Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sarah Werner

Book History, Volume 17, 2014, pp. 406-458 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/bh.2014.0005

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bh/summary/v017/17.kirschenbaum.html

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I

In dialogue with her epistolary interlocutors in Three Guineas (1938), Vir-
ginia Woolf sketched the current landscape for bookmaking and booksell-
ing from the perspective of an author and small press: “Still, Madam, the 
private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moder-
ate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. 
By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once 
rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies, and editors.”1 The passage is 
striking, not only for the uncompromising pragmatism of “actual facts” but 
for how deeply it resonates with our own situation, complete with questions 
of access to technologies of both authorship and publication and the uncer-
tainties of a still-shifting legal landscape. Today not only are word proces-
sors and e-books actual facts, so too are mass digitization projects and new 
forms of analytics ranging from so-called data mining and distant reading 
to visualization, geographic information systems (GIS), and advanced image 
processing techniques. Book history, as both a scholarly discipline and an 
intellectual community, now shares the world with the actual facts of these 
things.

Nor is this an especially new development, save perhaps for some techni-
cal particulars. Those who remember the first wave of academic enthusiasm 
for hypertext, cybertext, electronic textuality, and virtual-everything will 
also recall the unabashed enthusiasm with which glossy books with pri-
mary colored covers celebrated the coming of the empowered reader, the 
decentered author, non-linear narrative (seemingly paradoxically held to-
gether by “links”), and the equally paradoxical end of closure. These texts 
were laced with techno-neologisms or else imports from Continental theory: 
thus “hypertext” was deemed “writerly” after Roland Barthes, whereas the 

Digital Scholarship and  
Digital Studies


The State of the Discipline

Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 407

poor, staid pages of the conventional codex were condemned to be merely 
readerly. Readers themselves, meanwhile, clicked through “lexias” which 
populated hypertexts (or hypermedia), engaging “transversal functions” to 
navigate the “contours” of “textons” rendered on-screen in “flickering sig-
nifiers” dubbed “scriptons.” In journalism and the popular media, medita-
tions on the death of the book were the order of the day. The Gutenberg 
Galaxy was preemptively mourned by the Gutenberg Elegies, while Wired 
Magazine served up a monthly dose of McLuhanesque folk wisdom cou-
pled with edgy, pixelated layouts that emblematized a new aesthetic that 
was equal parts MTV and William Gibson. Text was reimagined as image, 
whether the suddenly ubiquitous banner ads on first-generation Web sites 
or the Photoshopped excesses of Wired’s many imitators. Critics from Neil 
Postman to Michael Joyce reframed the age-old paragone between word 
and image as a new battle of the books: “Hurry up please, it’s time,” Joyce 
wrote in 1991. “We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has 
passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The 
book is dead, long live the book.”2

Today, more than twenty years further on, we are perhaps in the late age 
of print still, even as books themselves are undeniably still being printed—
indeed never more conspicuously so, as they are fabricated on the spot and 
“on demand” by large purpose-built machines installed in the showrooms 
of venerable booksellers like Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., or the 
Harvard Book Store. That most modest word “text” has rather immodestly 
become a verb. The future of the Web turns out to be not immersive vir-
tual reality—from the early Virtual Reality Modeling Language to Second 
Life, efforts to terraform the Web in three dimensions have achieved at best 
niche success—but rather social media. Our avatars are not the animatronic 
phantasmagoria projected by science fiction writers like Neal Stephenson 
but rather mere thumbnail images, most often “selfies” captured with ubiq-
uitous digital camera technology; our online activities consist less of the 
cyberpunk exploits of Gibson, Stephenson, or Bruce Sterling than consid-
erably more mundane interactions: the aforementioned texting, as well as 
“posting,” “sharing,” “liking,” and, yes, “tweeting.” Nonetheless, if the 
social media landscape lacks the glam escapism of techno-color science fic-
tion, it is no less dangerous and sometimes malevolent a place, all the more 
so because the barriers between the “virtual” and the material are becom-
ing ever more permeable—what Steven E. Jones, after Gibson, has compel-
lingly framed as the “eversion” of cyberspace, its eruption into the material 
world.3 Whether a teen suicide as a result of cyber-bullying on Facebook or 



Book History408

sinister revelations about government surveillance, the Web today is con-
siderably more perilous a place than mere LOLcats and Likes might let on. 

It is also overtly textualized, governed now by what Kirschenbaum has 
previously termed a .txtual condition (after Jerome McGann’s influential 
idea of the textual condition).4 Hypertext persists, but it has become normal-
ized, absorbed into the most basic fabric of our daily routines, and governed 
neither by the readerly nor the writerly but rather by pitiless regimes of 
clicks, hits, eyeballs, and analytics. Innovative electronic fiction still exists, 
some might even say has flourished (witness Emily Short and Liza Daly’s re-
markable First Draft of the Revolution or the even more recent Device 6, a 
sophisticated piece of fiction wrapped in a series of ludic puzzles developed 
as an app for the iPad5), even if we are no longer buying the equivalent of 
small press titles on diskette. But the bookselling industry as a whole has 
been utterly transformed by the still unsettled cohabitation of print and e-
books, even as massive swaths of the cultural record are digitized by Google 
Books, the Internet Archive, and an array of smaller initiatives. Readers will 
know that 2011 was the year that Amazon.com reported that e-book sales 
in its popular Kindle format had exceeded their sales of printed books.6 
This, then, in broad strokes, is the media ecology in which contemporary 
authorship, book publishing, and reading now finds itself, a text-centric 
world that is categorized by new forms of short-form interaction, new eco-
nomic models, new metrics of visibility and reputation, and new forms of 
viral dissemination, as well as a polyglot riot of devices, platforms, systems, 
and services, most of them held tenuously together in something known 
vaporously only as “the cloud.”

Book history, however, must keep its feet on the ground: narratives of 
inevitability are as uninteresting as they are unnecessary. The “digital” pedi-
gree that is the ostensible unifying principle for this essay therefore reflects 
not so much the accidents of medium—the supposed reduction of all knowl-
edge to a lingua franca of ones and zeroes—but rather a series of material 
interventions in established systems of reading, writing, and publication, 
interventions that take shape and define themselves in relation to the af-
fordances of other, more familiar media, the printed page not least among 
them. The kind of scholarship we are interested in here, whether theoretical 
or applied, does not posit a transcendental “digital” that somehow stands 
outside the historical and material legacies of other artifacts and phenom-
ena; rather, the scholarship we favor understands the digital as a frankly 
messy complex of extensions and extrusions of prior media and technolo-
gies. Rather than speaking in a speculative or deterministic mode, we have 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 409

focused on the particular, grounding our review on what specific projects 
are now doing and what is happening in the real, decidedly non-virtual 
world of books today.

We have also chosen to focus our remarks on those areas where we feel 
we might have some authority to discern overall trends and developments, 
as well as where we can articulate a message we want to bring to this jour-
nal’s readership. For Werner (section II), this is the relevance of digital tools 
and methods to diverse areas of book history and the study of books as 
physical objects, whether or not individual scholars may elect to identify 
as “digital humanists”; for Kirschenbaum (sections III and IV), it concerns 
the transformations underway in nearly every aspect of contemporary au-
thorship, reading, and bookselling, and their implications for those scholars 
who seek to approach the study of printed books from the 1980s to the 
present. Both of us see the value in digital tools and in theories of the digital 
for complicating and reconfiguring our notions of textual “materiality” and 
dissemination.

Our coverage is not comprehensive, and the omission of a specific project 
or work should not be construed as a comment on its significance or inter-
est; but it is not merely coincidental that in looking at these new fields, much 
of the scholarship we cite exists in the full range of options for scholarly 
publishing, from print collections to electronic editions, blog posts, and dig-
ital databases. We have made no attempt to cover technical developments 
in the delivery of electronic content, especially not data standards like XML 
or EPUB, or the particulars of device technology like electrophoretic ink 
or retina displays. We have largely eschewed the fascinating field of book 
futurism, as manifested by journalists and critics such as Tim Carmody and 
Matthew Battles, and organizations such as Bob Stein’s Institute for the Fu-
ture of the Book.7 Nor have we covered the public debates about the status 
of “reading” in contemporary society, as focalized by the media attention 
around the several reports on the subject from the National Endowment 
for the Arts.8 Likewise, we have given only very passing consideration to 
copyright, legal matters, and the court cases being waged over Google and 
others’ mass digitization and scanning efforts.9 We have also made no at-
tempt to cover the ins and outs of the debates and discussions that have ac-
companied the sudden and seemingly ubiquitous arrival of “digital humani-
ties” as the term of choice for digital scholarship.10 Finally, our perspective 
is unavoidably parochial in that it is limited primarily to work not only in 
English but indeed originating in Anglophone nations. We hope whatever 
usefulness attends the survey that follows might help offset that last short-



Book History410

coming in particular. In keeping with the style of previous “State of the 
Discipline” essays we have given the publication information for the many 
works we discuss inline in the text; these are not typically duplicated as cita-
tions in our notes. We have provided a list of resources at the end, which 
will be useful as a starting place for those seeking a hands-on introduction 
to the projects and resources we discuss.

II

There is sometimes a reluctance among book historians to see the world of 
digital humanities as relevant and helpful to our work. We are, after all, a 
group who works intensely with material texts, books in hand, seated in 
special collections of rare materials. Perhaps more than most other schol-
ars, we are aware of the immediacy and circulation of texts as physical 
objects. Yet much of the digital work that seems to get the most attention 
in the press and grant world at the moment involves distant reading—using 
computers to analyze large corpora, looking for patterns of usage and other 
signals that are not readily visible through reading one book at a time. In 
the right hands, distant reading can reveal new insights into the develop-
ment and deployment of linguistics and rhetoric and genre, the impact of 
cultural forces, and the patterns of literary influence. (In the wrong hands, it 
fails to do any of these things.) This big data trend in the humanities is not 
one that has spoken to book historians. It has been the tool of literary and 
linguistic scholars, something prized by researchers interested in text, rather 
than textual production.

But ignoring what digital tools can offer the study of book history cuts us 
off from opportunities to further develop our knowledge of how books are 
made and used. Not only do we need to learn what tools to take advantage 
of, the rest of the scholarly and public world needs our insights as part of 
the conversation, especially as the means by which information circulates 
today continues to shift in response to the technological and societal shifts 
around us. This approach should not be a big change for book historians. 
The desire to catalog and to count and to sort means that book historians 
have been long involved in digital humanities, whether it has been called by 
that name or no. 

