Using this Schedule
Schedule Organization
With a few marked exceptions, our class is organized by weeks, each with assigned readings and a lab. Each week’s readings should be prepared (and the class prep for them committed to your fieldbook) prior to the first class of their respective week, which is generally a Monday. Typically we will devote one day largely to discussion of readings and one to our lab activities, though in any given week this precise organization may shift or blend. You should expect discussion of readings to continue into our lab activities. Labs are generally held in our regular classroom, but there will be a few times during the semester when we will meet in a place called out on the schedule.
Accessing Readings
The majority of our readings will be available online or through a digital course packet in Leganto. The first time you wish to access items from Leganto you will need to log in through Blackboard (the only time we’ll use it this semester), but thereafter the direct links in the schedule should work. If you switch to a new computer or device you may need to log in through Blackboard once.
Schedule
Preface ☛ Medium
September 4
Prep (together):
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964)
Chapter One ☛ Inscription
September 9 & 11
Prep:
- Plato, selection from Phaedrus (~370 BCE)
- Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects,” from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, read from pg. 1 to the break on pg. 12 (2006)
- Ken Liu, “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (2012)
- Leah Price, “Introduction” and “Reading Over Shoulders” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)
Lab 1 → Mark(it all)down
Chapter Two ☛ Literacy
September 16 & 18
Prep:
- Ælfric, Preface to his translation of Genesis (ca. 990)
- Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983)
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Object” from The Book (2018)
- Annette Vee, “Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy” from Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (2018)
Lab 2 → Programming Literature
Chapter Three ☛ Type
September 23 & 25
Prep:
- Excerpts from Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (1492)
- (watch) Stephen Fry, The Machine That Made Us (2009); note: this video is about 1 hour long; plan accordingly!
- Chris Gayomali, “How Typeface Influences the Way We Read and Think” (2013)
- Sarah Werner, “Finding Women in the Printing Shop” (2014)
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Content” from The Book (2018)
Lab 3 → Letterpress I: Composition
Chapter Four ☛ Press
September 30 & October 2
Prep:
- Emily Faithfull, “Women Compositors,” English Woman’s Journal (1861)
- Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal” (2011)
- Leah Price, “The Real Life of Books” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)
Lab 4 → Letterpress II: Presswork
October 3
Extra-Credit Lab → Dragon Prayer Book
Participate in the Dragon Prayer Book Exhibit kick-off workshop with Professor Erika Boeckeler in Snell Library, 11am-1pm, and write it up in the standard lab report format.
Chapter Five ☛ Image
October 7
Prep:
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
- This is a long work and I don’t expect you to read all of it. Read closely through page/object 10 in one edition (through “Proverbs of Hell”) and then compare those first 10 pages with 2 additional editions.
- Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing”
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Idea” from The Book (2018)
Lab 5 → Illuminating the Text
Chapter Six ☛ Archive
October 9 & 16
Prep:
- Ellen Cushman, “‘We’re Taking the Genius of Sequoyah into This Century’: The Cherokee Syllabary, Peoplehood, and Perseverance” (2011)
- Bonnie Mak, “Architectures of the Page” (2011)
- James Gleick, “Two Wordbooks” from The Information (2011)
Meet in the Northeastern Archives & Special Collections, 92 Snell Library (in the basement) on Wednesday, October 9
No class October 14 ☛ Indigenous Peoples Day
Meet in the lobby of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1154 Boylston Street) at 3pm on Wednesday, October 16
Lab 6 → Into the Archive
Chapter Seven ☛ Format
October 21 & 23
Prep:
- Jane Austen, Letters to her sister Cassandra (these are in order so you can read down from the first link to the next two letters):
- Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procustes” (1904)
- Leah Price, “Reading on the Move,” “Interleaf: Please Lay Flat,” and “Prescribed Reading” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)
Lab 7 → Book Binding
Chapter Eight ☛ Sensation
October 28
Prep:
- Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books” (1894)
- Sara Hendren, “All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on Disability” (2017)
- (or listen, as you prefer) 99% Invisible, “The Universal Page” (2019)
- read the “About” page and browse the website for Sari Altschuler and David Weimer’s Touch This Page project
Lab 8 → Multisensory Reading
Interlude ☛ Dead Media Posters
October 30
Chapter Nine ☛ Algorithm
November 4 & 6
Prep:
- Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer (2015), beginning-pg. 90, 147-257
Lab 9 → Text as Data
No class November 11 ☛ Veterans’ Day
Chapter Ten ☛ Corpus
November 13
Prep:
- Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen, “‘Fugitive Verses’: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers” (2017). Also Read “Beautiful Snow” and 2 other verses of your choosing from Fugitive Verses, looking at the example poems at the example newspaper printing linked at the top of each.
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “What Gets Counted Counts” from Data Feminism (2018)
Lab 10 → Corpus Analysis
Chapter Eleven ☛ Assemblage
November 18 & 20
Prep:
- Pagan Kennedy, “Prologue,” “Back to Pagan,” “Pagan’s Discovered to be Seventh Partridge,” and “Epilogue” from ‘Zine (1995)
- Zine Librarians Code of Ethics (2015)
- Erin Dorney, “6 Styles of Erasure Poetry”
- Amaranth Borsuk, “The Book as Interface” from The Book (2018)
Lab 11 → Zine You Around
Chapter Twelve ☛ Circuit
November 25
Makeup from earlier lab
Lab 10 → Corpus Analysis
Thanksgiving Break
November 27-December 1
Chapter Thirteen ☛ Memory
December 2 & 4
Prep:
- Craig Mod, “Future Reading” (2015)
- Jon Bois, “What Football Will Look Like in the Future” (2017)