Category Archives: Week 9: Methods of Studying Book as/in Networks & Media Archeology -Borsuk Ch. 4, Darnton, Huhtamo & Parikka

Physicality in Digital Texts

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This final chapter of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book discusses digital archiving initiatives such as The Internet Archive, Project Gutenburg, and Google Books. Crating digital texts still requires a hands on physical practice. The Internet Archive emphasizes the book as object by providing high resolution images of the pages in addition to web accessible files. These files and images fo not appear on the internet through digital means alone. They first require a physical process with a ” camera and cradle setup….while previous methods involved slicing off a book’s binding to facilitate auto feed of its pages though a scanner” (218).

The physicality of creating digital texts is also seen in the work of Andrew Norman Wilson, in Workers Leaving the GooglePlex and beyond: “[Wilson] has published images found among Google’s books that include the hands or fingers of these invisible scanners—a reminder of the relationship between the manual and the digital” (226). This relationship, as Borsuk implies, seems to be a imbalanced one, as the employees tasked with this scanning work (archival work) were mostly people of color who didn’t receive the same benefits as other employees. In this context, at least, we can see that the materiality of the book, and the labor involved in interacting with the object, is deemphasized and undervalued.

Maybe this is due in part to who digital archiving benefits the most: the underprivileged and under-resourced who “lack access to brick and mortar libraries (220). The relative accessibility of digital texts is threatening to publishers and those who profit off the commodification of the book. It seems that the further accessibility of digital texts tends to be hindered by the intervening of publishers. While I feel like I do buy into the perceived value of authorship (I feel like I would never pursue publishing if I didn’t) the publishing industry and copyright laws withhold text from the public in the name of capital.

E-Lit: Making a Text Sing

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In the final chapter of The Book, Borsuk gives examples of, “contemporary approaches to digital reading that, rather than offering up a crystal goblet, invite us to trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing” (203). This quote encapsulates how I feel about electronic literature. All books are a collaboration between creators and readers, but not all creators and readers are necessarily conscious of this when they’re creating and/or reading books. Electronic literature is necessarily an interactive experience, which makes the collaborative nature of the book impossible to avoid.

One example that Borsuk mentions is Pry, by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. Borsuk says that, “Pry explicitly requires the reader’s interaction to make meaning” (247). The text remains flat, literally and figuratively, if it is read like a normal e-book. The text must be pried apart for the reader to literally see what would otherwise be subtext. The reader gains a greater understanding of the text not just by close reading, but by active participation.

This is not our first encounter with E-Lit in this class. We read Marginalia in the Library of Babel by Marino at the beginning of the semester. To find meaning in Marino’s annotations, we had to interact with hyperlinks, follow rabbit holes, and make connections. While we all might have interpreted Borges’ Library of Babel differently, may have read with different levels of attention or awareness of context, may have skimmed it at different paces, but we probably interacted with the text similarly, based on how we’ve been trained to read these kind of text in school. Marino’s text, however, is not something most of us are trained to read. Many of us would have tried to read it in a linear form, chronologically or in table-of-contents order, but some probably tried to read it like they might explore Wikipedia, clicking on whatever seems most interesting at the time. Some probably skipped most of the hyperlinks and missed all of the story. Each of us truly read a separate text.

This is why I love E-Lit. It encourages close reading, exploration, and collaboration. It doesn’t just enable readers to make the text their own, it forces them to do so. The authors/designers/coders who create electronic literature must also understand our medium. We need to be able to, as Borsuk puts it, “[draw] attention to the interface to explore and exploit the affordances of the digital” (203). We must know what a reader expects to see and the different ways a reader might interact with the form so that we might subvert those expectations. We must be okay with the idea that most people won’t read every bit of text. The average reader won’t even find every page. However, the culture of electronic literature practically demands that someone will, if you leave it out there long enough to float around in cyberspace.

Where Will All Our Data Go?

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It will never fail to intrigue me how, for the most part, people want definitive answers. Humans want to be able to define the things they interact with and have claim of material knowledge, but in a lot of cases, it’s simply impossible. There’s always more to the conversation than x is x because we say it’s so or a professional has given it a definition. Like, yes, that is true, but anything’s existence is shaped by everything around it. Nothing exists in a bubble, and that could not be any truer than it is for books. 