In the field of early modern English literature, this desire to collect infor-
mation has produced the forerunners of many of the tools that we use today. 
The Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum, a 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 411

decidedly non-digital project, led to Pollard and Redgrave’s A Short-title 
Catalogue, which in turn is the forerunner to the decidedly digital English 
Short Title Catalogue now hosted as an open-access resource at the British 
Library (we will return to the implications of this trajectory later in this 
section).11 The ESTC is not the only catalog that book historians rely heav-
ily on, of course, but it is a convenient stand-in for the ways in which the 
tools we take for granted are—whether despite or precisely because of their 
long histories—digital resources. And because they are digital resources, the 
information in them is available to explore and manipulate in ways that 
can reveal larger patterns of production and circulation. The ESTC records 
works printed between 1473 and 1800 in English and in the British Isles and 
North America; it includes information not only on author, title (typically 
including uniform and variant titles when pertinent), date, and imprint, but 
also often on format, page length, genre, subject, and current institutional 
holdings. With access to the full MARC data in this and similar catalogs, 
one has access to many of the pertinent elements of the first centuries of 
book printing and the ability to sort, refine, and analyze its contours.

The Atlas of Early Printing uses the data in the Incunabula Short Title 
Catalogue (another freely accessible database at the British Library with 
origins in print catalogs) to map out the locations of presses and their dates 
of operation in the incunable period. The Atlas also has options to indicate 
the locations and dates of paper mills, book fairs, universities, and conflicts, 
thus handily making visible the relationships between cultural and economic 
forces in the early days of print. (The Atlas also provides some background 
essays on early printing and books and an animated printing press, in ad-
dition to a carefully detailed explanation of where their data is from.) The 
Atlas looks at the creation of incunabula; it is also possible to use this data 
to look at their subsequent histories. Mitch Fraas uses the Gesamtkatalog 
der Wiegendrucke (first printed in 1925 and now available as an online 
database through the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) to look at the distribution 
of incunabula in institutional holdings today.12 (The GW provides better 
geospatial information to work from, Fraas explains; your visualization is 
only as good as your data is.) While generally the map of output coincides 
with current holdings in Europe, there are some gaps—Fraas notes them 
in the Adriatic and the region south of the Baltic sea and east of Berlin—
that suggests some disruption in institutional histories. The Atlas does not 
necessarily show us anything we do not already know as book historians, 
although it is valuable for showing us that information in a manner that 
makes it clearly understandable to those who are not. And while Fraas’s ex-



Book History412

ploration of incunabula distribution is merely the start of delving into that 
data, his mapping highlights how questions about institutional histories and 
resources are an important aspect of studying rare books today.13 

There are numerous other mapping projects, especially for the hand-
press period, including The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 
1769–1794: Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâ-
tel, The Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century, 
and, although still in its early days, Mapping Colonial Americas Publish-
ing Project. Indeed, a number of the projects highlighted at SHARP’s 2013 
digital showcase were mapping-related.14 Mapping, you might be thinking 
to yourself, is not a particularly new activity for book historians, and you 
would be right. We have been producing maps of the book trade for as long 
as we have been studying it. But that is the point: the technology and value 
of mapping is not foreign to book history, but of it. 

Cataloging is also of book history, an information-parsing tool that we 
have been producing since there were first texts to be organized. With the 
easy manipulation that digital records allow, they can not only track texts 
and their locations, but help us discern other traits of production and recep-
tion. Ben Schmidt, for instance, has carefully considered whether or not we 
might be able to gain insight into the consumption and cultural history of 
genres of books by using Library of Congress classifications of books pub-
lished in the mid-nineteenth century and their relative page length in order to 
examine whether history was read more often during revolutions.15 Schmidt 
has also been using LC classifications as a way of looking at the gender dis-
tribution of authors in library holdings of works published between 1800 
and 1922, noting that, among other findings, the field of German history ap-
pears to be significantly more male-authored than other fields, while fiction 
unsurprisingly has the highest numbers of female authors.16 Meanwhile, 
scholars focused on the history of reading have taken advantage of database 
capabilities to create catalogs of readers: the Reading Experience Database 
(RED) is a multi-national collection of databases tracking evidence of read-
ing left through a range of sources from 1450 to 1945, including marginalia, 
diaries, court records, and surveys. What Middletown Read reconfigures the 
detailed records of Muncie, Indiana’s, public library to create a database of 
readers and reading materials between 1891 and 1902. 

In most of these instances, what such projects are using are the metadata 
of books, turning their imprint and holdings information into network anal-
ysis. But what might digital tools offer scholars who are interested in textual 
history? Are there ways of mapping the interior of a book? Alan Galey has 
been experimenting with how to display textual variants and paratextual 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 413

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Book History414

movement across editions. As textual scholars have long noted, the instabil-
ity of texts is a regular feature throughout textual transmission histories. 
Print editions have relied on a combination of commentary, parallel texts, 
and varying levels of complex notation to indicate variants. Digital editions 
have tended to rely on the same typographical features, albeit sometimes 
with hypertext functionality: one option might let you display the Hamlet 
second quarto variants only, another the folio variants. Galey’s experimen-
tation, however, plays with displaying instability itself, animating variants 
so that they switch back and forth without the user’s input. As a method 
of exploring the effect of instability on textual circulation, digital tools of-
fer options that paper does not. Animation enacts instability on the word 
level, but Galey has also experimented with how to visualize the instability 
of paratext by mapping its relative placement in and absence from textual 
sequencing. Tracking the levels of paratextual material in More’s Utopia, 
to use his prototype example, helps us understand the nuances of its cir-
culation and reception: the Humanist circle through which More carefully 
deployed his text shows up in the multiple combination of commendations 
published in its first four editions. (If you want to read through that para-
textual material, visit The Open Utopia, which includes all letters found in 
the 1516–1518 editions, albeit not in an order that reflects any one of those 
printings, and which strives to provide an interface for open, social com-
mentary on the text.) 

The same mapping can be done for the levels of commentary in vari-
orum editions, in which centuries of notes accrue in differing densities to 
texts. Now that increasing numbers of digital editions are being created in 
increasing levels of complexity—the Modern Language Association’s push 
to release its New Variorum Shakespeare editions in XML comes to mind, 
as does the Folger Shakespeare Library’s TEI-encoded digital texts of Shake-
speare’s plays—the opportunities for textual scholars to develop new tools 
for displaying and analyzing textual histories are rich. Galey’s prototype 
focuses on highlighting patterns of emendations over the centuries; in re-
sponse to the MLA’s invitation to create projects based on its Comedy of 
Errors edition, Patrick Murray-John used their data to view the variorum 
commentary as a community of scholarly conversations in his Bill-Crit-O-
Matic. The potential of electronic editions to allow social annotations not 
only has the possibility of expanding the knowledge pool that scholarship 
can draw from, it replicates the interpretive methodologies of earlier peri-
ods. Annotated Books Online is a digital archive of early modern annotated 
books that provides high-quality digital images of the books as well as tran-



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 415

scriptions and translations of their marginalia and that invites users to con-
tribute their own transcriptions, thereby annotating the annotations. The 
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project is, in their 
own words, “an interdisciplinary initiative spawned in the methodological 
commons of the digital humanities that seeks to understand the future of 
reading through reading’s past and to explore the future of the book from 
the perspective of its history.” One recent INKE project, the Social Edition 
of the Devonshire Manuscript, takes a sixteenth-century manuscript miscel-
lany and turns it into a Wikibook edition, aiming to replicate in digital form 
the coterie circulation of early modern poems. 

The circulation of texts within coteries and beyond them is another book 
history field that benefits from digital tools. Infectious Texts: Viral Net-
works in 19th-Century Newspapers uses algorithms to search large cor-
pora of nineteenth-century newspapers in order to identify texts that have 
been reused in multiple papers. The team’s work so far has identified the 
most popular viral texts, suggesting that their popularity is due in part to 
their ability to participate in multiple contexts. More excitingly, they have 
used GIS software to map the print histories of these viral texts alongside 
transportation data, census reports, and other information in order to begin 
uncovering the physical and social networks that linked these viral texts. 
They have confirmed a correlation between the railroad and the spread of 
linked texts, but they have also uncovered relationships between newspa-
pers that might not have been otherwise noticed. Their graphs revealed a 
close connection between the Vermont Phoenix (Brattleboro, Vermont) and 
the Fremont Journal (Fremont, Ohio) based on the frequency with which 
they reprinted texts; further investigation by the team showed that the news-
papers’ editors were brothers-in-law.17 One of the participants in Infectious 
Texts, Ryan Cordell, has also produced research using similar techniques of 
mobilizing large-scale digitization to reveal the frameworks of social texts; 
looking at the early publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial 
Railroad,” Cordell recovered early printed witnesses of the story and para-
texts that had not been part of the scholarly record.18

If the focus so far has been on ways in which digital tools are a natural 
home for the interests of book historians, it shifts here to argue that digital 
tools would benefit from the scrutiny of book historians. The English Short 
Title Catalogue (ESTC) is one example: the current version is a remarkable 
tool, but what do we learn from studying its history through different media 
incarnations? The biases embedded in the catalog’s initial creation become 
part of its current functionality. For instance, as Ian Gadd has been explor-



Book History416

ing, the 1884 Catalogue of Printed Books in Library of the British Museum 
Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Books in English Printed 
Abroad to the Year 1640 used as its end-date the year 1640 because that 
was the terminal date used by Edward Arber in A Transcript of the Registers 
of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, A.D (a date chosen 
not because of its significance but because after this point, in the wake of 
the Long Parliament, the Registers grew exponentially and working with 
them would have become significantly more complicated).19 That decision 
shaped the scope of A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave’s 1926 A Short-title 
Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English 
Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (STC), which catalogs extant books in 
major institutional holdings along the same criteria and incorporates infor-
mation from Arber’s Transcript. Works printed between 1641 and 1700 are 
part of a different catalog compiled in the mid-twentieth century—Donald 
Wing’s Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ire-
land, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other 
Countries, 1641–1700 (Wing)—which, unlike the STC, does not incorpo-
rate information from the Stationers’ Registers and which excludes periodi-
cals and many ephemera. Works printed in the eighteenth century formed 
The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, which was published in the 
1970s first on microfiche and later on CD-ROMs, and which was intended 
to be a union catalog of all known copies, again excluding periodicals and 
most ephemera. In the 1980s, these three catalogs were combined into the 
single English Short Title Catalogue and released first as CD-ROMs in the 
mid-1990s; in 2007, the ESTC was made available as an online, open-access 
resource hosted by the British Library.20 

