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Schedule

Media for Discussion & Assignment Due Dates

August 25: Media

Core

Penumbra

  • Donald F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” from Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (orig. 1986), resource via library
  • N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” introduction to Comparative Textual Media (2013), resource via library
  • Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires, “The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit” (2013), resource via library
  • Agatha Beins, “A Publishing Assemblage: Building Book History Methodology through Feminist Periodicals” (2018), resource via library
  • Francesca Benatti, “Superhero comics and the digital communications circuit: a case study of Strong Female Protagonist” (2018), resource via library

September 1: Rags

We will meet this week at the Fresh Press Paper, which is located in the studios on the southwest corner of campus. There is a bus that stops by the Fire Service Institute, less than a block away, and there is ample parking at the studio. If transportation is an issue please let me know so we can find you a ride.

Core

  • Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), external resource
  • Sarah Werner, “Paper” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), library resource
    ☞ Note: Werner’s book is a valuable reference that appears several times in this syllabus, but only one electronic copy is available at a time from the library. Start these readings early & check back if someone is reading when you first try. Important: don’t keep this book open in your browser when you’re not actively reading, so your colleagues will also have an opportunity to read it.
  • Jonathan Senchyne, “Introduction” from The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2019), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Peter F. Kornicki, “Paper and the Roll” from The Book in Japan (1998)
  • Bonnie Mak, “Architectures of the Page” from How the Page Matters (2012), resource via library
  • Any other chapter from Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2019), resource via library or his article, “Rags Make Paper, Paper Makes Money: Material Texts and Metaphors of Capital” (2017), resource via library
  • Martin Paul Eve, “New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination” (2022), external resource

September 8: Press

Discussion Leaders: Emma and SophieYou will want to wear clothes that can get dirty on our days working in the press. If you’ve never worked in the press before, it could be helpful to watch videos 2-9 in this orientation playlist from my previous press (watch from “Investigating a Composed Form of Type” to “Woodcuts”). These will explain the basics of typesetting with a close-up video of the process and allow us to jump into our lab more quickly. This should take 30-40 minutes in total, but please pay close attention—the details are important.

Core

  • Meaningfully browse 2 of the following:
    • Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-works: Applied to the Art of Printing (1683), web resource
    • C. Stower, The Compositor’s and Pressman’s Guide to the Art of Printing (1808), web resource
    • J. Johnson, Typographia (1824), web resource
    • C.S. Van Winkle, The Printer’s Guide (1836), web resource
  • Read Walt Whitman, “A Font of Type” (1891), web resource and browse The Poets and Poetry of Printerdom (1875), web resource
  • Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and Its Importance” from Comparative Textual Media (2013), resource via library
  • John J. Garcia, “Critique! Critique! Critique! Black Labor in the Early American Book Trade” (2022), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1916), Chapters 2-7. Note: You can mostly skim this text, but read the sections describing work in the print shop, which are spread through these chapters, closely), external resource
  • Kai-wing Chow, “Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe and China” in _ Agent of Change_ (2007), resource via library
  • Elyse Graham, “The Printing Press as Metaphor” (2016), external resource
  • Paul Erickson, “The Business of Building Books” (2017), external website
  • Sarah Werner, Parts 1-3 Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), resource via library.
  • Kandice Sharren, Kate Ozment, and Michelle Levy, “Gendering Digital Bibliography with the Women’s Print History Project” (2021), resource via library
  • Claire Battershill, chapters 1-2 (“Historicizing” & “Learning”) from Women and Letterpress Printing, 1920-2020 (2022), resource via library
  • Kate Ozment, “Women’s Retail Networks in the London Book Trades, 1710-1760” (prepub; can email)

September 15: Type

Discussion Leaders: Vidhi and BoYou will want to wear clothes that can get dirty on our days working in the press.

