Tag Archives: disability

Stumble! Moving with the Media Network of Rufus Butler Seder’s “Gallop!”

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The book is a mobile technology which moves across media and time. Following these movements was the collaborative exercise of the under/graduate “experimental” course BOOKS!!, taught by Dr. Jessica Pressman and Anna Culbertson at San Diego State University (“About/Class Info”). In visits to SDSU Library’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), I wrote my first bibliography of Rufus Butler Seder’s toy book Gallop! (2007). I now narrate the traversals through creative project design which directed me back to the materiality of Gallop!, situating my embodied learning in what Alan Liu (2018) terms the “media network” through which the book and its sister text Swing! (2008) move. Seder’s “Scanimation” books mediate the colliding movements of intermedia histories between the book and screen media in relation to the physical reading processes of human bodies and their media network. Examining the media networks of Seder’s books necessitates examining the bodily movements of their readers – including myself – and models how materiality and network studies might be used in bodywork like disability studies.

Watch My Project Demo Here

(Captions forthcoming.)

Stumble! My Project Prototype

In reading Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s augmented reality book Between Page and Screen (2012), Pressman describes how its “network of animate and inanimate actors”, “one of whom is you . . . , work together [to] produce a literary performance that highlights simultaneously the thingness of the book and also the book’s capacity to participate in a digital circuit” (Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age 70-1). Scanimation books enact a parallel networking in which the “thingness of the book” – extending to its reader’s physical acts of reading it – embodies the book’s “capacity to participate” in an intermedia audiovisual circuit. This circuit model expands through the lens of Alan Liu’s network archaeology, in which “a ‘work’ [is] not . . . an item to be transported or linked in a network but instead as itself a micro-network.” By “treating works as internally networked structures”, a network archaeologist might trace a constellation of interactions and histories which ripple through time and place. When we consider a book as “dynamic, event-driven information”, we reveal the significance not only of its immediate material body but of that body’s movements, interactions, and convergences across “events.” In this paper, I rehearse how the design of Gallop! and Swing! act on the bodily movements of Seder’s readers – myself and others – to hypermediate the reading of the book as an intermedia network event.

Gallop! hypermediates reader activation: movements of the reader incite and parallel the movement of the book’s illustrations. I expand on my earlier bibliography of Gallop! to examine the Scanimation book’s materiality in the pages below.

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Week 6: Thinking on Critical Bibliography

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I was out sick and missed Tuesday’s practice in descriptive bibliography, as described by Terry Belanger (1977 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). (Thanks to Vide for keeping me in the loop.) Now I’m typing this week’s post informally because my mind is slow-simmering with sick. I note this because it’s offering me insight into how sickness influences energy and modes of functioning in a way that, like the language and probable typos in this post, can be read in comparison with other posts to signify my material circumstances as a creator. Considering the scope of bibliographic methods described in the Bibliographical Society of America’s “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” (2025), I’m thinking about how a disabled or sick bibliography would operate.

Following Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment’s “critical bibliography”, I want to approach bibliography as culturally situated and potentially radical work. I’m thinking of a disabled or crip bibliography, which is a familiar practice in disability studies. There’s a quandary of identification in disability studies: How can we determine that a creator is disabled when there’s no hard evidence of this? Using bibliography, I think that we can elide this unnecessary (and at times medicalist) question and instead center how the materiality of a created object holds traces of disabled ways of being and production.

While it’s common to encounter a work and “just know” that you’re encountering crip kin, what you’re really experiencing is the recognition of familiar material behaviors in their media. The manically-typed scroll of Jack Kerouac, the multiple hands of blind Jorge Luis Borges and his assisting mother, the smudged and slanting correspondences of Frank’s Kafka during his late institutionalization, and the frenetic journal infodumps of Ada Lovelace can all be read for traces of disabled production practices. We might not know the affective experiences with which actors approached a book object, but we can read what G. Thomas Tanselle calls “physical clues [that] reveal details of the underlying production process” (2020 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). There is some uphill work, I think, in defining and asserting ways of reading disabled production to a broader audience, but understanding the book as a technology means that we can understand how actors adapt it for disabled use.

This approach to bibliography is not limited to the processes of writing or printing a book object. The ways that people use books, as we’ve seen, are shaped by material circumstances; reading is, and has always been, transformed through disabled adaptations. Physical production processes are shaped by bodily limits on energy, time, and access. Charting these processes through crip bibliography can recenter the prevalence and importance of disabled life across history, resisting the dehistoricization and erasure of disabled life in dominant histories. This is critical when the erasure of our histories is used to justify the eradication of our futures.

I follow the bodily attunement of disability and affect theories in centering this way of experiencing the world as I practice bibliography from home. I’m looking over my journals and (in comparative readings with the aforementioned letters) observing how (re-)inking, formatting, and medium reflect how I was evidently using sketchbooks, notebooks, Post-It’s, and other ephemera both as existing books (mostly store-bought) and as creative adaptions. I will not be doing this project before a more foundations-based attempt at bibliography, but I do want to give it a try: I’ll write a bibliography of my written journals across my changes in health. Here I am trying out a disabled bibliography that can only be done in a disabled way. I’m thinking on this as my fever has exacerbated my memory issues, and approaching my journals does not come with memories of their creation. I would here undertake bibliography of objects that I know the context of (I modified them at some point) but not the actual processes of creating (those memories are gone). This would invite critical insight into doing disabled (auto?)bibliography, using immemory to investigate the fractured but continuous relationship between bibliographer, book object, and trace actors.

Week 2: Bodies and Knowledge Production in Borges’ Library

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New York Times writer Noam Cohen names Jorge Luis Borges the “Man Who Discovered the Internet” (“Borges and the Foreseeable Future” 2008). Borges (1899-1996) envisioned prescient models of hypertext and the Internet not only as technologies, but as cultural institutions which shape human relationships to reading and space. The Library of Babel, Borges’ famous 1941 short story, is framed as the late dispatch of a philosopher in the limitless, arcane Library of Babel. Borges suggests that the custom of reading is a perpetually iterated project in which we interpret our environments, and through which we construct and deconstruct knowledges.

The narrator of The Library of Babel catalogs the esoteric architecture of the Library, defining its physical properties much like an archivist recording the material data of a book object. The datific language of this archival reads the Library itself as a book object. (The fabled “book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books” would thus seem to be the Library itself, and all librarians within it thus together compose the demi-godly “Book-Man” [116].) The narrator’s descriptions increasingly focus in scale, suggesting the labor and time taken to read the Library space: while it might take quickly enough to mark that “[e]ach wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves”, for how long have the librarians studied to find that “each line” of every book contains “approximately eighty black letters” (113)? The labor of cataloging the Library’s material properties, as visible in the narrator’s report as it is in the metadata of SDSU’s library catalog, is bound up in bodily time. Borges situates archival, reading, and knowledge production as material, time-bound labors that interface with violence and mortality. Before the Internet exists, Borges reminds us that this network is a material construction through which human labor produces means of interpreting information. This seemingly prophetic image indicates Borges’ understanding of books, reading, and knowledge production as material objects and actions.

More under the cut.

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