Tag Archives: raine

Week 5: Morph as Content

Posted on by
1

Amaranth Borsuk defines the book as “a portable information storage and distribution method” (The Book 1).The History of Reading Working Group (William Warner et al.), part of UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project, reads these methods across time through In the Beginning Was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface (2008). The Flash animation, now archived as three video simulations, “represent[s] the morphs of the page over the past 1,400 years” through “the first fourteen lines of the Gospel of John.”  I examine the connotations of the term “morph” in the context of Borsuk’s materiality studies.

I was curious about The History of Reading Working Group’s use of “morph” as a noun, which I had only been familiar with in evolutionary biology contexts. The OED lists the meanings of “morph” as “The action, process, or technique of changing one image into another by morphing; an instance of this” (first attested in 1991) or as “An image or character created by morphing”, particularly through computer manipulation (first attested in 1992). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers the additional meaning of “An allomorph” (2022), suggesting the morph as a multiple variation of a linguistic element. The OED’s examples show the morph’s prominence in discourses of computer art and digital literature from the 90s. The term frames digital media’s linguistic and visual transformations as physical metamorphoses, asserting the materiality of digital media and language.

In the Beginning Was the Word presents a sequence of morph, with its own .SWF (“john-morph.swf”) and video files representing more. The biologic connotation that is remediated in digital uses of “morph” – “each of the different forms exhibited by an animal or plant in the course of its life cycle” – presents the digital morph as one “form” in a broader media ecology (“Morph, N. (4).”). Approaching In the Beginning Was the Word as “morphs” characterizes the page, and book technology, as a multiply evolving type of body. Framing books as biological morphs frames books as biologically or ‘naturally’ mutative.

The “natural”, though, is defined through contemporary natural science’s own morphs of Enlightenment codifications. If we approach the page through a natural science framework, we need to grapple with the politics of that framework, or we risk “naturaliz[ing]” the book’s political imbrications (Borsuk 109, 1). As Borsuk writes, typography mediates “the legacy of othering embedded in language’s form” (93). Following Borsuk’s definitions, we must read the page’s morphs not simply as “content,” but as “objects.” When approaching objects in Special Collections, I’ll pay closer attention to design, including typography, as signifiers of sociopolitical contexts.

Post is no good this week as I feel like I’m under two feet of municipal hard water & I think the other 600 words made no sense. Vaxx up & mask up !

Week 4: “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal”

Posted on by
1

In The Book (2018), Amaranth Borsuk foregrounds the networked production histories of book media. In an example from 1153, hair follicles on a parchment page evidence the remediation of a living being into book materials (52). I have been reflecting on Borsuk’s reproduction of this parchment page in comparison to Jonathan Senchyne’s warm instances of human “traces” through book media in The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2020), which I encountered in Dr. Pressman’s Literature’s Media course in Fall 2024. Senchyne’s traces manifest moments of human interconnection, creating an empathetic bond between readers throughout time and place that situates how a book object traversed its setting. In one example, the handprint of a reader marks time from 1657 (Senchyne 15). The organism which traces its memory in Borsuk’s parchment leaves the trace of a time marked more violently: unlike the human craftsperson, the animal/s lost its life in the parchment production process. How do we read media for traces not only of life, but of death?

If its materials influence the ways that we interact with and perceive a book, the book also influences the ways that we interact with and perceive its materials: that is, our understanding of trees is influenced by our interactions with paper, and our understanding of animals is influenced by our interactions with parchment and vellum. Borsuk notes that, in first millennium CE Egypt, the cyperus papyrus plant was exploited to near-extinction in papyrus production (14). Did a similar fate befall the animals whose hides were culled for use in parchment production? How did the economy of parchment shape human-animal relationships, contextualizing the role of animals in human trade and information production?

The parchment product mediates a power organization and economy of human-animal relationships in which animal bodies are exploited, alive or dead, and in which their passage from living to dead is directed by human actors. This leads me to question how life and death are configured in “media ecologies,” and how significant death is to media production. The reeds, the animals, and the trees which compose common book media interact with eventual readers as de-autonomized bodies – traces of once-life and the conditions which created their death. The plant or animal’s body is remediated from living to dead. This exploitation interrelates with the ecological violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and their social permutations.

Considering this, Borsuk’s chapter has raised new research questions for me. How were the bodies of animals used for parchment and vellum production symbolically and culturally encoded as products of information production, economy, and “the very nature of thought itself”? (44) How were human interactions with these animals shaped by the association of living organisms with product? Further, how were the lives and animal cultures of these creatures shaped by their exploitation in the vellum and parchment trades? Did botanical and zoological adaptations occur through these contexts? This would make good material for a study of nonhuman reader networks and media ecologies, which N. Katherine Hayles gestured towards in her presentation at SDSU last semester.

