Using this Schedule

Reading Due Dates

You should complete the readings listed under a given class session before that class begins. Any in-class assignments we complete will assume you have fully prepared all required readings for that day.

Course Reading Packet

Most of our readings this semester are freely available online. There are a few books you will need to purchase—see the required texts—a few you will need to download in this password-protect, zipped course packet. I will share the password to expand this zip file in class on the first day of class.

A Key to Alerts

Preface ☛ re:Mediation

Tuesday, January 9: Romancing the Book

Introduction to the course and to each other

Friday, January 12: Media Messages

Read:

• Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message”
• Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter”

Chapter 1 ☛ Inscription

Tuesday, January 16: Orality & Literacy

Read:

• James Gleick, The Information, prologue-chapter 2 (pg. 3-50)
• Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds”

Friday, January 19: Making Language Visible

Prof. Cordell away today; practicum students will lead this lab at the MFA.

Read:

• Christopher Woods, “Visible Language: The Earliest Writing Systems”

Tuesday, January 23: Manuscript

Read:

• Bede, “The Story of Cædmon”
• Ælfric, Preface to his translation of Genesis.
• Geoffrey Chaucer, “Chaucer’s Words to His Scrivener”
• Excerpts from Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes

Watch:

• Getty Museum, “Making Manuscripts” (6:19)

Friday, January 26: Dead Media Workshop

Prof. Cordell away; practicum students will supervise a work session for Dead Media projects.

Tuesday, January 30: Vivifying Media

Chapter 2 ☛ Impression

Friday, February 2: Book Tech

Read:

• Adam J. Hooks, “How to Read Like a Renaissance Reader”
• Browse the following (pick 3-4 to focus on):
  • Codex Sinaiticus
  • Lindisfarne Gospel
  • Book of Kells (this may take awhile to load)
  • Diamond Sutra
  • Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an
  • The Golden Haggadah
  • The Sherborne Missal
  • The Gutenberg Bible
  • The Nuremburg Chronicle
  • Codex Arundel
  • De Humani Corporis Fabrica
  • Shakespeare First Folio
  • Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk VVusku Testament
  • The Mercator Atlas of Europe
  • Nature Printing
  • Birds of America

Tuesday, February 6: Into the Matrix

Read:

• James Gleick, The Information, chapter 3 (pg. 51-77)
• Ann Blair, “Introduction” from Too Much To Know (2010)

Watch:

• Stephen Fry, The Machine That Made Us (This video is about 1 hour long; plan accordingly!)

Optional, but quite useful:

• “Letterpress Printing”

• “How to Use a Composing Stick”

Friday, February 9: The Business of Print

Read:

• Sarah Werner, “Finding Women in the Printing Shop”
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (pg. 7-57, ending at “The affairs of the Revolution occasion’d the interruption.”)
• Herman Melville, “The Tartarus of Maids”

Read (optional):

• Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance”

Watch (Optional)

• Tested Learns the Craft of Letterpress Printing

Tuesday, February 13: Typecasting

Read:

• Chris Gayomali, “How Typeface Influences the Way We Read and Think”
• Lindsay Lynch, “How I Came to Love the En Space”
• Pick at least one font from the Kern Your Enthusiasm series and read its blog post. You will be reporting on your chosen article in class so read it carefully.

(Optional) Watch:

• Helvetica movie trailer

Friday, February 16: A Mechanical Mind

Read:

• Ellen Cushman, “‘We’re Taking the Genius of Sequoyah into This Century’: The Cherokee Syllabary, Peoplehood, and Perseverance”
• Articles about the Victoria Press
  • M. M. H., “A Ramble with Mrs. Grundy: A Visit to the Victoria Printing Press,” English Woman’s Journal (1860)
  • “The Victoria Press,” Illustrated London News (15 June 1861)
  • Emily Faithfull, “Women Compositors,” English Woman’s Journal (1861)

Tuesday, February 20: Media & Moral Panic

Read:

• Frank Furedi, “The Media’s First Moral Panic”
• Anna North, “When Novels Were Bad for You”
• 19th-Century Commentaries on Novel Reading:
  • “On Novel Reading” (from The Guardian; or Youth’s Religious Instructor, 1820)
  • “Devouring Books” (from the American Annals of Education, 1835)
  • M.M. Backus, “Novel Writers and Publishers” (from Christian Parlor Magazine, 1844)

Friday, February 23: Format

Read:

• 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):
  • Friday, January 29
  • Thursday, February 4
  • February ?? 1813
• Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procustes”
• Leah Price, “Introduction” to How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Chapter 3 ☛ Read-Write-Execute

Tuesday, February 27: Annihilating Time & Space

Read:

• James Gleick, The Information, chapters 4-6 (pg. 78-203)
• Henry David Thoreau on the telegraph

Friday, March 2: Circulation

Read:

• James Gleick, The Information, chapter 11 (pg. 310-323)
• Rebecca Onion, “Going Viral in the Nineteenth Century”
• Read “Beautiful Snow” and 4 other verses of your choosing from Fugitive Verses.
  • Read the poems and also look at the example newspaper printing linked at the top of each.

Spring Break, March 4-10

Monday, March 12

Tuesday, March 13: SNOW DAYA Pocket Universe

Read:

• Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (beginning-pg. 90)</del>

Friday, March 16: A Pocket Universe

Read:

• Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (beginning-pg. 90)

Tuesday, March 20: Text as Data

Read:

• Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (pg. 147-257)

Read (optional):

• Mark C. Marino, “Why We Must Read the Code: The Science Wars, Episode IV”

Friday, March 23: Open Lab

Professor Cordell away: Open Lab with practicum students to catch up with R programming labs

Tuesday, March 27: Machine Writing

Read:

• Vikram Chandra, “The Beauty of Code”
• Annette Vee, “Understanding Computer Programming as Literacy”

Chapter 4 ☛ Memory

Friday, March 30: Obsolescence

Watch:

• Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” (30 mins)

Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU - 1978 from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

Read:

• Lauren J. Young, Daniel Peterschmidt, and Cat Frazier, “File Not Found Series”
  • “Ghosts in The Reels”
  • “The Librarians Saving the Internet”
  • “Data Reawakening”

Tuesday, April 3: An Index of All Knowledge Processing Words

Read:

• James Gleick, The Information, chapter 14-epilogue (pg. 373-426)
• Jorge Louis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

(Optional) Read/Browse:

• Kenneth Goldsmith, “The Artful Accidents of Google Books”
• The Art of Google Books

Read:

+ David M. Berry and Jan Rybicki, “The Author Signal, Nietzsche’s Typewriter and Medium Theory” + Matthew Kirschenbaum, “This Faithful Machine” + ——, “Technology changes how authors write, but the big impact isn’t on their style”

Friday, April 6: The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book)

Read:

• Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books”
• Charity Hancock, Clifford Hichar, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Kari Kraus, Cameron Mozafari, and Kathryn Skutlin, “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday”

Watch:

• “Elektrobiblioteka / Electrolibrary”

Elektrobiblioteka / Electrolibrary from printscreen on Vimeo.

Tuesday, April 10: Because Survival is Insufficient

Read:

• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (beginning-page 115)

Friday, April 13: The Museum of Civilization

Read:

• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (page 117-228)

Tuesday, April 17: Symphonies & Newspapers

Read:

• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (229-end)

+ Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”

Epilogue ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛ ☛

Friday, April 20