Users of the ESTC today, therefore, are in fact consulting three separate 
catalogs, each following its own principles and scope.21 Someone who is not 
familiar with that history might wonder why periodicals suddenly disap-
peared in 1641, for instance, or why a catalog of English works includes 
many items printed in other languages. One small but telling detail is the 
way in which ETSC numbers are generated. STC and Wing numbers are 
ordered by author; put the numbers in order and the list of authors will also 
be in order. ESTC numbers, however, are determined in part by the location 
from which they were entered (a number starting with T was done at the 
British Library, for example) and are otherwise randomly generated. The 
earlier numbering system was shaped by the format by which users encoun-
tered the records: you needed to be able to turn through pages in a book 
to locate the item or the item number you were looking for. Under these 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 417

older systems, you could flip through pages to get to “Joceline, Elizabeth” 
to find the 1625 edition of her A Mother’s Advice to her Unborn Child 
or you could look up STC 14625 to discover what work the number cor-
responded to. (Wing numbers start with the first letter of the author’s last 
name and then proceed numerically.) But the ESTC was from its beginning 
conceived as a machine-readable catalog. There was no book that had to 
be flipped through in order to find an entry, but search fields. With locat-
ability not being shaped by sequence but by searching, the primary purpose 
of ESTC numbers is durability: they provide a persistent identifier, not a key 
to discovery. Looking up S119882 brings you to the same Joceline edition 
(STC 14625), but the next edition is S124784 (STC 14625.5), followed by 
S1256 (STC 14625.7) and R19745 (Wing J756). S119883 leads to Nathan-
iel Wickins’s 1638 Woodstreet-compters-plea, for its prisoner (STC 25587); 
S119884 to Thomas Middleton’s 1609 Sir Robert Sherley his Entertainment 
in Cracovia (STC 17894). With ESTC cataloging being done in multiple lo-
cations simultaneously, random numbers make more sense than sequential 
ones. Both systems of citation numbers make sense according to their own 
needs, and if we were to look closely at the numbers without knowing their 
history, we might still be able to reconstruct the paths behind their creation. 
But without that vantage point, we miss the stories that ESTC has to tell us. 
A book historian’s perspective on the shaping principles and effects of this 
digital resource adds a much-needed lens on how its current incarnation 
operates.

The perspectives of book historians are also sorely needed on the large-
scale digitization efforts underway at such places such as Google Books, 
the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Gallica, and other institutions that are 
actively aiming to make print resources available as digital objects. Digitiza-
tion projects are key to the history of digital humanities and to the work 
of book historians and textual scholars. Some of the earliest projects, like 
The William Blake Archive, which began in 1995 and continues on today, 
have helped us see the possibilities for online resources for bringing together 
disparate physical objects into a single virtual home. The Shelley-Godwin 
Archive, released in beta in November 2013, attests to the power of this 
kind of digital work. Combining high-resolution images of works held in 
multiple libraries with careful transcriptions and an interface that allows us-
ers to search and interact with the texts in a range of ways, these sites make 
possible a view into the production and dissemination of these important 
materials. More disparate digitization efforts can have the same effect. At 
last count, there were ten different freely accessible copies of Shakespeare’s 



Book History418

First Folio fully digitized by eight different institutions; although the quality 
of the images and the richness of the interfaces vary, it is nonetheless pos-
sible for a user to find and share variants as well as other copy-specific fea-
tures.22 While it can be hard to track down digitized copies of works when 
they are held at different institutions, an omnibus site can also be mislead-
ing in its appearance of completeness. The newly opened Emily Dickinson 
Archive and the debate over its contents highlights some of those dangers: 
although the site presents itself as a source for viewing Dickinson’s manu-
scripts, the materials online represent only a portion of the manuscripts 
available through its partner institutions. The controversy over how the site 
positions itself in relationship to already published editions of Dickinson’s 
poems and which partner institutions have been given access to materials 
reflects not only the struggles for funding and publicity that all libraries 
face, but the long-standing battle over Dickinson’s legacy and manuscripts 
fought first by her heirs and continued by the institutions holding the bulk 
of her papers.23

Digitization has wonderful benefits for book historians: we can consult 
high-quality images of works from multiple locations at a single moment. 
But our ability to do that depends on the quality of the metadata attached 
to those digital objects. Finding digital copies of works can itself be a huge 
challenge. Anyone who has searched for something on Google Books knows 
how difficult it can be to know what you are looking at: multiple-volume 
works are recorded as separate objects without being linked together and 
works that exist in multiple editions (let alone multiple states) are often 
cataloged as different printings than what they are.24 The records in Hathi-
Trust’s digital library are dramatically better (not surprising, since they are 
a partnership of academic and research institutions), while those in the In-
ternet Archive are a mixed bag (depending on the quality of the informa-
tion provided by the person who uploaded the item). Eighteenth-Century 
Book Tracker, run by Benjamin Pauley, strives to improve this situation 
by creating an index of openly accessible digital facsimiles of eighteenth-
century texts linked to bibliographically reliable records. The site allows 
users to add texts but also provides a bookmarklet to help users navigate 
Google Books and Internet Archive by making it easier to identify accurate 
bibliographic information about the texts they hold. (Pauley is also part of 
the working group for ESTC 21, an effort to reimagine how the ESTC can 
be redesigned “as a 21st century research tool,” including allowing for user 
input and better matching of ESTC records with digital resources.25)

Of course, figuring out what you are looking at is only part of the chal-
lenge of working with digitized texts. Another is understanding the risks of 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 419

letting a copy stand in for an edition. Digitization projects often let the digi-
tization of one book represent the entire print edition of that work. Early 
English Books Online (EEBO) claims that it “contains more than 125,000 
titles” listed in STC, Wing, and the Thomason Tracts.26 But what EEBO 
provides is access to digitized microfilms of copies of more than 125,000 
titles. Especially in the hand-press period, with its proliferation of variant 
states, including stop-press changes and cancels, a copy is not necessarily 
representative of an edition. To choose but one example, the EEBO instance 
of the 1791 edition of the Earl of Rochester’s Poems &c on several occa-
sions (R1756, to use its Wing number) is taken from the Huntington copy 
of the work, a copy that includes the cancellanda of leaves D3 and D7, 
rather than the cancels that were to replace them. (The later state of the 
Poems omits the last stanza of “Love to a Woman,” presumably out of the 
same prudishness about sexuality that was responsible for the cuts made 
throughout the collection.) There is nothing in EEBO’s record to indicate 
that this copy is anything other than a surrogate for the edition. But the 
textual history of Rochester’s poems is complicated enough without adding 
in confusion about states of editions.

The solution to this problem is not difficult: accurate and accessible 
metadata, so that we know what it is we are looking at and so that search 
engines can find it, would fix many of these problems. The problem of how 
digital objects can represent the materiality of textual objects is a more com-
plicated one, and in many ways more interesting. At the moment, most digi-
tizations focus on the value of the object as a text to be read. The text block 
is digitized, but not necessarily the endleaves or the binding (sometimes, as 
in Eighteenth Century Collections Online, even the blank pages inside the 
text block are omitted, presumably on a cost-saving theory that if a page 
does not have words on it, it surely does not have any meaning). And many 
images are of pages only, rather than openings, so that the text is further 
removed from the context and experience of reading it in a book. Digitiza-
tions of textual objects tend not to show the watermarks and chainlines of 
paper, the bite of type, the texture of parchment—the characteristics of an 
object that we observe as we handle it and that inform our knowledge of its 
making and its history.

Digital facsimiles appear to be flat, made up of pages without depth or 
relationship to other pages, part of a sequence that is made up of bits rather 
than bindings. But this is not because such flatness is inherent to digitiza-
tion. It is because of the limited ways in which digitization has been put 
to work for us. We have allowed digital images of texts to be conceived 



Book History420

of as surrogates of those texts, rather than new objects with their own af-
fordances. What might digitizations do other than show us pages of text? 
They might show us text that is not there. The work done with the Great 
Parchment Book exploits the potential of digitization to reshape the mate-
rial object to our benefit. The Great Parchment Book is a survey compiled 
in 1639 of all those estates in Derry managed by the City of London through 
the Irish Society and the City of London livery companies. A fire in 1786 
badly damaged the book, and the 165 surviving leaves remained unavailable 
to researchers for over 200 years. Through careful preservation, about 50% 
of the text was recovered, but the brittle, wrinkled parchment remained an 
intractable obstacle to further work. But a team at the University College 
London’s Centre for Digital Humanities was, after detailed digital imaging, 
able to virtually unwrinkle the pages. About 90 percent of the text of the 
Great Parchment Book is now readable and available for examination on-
line as images of the leaves, enhanced images, or a transcription of the text. 
The Archimedes Palimpsest Project has similarly disembodied a manuscript 
to make accessible text that would otherwise remain hidden, using multi-
spectral imaging to recover two lost Archimedes treatises and other ancient 
texts that had been written over in the thirteenth century. The Project then 
released all of its data to the public and published the earlier state of the 
manuscript through Google Books, making available to read in digital form 
a text unreadable in its material manifestation.

Digitization also offers the opportunity to take objects apart so that we 
can study their components. The Bodleian’s Broadside Ballads Online has 
not only been digitizing their large collection of sixteenth- through twenti-
eth-century ballads, but has been experimenting with an image search tool 
that allows users to highlight an image—or a selection of an image—to 
search across the collection for other instances of its use. ImageMatch can, 
for example, trace the use of a woodcut image of a hat across multiple bal-
lads; while tagging might allow one to search for “hats,” image searching 
allows one to look for a particular hat, even when the person depicted wear-
ing it changes.27 Rather than cutting out bits of a text, the Folger Shake-
speare Library’s Impos

i
tor strives to turn bound books back into printed 

sheets. Using the images and metadata produced by the Library as part of 
its digital image collection, Michael Poston created a tool that allows users 
to generate a facsimile of a printed sheet. You cannot disbind a book in 
order to rearrange its leaves into the format in which it would have been 
printed (unless the book has already been slated for conservation and the 
conservation team is willing to let you play with it), but digital pages can be 
rearranged in any order you like.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 421

Figure 3. An example of an Impos
i
tor-generated quarto imposition for Titus 

Andronicus. Screenshot by Werner.

Figure 2. The first image of the 
recovered Archimedes Palimpsest, 
as seen in its Google Book incar-
nation. Screenshot by Werner.



Book History422

Digital tools can help us see what is otherwise difficult to observe. Reflec-
tance Transformation Imaging (RTI) has been used more often on archaeol-
ogy and art objects than on textual objects, but it is a potentially rich tool 
for physical bibliography. Developed at Hewlett Packard Labs, RTI uses 
multiple digital photographs shot from a stationary position with varying 
angles of light; through an interactive RTI viewer, a user can manipulate 
the light source and qualities to create a detailed 3D imaging of an object’s 
surface. With the cuneiform tablets that were used in the first exploration of 
the technology’s potential, the relief in the RTI images revealed more clearly 
than photographs could the features of the tablets.28 Subsequent projects 
have used RTI technology to explore Japanese woodblock prints, book 
bindings, and illuminated manuscripts.29 Taking our cue from the work that 
Randall McLeod has done on the topographies of paper, looking at bearing 
type and other blind impressions, imagine what RTI could do for the study 
of books.30

If we are going to let our imaginations run wild with what digital tools 
might offer the study of material books and book history, there are other 
suggestive paths forward. What might the distribution of dirt tell us about 
the usage of books? Kathryn Rudy uses densitometers to study medieval 
prayer books and identifies which pages were used the most often and how 
they were held; her research has also revealed some of the effects that clean-
ing treatments have had on the books’ appearances today.31 Could smell 
tell us about something other than nostalgia for paper books over digital 
ones? Scientists have been analyzing the smell of paper and suggesting the 
use of odor analysis as a diagnostic tool for conservation purposes in nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century works, but anecdotal evidence suggests that 
earlier books might have different smells depending on where their paper 
was sized.32 Could sound help us understand books and textual scholarship? 
Listen to Wikipedia is a site that translates the edits made to Wikipedia into 
sound, producing the sonic equivalent of visualization that could help us 
grasp the nuances of variorum histories of editing.