Core

  • Read the Preamble & browse David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830) with a particular eye to the way Walker uses typography throughout, web resource
  • Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal” (2011), resource via library
  • Joseph Rezek, “Author” (2018), resource via library
  • Kadin Henningsen, “Making Mary Ann Waters is a Free Black Woman: Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method” (2022), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Sydney Shep, “‘Smiley, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons & Pre-Digital Networks” (2010), external resource
  • Ellen Cushman, “We’re Taking the Genius of Sequoyah into This Century’: The Cherokee Syllabary, Peoplehood, and Perseverance” (2011), resource via library
  • Marcy J. Dinius, “‘Look!! look!!! at this!!!’: Reading Walker’s Appeal” in The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 (2022), resource via libary. Note: this book chapter builds on and in some important ways revises Dinius’ argument from the article in the Core reading for this week.
  • Linc Kesler, “Indigenous People and the Written Word” from The Unfinished Book (2021), external resource
  • Johanna Drucker, “Letterpress Aesthetics,” in Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future (2023), resource via library

September 22: Information

CoreWe will meet this week in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, on the 3rd floor of the main library.

Penumbra

  • Any chapter from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007), resource via library
  • Ann Blair, “Information Management in Comparative Perspective” from Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010), resource via library
  • Molly O’Hagan Hardy, “‘Black Printers’ on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Data Structures of the Early American Book Trades,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (2016), external resource
  • Jessica C. Linker, “Technology” (2018), resource via library
  • Juliet S. Sperling, “Image” (2018), resource via library
  • Jillian M. Hess, “Anatomy of the Commonplace” in How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (2022), resource via library
  • Derrick R. Spires, “Order and Access: Dorothy Porter and the Mission of Black Bibliography” (2022), resource via library

Discussion Leaders: Cyrus and James

Core

  • Meredith McGill, “Introduction: The Matter of the Text” from _ American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853_ (2003), resource via library
  • Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Introduction” from Writing with Scissors (2012), resource via library
  • Ryan Cordell, “Viral Textuality” from Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers (2023), external resource

Penumbra

  • Christy L. Potroff, “Circulation” (2018), resource via library
  • Corinna Zeltsman, “Defining Responsibility: Printers, Politics, and the Law in Early Republican Mexico City” (2018), resource via library
  • Adam C. Lewis, “Periodicals” (2018), resource via library
  • Will Slauter, “Introduction” to Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright (2019), resource via library
  • Katie McGettigan, “Transatlantic Reprinting as National Performance: Staging America in London Magazines, 1839–1852” (2019), resource via library
  • Avery Blankenship, “What We Didn’t Know a Recipe Could Be: Political Commentary, Machine Learning Models, and the Fluidity of Form in Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Recipes” (2024), external resource
  • Mark Mattes, “Litigating the Letter in Early Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” (2025), resource via library
  • Yi Liu, Leen-Kiat Soh, and Elizabeth Lorang, “Integrating Textual-Based and Visual-Based Features in Poem Detection for Digitized Historical Newspaper Document Images” (2025), web resource

October 6: Mechanization

Discussion Leaders: Maninee & Aaryn

  • Florence McLandburgh, “The Automaton Ear” (1876), external resource
  • Browse, William John Johnston, Lightning Flashes And Electric Dashes: a Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom (1877), external resource
  • Lisa Gitelman and Thomas S. Mullaney, “Nineteenth-Century Media Technologies” in Information: A Historical Companion (2021), resource via library
  • Jeff Jarvis, Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (2026), resource via library. This is a very accessible book, but I still don’t expect you to read a whole book as one reading assignment for the week. Read as much as you’re able/want, but most relevant to our discussion will be:
    • Chapter 2: “The Type-Writer”
    • Chapter 4: “A Line of Type”
    • Chapter 6: “Mass Media”
    • Chapter 8: “Labor and the Linotype”

Penumbra

October 13: Bookish

We will meet this week in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, on the 3rd floor of the main library.