In learning about “What Is the History of Books” and having a glimpse of “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” I got to read about the evolution of how people approach artifacts, media, and, quite frankly, the world. Within the first “school” of book history, there was a focus on the books of essay access, aka the books from the upper echelon who could afford a variety of books. But, the Annales school brought a new perspective to book history, a more common perspective “on the most ordinary sort of books – to discover the literary experience of ordinary readers” (Darnton, 3). By focusing on the ordinary, the understanding of societies becomes more complete and holistic. 

When considering how book history has shifted to be more inclusive and look at any sort of media, I wonder how book historians will approach the digital, especially with the mass of information out there. What will be considered culturally significant? What will be overlooked? When reading about the Internet Archive and its mission to digitize media, I thought about the overwhelming amount of information out on the internet and how much of it gets missed. I often use Internet Archive to access textbooks I can’t afford to buy, and though they have plenty of textbooks, sometimes they don’t. Which led me to question how much we can truly digitize or preserve online, especially when things become outdated or buried under other searches. 

Week 9: Methods of Studying Book as/in Networks & Media Archeology 

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When I read Robert Darnton’s essay “What Is the History of Books?”, I was surprised by how many different things he connects to something as ordinary as a book. At first, I thought he would just talk about old printing methods or famous writers. Instead, he describes a whole system of people, materials, and ideas working together. For Darnton, a book is part of a communication circuit that links authors, printers, publishers, booksellers, and readers. Each step influences the others, and the reader even closes the circle by reacting to what has been written.

I really liked this idea because it makes books seem alive, not just objects sitting on a shelf. The example of the 18th-century bookseller Rigaud, who had to smuggle Voltaire’s works through borders and censorship, shows how political and risky reading could be. It reminded me that books have always been about power. Who gets to print, sell, and read what.

Darnton also talks about how this field of “book history” brings together many disciplines, from sociology to economics. I find that exciting because it shows how literature is never isolated from the world around it. As a student today, I can also see how his “communication circuit” still applies, just with new players. Online publishers, e-books, and social media instead of printing presses. Readers still influence writers, only much faster now.

One part that stayed with me is Darnton’s question about how reading has changed over time. He mentions that people in the past often read a few books very deeply, while today we read many things more quickly. I recognized myself there, constantly reading, but maybe not always really absorbing.

In the end, Darnton made me see books as part of a larger story of human communication. His essay isn’t only about history, it’s about how ideas travel, survive, and keep connecting people, even centuries later.

Turning Commodification Into an Art

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Rather than turning art into a commodity, Fiona Banner does quite the opposite. When we start from the beginning, books were never meant to be a commodity. But as soon as the printing press made books mass market media, supply and demand exploded, and books became a worldwide necessity. What I was surprised to learn about was that even though books had been widely printed—and even more so since the Industrial Revolution—it wasn’t until 1967 that “the ISBN was initiated in the United States” (Borsuk 242). Truthfully, I did not know how much information the ISBN held, such as the sale, distribution, origin, publisher, title, and edition. I understood the number was used to indicate the specific book, but I never paid any mind to how much it actually documented.

To know that the ISBN is simply a method to track the commodification of a book, it is almost like the dehumanization of a book. Like a book has been imprisoned, assigned a number, and that’s what it’s better known for by sellers. Our demand for these items through the fetishization of books has created the book as a simple, predictable object that we purchase at a moment’s notice. In our world of consumerism, at least there are still unique producers like Fiona Banner, virtually turning herself into a commodified book by “tattooing ‘ISBN 0-9548366-7-7’ on her lower back” (243). While this number signifies lack of individuality (suggesting that there are more people just like her—different versions of herself), it also shows a sense of ownership of self. This act is a form of art and revolution, destroying the concept of predictability. Just to test it out, I copied this ISBN into Google and discovered I could not buy it. Fiona Banner has created a break in the system of commodification. It’s not possible to buy her ISBN, she already owns herself.

As much as we like to fulfill supply and demand, forever and ever, it is simply a man-made concept. It makes complete sense for us to create something that virtually dismantles the idea of art and beauty only for us to deconstruct that idea with art and beauty.

Books and Interface

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This chapter of The Book speaks to and proves just how much readers may want to interact with the book, not merely be able to see its words, but hold, write on, and interface with it, Many of the “e-reader” inventions described by Borsuk are made to “emulate the physical book,” with features that “evoke the curved spine of a paperback.” (Borsuk, 232). Typically today the book, both physical and digital as we know are made for interaction that goes beyond just skimming eyes over letters, with the digital even having tools for bookmarking and annotation, while the physical keeps appropriate margins for the same purposes. Books with these features are made for what Borsuk describes as “handedness.” (234).