As we hope is clear from these examples, book historians can do a lot 
with the digital tools that are available to us. But if we want tools that reflect 
the full range of work that we do as book historians, studying the social, 
economic, and material circulation and creation of texts, we will need to 
engage with the development of these resources. Even if we do not have the 
technical skills to create digital tools from scratch, we should understand 
them well enough to be able to recognize how these tools might shape our 
research and to participate in conversations with those who can build the 
tools we need.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 423

III

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was published on Tuesday, August 31, 2010. 
Many readers who had placed an advance order for the electronic edition 
of the novel woke that morning to find that the text had been wirelessly de-
livered to their Kindle (whether their account or an actual Kindle reader de-
vice) as they slept. Freedom was a widely anticipated book, even if not quite 
a publishing sensation on the order of, say, Harry Potter and the Deathly 
Hallows (see Ted Striphas’s masterful coverage of the Potter franchise’s mar-
keting techniques and retail procedures).33 It would seem uncontroversial 
to suggest that Franzen, National Book Award winner and Oprah enfant 
terrible, will be a subject of future inquiry by critics and historians of the 
novel and literary fiction. What will such persons wish to have available to 
them as prerequisites for scholarly inquiry? Merely a good, clean copy of the 
text? Even this might not prove completely unproblematic if one isn’t care-
ful, since the UK HarperCollins edition was subject to a recall (some 8,000 
copies) when it was found to contain errors from an uncorrected proof of 
the text published by mistake.34 But of course many will want much more 
than just a clean reading text. Depending on one’s interests, we might well 
want as many editions and printings and translations as we can lay our 
hands on, including an exemplar of the corrupt UK release (Amazon lists no 
fewer than 45 formats and editions). 

The Kindle release is just one of these, yet it presents a reader with a 
number of unique features. One can access the Popular Highlights func-
tion to see passages that other readers have singled out as significant. For 
example, we can know that 1,180 other readers have taken note of the fact 
that “She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still 
not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.”35 
The Amazon Kindle edition also includes “extras” like a plot summary, lists 
of characters and important places in the book, memorable quotes, errata, 
and recommendations for other books a reader might like if they like this 
one (this content is all drawn from something called “Shelfari,” an “editable 
book encyclopedia”). The plot synopsis includes an option to toggle spoil-
ers on and off. Clearly a future student of Franzen’s Freedom would have 
some cause to wish to access this electronic incarnation along with a printed 
text, even if we assume the textual content, what McGann once termed the 
linguistic codes, to be the same.

But of course, there’s more. In Amazon’s online listing for the book, we 
find, as of this writing, 1,197 customer reviews, many of them in turn rated 



Book History424

and commented by other members of the Amazon community. We can see 
that the book’s current Sales Rank, again as of this writing, 13,945, though 
it was in Amazon’s Top 10 at the time of its publication. We can purchase 
the audio book, read by one David LeDoux; there is an exclusive fourteen-
minute interview with Franzen for the Amazon Omnivoracious podcast; 
there is a discussion forum, with active threads. We can “look inside the 
book,” and, more intriguingly, perform, within the limits of fair use on 
copyrighted material, keyword searches to call up specific passages. And 
then there are the other obligatory ports of call. Franzen’s official page at 
his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the Oprah Book Club site, a uni-
verse all its own with spiraling nebulae of supplemental material and vast 

Figure 4. Page from Franzen’s Freedom as displayed in Kindle for iPad version 
2.7 on an iPad 4 running IOS 6.1.3 in a leather carrying sleeve. The “Popular 
Highlights” tab is open, with a passage selected by some 1180 other readers 
marked with underlining at the top of the screen. Font has been enlarged to suit the 
owner’s preferences. Photo by Kirschenbaum.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 425

galaxies of discussion forums; dozens and dozens of videos on YouTube, 
capturing Franzen at readings, in interviews, even on the street. Unlike, say, 
Margaret Atwood or Alice Walker or William Gibson, Franzen himself, a 
strident social media refusenik, does not blog or tweet, though there have 
been several Franzen fakes on Twitter. Pirated copies of Freedom, mean-
while, were reported on the usual torrent sites no later than September 3. 
And all of this thus far relates only to the book’s publication and reception. 
We have not yet said anything about the novel’s composition, its editing, 
or production. Franzen himself, according to Time magazine, writes with a 
“heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts 
and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system.”36 Where are the 
digital manuscripts? Will Franzen allow them to be accessioned by whatever 
institution eventually acquires his literary papers? Will the documents con-
tain track changes and other algorithmically encoded versions and variants? 
What would forensic computing tell us about the expurgated fragments of 
files on the original hard disk? And what of the digital prepress materials 
at Farrar, Straus and Giroux? Franzen’s email correspondence with agents, 
editors, publicists, and friends, and confidantes?

What does it mean, then, to study histories of authorship, publishing, 
and reading right now? What will future scholars have to account for as dif-
ferent with respect to today’s books, even a mainstream piece of literary fic-
tion, when it is released into the kind of networked media environment that 
characterizes our most mundane daily interactions, whether paying a bill 
or checking the forecast? What are the material realities of book-writing, 
bookmaking, and bookselling in the present moment? That is the question 
to which we turn in this latter part of our State of the Field essay. For in 
2014, book history shades ineluctably into media history. Some might see a 
hopeless schism, or better, a punctuation mark for book studies, the point at 
which the book as physical object is subsumed by a much vaster media spec-
trum where it is at best a derivative object in a system of digitized produc-
tion and vertically integrated transmedia content. Yet over the last ten years 
or so there has been a marked “material turn” in digital studies that, we 
will insist, more or less aligns with the material turn that brought about the 
study of books as historically situated and socially manufactured artifacts. 
A variety of scholars, theorists, and media arts practitioners now recognize 
that computers—by which we mean not only the tangible hardware, but 
also software and even the very algorithmic processes of computation—are 
material phenomena. How we move from the seemingly counterintuitive 
assertion that code, bits, symbolic logic, and signal processing are in fact 



Book History426

“material” has been the decisive maneuver in digital studies, largely defining 
the state of the field as it is conducted today. There is thus a marked contrast 
between current scholarship in digital studies and the early enthusiasms we 
limned at the beginning of this essay. Moreover, given the media ecology 
surveyed in our brief discussion of Freedom, the convergence between the 
materially-minded pursuits of book history and the agendas of contempo-
rary digital studies opens the way for sophisticated studies of contemporary 
reading, writing, and publishing that are grounded in the individual circum-
stances of authoring technologies like word processing and beyond, as well 
as the bookseller’s marketplace, networks for electronic dissemination, and 
readerly histories that spill across the whole of the Web 2.0 landscape.

The materialist turn in digital studies is not a unified or prescribed move-
ment, and practically speaking it has coalesced through several different 
sub-fields that we will survey below. There are, however, some broadly 
shared assumptions: the materialist turn assumes that computers and com-
putational processes are material in nature, and thus subject to documen-
tary and historical forms of understanding; it is technically rigorous and ac-
knowledges the material particulars of media and computation as worthy of 
critical investigation; it understands the particular constraints of software, 
code, and platform as generative for studying the processes and products of 
digital culture; it cultivates and actively seeks to refine an archival record 
for digital culture; and it understands the activity of archiving itself in new 
and capacious ways, that include such techniques as crowd-sourcing, hack-
tivism, restoration and retro-computing, and citizen archivists. Of course 
none of the above are concerns or ideas that have manifested exclusively 
in just the last ten years, and certainly not only in the primarily Anglo-
American contexts we will look at below. Harold Innis, whose key books 
on the materialities of communication have been overshadowed by Toronto 
colleague Marshall McLuhan’s fame and following, laid the groundwork 
for such an agenda in the years immediately following the Second World 
War (see especially Empire and Communications [1950] and The Bias of 
Communication [1951]). In Germany, meanwhile, Friedrich Kittler reject-
ed the overtures of post-structuralism in favor of the dubious allure of a 
soldering iron and machine code, fabricating a techno-hardcore media his-
toriography that displaced human agency from the central circuits of the 
culture machine, paving the way for the media archaeology movement that 
we will discuss in some detail. Kittler, of course, is routinely taken to task 
for playing fast and loose with his historical accuracies, but his impact is 
undeniable; as Geoffrey Winthrop-Young writes in his book-length intro-



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 427

duction to Kittler’s legacy, “The battle cry ‘media determine our situation’ 
is reduced to the tacit agreement that scholars should pay some attention 
to media formats after having paid none at all for decades.”37 Kittler is also 
surely the most brutally minimalistic of all the techno-materialist thinkers, 
arguing that in the end “there is no software” because all digital phenom-
ena “come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am 
afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences.”38 (The canonical introduction to 
Kittler remains his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, especially the opening 
chapter wherein he presents the thesis about the nineteenth century’s lib-
eration of media from the symbolic constrictions of exclusively alphabetic 
forms, but the essays collected in Literature, Media, Information Systems 
are likewise very approachable [those in Optical Media somewhat less so]; 
both are recommended before attempting the Gesamtkunstwerk, Discourse 
Networks 1800/1900.) Finally, Nancy Ann Roth’s recent translations of the 
Czech Vilém Flusser’s work for the University of Minnesota Press (Into the 
Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? [originally 
published in German in 1985 and 1987, respectively]) have helped restore 
to our attention a theorist who, as the late Mark Poster puts it in his in-
troduction to both volumes, “stands out, with only a handful of others, as 
one who presciently and insightfully deciphered the codes of materiality 
disseminated under the apparatus of media” (xi). Innis, Kittler, and Flusser 
have each produced work that is broadly relevant to students of all media 
forms, wherein the inscription and transmission of the written word and 
specifically the materialities of print and literature are channeled through a 
wider media spectrum. Together with figures such as Benjamin and McLu-
han, they offer a foundation for an approach to book history in the current 
threshold moment of the digital, even as more recent thinkers have chal-
lenged, revised, and extended their positions. To these we now turn.

