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Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
Lisa Gitelman
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Description for Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
Paperback. A book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). Whether examining late-nineteenth-century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, it reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. Series: Sign, Storage, Transmission. Num Pages: 224 pages, 11 photographs. BIC Classification: JFD. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 230 x 152 x 13. Weight in Grams: 372.
Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or job printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the ... Read moredocument, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Duke University Press
Series
Sign, Storage, Transmission
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Lisa Gitelman
Lisa Gitelman is Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era and the editor of Raw Data Is an Oxymoron and New Media, 1740-1915.
Reviews for Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
Lisa Gitelman provides a provocative set of microhistories that expand our conceptualization (and confusion) of the history of physical and electronic documents....The intended reader is not just the historian but everyone thinking about the future of the humanities.
Jonathan Coopersmith
American Historical Review
If Paper Knowledge offers one crucial insight to the conversation about print ... Read moreand technology it is that 'print culture' as a category is highly problematic because it presupposes certain kinds of print and leaves too much out.
Nicole Howard
Technology and Culture
Gitelman offers keen insights into the constitutive nature of documents in modern social life. Merging wittiness, casualness, and rigor, she crafts a nuanced picture of the document and some ofits key genres. ... A must-read for media studies and digital media; useful for those interested in communication, cultural studies, and sociology. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
W. Alvarez
Choice
For young scholars navigating the worlds of online and print publishing, and all the meanings and values placed on those outputs, Gitelman's reflections prove immensely insightful at a defining moment when paper no longer rules.
Mel Hogan
Archives and Manuscripts
The history of documents carries great significance, perhaps more than any of us could have realized, and Gitelman's comprehensive scholarship in this book establishes a new agenda, one that celebrates the past and charts the course of the document. This book provides educational support for researchers in information science, media history, and the digital humanities.
Melony Shemberger
Journalism and Mass Communication Educator
Gitelman's richly detailed excavation of institutional artifacts that shape material and semiotic processes (such as the `job printed'blank form and the PDF file) encourages rhetorical critics to stop flattening media into texts and start fleshing out documents as media with specific histories and utilities, transient technologies that leave a substantial wake in their passage through social worlds.
Joan Faber McAlister
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Every chapter in Paper Knowledge stands on its own as a complete history. Each chapter provides the reader with a better understanding of the symbiotic relationship between printed document and the global economy. ... Paper Knowledge turns the focus of Media Studies from the Big Cultural Object and applies the same rigor to printed objects that were never designed to be noticed in the first place. And these forgotten objects carry with them the history of how we really understand the richness of media in our lives.
John Rodzvilla
Publishing Research Quarterly
The proliferation of marriage certificates and death warrants holds few terrors for Lisa Gitelman, who finds richness rather than ennui in them. Her ingenious essay in media archaeology, Paper Knowledge, takes as its central category the document. The document is a material genre; the words matter, but so too does their physical instantiation, which is often accompanied by a baroque flummery of water-marks, seals and signatures. And the document is remarkable as a product of print that does not ask to be read. Instead, documents are used to hold us in place within a web of bureaucratic institutions.
Jason Scott-Warren
Times Literary Supplement
A well-rounded exploration of publishing technology and how it transforms every aspect of our lives, from the way we are governed to the way we read books and news.
Alexander von Lunen
Somatosphere
Gitelman practices a kind of conceptual archeology without obeisance to the master, in an argument that stands well on its own. . . . By the time you reach the book's final chapter, on the rise of PDF, the relationship between the history of ground-level print culture and that of its Ivory Tower analog seem linked in so many suggestive ways that the advent of digital culture seems like just one part of an intricate pattern.
Scott McLemee
Inside Higher Ed
In all cases, Gitelman offers a meticulous reconstruction of the historical context of the media changes she foregrounds and in many regards this book is a real Wunderkammer. At the same time, however, the author always scrutinizes the past in order to show what it can mean for us today, and here the political dimension of the book comes to the fore. For Paper Knowledge is also a passionate discussion of what knowing and showing are about, namely the possibility to producing, sharing, debating knowledge in a society to opens this knowledge to all of its members and whose structure, thanks to technology, is no longer determined by those who know and show and those who don't.
Jan Baetens
Leonardo Reviews
Four intriguing essays make up this tantalising and ambitious short book. . . . The strength of this bold volume is in its argument that we can learn a great deal if we focus, not only on what information they contain but what institutional and social function they serve; not what they're about but what they do.
Colin Higgins
Times Higher Education
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