The book as an interface is something that permits and invites full immersion into it, not just immersion in the text provided, but in its shape, page, and utility. As a device it is a body that wants to and is meant to be used, have its pages turned until they are torn or have it’s screen pressed until it is cracked. The book will only continue to grow and evolve so long as it prioritizes the reader’s experience, improving and adapting to how a reader can read the book.

Week 9: We’re Getting Booked

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Artist Erica Baum defines the book by defining the verb “contain” (qtd. in Amaranth Borsuk, “Essential Knowledge: The Book”). Following Baum, I’m considering “book” as a verb: to book a reservation, to “book ‘em” in a police databank, “[t]o record in a book, and related senses” (Oxford English Dictionary). To be “booked” in these senses is to be produced as information that is variously legible across what Robert Darnton (1982) calls the “communications circuit”, which models the associational “life cycle” of a book object across prosumer actors (“What is the History of Books?” 67). In each instance, the booked referent is recorded and “contained” as data in an information system. This system is distributed across a communications circuit of readers, producers, and other actors — not all of whom (or which) read the booked information as content, but all of which interact with and entangle the book object in a web of temporal and spatial signifiers. We can thus examine the book as a network which materially reproduces time signatures.

The thinkers profiled in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s introduction to Media Archaeology (2011) variously frame time as a medium which intersects with other media: books, film, social gatherings. “Archaeology” itself entails the reading of bodies across time, which theorists like Marshall MacLuhan, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Zielinski apply to media studies (5, 6, 10). These theorists understand media as circuits which interconnect with other media and bodies through material, temporally-situated exchanges. In writing our bibliographies, we approach media archaeology to record the historic, circuited interactions that are “contained” in, by, and as the book object. Our prosumption expands the book’s circuit through our own temporal interactions with its body, the exchange forging future contexts.

So I’m considering the book object as something which may or may not outlast me, but that which operates by a specific temporality. The book I’ve chosen for my bibliography was published in 2007, but its context expands before and beyond this date. It is generative to consider how the life cycle of the book object differs from your own — it might be a bit like mindfully approaching nonhuman animals with an understanding of how their behavior is shaped by their life cycles. I make this connection not only because the organic materiality of many books situates them as ecological artifacts, but because it is limiting to treat the book object as being removed from organic body-temporalities.

Dr. Pressman writes in “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness” (2018) that “[f]etishism . . . involves attributing to an object the ability to possess and exert powers rather than seeing that object as part of a larger system of programmatic operations” (106). The fetishization of the book displaces it from its context or communications circuit, meaning that it displaces the book from its “life cycle” as a networked object. As a cultural and ritual artifact, the book’s “ability to possess and exert powers” is also the ability to possess and exert a value of atemporality. In a sense, the fetishization of the book vacates it of its life cycle by removing it from its communications circuit. Practically, this might involve a reader or bibliographer failing to notice signs of historical interactions that could reveal the temporal information “contained” in/as the book body. It’s important that we approach book objects with a mind to their communications circuits across time, including our own interactions with them and the possibility of interactions between future actors and the book.

This temporally-mediated approach can guide our readings of book objects as containers of time signatures and material interactions. We should not only read a book, but read that which has been booked. That sounds goofy, but it’s helping me ground my approach to handling book objects and bibliography.

The Book as Interface – Completing the Circuit

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Over the past weeks, my thoughts about the book have slowly shifted. From body, to space, to page. Each chapter of Borsuk’s The Book has opened a new way of seeing what it means to read. This week, reading Chapter 4, I realized that all these ways were already connected by something larger: the book as interface.

Borsuk reminds us that the book is not only an object we hold, but a surface where meaning happens. It stands between us and the text, turning thought into touch, paper into feeling. What struck me most was the line “The book accommodates us, and we accommodate to it.” (p. 198) It captures exactly what I have been circling around all along. Reading is not just something we do, but something that also shapes us. We lean toward the page and the page leans back.

In earlier chapters, I imagined each page as a room, a space to walk through. With Borsuk’s idea of the interface, that room now has a threshold, which is the moment where we cross from our world into the book’s. The interface is that invisible border, one that feels natural only because we have learned not to see it. When she describes how modern devices try to make the interface “transparent”, I think back to Mak’s observation that we have been trained to treat the page’s edges as the limits of our thinking. Both show that what feels natural is often the product of design. A quiet space built around our attention.