Over a decade old, the New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-
Fruin and Nick Montfort and released in 2003 by the MIT Press is an ap-
propriate milestone to demarcate the onset of what we have characterized 
as the material turn in digital studies. The NMR was very much intended as 
an intervention when published, bringing together artists, humanists, and 
technologists from the second half of the twentieth century, pointedly end-
ing with Tim Berners-Lee’s 1994 paper about the World Wide Web. The 
“new media” between its covers (and on the accompanying CD) thus ar-
rived already overtly historicized, the very heft of the hardbound volume a 
reminder of the fact that conversations about computers, writing, art, and 
interactive design had been underway for decades prior to the advent of to-



Book History428

day’s desktop browser. The historical documents range from Turing, Bush, 
Licklidder, and Weiner to Burroughs, Roy Ascott, Brenda Laurel, and Lynn 
Hershman; of particular interest to students of book history will be pieces 
such as Ted Nelson’s “Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System 
and Archive” (from 1981’s Literary Machines) and Robert Coover’s much-
cited 1992 “End of Books” New York Times Book Review essay, as well as 
a compendium of Oulipo writings including a complete do-it-yourself cut-
up implementation of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poems. 
The volume deploys a deliberate contrapuntal strategy, juxtaposing, say, 
Bush’s Memex with Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths.” While a useful 
compendium for researchers and a compelling choice for classroom instruc-
tion, the NMR also helped inaugurate a new historically-aware phase of 
digital studies, one in which the presentism that afflicted so much of the field 
in its earlier incarnations—or else the crude historicism whose fulcrum was 
ceci tuera cela—is filled in by documentation of the decades of dense aes-
thetic and scientific conversation on the very borders of the screens, pages, 
windows, and frames that limn the contours of our contemporary media 
landscape.

Two other figures whose careers have been heavily identified with aspects 
of book history and textual scholarship deserve particular mention at this 
point. Johanna Drucker, whose pathbreaking scholarship on the radical ty-
pographic experiments of the modernist avant garde will be known to many 
readers here, as will her steady output of artist’s books, began speaking 
and writing overtly about digital media in the 1990s. Many of her early 
statements about digital media, are collected in Figuring the Word: Essays 
on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics, a 1998 Granary Press volume; her 
formal identification with “digital humanities” as it manifests today can be 
seen in Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2012), co-authored with Anne Burdick, 
Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Her University of Vir-
ginia colleague Jerome McGann, meanwhile, had been integrating ideas 
from early hypertext theory into his thinking and writing about critical tex-
tual editing since the 1980s; by the 1990s, the Rossetti Archive project was 
well underway, and it furnished a continual source for theoretical reflection 
and provocation. These essays of McGann’s are collected in 2004’s Radiant 
Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (Palgrave), while his more 
recent thought on matters digital can be found in A New Republic of Let-
ters (Harvard, 2014). What Drucker and McGann each offered in their own 
way were models of figures whose deep engagements in the materialities of 
books and printed matter served to shape and refine their thinking about 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 429

electronic textual forms, rather than positioning them in reductive opposi-
tion as was the case for such bibliophiles as Sven Birkerts. Both of them 
introduced perspectives from the material study of textuality to audiences 
otherwise engaged with electronic technologies, who then found occasion to 
bring such perspectives to bear on digital objects and artifacts.

One such point of influence was N. Katherine Hayles. Though Hay-
les’s intellectual trajectory was already well established, marked out by her 
training and scholarship in the history of science, her short 2002 Writing 
Machines from MIT Press (which featured a collaboration with graphic 
designer Anne Burdick) carried concepts from textual materiality directly 
to readings of works that included both threshold codex productions like 
Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, as well as Talan Memmott’s online 
hypertext Lexia to Perplexia. Here Hayles introduces the term “media-spe-
cific analysis,” and enjoins her readers to no longer “treat text on the screen 
as if it were print read in a vertical position. Electronic text has its own 
specificities, and a deep understanding of them would bring into view by 
contrast the specificities of print, which could again be seen for what it was, 
a medium, and not a transparent interface.”39 Similarly, Matthew Kirschen-
baum’s 2008 Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT 
Press) explicitly brings together perspectives from textual scholarship and 
book history, as well as the technical field of computer forensics. This ap-
proach produces new readings of landmark digital work such as William 
Gibson’s “Agrippa” and Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and demonstrates the 
extent to which computer forensics—which locates, recovers, and authen-
ticates digital evidence to a degree admissible in legal settings—offers the 
specific methodological bridge between new forms of electronic writing and 
the traditional concerns of bibliographers and textual scholars. Arguing that 
the previous generation of writing about electronic textuality had been gov-
erned by a “medial ideology” in which tropes such as light, lightning, speed, 
and ephemerality predominated, Kirschenbaum insisted instead on the fo-
rensically replete realities of inscription for devices such as hard drives to 
argue that a “computer,” like a “book,” is in fact an individuated artifact, 
always subject to deep historical forms of understanding.

What has become one of the most important routes to such understand-
ings emerged almost in passing, as a throwaway, in the course of an enor-
mously influential book in its own right, Lev Manovich’s The Language of 
New Media (MIT Press, 2001). Manovich’s work here is justly celebrated 
as perhaps the most comprehensive formal framework of digital media and 
objects to date; it has been influential for its linkages between digital media 



Book History430

and cinema, as well as a provocative (if much contested) “opposition” be-
tween database and narrative as cultural organizing principles. But early in 
the pages of the book Manovich presents us with a vignette. He is seeking 
to distance himself from what he perceives as the vulgar futurism, as well 
as the lack of interest in the messy details of actual software and computer 
programs, of previous academic commentators on the digital technologies 
emerging all around us. At stake are not just better theories, but also the ac-
tual history of digital culture and its myriad non-virtual realities. “Where,” 
he asks, “were the theoreticians at the moment when the icons and the 
buttons of multimedia interfaces were like wet paint on a just-completed 
painting, before they became universal conventions and thus slipped into 
invisibility?” He then poses the question even more insistently, evoking the 
hypothetical but eminently plausible “historical moment” when

a young 20-something programmer at Netscape took the chewing 
gum out of his mouth, sipped warm Coke out of the can—he was 
at a computer for 16 hours straight, trying to meet a marketing 
deadline—and, finally satisfied with its small file size, saved a short 
animation of stars moving across the night sky? This animation was 
to appear in the upper right corner of Netscape Navigator, thus be-
coming the most widely seen moving image sequence ever until the 
next release of the software.40

This is an enormously captivating and compelling gesture, dramatizing as it 
does the distance from the so-called “theoreticians” of first-generation digi-
tal studies to the specific, localized, embodied, and ineluctably materialist 
concerns Manovich wishes to foreground. He called the research agenda he 
was then proposing “software studies,” and although its uptake was not im-
mediate, software studies has now emerged as a recognized sub-field of digi-
tal studies, complete with a dedicated book series from the MIT Press. The 
affinities with book history should at this point require no great elaboration 
on our part: Manovich, and those who followed him in to software studies 
are interested in specific software packages, their conceptualization, design, 
engineering, implementation, and their use and circulation within particular 
communities. Matthew Fuller, editor of Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT 
Press, 2008) puts it this way in his introduction: “While applied computer 
science and related disciplines . . . have now accreted half a century of work 
on this domain, software is often a blind spot in the wider, broadly cultural 
theorization and study of computational and networked digital media . . . . 
Software is seen as a tool, something you do something with. It is neutral, 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 431

grey, or optimistically blue.”41 (Fuller’s important early work, meanwhile, is 
collected in Beyond the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software [Autonome-
dia, 2003].) Software studies thus emerges as a framework for historicizing 
software and dislodging it from the purely instrumental sphere. One could 
imagine useful convergences of software studies and book history around 
applications such as WordStar or Microsoft Word, or Aldus PageMaker, to 
name just some of the most obvious. 

Yet software is not always an intuitive artifact, which surely helps ac-
count for the kind of blind spots Fuller notes. Is software the user inter-
face that most of us see and experience, or is it the lines of source code? 
Is it the application or the complete operating environment? What about 
documentation, packaging, and other kinds of ancillary material? Closely 
related to the ambitions of software studies then is the practical challenge 
of software preservation—how will researchers actually access historically 
important software packages in decades to come? How is the history of soft-
ware being preserved? Some software history is contained in the corporate 
archives of entities like Microsoft and Adobe, and researchers will need to 
become proactive about seeking access to these typically cloistered settings. 
But much is also now available on the open Web, for example the efforts 
of the Internet Archive, whose recently launched Historical Software Col-
lection offers users the ability to interact with emulations of key software 
programs natively in their browser; likewise, large amounts of documenta-
tion are readily available through grassroots computer history efforts such 
as BitSavers.42 Finally, oral history interviews with living key technological 
innovators can be extremely valuable, as Belinda Barnet demonstrates in her 
Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem, 2013). Though 
she does not use the term, Barnet’s software studies approach makes her 
work very different from first generation treatments of hypertext theory. 
Manovich’s most recent book, Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Ac-
ademic, 2013), takes as its centerpiece an extended history and “reading” 
of Adobe After Effects, the industry standard for creating moving image 
animations.

Critical code studies is a related movement which focuses not so much on 
software as an application or artifact but on the literal code of the applica-
tion itself. If software studies is akin to the study of paper or bindings or 
typography, critical code studies asks us to reckon with the underlying pro-
cesses of computation, much as we would seek to understand the interac-
tion between, say, collation and imposition in the hand-press period. While 
often regarded as the sole province of programmers and other specialists, 



Book History432

the reality is that all “computer code” as we typically know it is really only 
ever human readable; it only becomes legible (which is to say actionable, or 
operationalized) by the machine once it has undergone a process known as 
compiling, which takes so-called “high-level” languages like Java or BASIC 
or FORTRAN and converts them to the binary ones and zeroes that furnish 
a computer’s operating instructions. Critical code studies thus foregrounds 
software and computer programs as semantically replete fields of interpre-
tation, written by and for human beings (nor is this strictly a humanistic 
conceit: Donald Knuth, perhaps the most famous living computer scien-
tist, espouses the same principles through what he terms literate program-
ming).43 Critical code scholars are given to close readings of individual lines 
of computer code, looking for the expressive dimension of such elements as 
the names given to variables or the choice of conditional structures used to 
govern the actions of the program; however they also locate agency at the 
level of the process the code enacts, the specific computational behaviors set 
in motion by the source code. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, in his book Expressive 
Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT 
Press, 2009) writes eloquently of a code literacy as not only a scholarly vir-
tue but a civic necessity, from the algorithmically ranked results of “every-
day Google searches to the high stakes of Diebold voting machines”;44 the 
book itself offers close, “procedural” readings of the semantics and struc-
ture of individual software programs, including the Tale-Spin story genera-
tor, SimCity, and Eliza. In yet another example, Dennis Jerz recovered the 
original FORTRAN source code for the foundational interactive story-game 
ADVENTURE, and offers a detailed “reading” of its particulars and their 
implications for our understanding of the composition of the game in a 
model of both critical code and software studies.45 But perhaps the most 
extreme, and tantalizing, example of the potential of the critical code ap-
proach is a book cryptically entitled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : 
GOTO 10 (MIT Press 2013).46 The book, which was jointly authored by 
a collective of some dozen members, takes that single eponymous line of 
source code for the Commodore 64 (which drew a randomly determined 
maze pattern on the screen) as the basis for an exploration of 1980s home 
computer culture that ranges from discussions of the labyrinth as a cultural 
form to the nature of computational randomness to the means of dissemi-
nation for early computer programs, which often included (for example) 
print magazines, from which a reader would transcribe and retype them 
into his or her own system. 10 PRINT thus uses a line of code as the pro-
verbial grain of sand (silicon) within which to see a world; it is a remark-



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 433

able example of the cultural richness and repleteness of a supposedly purely 
operational expression.