Core

  • Leah Price, “Introduction” from How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), resource via library
  • Meredith L. McGill, “Format” (2018), resource via library
  • Jessica Pressman, “Introduction” to Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (2020), library resource
  • Sarah Bull, “Content Generation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (2023), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Christopher Looby, “Southworth and Seriality” (2004), resource via library
  • Catherine Coker, “The Margins of Print? Fan Fiction as Book History” (2017), external website
  • Jamie L. Jones, “Print Nostalgia: Skeuomorphism and Rockwell Kent’s Woodblock Style” (2017), resource via library
  • Aaron Kashtan, “Introduction: Comics, Materiality, and the Future of the Book” from Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future (2018), resource via library
  • Michael Winship, “Subscription” (2018), resource via library
  • Sarah Werner, “Binding” and “Looking at Books” from Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800 : A Practical Guide (2019), resource via library
  • Alberto Campagnolo, “Insides and Outsides” from The Unfinished Book (2020), resource via library
  • Adam Hammond, “Books in Videogames” from The Unfinished Book (2021), resource via library
  • Shira Belén Buchsbaum, “Binding Fan Fiction and Reexamining Book Production Models” (2022), web resource

October 20: Data

Discussion Leaders: Hsiang Yun and Aabir

Core

  • Skim L. F. Menabrea, “A Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” (1842), external resource but then read more closely the “Notes by the Translator,” Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. I’m not concerned that you follow all the mathematics, but encourage you to focus on how these notes imagine computation might be used.
  • Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, “Introduction” to Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013), resource via library
  • Lauren Klein, “What Data Visualization Reveals: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Knowledge Production” (2022), external resource
  • Avery Blankenship, “Literary Forensics as Method: Chemical Analysis, Food Stains, and Readerly Encounters with Nineteenth-Century Cookbooks” (2025), external website

Penumbra

  • Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945), external website
  • Steven Lubar, “‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card” (1992), resource via library
  • Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact” in Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013), resource via library
  • Ellen Gruber Garvey, “‘facts and FACTS’: Abolitionists’ Database Innovations” in Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013), resource via library
  • Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (2016), external website
  • Mar Hicks, “Introduction: Britain’s Computer ‘Revolution’” from Programmed Inequality (2017), resource via library
  • Craig Robertson, “Documents, Empire, and Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century” in Information: A Historical Companion (2021), resource via library
  • Roger Whitson, "Algorhythmics and Media Concepts: Ada Lovelace’s Notes to “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” (2025), resource via library

October 27: Visiting Scholar Lecture(s)

We will not have our regular class today, so that you are able to attend this lecture in RBML:

Also this week we will have the first “Media Necromancy” talk of the semester from James Hodges, Assistant Professor in the School of Information at San José State University on Friday, October 30th, 12-1pm in the CU FabLab (our classroom, basically). Topic TBA, but it will certainly be relevant to our class, as we’ll be reading some of Dr. Hodges’ work just a few weeks later.

November 3: Documentation

Discussion Leaders: Evan and Lock

Core

  • Watch (~30 minutes), Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” (1978), external resource.
  • Lisa Gitelman, “Xerographers of the Mind” and “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf” from Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), resource via library
  • Joli Braun, “Your Zine Saved My Life: The Impact and Legacy of Zines in Sassy Magazine” (2020), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Play (at least 30 mins), Papers, Please (2013), external resource
  • Mar Hicks, “Hacking the Cis-tem: Transgender Citizens and the Early Digital State” (2019), resource via library
  • Andrew Piper, Chad Wellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet, “The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents” (2020), resource via library
  • Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy” (2020), external website
  • Judith Flanders, “I is for Index Cards: From Copy Clerks to Office Supplies in the Nineteenth Century” or “Y is for Y2K: From the Phone Book to Hypertext in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries” in A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (2020), resource via library
  • Craig Robertson, “Introduction: The Efficient Work of Paperwork” from The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (2021), resource via library
  • Martin Paul Eve, “New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination” (2022), external website
  • Jolie Braun, “1990s Zine Distribution and Understanding the Work of Zine Distros through Their Catalogs” (2024), resource via library

