The following works tackle questions of materiality across different archival settings, including the impact of the digital on our understandings of materiality and archival engagements. Carrie Smith. The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes’s Creative Process. Liverpool University Press, 2021 This monograph offers the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Smith poses the questions: […]
Category Archives: digitization
Reanimating Working-Class Writing
posted by mdever
In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried […]
Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents
posted by mdever
An exciting breakthrough has been announced this week, one that permits researchers to read letters without unfolding them, offering new ways of managing sealed and fragile documents. Using a combination of X-rays and 3-D imagining techniques, researchers virtually “opened” four letters from the Brienne Collection, a trunk filled with 2,600 notes sent from Europe to the […]
Colloquium: Information Studies at UCLA
posted by mdever
One of the small upsides of the pandemic has been the move to offer research seminars online via Zoom. What were once small gatherings advertised to a local few are now events available (time zones permitting) to interested scholars globally. For those who can line up with Pacific Time (PT), the offerings for the Department […]
Manuscript fragments: a webinar to catch up on
posted by mdever
The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has been running a lively set of lectures and panel discussions that are now available online for anyone slow to catch on or living in incompatible time zones. For those interested in manuscripts there is: A Fractured Inheritance: The Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities of Collecting Manuscript […]
New: The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts
posted by mdever
A new book by Cornelis van Lit investigates how we might think about the materiality of digitized manuscripts. Of particular interest may be the chapter ‘The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts”. Often distinctions between analogue sources and digital surrogates turn on the latter’s apparent loss or lack of materiality, a proposition that is challenged here. […]
NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.
posted by mdever
New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]
New book on technology and complex materiality
posted by mdever
ARC Humanities Press has released the new title by Bill Endres, Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts: The St. Chad Gospels, Materiality, Recoveries, and Representation in 2D & 3D. While outside the historical period mainly covered on archivefutures, it may be of interest nevertheless in terms of the how it advances debates around digital technology and complex materiality. […]
New open access book: ‘Archives’
posted by mdever
A free PDF of the new book, Archives, containing a series of essays by Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Rick Prelinger, can be downloaded from Meson Press or purchased from The University of Minnesota Press. From the Meson Press page: “Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to […]
The taste of the archive in the digital age: article
posted by mdever
Quite exciting to locate this article today via the Documentary Heritage News digest: Le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique published in La vie des idées. Anyone familiar with Arlette Farge’s book will immediately recognise the reference and also the importance of seeking to extend her thinking into the digital era. By the time Farge’s wonderful […]
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