Closely aligned with both software studies and critical code studies (in-
volving many of the same individual scholars) is the “platform studies” 
movement, which is most heavily associated with Nick Montfort and Ian 
Bogost, who edit another MIT Press book series devoted to the topic and 
published its inaugural volume, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Comput-
er System (2009). Textbooks and tutorials often explain the fundamentals 
of modern computing to newcomers by employing the metaphor (and visual 
imagery) of stacks and towers, working from hardware and machine code 
up through levels of abstraction including assembly code, high-level pro-
gram languages, and finally end-user applications and what we see on the 
screen. Much of the scholarship comprising the material turn in digital stud-
ies has tended to hew, sometimes quite explicitly, to this same model (which, 
it is worth noting, is itself a historical construct, an artifact of the Von Neu-
mann architecture for computer systems). “Platform,” Montfort and Bogost 
tell us, “is the abstraction level beneath code, a level which has not yet been 
systematically studied. If code studies are new media’s analogue to software 
engineering and computer programming, platform studies are the human-
istic parallel of computing systems and computer architecture, connecting 
the fundamentals of new media work to the cultures in which they were 
produced and the cultures in which coding, forms, interfaces, and eventual 
use are layered upon them.”47 The title of their Atari 2600 book, Racing the 
Beam, in fact refers to the beam of the cathode ray gun that would “paint” 
the game’s graphics on a television display in a continuously scanning hori-
zontal pattern that programmers of the system’s cartridges not only had to 
compensate for but sometimes took advantage of to overcome the inherent 
limitations in memory and processing power also characteristic of the sys-
tem. This close dialectic between the technical particulars of the platform, 
sometimes articulated at very high levels of detail, and their implications 
for the kind of creative and imaginative work performed on those systems 
is characteristic of platform studies, which has also seen books covering the 
Nintendo Wii (Codename Revolution, by Steven E. Jones and George K. 
Thiruvathukal [2012]) and the Commodore Amiga (The Future Was Here, 
by Jimmy Maher [2012]). Though “platform” is perhaps most conveniently 
associated with physical computing hardware (as the preceding examples 
suggest), Montfort and Bogost are quick to point out that platforms can be 
virtualized as well: for example, a forthcoming book in the series addresses 
the Web’s once ubiquitous Flash technology as a “platform.” Here too then 



Book History434

we can see the explicit parallels to book history: what would it mean to 
think of the Kindle as a platform, for example, to critically examine the con-
straints and affordances of the device (both its physical incarnation as well 
as its architecture and protocols)? Platform studies, like the history of the 
book, is characterized by close, some might even say obsessive or unseemly, 
attention to detail out of the fundamental conviction that such material 
particulars are ineluctably part of the history of communicative objects, ar-
tifacts, and our human interactions with them.

The distinctions between software studies, critical code studies, and plat-
forms studies can sometimes be opaque intellectual terrain for the uniniti-
ated, not only because of the technical connotations of such terms but also 
because the boundaries between them—in terms of people, publishers, and 
intellectual approach—can seem rather permeable. Indeed, the 10 PRINT 
volume discussed above in relation to critical code studies was published 
as part of the MIT Press’s Software Studies series. Other works have also 
blended the three approaches to create generative readings of electronic 
media. Terry Harpold’s Ex-Foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade 
Path (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) is meticulous in its documenta-
tion of specific platforms and software versions for the creative electronic 
literature it takes as the focus of its discussion, including (again) Joyce’s Af-
ternoon. Likewise, Christopher Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An 
Archeology of Forms, 1959–1995 (University of Alabama Press, 2007) is a 
deeply researched volume based on the archival recovery of primary source 
documentation for the period under discussion, in this regard treating “digi-
tal poetry” no differently from other literary phenomena where such explic-
it period demarcation is commonplace. And Steven E. Jones’s The Meaning 
of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (Routledge, 2008) applies 
a textual and software studies approach to the study of computer games as 
material artifacts. Perhaps the single most illustrative and effective example 
of the relevance of all three approaches to book history comes in the form of 
Alan Galey’s 2012 Book History essay “The Enkindling Reciter: E-books in 
the Bibliographical Imagination.” This essay, which won the 2012 Fredson 
Bowers Prize, is a tour de force in its demonstration of the both the new ma-
terialist sensibility and new bibliographic—and forensic—techniques in the 
investigation and evaluation of digital book objects. Readers will recall that 
we have already encountered Galey’s innovative interface designs in the Vi-
sualizing Variation project; here he solves an actual bibliographical problem 
(several, in fact) in the electronic presentation of the text of Johanna Skib-
srud’s The Sentimentalist, winner of the 2010 Canadian Scotiabank Giller 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 435

Prize. Since readers of the present essay will have ample access to Galey’s 
text we will not rehearse its particulars in detail, but instead remind our 
readers of Galey’s closing contentions around “stripping the veils of code,” 
offered in conscious revision not only of Bowers but also Kirschenbaum’s 
earlier work on digital forensics:

One of the consequences that the bibliographical study of e-books 
forces upon us is the need to rethink traditional bibliography’s ba-
sis in empiricism. To reverse the terms of the errant William James 
epigraph, the different forms of e-books may have no rocky bot-
tom, no absolute Real that serves to anchor the evidence of our 
senses. The reason is simple: e-books, like all digital texts, require 
us to interpret phenomena not directly observable by the senses. We 
must rely on layers upon layers of digital tools and interfaces, as we 
have seen in the examples above. A purely empirical and forensic 
perspective assumes that objects speak for themselves, and yield up 
their evidence to the observation of human senses and the inquiry 
of human reason. My purpose in drawing attention to the role of 
the enkindling reciter is to emphasize that digital objects do not 
speak for themselves; someone always speaks for them. 8

Ultimately software studies, critical code studies, and platform studies are 
each varyingly inflected methodologies for cultivating both the critical sen-
sibility and the technical acumen necessary to swim deep into the cultural 
reservoirs of contemporary digital production, if not quite touch that final 
rocky bottom. We would advise our readers to attend to the commonalities 
between them rather than succumbing to the parsing of their differences.

There is one other articulated movement with direct bearing on the ma-
terial turn, developing not primarily in North American but rather Anglo-
European settings. Media archaeology is a term which originates in cinema 
studies with the work of C.W. Ceram, but which has more recently expand-
ed to offer coverage to the full spectrum of media phenomena, including, 
of course, the products and productions of the digital age. Kittler, discussed 
earlier, is often regarded as a prototypical media archaeologist for his as-
signment of radical agency to non-human actors and technologies, though 
he himself would have disavowed the label. Media archaeology’s most in-
fluential figures have nonetheless tended to emerge from the Continental 
intellectual scene, though the movement’s most prominent English-language 
organizer and advocate, Jussi Parikka, is a Finn working in the British uni-
versity system. Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology? (Polity, 2012) and a 
collection co-edited with Erkki Huhtamo, Media Archaeology: Approaches, 



Book History436

Applications, and Implications (California, 2011), will be the best start-
ing points for most of our readers. In North America, meanwhile, media 
archaeology has been increasingly absorbed into the academic conversa-
tion around digital technologies, with ground already been prepared by 
the thinkers and trends discussed above. As Parikka himself acknowledges, 
there is a general compatibility between the methods and concerns of soft-
ware studies, critical code studies, platform studies, and computer forensics, 
and media archaeology.

Broadly speaking then, media archaeology is characterized by an intense 
fixation on the technological operations of media. Its historiography gen-
erally hews to Foucauldian genealogies of “disruption” and discontinuity. 
Siegfied Zelinski’s Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Arcaheology of 
Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (MIT Press, 2006) and the work 
collected in his series of edited Variantology volumes (Verlag der Buchhan-
dlung Walther König, 2005–), as well as Erkki Huhtamo’s Illusions in Mo-
tion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles 
(MIT Press, 2013) are representative in this regard. Though invested in the 
recovery of neglected, forgotten, crashed, erased, and overwritten media 
devices in order to question and reframe established narratives of media 
history, media archaeology is also, in the eyes of at least some practitio-
ners, about a radical revisionary historiographical practice in which ma-
chines assume primacy of agency in the recording and narration of cultural 
events. Wolfgang Ernst, who uses the term “archaeography” to describe 
this process, by which the “archive” writes itself through varied modes of 
technical inscription—many of them forms of signal processing occurring 
at sub-semantic levels—is the key figure here: his writings are collected in 
English in Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by Parikka (Minnesota, 
2013). There is a practical component as well, in that hardware conserva-
tion and preservation are important facets of media archaeology, the skills 
and expertise necessary to restore vintage computers and other technolo-
gies to working condition. (Ernst maintains such a facility, the “Media 
Archaeology Fundus”; Lori Emerson’s work with her Media Archaeology 
Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, which maintains dozens of vin-
tage computers in working order, is likewise exemplary here.49) Finally, as 
the title of Ernst’s collection above suggests, “the archive” has emerged as 
a site of intense interest for media archaeological investigation, not only 
for the practicalities in preserving access to its technological apparatus but 
also because the very conceptualization and theorization of archives has 
direct implications for our articulation of media history. Wendy Hui Kyong 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 437

Chun thus lays great stress on the technological as well as the bio-informatic 
origins of archive and memory in her Programmed Visions: Software and 
Memory (MIT, 2011), a work that has been generally embraced by media 
archaeological writing.

