Spring
1998
Soundings is a publication of the School of Humanities and Social Science at MIT
Comments and questions to www-shss@mit.edu
Programs and
possibilities
The look of
books in the digital age
A
good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from
getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Roy Blount, Jr.
His un-PC comment notwithstanding, humorist Roy Blount, Jr. might well have found kindred spirits at the Transformations of the Book Conference, a gathering of assorted techno-wizards, classicists, media savants, and Chaucerian and Shakespearean scholars. Held October 24-25, 1997, the two-day conference explored the social and cultural significance of emerging technologies.
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(l to r) Dean William Mitchell of the School of Architecture, Professor Peter C. Perdue, head of the History Faculty, and Ms. Ann Wolpert, director of the Libraries. |
Echoing Blount on the virtues of old-fashioned books, literature Professor David Thorburn — who, along with Professor Peter Donaldson, organized the conference — argued that "you can take a book into the most intimate spaces of your life or put it in your pocket. That intimate portability won't be easily duplicable in digital technology." Noting that "the conference offered a reminder of the wonder, power and beauty of books," Thorburn says "the relation between emerging technologies and older print forms are much more nourishing to one another than many commentators have imagined. The metaphor of revolution" — that the new technology is sweeping away older cultural forms — "is simple-minded."
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Research scientists Roger Hurwitz (l) and Karen Sollins (r), members of the Media In Transition governing board, with Professor David Thorburn (c) director of the Communications Forum. |
Among the areas in which computer technology is opening astonishing possibilities are research and editing. Consider Chaucer. Peter Robinson, a speaker at the conference who is a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Electronic Library Research at De Montfort University, edited the first major electronic publication of the Canterbury Tales Project. Putting The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM, Robinson and his staff compiled 30 Prologue editions, incorporated all associated commentary, catalogued all verbal images, provided 16,000 spellings of various words, and offered millions of hypertext links — computer branchings that take users to a network of multi-layered connections within a text.
Comprehensive? Yes
If exhaustiveness is the standard, their work is an unparalleled success. The problem, Robinson noted, is that "Chaucer deserves better" — meaning the fruit of their labor is so overwhelming and "provides very little guidance as to what it all means, [that] we limit our readership to experts." In short, Robinson and his team created not only a brilliantly comprehensive work, but a form of chaos ordinary readers would flee.
Bringing together the printed past and the digital future, the conference sparked lively debate among the assembled scholars, electronic text producers, hypertext fiction writers, librarians, and members of the public. Among the digital luminaries participating in the conference: Gregory Crane, associate professor of classics at Tufts University and editor-in-chief of the Perseus Project, an on-line archive of classical material; Peter Donaldson, Ann Fetter Friedlaender professor of humanities at MIT and director of the Shakespeare Digital Archive Project; Greg Easely, director of media integration for the National Laboratory for Rural Telemedicine at the University of Iowa; Michel Ester, president of Luna Imaging, Inc.; Shelley Jackson, author of the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl; and William Mitchell, professor of architecture and media arts and sciences, and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. The Conference was part of the Media in Transition project, a collaboration of the MIT Communications Forum, the MIT Film and Media Studies Program, and the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, which supports the collaboration with a $525,000 grant.
Conference proceedings, including selections from discussion periods, will be published in both book and hypertext forms. The conference is available in summary format on the Web at http://media-in-transition.mit.edu
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology