Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)

“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.

In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.

In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
368 pages

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Roland Barthes: Image Music Text (1977)

“These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” and “The Death of the Author” are also included.”

Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath
Published by Fontana Press, London, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1977
ISBN 0006861350

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Peter L. Shillingsburg: From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts (2006)

As technologies for electronic texts develop into ever more sophisticated engines for capturing different kinds of information, radical changes are underway in the way we write, transmit and read texts. In this thought-provoking work, Peter Shillingsburg considers the potentials and pitfalls, the enhancements and distortions, the achievements and inadequacies of electronic editions of literary texts. In tracing historical changes in the processes of composition, revision, production, distribution and reception, Shillingsburg reveals what is involved in the task of transferring texts from print to electronic media. He explores the potentials, some yet untapped, for electronic representations of printed works in ways that will make the electronic representation both more accurate and more rich than was ever possible with printed forms. However, he also keeps in mind the possible loss of the book as a material object and the negative consequences of technology.

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2006
ISBN 0521864984, 9780521864985
216 pages

Key terms: SGML, Textual Criticism, Jerome McGann, Vanity Fair, textual scholar, William Makepeace Thackeray, ASCII, text files, Text Encoding Initiative, W. W. Greg, comparison computer program, Stijn Streuvels, typesetting, English Literary Studies, Victorian fiction, University of Michigan, computer files, JITM, W. M. Thackeray, Malcolm Lowry

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