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they don’t. Which led me to question how much we can truly digitize or preserve online, especially when things become outdated or buried under other searches.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.

Obtaining, Processing, and Distributing the Interface

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I found the descriptions regarding legal gray areas that The Internet Archive and Google Books went through very revealing of the digital age’s growing pains. The Internet Archive went through a major legal case after quarantine when several large publishers accused Archive for giving out free copies of books under something Archive called “the emergency library”. The emergency library was created for people to continue to access books even though they did not have physical access to their libraries. In the end, The Internet Archive lost the case. This case reflects Google Books when the “Author’s Guild… filed [a] suit in 2005 for copyright infringement… they argued that the library project, which scans numerous copyright–but out-of-print–works, was illegal, and that Google needed to pay royalties for these books” (Borsuk 228). Google argued that their use was “like an author quoting a source… but at the level of the code” (Borsuk 228).

Both of these cases illustrate how distribution manifests itself very differently with e-books. While free distribution of copyrighted books is not allowed, searchable snippets are. The digital age has brought a different way to interact with books that was not possible before. Now, we can distribute a near-infinite number of books of all kinds. We can parse through them with unprecedented detail. Yet, only certain forms of distribution are allowed. In large part, Capitalism plays a role in the logic of distribution legality. The Archive wanted to freely distribute books, Google wanted to make it easier to find snippets of books which the reader would (presumably) eventually buy. I do not want to make any claims of foul play in the decision making process of these cases, however, I will argue that there is a capitalistic ethos at play which seems to almost arbitrarily draw lines on copyright law until one considers the monetary potential of these decisions. In other words, stealing intellectual work only matters when someone can’t make money anymore. It only seems to matter when the entity unable to make money from intellectual work has enough bargaining power to make someone listen. In this case, it is the major publishing companies.

People no longer need to go to the library or scour through multiple books to find the information they need. Knowledge is as far away as a few clicks. The distribution of knowledge is as free as it ever has been, presumably this gives further justification to ideas of meritocracy. Additionally, e-lit can be parsed through for information incredibly quickly in a way that physical books cannot. This rationalizes the modern fetishization of physical books–of book-ishness. E-Lit is for information, physical books are for leisure. In some ways, it is a symbol of class divide. To have time to read is to have time for leisure, to have time for leisure is to be upper-middle class.

Ways of Seeing

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My interpretation of the book has shifted—not only is it a materialistic characterization of the physical qualities of the book itself, but also a vessel that reveals society’s underlying values, whatever those may be at the time it is written or read. The book is ever-evolving, adapting to social trends; in the 1600s, it was viewed as a symbol of status, power, and control, as only those of the higher orders of society were able to read and interpret texts. Those views have greatly shifted—people rarely read today, and those who do often romanticize it for the prestige that has become intrinsic to the book—echoing that the book is dependent on our values. Therefore, the book is not merely a physical object but a cultural artifact that responds to and acts in accordance with our needs. It is a material form that reflects our values and technological advancements, a medium that can serve as a weapon, a sacred text, or simply the bread and circus for a society too self-centered to recognize the value and worth of words. Therefore, the book cannot be a fixed object but one that embodies our social structures, operating from within rather than independently; the book allows us to engage with the world in alternate ways. We are all interconnected, sharing the same experiences, collectively challenging our ideas and beliefs, encouraging critical thinking and awareness. As Amaranth explains, “we might examine the book as what scholar N. Katherine Hayles calls it a “material metaphor”, through which we interface with language and which in turn alters how we can do so” (Borsuk 141); language is not static, it bounces between different signifies/signifieds, it allows us, the readers, to mediate between, word, text and meaning– in a manner, the book not only represents our social values as I previously mentioned but also redefines our ways of thinking– influencing how language is transformed through an amalgamation of social-cultural apparatus that interjects in our relationship with words and text.

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.

history of books = the study how ideas make us who we are

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Robert Darnton wrote that the purpose of book history is “to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years.” (p.65) This statement captures not only the essence of Darnton’s essay “What Is the History of Books?”  but also the broader human story of how reading shapes who we are. Books, in Darnton’s view, are not just reflections of history they are engines that drive it. His focus on transmission and exposure reveals a belief that the printed word has transformed not only what people think but how they think.

Darnton’s use of the words “transmitted” and “exposure” is particularly telling. He writes as if ideas themselves are living entities that move through society, carried by print. To be “exposed” to print, in his sense, is to encounter a force capable of altering consciousness and culture. For Darnton, the invention of printing was not a mere technological development it was a social revolution. When the printed word began to circulate widely after Gutenberg, it created new readers, new publics, and new ways of understanding authority and truth. This helps explain how the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even modern democracy were all, in part, consequences of printed communication. The book, in Darnton’s framework, becomes a kind of historical virus infectious, transformative, and unstoppable once released into the world.

What makes Darnton’s insight so powerful is that he shifts our attention away from individual authors and texts toward the systemthat connects them: printers, booksellers, readers, and ideas all interacting in what he famously calls the “communications circuit.” (p.67) This model breaks down the myth of the solitary genius writing in isolation. Instead, it shows that intellectual change happens through network through the messy, material processes of production and exchange. The meaning of a book, then, does not end on the page it continues in the reader’s mind and in the society that absorbs it.

Darnton’s vision remains strikingly relevant today. If he saw the printing press as the great disruptor of the early modern world, we might see the internet as its digital heir. Our ideas still travel, multiply, and mutate through systems of transmission. His insight reminds us that every act of reading whether of a printed book or a glowing screen links us to a centuries-old chain of human communication. To study the history of books, as Darnton suggests, is really to study how ideas make us who we are.

A Network of Communication

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In his essay “What is the History of Books?”, Robert Darnton describes books not simply as texts or objects, but as part of a living communication system. Darnton emphasizes that books are not static things, but social actors that circulate within a complex network of people, institutions, and ideas.

The model described by Darnton, the “communications circuit,” illustrates this insight very well. “Communications circuit” refers to a cycle in which a book moves from its creation to its reception. He writes: “It could be described as a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher, the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader.” Each of these actors shapes the text. The author is himself a reader of other texts. The publisher decides what will be published. The printer influences the design. The distributor determines the distribution. The reader closes the cycle by interpreting the book. This is how new ideas are generated. This model shows that books do not exist in isolation, but are products of social and economic relationships. There is a long way between the author and the reader, which is usually not taken into account. Paper suppliers, censorship authorities, transport networks, markets, and cultural institutions are the infrastructures that lie between the two entities. Darnton illustrates this with the example of Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. This book, which was officially banned, traveled across borders, smuggling routes, and publishing networks from Switzerland to southern France. It was therefore not only an intellectual work, but also a material object shaped by political, economic, and logistical conditions.

The history of books is therefore not a secondary discipline, but a gateway to the history of communication itself. It connects literature, economics, politics, and society. I find Darnton’s idea that books not only tell history but also make it particularly convincing. They are tools for spreading ideas and knowledge, but also products of their own time. Darnton’s model reminds us that every medium, whether printed or digital, remains part of a social cycle in which knowledge, power, and meaning are interwoven.

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.