Cavallo and Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2004). Annotated Entry.

Clanchy, Michael, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Annotated Entry.

Diringer, David. The Book Before Printing (Dover Publications, 1982)

Chartier, Roger ed., The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge UK: Polity Press,1989)

Chartier, Boureau, Dauphin, (trans. Christopher Woodall) Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton 1997)

Febvre, Martin, (trans. Gerard) The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (Verso, 1997)

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University Of Chicago, 2000)

Kerby-Fulton and Hilmo, The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Univ of Victoria Dept of English, 2001)

Parkes, M.B., Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991)

Smith and Taylor, eds. Women and the Book: Assessing the Evidence (The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture) (University of Toronto Press, 1997). Annotated Entry.

Image Detail from the Santa Barbara Bible.

Selection from the Santa Barbara Library’s Book of Hours.

Title Pages from the New Atalantis

Featured Research Report by Kim Knight from the Project’s Research Clearinghouse

Report on NINE’s Collex tool

Conceptual art piece that proposes to network final resting places with online content.

“Cemetery 2.0, by Elliott Malkin, is a concept for networked devices that connect burial sites to online memorials for the deceased. The prototype links the gravestone of Hyman Victor, Malkin’s great-grandfather, to his surviving Internet presence…The Cemetery 2.0 device maintains a live satellite Internet connection. Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors of any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site.” (From We Make Money Not Art)

Starter Links: Review from We Make Money Not Art | Project Description from the Artist’s Web Site

“Kitab-al Hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) documents the mechanical description of various hydraulic machines, written in 1206 by Al Jazari, an irrigation engineer who was employed in the palace of the Artuklu Sultanate in today’s south-eastern Turkey. The book contains approximately 300 automated devices including their construction and usage information — all illustrated with technical drawings in the style of miniature painting.
One of the most important aspects of this book is its visualization techniques such as showing the important parts of mechanisms separately in a bigger scale, constructing mechanisms step-by-step from parts to whole, and cross sectioning for depicting inner layers. Another characteristic of this manuscript as an interface archetype is the attention given not only to the explained mechanisms with their functional structure but also to the outer layer that creates and enhances the illusion of artificial life. The fairytale figures on the outermost layers of the mechanisms further serves the purpose of entertaining the guests of Artuklu Palace.”

Starter Links: Water Pouring Automaton | Elephant Clock

Online tool by Brian L. Pytlik Zillig.

“TokenX: a text visualization, analysis, and play tool” (from the project web site), is an online interface based out of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities that allows the user to view web page components or file components in alternative organizational formats.

Starter Links: TokenX

Project that blends news articles from popular and alternative sources.

“News Reader is software for reading and playing the network news environment. News Reader initially offers the current “top stories” from Yahoo! News – which are always drawn from mainstream sources. Playing these stories brings forth texts generated from alternative press stories, portions of which are (through interaction) introduced into the starting texts, gradually altering them. News Reader is an artwork designed for daily use, providing an at times humorous, at times disturbing experience of our news and the chains of language that run through it.”

Starter Links: Project description

Transliteracies Research Report By Brooke Belisle

Program by Chirag Mehta that tracks the frequency of word usage in presidential speeches dating back to 1776.

“The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD. The dataset consists of over 360 documents downloaded from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com. Once the documents have been dated and converted to plain-text, my tag-cloud-generation script goes through every text chronologically and makes a list of all the unique words that have been used and counts how many times each word is used.”(From the project web site.)

Starter Links: Home Page

Graduate Student, English Dept. UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Published in October 2006, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I has been made simultaneously available on free CD-rom and online. The collection is published by the Electronic Literature Organzation and edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland.

“The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.” (Electronic Literature Organization).

Starter Links: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I | Press Release announcing the collection | The original Call for Works |

Summary:
The Book after the Book by Giselle Beiguelman (1999) is an extended commentary upon online reading in the form of an online hypertext. Set against a flickering background of javascript, the prologue reads, “After more than 500 years, we are facing the development of a new form of written culture which is an hybrid of digital and printed substrata. The library idea does not organize knowledge anymore. It functions as node of a network, a set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine.” Modeled after Jorge Luis Borges’ “Book of Sand,” The Book after the Book seeks an understanding of the ways in which hypertext and online reading change the ways we think about the book as volume, the library as place, and the relationship between image and text. The work includes the artist’s commentary on online reading as well as a repository of links to various “ways of reading” online. (more…)