Week 1: Introduction

Hi all, welcome to my inaugural blog post! Like most of us, I am a second-year LIS student, and I'm also in the Book History and Print Culture collaborative program. My background is in history and medieval studies, and I have focused my studies here at the iSchool on rare books, book history, and other old-school forms of librarianship. So I see Future of the Book as a natural step forward, i.e. How can I use this new exciting format of the digital interface to help other people explore medieval books? But I also see it as a real challenge for me, i.e. Dear God what will I do without my physical substrate? How do I code? Etc. By the end of the course, I hope to be more familiar with the terminology and basics of digital humanities; this will hopefully complement my practicum, where I'll be working with the Digital Scholarship Unit at UTSC.

I took Professor Galey's Analytical and Historical Bibliography class last term, and the born digital bibliography project was really helpful in breaking down the barriers between traditional forms of studies on books and things that up until now had been completely out of my field of reference, like code, video games, audio files, and more. What I took away from our readings last week--both Drucker and Duguid--was that we can't privilege the physical over the digital, but we also can't privilege the digital over the physical. In the field of digital humanities and book futurism, I think that it's essential that both exist in the context of the other.

For example, http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/ms-17/index.htm is a link to the first digital humanities projects I really looked at: it's a medieval calendar of sorts--something called a "computus", where data was listed (like cosmology, herb information, etc) for people to be able to accurately practice medicine. The manuscript was digitized out of Oxford, and commentary was added from the history department at McGill, with the links in the description pointing you to certain points of the MS. This project relies on the physicality of the manuscript to be successful: you need to see how things are laid out on the page, and you need the scan of the original codex to get a sense of how the book could be used for its intended purpose. The navigational tools afforded by the digitization project, however, make this text much more accessible and understandable to people with little to no experience with manuscript studies.

Looking forward to a great term!