For book history, media archaeology offers a framework for media inves-
tigation which tends to have an even longer historical reach than the primar-
ily North American movements described above; media archaeological in-
vestigations routinely extend back into the nineteenth century and beyond, 
grounding themselves in “prehistoric” (recall Funkhouser) manifestations 
of cinema and the moving image, photography, and recorded sound. There 
is also a conspicuous strain of media archaeology that takes as its primary 
locus documents, records, and writing technologies such as the typewriter 
and telegraph, as well as “soft” technologies such as shorthand. Lisa Gitel-
man’s work is exemplary and indispensable here, and though she has never 
overtly declared herself a “media archaeologist” she has both influenced 
and been influenced by the movement. Her Scripts, Grooves, and Writing 
Machines (Stanford, 1999) offers a more historically attentive narrative 
of nineteenth century inscriptive economies than Kittler, and an essay col-
lection co-edited with Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media 1740–1915 (MIT, 
2004), consolidates and amplifies the import of this period as a long ante-
cedent to the media landscape of today. More recently, her Always Already 
New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2006) offered perhaps 
the first serious attempt to genuinely historicize the Web, including explicit 
attention to the twin concepts of records and documents in electronic (and 
aural) culture; her newest monograph, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Me-
dia History of Documents (Duke, 2014), supplies readings of documentary 
technologies from nineteenth-century job printing to the ubiquitous PDF 
format of our own time. A scholar such as Gitelman thus foregrounds the 
linear conceptual path from book history to media history and back again, 
with the additional virtue of a long historical perspective that understands 
the screens and devices of the present as descendants of earlier technological 
dispensations. Much the same could be said of Darren Wershler and The 
Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell, 2005), which 
offers archaeologies of book-writing and media alike. Similarly, Ben Kafka, 
in The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (MIT, 2012) 
explores paper as a medium, even as he develops a media archaeological 
account of bureaucracy and office work. Cornelia Vismann, in Files: Law 
and Media Technology (Stanford, 2008; translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young, also Kittler’s chief translator and explicator) brings similar attention 



Book History438

and stress to the construct of the “file” in legalistic and documentary con-
texts. Jean-Francois Blanchette’s Burdens of Proof: Crpytographic Culture 
and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents (MIT, 2012) draws 
together (again) legal discourse with forensic technologies and a consider-
ation of the longstanding problems of diplomatics, namely document au-
thentication and documentary authority, in relation to the particular prob-
lematics of born-digital documents. Lori Emerson’s forthcoming Reading/
Writing/Interfaces (Minnesota, 2014) employs media archaeological pre-
cepts to consider the physical substrates of experimental poetry and poetics, 
with authors ranging from Dickinson to contemporary Canadian writers 
such as Steve McCaffery and bpNichol. Finally, Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The 
Meaning of a Format (Duke, 2012), might appear at best oblique to the 
interests of book history—that is until one remembers to consider the place 
of digital audio books amongst today’s reading public.

IV

Media archaeology, together with software studies, critical code studies, 
and platform studies, gives us a route into the vexed, recursive layers of 
today’s textual landscape that is broadly compatible with the sensibilities 
and intellectual agendas of today’s scholarship in book history. More than 
that, however, all of these movements or trends offer the opportunity to 
reconsider the book as the locus of critical attention. Books, after all, have 
always been a narrow and particular subset of humankind’s written endeav-
ors and activities. What is the nature of the relationship between books and 
documents, or books and records, or books and paper or other forms of 
media and material supports? Such questions, we maintain, are not mere 
theoretical prompts, but essential prerequisites for responsible scholarship 
of books as they are written and read today; for despite some important 
contributions, book history by itself does not yet have a critical mass of 
scholarship with which to answer that challenge. Works such as Jason Ep-
stein’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (Norton, 2002) 
are invaluable as memoirs but they lack the necessary critical and theoretical 
framework for working through questions such as we have raised. David M. 
Levy’s Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age 
(Arcade, 2001, now sadly out of print) offered a starting place for a materi-
alist reconsideration of the status of texts as embodied documents amid the 
shifting landscape of digitization. Bonnie Mak’s concise How the Page Mat-



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 439

ters (Toronto, 2011) historicizes the seemingly homogenous “page” as both 
a conceptual and a material unit in manuscript, print, and digital culture 
through a case study of what Randall McLeod might have called the “trans-
formissions” of one particular text. Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Read-
ing in Electronic Times (Chicago, 2012) is a focused, sometimes personal 
attempt to historicize today’s questions about the significance of reading 
(specifically) books, informed but not burdened by Piper’s training in criti-
cal theory; it is usefully considered with both Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead: 
Books in Our Digital Age (Palgrave, 2007) and Alan Jacobs’s The Plea-
sures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011). The best critical 
overview of book publishing in the present moment is undoubtedly John B. 
Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the 21st Cen-
tury (Plume, 2012). Of equal relevance is Ted Striphas’s aforementioned The 
Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control 
(Columbia, 2009) which grounds its analysis not in futurisms but rather in 
research and critical analysis of the status of the book in the present, from 
big-box bookselling and electronic distribution systems to reading clubs, 
and the (yes) the Harry Potter phenomenon, among other topics; Striphas, 
whose intellectual pedigree is more cultural studies and materialist Marxism 
than the digital studies authors we have been discussing, nevertheless offers 
an example of a project that understands that the distinction between book 
history and media history is now literally and purely and finally only aca-
demic. The recent collection Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the 
Humanities in the Postprint Era, edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica 
Pressman (Minnesota, 2013) as well as the new Cambridge Companion to 
Textual Scholarship, edited by Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge, 
2013), likewise eschew unproductive distinctions between these fields.

Let us now offer some additional examples to demonstrate the potential 
for scholarly inquiry bridging the various approaches to media history and 
theory we have been surveying, and the history of the book, broadly con-
ceived. We can begin with the fact that computer history has spawned any 
number of compelling book objects that ought to be of interest to book his-
tory. There are surely projects for those who wish to explore the publication 
histories of newsletters and ’zines like that of the Homebrew Computing 
Club (whose archives are at Stanford), or Mondo 2000; similarly, landmark 
publications such as Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 
Whole Earth Catalog are fascinating book objects, filled with complex as-
semblages of visual and verbal material. The massive popular interest in 
personal computing and video games that had taken hold by the early 1980s 



Book History440

(in 1982, Time magazine anointed the computer its “machine” of the year) 
spawned hundreds of mass-market trade publications, including introduc-
tions, tutorials, how-tos, and guidebooks (see Fig. 5). Computer magazines 
such as BYTE and PC Magazine and Macworld also offer key documenta-
tion from this period. In short, the reality is that much significant computer 
history has been written and rendered in print; this is a vast and largely 
unexplored space.

Book history has the potential to bring much-needed nuance to tired, re-
ductive binaries around the paragone between print and the digital. Abigail 
J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper have argued compellingly that far from 
eliminating it, digital technologies (such as word processing and the laser 
printer) greatly exacerbated the consumption of paper in office settings.50 
It is tempting to explore similar dynamics in other milieu: for example, the 
avant garde literary arts journal Between C&D, a “little magazine” which 
began publication in New York’s East Village in 1983 and was printed and 
distributed on fanfold paper from a dot matrix printer and came packaged 

Figure 5. A selection of 1980s trade books written as guides to home computers 
and video games, whose diverse and notable authors include Martin Amis, Michael 
Crichton, Newt Gingrich, Frank Herbert, Hugh Kenner, and Jerry Pournelle; also a 
1984 pop-up book entitled Inside the Personal Computer. Photo by Kirschenbaum.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 441

in a ziplock bag. (Authors included Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Gary 
Indiana, Patrick McGrath, and Lynne Tillman.) As editors Joel Rose and 
Catherine Texier recall: “The combination of our high-tech look—the com-
puter printout, the fanfold, the dot-matrix print type—in conjunction with 
handmade art by East Village (or Downtown) artists on the front and back 
covers, and the ziplock plastic bag binding, along with, needless to say, the 
featured ‘new writing’ immediately attracted both readers and writers, from 
New York City and elsewhere.”51 Such episodes dovetail, at least anecdot-
ally, with the kinds of arguments scholars such as Harold Love and Peter 
Stallybrass have long made about the persistence of scribal and manuscript 
writing into cultures of printing, whereby the cross-transfer between two 
active media spheres (in this case print and the digital) results in the prolif-
eration, rather than the diminishment, of prior forms of media and inscrip-
tion.52

One notable exemplar from this period is Robert Pinsky, Steve Hales, and 
William Mataga’s Mindwheel, published by Synapse/Brøderbund in 1982. 
Mindwheel is a self-described “Electronic Novel.” While our readers will 
know who Pinsky is of course, it is unlikely they will recognize either of the 
other names. That is because they are computer programmers who share 
the authorship credits with Pinsky. Mindwheel is in fact a hybrid book/
digital artifact. It consists of a ninety-page clothbound volume (packaged 
in a paper slipcase) containing prose materials (credited separately to one 
Richard Sanford), artwork, verse, photos, and faux-interviews, journals en-
tries, and other documentary materials; also included is a sleeve containing 
a 5.25- or 3.5-inch computer disk, available for Macintosh, the Apple II, 
and the PC. One engaged Mindwheel by beginning with the thirty or so 
pages of Sanford’s prose in the printed volume, at which point the transition 
to the interactive content was effected by way of a dream sequence; practi-
cally speaking, the reader would set the book aside, boot the disk, and find 
him- or herself in a “text adventure” style environment where they would 
read prose descriptions of their current situation and type their intended 
actions, to be interpreted by the program’s parser which would advance 
the action of the story accordingly. This in itself was no great novelty at the 
time, and in fact text adventures constituted an important segment of the 
computing gaming market for home computers (Infocom set the standard 
with dozens of such titles). What set Mindwheel apart, however, was both 
the dual book/disk combination (though it should be noted the packaging 
of Infocom games routinely included printed paraphernalia such as maps, 
letters, and photos), and the engagement of Pinsky as a “significant” literary 



Book History442

talent. (In a feature which conspicuously leverages the material affordances 
of print versus disk media as an anti-piracy safeguard, the participant in the 
interactive portion of the text must enter a “password” which is discovered 
by referencing a particular page in the accompanying volume.) Clearly the 
conceit of an “electronic novel” as a combined print and interactive experi-
ence was envisioned as a paradigm for future publishing—the phrase was 
apparently even trademarked. Alas, it was not to be: Synapse went under 
shortly thereafter. Pinsky himself today still seems to recall his contributions 
to the project fondly, and talks freely about it in interviews. 