What makes Borsuk’s idea powerful is that it reintroduces the body. Touching, turning, swiping, each is a way of thinking through movement. The gestures may have changed, from paper to glass, but the intimacy remains. Reading becomes a circuit that includes us. The author, the text, the page and the reader’s hands all connected in one loop of attention.

Looking back, I have really enjoyed this journey through The Book. Each chapter felt like walking a little further inside it. From its body, to its rooms, to the very surface that connects us to it. What is most interesting to me is how much my own perception has changed along the way. I began by thinking of the book as something to look at, but now I see it as something to move through. The book is not a fixed thing, but a living relationship. A body that greets us, a space that invites us in, and finally, an interface that completes itself only through our touch. Every time we turn a page or brush a screen, we close that circuit. In the end, the book is not what stands between us and meaning. It is the place where we meet it.

Week Nine: Methods of Studying Book

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As our study of books nears the modern, digital-age, it is necessary to recognize the challenges that come with what we consider media archaeology. As a field, media archaeology is hard to define as it has no founding institution or principles which scholars may refer to and the advent of today’s ever-evolving digital landscape furthers the ambiguity. 

A strength and a weakness to digital creation is accessibility and its ability to support experimentation by any scholars and creators who can access such technology. The digital democratizes media production and includes more voices in scholarly discourse, however, with a surplus on information comes voices falling into the margins. As highlighted in An Archaeology of Media Archaeology, Huhtamo and Parikka present, “Media archaeologists have concluded that widely endorsed accounts of contemporary media culture and media histories alike often tell only selected parts of the story, and not necessarily correct and relevant parts. Much has been left by the roadside out of negligence or ideological bias” (3). While media archaeology aims to uncover media history that dominant narratives overlook, Huhtamo and Parikka warn against “widely endorsed accounts” as being notable but not neutral. Though such certain aspects of media culture may be widely accepted, they “often tell only selected parts of the story” with what is “selected” being a site of politics and power. What is “correct and relevant” will always be subjective, but it points to exclusion occurring in media archaeology though the discipline having best interests in preservation of varying backgrounds and perspectives. 

In the digital age, accessibility presents an illusion of inclusivity as algorithms and platforming of certain voices make it impossible for all to be heard. While conversations of AI replacing human creativity is ever prevalent today, as a scholar I feel more concerned about what information and narratives are already lost. I will be interested as we move forward into experimental and digital literature to know more about who are the creators behind the archives we observe and if their backgrounds are different than those of traditional literature.

The Book Chapter Four

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In Chapter four, the conversation of interfaces really interested me. Borsuk discussed how we encounter interfaces continually, on many different levels and devices, each being different and unique. She says-  “A good interface, according to human-centered design principles, is like Ward’s crystal goblet: a transparent vessel through which we access the information we want. This invisibility may be marked as utility, but it is not necessarily in our best interest” (page 116). As she discusses the invisibility of interfaces she says how this can harm us, as it limits our ability to understand them. She says this turns us into just consumers, and blocks the ability for us to make content. I thought this was an interesting observation, the Kindle being an example of this, its interface changing the way I read or consume a book. I knew this prior to reading this chapter, but thinking about it-it really does drastically change how I read. I feel like I skip through pages quicker and consume books faster on a Kindle or e-book device, then I would with a physical book. The difference in interface changes the difference in the content I’m consuming, I do not read the same way on a Kindle that I do with a physical book. This conversation about interfaces made me think more deeply about how I consume content on different devices, as well as how an interface in general changes the experience of the consumer. Each interface I consume has a different outcome than the rest, if I read a e book on a computer versus a Kindle, my engagement is deeper on the latter. I had not thought about how important an interface can be when consuming media, and how it overall changes my reading experience.

Another concept that fascinated me was the discussion of the “Physical Archive of the Internet Archive.” The text says “Physical Archive of the Internet Archive, housed in forty-foot climate-controlled shipping containers in Richmond, California, to maintain the books, records, and movies in their digital archive” (page 125). This caught my attention because I grew up 15 minutes away from Richmond, California, and I did not know this existed. I was intrigued with the fact that Borsuk was saying that libraries did not want physical books, which was a part of the creation of the internet archive. I had not thought about the fact that physical books were not wanted, I thought it would be the opposite, but it is interesting to read about how the internet archive was Birthed. A lot of books are being deaccessioned by libraries because the digital format now exists, which is sort of sad to think that digital versions are championing the print versions. Now that I know how I consume digital literature differently than physical literature, I prefer the latter. I enjoyed reading about the digitization of books and the interface as context to reading materials.