These questions relate to my capstone project-in-progress, which in part historicizes scientific galvanism through a disability studies framework. The galvanic slab is a site of networked interconnection between human, nonhuman animal, and technological bodies – much, I’m now realizing, like the parchment or vellum page. We know that the information in a book can be violent – and so, I need to emphasize, can be the production of the book. The medium might be fatal. I’m now thinking about anthrodermic bibliopegy (the custom of binding books in human skin) as it relates to spectacles of capital punishment, which also featured heavily in galvanism. Borsuk’s materiality study has made me more aware of the ecocritical, ethical, and thanatological implications of the human-animal-technology circuit in disseminating information and encoding meanings through trans-species interactions with book media. The dead reed, animal, or tree is a key model in contextualizing the material production of book objects. Who died to make this object? Who killed? How does the fact of death-production influence how we interact with and present the object? Now that I’m finding some footing, I want to get serious with media studies and explore these wider effects as I handle objects in Special Collections with more attuned sensitivities.

Week 3: Mapping the Limits of the Library with Media Ecology

Posted on by
Reply

Our readings this week prime us to approach Special Collections materials within a “media ecology” (Jessica Pressman, “Old Media/New Media”). Operating themselves in this ecology, these readings cite diverse scholarly approaches to book studies. While this is my third time reading Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017) with Dr. Pressman, I’m struck by the immensity of information and approaches to information cataloged in the History. As we prepare to enter Special Collections, I’m struck by a deep thought: There’s a lot to read. How do we read a lot?

If we understand each book as a networked media object, we must read this object’s contexts across time and place. To use Dr. Pressman’s term from “Old Media/New Media”, how do we read an “ecology of interrelated feedback loops” if all are entangled? How does one read an ecology? How do we focus or curate our readings of an object when we understand its paratext to spiral in directions and scopes beyond our comprehension? If the book object is assembled and networked so pervasively, how do we decide the scope of our reading? As Dr. Pressman said of digital hypertext in last week’s class, how does the reading end, and how do we decide where it ends?

What Dr. Pressman calls the “linear historical narrative that describes the shift from old to new media” (2), thoroughly unwound by book archaeology, is tempting because it makes reading media easier. Questions of immense scope are detangled; the singular reader retakes authority to create a sequential history and to construct singular meanings from this easier narrative. This reduced “flowchart” history is popularly bent to political ends. We don’t need to fall into this practice just because it’s easier – rather, it is important that we commit to following the confusions and uncertainties of research if we really want to meet and draw more nuanced interpretations of our book objects.

Without needing to construe reading history through the transitional “intensive to extensive reading” model, we can recognize that the way we approach reading is influenced by our perception of how many things are available to read (Levy and Mole xviii). I realized during our discussion of Mark C. Marino’s Marginalia in the Library of Babel that many hypertexts take me longer to process than static texts because they offer no readout showing how much content remains to be read. As a mortal thing, having some concept of when – or at least if – I’ll end a reading informs how I apportion my time and attention. My attention transitions out of the text and through others. Instead of expecting a fixed termination point, then, I think I’ll enter Special Collections with the framework that my reading of a book object will be transitional: our feedback loops will pass through each other. Maybe the ending that will guide my reading is not the limit at which a reading or history terminates, but the transitional process that happens when the book object takes on new meaning. It’s not a cessation, but a transition into more and radiating loops. I need to pay attention to my reading processes in order to notice when this transition is taking place.

Last week, Borges’ narrator in The Library of Babel conjured “[an] unspeakably melancholy memory: I have sometimes traveled for nights on end, down corridors and polished staircases, without coming across a single librarian” (114). Borges philosophically dramatizes conflicts surrounding the ways in which people approach books and reading as cultural practices; here the conflict is not between opposing readers but in the echo chamber of an intellectual journey undertaken alone. I am grateful that we populate our own Library within the massive ecology of scholarship, expertise, and curiosities of people across time and place.

Week 2: Bodies and Knowledge Production in Borges’ Library

Posted on by
1

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.

Continue reading →

Week 1: 👋🙂

Posted on by
3

Hi! I’m Raine Porath (he/him), a grad student starting my second year of the MALAS program. I did my undergrad in English & Comparative Literature here at SDSU, and am now researching digital and popular cultures through a disability studies framework. In my downtime, I make comics and read/watch/play everything horror.

I’m lucky to work as Writing Fellow for the ECL Department, which gives me the opportunity to liaison between students and faculty. If you’re interested in sharing your ideas for department events and letting us know what you need to succeed as an ECL student, there’s a new Student Outreach Survey you can complete here!

I’m also working on CAPTION, the new e-lit imprint of SDSU Press. If you’re a digital creative of any medium, I’d love to chat about your work and opportunities for publication or collaboration.

I’m psyched to be learning alongside you all, and I hope we find joy in caring about books, the world, and each other. 🕮