D. F. McKenzie: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1999)

“D.F. McKenzie shows how the material form of texts crucially determine their meanings. He demonstrates that as works are reproduced and reread, they take on different forms and meanings. This is true of all forms of recorded information, McKenzie claims, including sound, graphics, films, landscape and new electronic media. The bibliographical skills first developed for manuscripts and books can, he shows, be applied to a wide range of cultural documents. This book offers a unifying concept of texts that seeks to acknowledge their variety and the complexity of their relationships.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1999
ISBN 052164495X, 9780521644952
130 pages

Review (Jerome McGann, London Review of Books)
Review (William Warner)
Commentary (Peter Shillingsburg)

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Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading (1934-) [EN, ES, PT]

Ezra Pound’s classic book, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of his aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world’s best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound’s great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

First published by George Routledge, 1934
New edition published by Faber and Faber, London, 1951
This edition first published in 1961, reissued in 1991
ISBN 0571058922
206 pages

wikipedia (EN)

ABC of Reading (English, 1934/1991)
El ABC de la lectura (Spanish, trans. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2000)
ABC da literatura (Portuguese, trans. Auguste de Campos and José Paulo Paes, 2006)

Harry Collins: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (2010)

“Much of what humans know we cannot say. And much of what we do we cannot describe. For example, how do we know how to ride a bike when we can’t explain how we do it? Abilities like this were called “tacit knowledge” by physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, but here Harry Collins analyzes the term, and the behavior, in much greater detail, often departing from Polanyi’s treatment.

In Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concept’s disparate domains by explaining explicit knowledge and classifying tacit knowledge. Collins then teases apart the three very different meanings, which, until now, all fell under the umbrella of Polanyi’s term: relational tacit knowledge (things we could describe in principle if someone put effort into describing them), somatic tacit knowledge (things our bodies can do but we cannot describe how, like balancing on a bike), and collective tacit knowledge (knowledge we draw that is the property of society, such as the rules for language). Thus, bicycle riding consists of some somatic tacit knowledge and some collective tacit knowledge, such as the knowledge that allows us to navigate in traffic. The intermixing of the three kinds of tacit knowledge has led to confusion in the past; Collins’s book will at last unravel the complexities of the idea.

Tacit knowledge drives everything from language, science, education, and management to sport, bicycle riding, art, and our interaction with technology. In Collins’s able hands, it also functions at last as a framework for understanding human behavior in a range of disciplines.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226113809, 9780226113807
xiv+186 pages

Reviews: Alan Warde (Sociological Review, 2010), Massimo Mazzotti (Isis, 2011), Wiebe E. Bijker (Technology & Culture, 2011), Stephen P. Turner (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2011), Park Doing (Social Studies of Science, 2011), Joseph Agassi (Philosophy of Social Sciences, 2013).
Commentary: Philosophia Scientiae (Léna Soler, Sjoerd D. Zwart et al., 2013).

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