November 10: Electronic

Discussion Leaders: Will and Emrys

Core

  • Read about Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992) at https://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu. Explore the links to its history, reception, and the emulation(s) online.
  • Élika Ortega, “The Many Books of the Future: Print-digital Literatures” (2020), external resource
  • Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Archives without Dust,” from Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (2021), resource via library
  • Choose 2-3 works from the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 (2016) or Volume 4 (2022) to read and share with the group

Penumbra

  • Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination” (2012), resource via library
  • Lori Emerson, “Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier” from Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), resource via library
  • Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Introduction: It Is Known” from Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016), resource via library
  • Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop, “Introduction: Why Twine?” and “Chapter T-1: Twine as Platform” from Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narrative (2021), external website
  • Dennis Yi Tenen, “Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book” from The Unfinished Book (2021), resource via library

November 17: Digital

Discussion Leaders: Felix and Alokabho
Core

  • Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning” (2016), external website
  • Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously” (2017), resource via library
  • Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism” (2021), external website

Penumbra

  • Cassidy Holahan, “Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive” (2021), resource via library
  • Hazel Wilkinson, James Briggs, and Dirk Gorissen, “Computer Vision and the Creation of a Database of Printers’ Ornaments” (2021), external website
  • Benjamin Lee, “Compounded Mediation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset” (2021), external website
  • Ryan Cordell, “Material Cultures of the Digital” (2022), external website
  • James Dobson and Scott Sanders, “Distant Approaches to the Printed Page” (2022), external website

November 24: No class for Fall Break

December 1: Preservation

Guest Scholar: Travis L. Wagner, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences

Core

  • Sonya Donaldson, “The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of Discord” (2021), external website
  • James A. Hodges and Ciaran B. Trace, “Preserving Algorithmic Systems: A Synthesis of Overlapping Approaches, Materialities and Contexts,” Journal of Documentation (2023), resource via library
  • Amelia Acker, “Archiving Data” from Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (2025), resource via library
  • Travis L. Wagner and Ashley Blewer, ““Each character you create requires a full 15 blocks!” preserving video game memory cards in the age of cloud storage” (2025), resource via library

Penumbra

  • Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination” (2012), resource via library
  • James A. Hodges, “Forensic Approaches to Evaluating Primary Sources in Internet History Research: Reconstructing Early Web-Based Archival Work (1989–1996)” (2021), resource via library
  • Sarah Well, “The Forgotten History of the Blinking Curso▒” (2021), external website
  • Klint Finley, “What We Can Learn from Vintage Computing” (2022), external website
  • Lori Emerson, “Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History” (2023), external website
  • Sydney J. Shep and Ya-Wen Ho, “East Meets West: Merging Technology, Language and Culture” in Letterpress Printing : Past, Present, Future (2023), resource via library
  • Marcin Wichary and Mihai Parparita, “Frame of Preference: A History of Mac Settings, 1984-2004” (2025), external resource

December 8: Models

Core

  • Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System” (2018), external resource
  • Kent K. Chang, Mackenzie Cramer, Sandeep Soni and David Bamman, “Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4” (2023), external resource
  • Rafael Alvarado, “What Large Language Models Know” (2024), external resource
  • Tyler Shoemaker, “Systems Programming the Model” (2026), external resource

Penumbra

  • Sandeep Soni, Lauren F. Klein, and Jacob Eisenstein, “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers” (2021), external resource
  • Ted Underwood, “Mapping the Latent Spaces of Culture” (2021), external resource
  • N. Katherine Hayles, “Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation” resource via library
  • James E. Dobson, “On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks” (2023), external resource
  • Laura Manrique-Gómez, Tony Montes, and Rubén Manrique, “Historical Ink: 19th Century Latin American Spanish Newspaper Corpus with LLM OCR Correction” (2024), external resource
  • Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, and Elizabeth Gronski, “Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?” (2024), external resource
  • John Gallagher, “The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines” (2025), external resource