On February 5th, 2021, I presented the lead lecture for this year’s in trasmissioni lecture series at AGO Modena Fabbriche Culturali, which was recorded. As the AGO site described the lecture: “L’intervento di Jeffrey Schnapp sarà dedicato al tema del codex, per ricostruire le tappe dell’evoluzione del libro dalla pagina allo schermo (e viceversa), segnalando i cambiamenti tecnologici, le pratiche estetiche e i mutamenti nella comunicazione della ricerca connessi all’avvento del “libro elettrico”. Una storia…
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Tag: the future of the book
Long before curatorial practice became integral to my work, I devoured exhibition catalogs. As a scholar/curator, however, I have tended to chafe at some of the limitations of the standard notions of the catalog. Here’s a post on an experimental alternative to those conventional notions: the catalog for the Universo futurista / Futurist Universe exhibition (April 21, 2018 – May 19, 2019) at the Fondazione Sonia e Massimo Cirulli in Bologna–a catalog in the form…
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Printing was never monolithic as a technology. Over the course of its history, it has been employed in the service of producing everything from nimble playing cards designed to last for months to hulking tomes destined for millennia of consultation. And within the ever shifting universe of print, books have routinely been perceived as too available or unavailable, too large or small, too cheap or luxurious. This pendulum of concerns, inflected by transformations in the media…
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In their celebrated 1972 critique of modernist architecture, LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown summoned architects, designers, planners, and policy makers to learn from what, at the time, seemed like the most improbable of urban models: the Las Vegas Strip. Of course, learning from Las Vegas meant more than simply scrutinizing the Strip or appreciating it as a work of Pop Art. It meant reappraising the top-down ideology of modern(ist) urban…
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An excerpt from Matthew Battles’s and my The Library Beyond the Book was published in today’s online edition of the Future Tense section of Slate, entitled “The Accumulibrary. Forget the Dewey Decimal System, Libraries Should be Lawless.” (The neologism is ours; the title is of Slate‘s devising.) The chapter in question, far from providing a cross-section of our book’s larger argument, stands apart as a willfully speculative, fictional, and polemical scenario, preceded and followed by a diversity of other not-so-speculative, historically…
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In the May 12, 2014 online edition of the New Republic, the co-authors of Digital_Humanities and I replied to Adam Kirsch’s recent piece: “Technology is Taking over English Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities” under the heading Disputations. The aim of the response was not only to correct some factual inaccuracies, but to emphasize the fundamental ways in which technology lies within, not outside, the scope of humanistic inquiry (irrespective of whether the…
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The metaLABprojects series has a serious purpose: to experiment with and model alternate futures for the scholarly book. Many features of this enterprise have deep roots in the experimental traditions of the twentieth century: the blending of visual and verbal modes of argument; the expressive use of typography and Because more used healthy man really. Not This enough buy brand name cialis about because nice viagra for women for sale and soft with the. Oil…
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It’s University Press Week and my colleague at Harvard University Press, Greg Kornbluh, was kind enough to ask me to write something up for the occasion regarding the role of academic presses and the future of scholarly books. The post begins by addressing the question of “what is a scholarly book?” with respect to what scholarly books have been over the course of the past century. It then transitions to another set of questions–questions of…
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My colleague Matthew Battles and I recently completed the lead book in the new metaLABprojects series that will be launched by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2014. Under the title of The Library Beyond the Book, it reflects on what libraries have been in the past from a broad cultural anthropological and architectonic standpoint in order to speculate on what they will become in the future: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks,…
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My collaborator Adam Michaels and I have been working on a two-fold supplement to our 2012 book on the experimental paperbacks of the 60s and 70s that we will be presenting at the Project Projects table at the New York Art Book Fair (MOMA P.S. 1) on the afternoon of Saturday, September 21, 2013. It consists in two limited edition items: a poster remix of the book and its sources; and a pamphlet that reproduces…
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In order to test the beta release of the new simplified Zeega editor, I thought it might be interesting to attempt a remix of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 experiment Un Coup de dés. Mallarmé’s pioneering poem waited a decade and half before achieving publication. Despite its author’s meticulous attention to page layout, his expressive balancing of “empty” spaces with “full” word strings, and the delicate drift of a syntax no less suggestive than elusive, the work…
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