Media/New Media », the definition and use of new media being a new perspective of technology got me thinking about the fetishization and idealization of old media because of new media. It has been trends for multiple decades to romanticize old media whether it be books, movies, music, or technology. As a generation, I’ve noticed this resurgence of old record keeping and collections. I’ve noticed that in the wave of new media and digital record keeping, there’s a distrust of whether it truly will forever keep everything accessible. Yes, things will always be on the internet or main frame, but it’s the question of whether or when it will stop being accessible to common people.
Over time, updates come and things need to be backed up or older versions won’t be able to be processed. While things stay forever, the digital format is growing so rapidly, websites and old applications even from ten years ago take much longer to load or don’t work. It happened to me when I tried playing a flash game that I played in middle school that no longer worked. Flash isn’t supported by my computer anymore and blockers won’t let me download it or bypass it.
Changing governments over time can also change the access to media. Government documents right now are being deleted from certain websites. While we can still access it as other forms or on other websites, going to the main place we usually find these documents and political information make it a step harder to find these things. This creates a form of censorship and real time evidence that historical information we thought we could have forever can be deleted or made harder to access in real time. In this era, we’re witnessing these things get harder to attain and we get worried.
I think this generation is scared of having their childhood memories be unattainable or unplayable because of slower systems not being able to work anymore or it being blocked from access. By fetishizing old media and using it like saving childhood books, 3D’s, or DvD’s, we are trying to save our childhood memories from being lost. As well as romanticizing old media like vinyls, we’re trying to create memories with things that can’t be taken away because it’s tangible, not digital.

Introduction

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Hi guys, I’m Janesa!

I’m a junior who just transferred to sdsu from Glendale Community College with an AA in Liberal Arts. I’m finishing a bachelors in English and Comparative Lit here for the next two years. I love writing, reading, and hope to be an editor.

I’m from Santa Clarita, where Magic Mountain is, about 45 minutes from Downtown La. I don’t think there’s much else to the town, but there is some filming done and gold was first found in California in our town. I do like our proximity to La though and love the places I’ve been able to go because of it. I loved my time going to Glendale, which has amazing Armenian food, and near is Pasadena which is really cute.

My hobbies are dancing, baking, and going to coffee shops. My two home away from homes are my old dance studio and any cafe because of how much time I do or used to spend there. I will immediately say yes if anyone wants to go to a coffee shop or ballet, which my favorites are Romeo and Juliet and The Rite of Spring(the music is crazy, it was actually so badly received, the audience started a riot). I also really love fashion and music, my favorites being 60’s and 90’s for both. My favorites are The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Sam Cook, and currently Laufey.

The photo upload keeps not working so I can’t put one here, but it was a photo of me in a bookshop in Pike Place in Seattle. For reference to point me out, I’m 5 foot and have brown hair.