We rehearse this history not only because of Mindwheel’s import in its 
own right, though it does bear genuine significance both for the involvement 
of a future Poet Laureate of the United States and as an early exemplar of a 
hybrid publishing model which would be often repeated in the avant garde 
world,53 as well as in the commercial market, where for a time CD-ROMs 
(far more durable than diskettes) were routinely bundled with all manner of 

Figure 6. Mindwheel, by Pinsky, et al. Slipcover, book, and 3.5-inch diskette. 
Note label on slipcover specifying it as the Macintosh version and the two “Pro-
grammers” who are given billing alongside of the “Author.” Pinsky was respon-
sible for the electronic content, but the text in the printed volume was by Sanford. 
Photo by Kirschenbaum.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 443

trade books and textbooks. As these examples show, digital media cohabi-
tate with the codex, not only just in close physical proximity—between the 
same covers—but occupying conceptually coterminous textual and narra-
tive space. But Mindwheel also raises the vital question of preservation, and 
how one accesses it today as a significant historical artifact. One option, of 
course, is to seek out an original copy on the secondhand market, and at 
least as of this writing they are not especially difficult to find or priced pro-
hibitively; yet it would still be impractical to assign the book to a class full of 
students, and even having an original diskette in hand raises the question of 
how it can be accessed on a modern computer, which lacks the disk drives to 
say nothing of the appropriate operating systems. An alternative presents it-
self in the form of the Web’s so-called “abandonware” hubs, where software 
of uncertain copyright status (presumed “abandoned” by the original rights 
holders) may be downloaded under conditions of questionable legality and 
experienced by way of an emulator, a piece of software whose function 
is to replicate the graphics and behaviors, using the original programmed 
logic, of some long-vanished platform; PDFs of the original printed volume, 
meanwhile, are also in circulation, and their copyright status is equally du-
bious. Both abandonware repositories and emulators are situated within 
what is at best a grey area where, as Galey has also noted in the context 
of his work on e-books, copyrights and Digital Rights Management tech-
nologies can render seemingly innocuous scholarly activities illicit uncertain 
under the letter of the law. Mindwheel thus dramatizes the complexities of 
doing book history on this comparatively recent material, as well as the 
importance of scholars acquainting themselves with the various issues and 
trade-offs inherent in various forms of digital preservation. Such knowledge 
is no different in principle from what we expect of those who would navi-
gate a reading room for access to special collections materials because they 
understand that a facsimile is not an adequate substitute for the experience 
of the original volume. 

Books themselves can also be used as a kind of emulator, to capture and 
document the experience of the digital, a trend we see in mainstream pub-
lishing in a novel like Jennifer Grose’s Sad Desk Salad (2012), which embeds 
the ubiquitous chat balloons, message icons, and avatars of social media 
into its prose pages. But the most interesting such work typically takes the 
form of artist’s books or novelty projects. The most literal example may be 
Richard Moore’s Paper Pong (2008), which allows you to actually “play” 
the classic video game using a system of directed page references similar to 
the old-style Choose Your Own Adventure™ books. The difference is that 



Book History444

instead of a picaresque adventure plot, one makes their decision about what 
to do next (which way to move the paddle) based on a visual depiction of the 
current state of the game, which is rendered in a full page layout. Silvio Lo-
russo and Sebastien Schmieg’s 56 Broken Kindle Screens (2012) presents the 
reader with exactly that, uncaptioned black and white photo-reproductions 
of the eponymous cracked and shattered devices. While clearly intended as 
a statement on the materiality of the digital and its counterintuitive persis-
tence in the form of print, the book also serves to document the surprising 
variety and aesthetic allure of these unfortunate accidents. More extreme in 
this regard is Martin Howse’s Diff in June (2013), a 1600-page tome, like 
56 Broken Kindle Screens available as either a PDF or a print-on-demand 
publication from Lulu.com. The project is described as follows: “Using a 
small custom script, for the entire month of June 2011 Martin Howse reg-
istered each chunk of data which had changed within the file system from 
the previous day’s image. Excluding binary data, one day’s sedimentation 
has been published in this book, a novel of data archaeology in progress 
tracking the overt and the covert, merging the legal and illegal, personal and 
administrative, source code and frozen systematics.”54 The experience of en-
countering Diff in June as a printed volume is to be confronted with a dense 
slab of text whose closest cousin may be a telephone book for a large-sized 
metropolitan area. The pages are the data dump, most of it simply opaque 
and even the infrequent pockets of legibility resisting any simple semantic 
engagement since they are messages intended for the operating system of 
the computer rather than the attention of a reader. Diff in June reminds us 
that the vast majority of writing that takes place now occurs without human 
agency or intervention: it is machines writing to machines, as Félix Guattari 
once said, a fact which makes this volume a primary media archaeologi-
cal artifact after the likes of Kittler and Ernst. Yet this book, like Moore’s, 
and Lorusso and Schmieg’s, also speaks to some more mundane but no less 
consequential facts about book publishing today: practically speaking, Diff 
in June could not exist without either electronic distribution or the print-on-
demand services harnessed by a company such as Lulu. Similarly, Moore’s 
Paper Pong is also available as a PDF, under a Creative Commons license, 
which grants its reader the ability to “share” and “remix” the work as long 
as Moore is credited and there is no commercial profit from the activity; 56 
Broken Kindle Screens, meanwhile, is not available electronically, but this 
book too could not exist without digital media, not only in the obvious sense 
of its subject matter but also because the images it collects were themselves 
harvested from the Web, from Flickr and other photo-sharing services. All 
of these works thus demonstrate the book’s surprising capaciousness as a 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 445

platform for documenting the minute particulars of the digital world and its 
devices, even as new digital publishing practices and economies of circula-
tion are reconfiguring the status and consumption of books themselves.

With the exception of boutique letterpress editions and the like, all books 
today, as Kirschenbaum has previously argued,55 are “born digital” in the 
sense that at some point in their composition, editing, layout, and printing 
they become (re)configured as data objects in software packages such as 
Word and Quark. The history here is very rich and very much in the process 
of active exploration, but we can cover it only in passing. Computer typeset-
ting began in the mid-1970s, with pioneers like Roderick Chisolm at Brown 
University and Douglass Hofstadter, who has attested that Gödel, Escher, 
Bach (1979) could not have been completed without the assistance of an 
early Stanford program called TV-Edit. Bessinger and Smith’s Beowulf Con-
cordance (1969) was even earlier, and is a landmark of both “humanities 
computing” and digital presswork. Starting in 1977 meanwhile, Stanford 
computer scientist Donald Knuth took nearly a decade away from his writ-
ing of what are still the definitive textbooks on The Art of Computer Pro-
gramming to develop TeX, a computer typesetting language that enabled 
him to lay out the mathematical equations and other specialized elements 
of the books to his satisfaction, something his commercial publishers were 
not then capable of doing; the story is told in his Digital Typography (CLSI, 
1999). Small presses were also often innovators, as John Maxwell’s ongoing 
work on Coach House Press will demonstrate when published; document 
markup technologies, including the Web’s ubiquitous XML, owe substantial 
debts to innovations by Stan Bevington and others associated with Coach 
House. Kirschenbaum, meanwhile, has documented what is likely the first 
book written with a word processor, Len Deighton’s Bomber (1970), as 
part of his ongoing research on the literary history of word processing.56 
John Updike summed up much the state of things at a 1988 conference at 
MIT: “And in regards to the iron curtain that exists between the humani-
ties and the sciences, the computer is a skillful double-agent: the production 
and analysis of texts has been greatly facilitated by the word processor; for 
instance, programs for the making of indices and concordances have taken 
much of the laboriousness out of those necessary scholarly tasks. In my own 
professional field, not only does word processing make the production of 
perfectly typed texts almost too easy, but computer-setting has lightened the 
finicky labor of proofs.”57 

But while computers have had an obvious impact on the circumstances 
of authorship and the industry of publishing, they are also responsible for 
key aspects of what we might think of as a widespread renaissance in the 



Book History446

appreciation of the book as material object. Steven E. Jones, in his afore-
mentioned The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2013) 
narrates the way in which such an extraordinary and intricate book object 
as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes in fact owes its existence to com-
puter-mediated design and production. Describing a video released by the 
publisher, Jones notes: “At about one minute in, we see the large computer 
screen of the designer at work, and then what looks like a laser cutter pro-
ducing the dies.” 8 Tree of Codes, therefore, turns out to be a book which, 
despite its flagrant bookishness, could not have been created—or certainly 
could not have been practically fabricated as a trade multiple—without the 
employment of sophisticated digital technologies. Any scholar attentive to 
the actual facts of book history must regard such a work not as a protest 
against digitization but as material evidence of the interplay between ana-
log and digital forms. One could multiply examples here with other recent 
books with conspicuous design dimensions whose production was abetted 
by desktop publishing and layout tools: Mark Danielewski’s novels come 
immediately to mind, including his first, House of Leaves (2000), which 
circulated as a PDF samizdat before being picked up by Pantheon (legend 
has Danielewski flying to New York to lay out the book himself in QuarkX-
Press in his publisher’s offices). Likewise, the 2013 collaboration between 
J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, S, is a faux-library volume dating from the 
1940s which comes complete with a slip case and interior pages stuffed full 
of postcards, scrap paper, ephemera like a coffee shop napkin, and marginal 
annotations. The design firm who did the work, Melcher Media, is based in 
New York City’s West Village and recently hosted a “Future of StoryTelling 
Summit.” S is thus not a nostalgic offering; it is a proleptic one. Perhaps the 
most extreme example we can consider is the remarkable and aptly titled 
Between Page and Screen (2012), which is a collaboration between writer 
Amaranth Borsuk and programmer Brad Bouse; originally produced in a 
limited letterpress edition, the book is now available from Siglio Press. To 
read it, one opens the pages of the volume, which turn out to contain not 
text but rather large, geometric black and white glyphs loosely resembling 
the more familiar QR codes. By itself, then, the book is essentially meaning-
less; but when one accesses the accompanying Web site they are directed to 
activate their computer’s camera and hold the book’s pages up to the lens: 
software on the Web site interprets the glyphs as captured by the camera, 
and the result is an “augmented reality” text that appears to literally float 
above the pages of the book when rendered by the computer’s display of the 
camera’s image—the effect never fails to be breathtaking, and the project, 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 447

though it wears its prejudices on its sleeve, nonetheless serves as perhaps 
the definitive statement on the jointly enabling potential of computers and 
codex.

Some readers may object that these are specialized texts, projects which 
sought out their opportunities to make a statement on the “the future of the 
book.” The reality, however, is that in today’s bookselling economy digital 
media are often integral to the publishing phenomenon. Books are thus not 
only “born digital” in the sense that their composition and layout involves 
digital tools and technologies, but often their viability as marketable book 
projects is itself a direct outgrowth of a digital pedigree. One could argue, 
for example, that the massive online fan culture devoted to the Harry Pot-
ter books is indispensable to that franchise’s success. “Harry Potter,” after 
all, is not just a series of novels; it is a platform from which fans engage in 
their own creative acts, whether via official extensions of the franchise or 

Figure 7. Borsuk and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen. Here what one is looking 
at is a reproduction of a screenshot taken of the feed from her computer’s digital 
camera, which has captured an image of Borsuk facing the screen with the book 
open to one of its glyphs, thus generating the legible text which the software super-
imposes on the display of the camera image. Screenshot by Borsuk and Bouse, used 
by permission.



Book History448

through fan fiction, with online sites hosting literally hundreds of thousands 
of creations set in the Potter universe. A less prominent example is the ex-
perience of Hugh Howey, author of the science fiction novel Wool, which 
began in 2011 with a short story released through Amazon’s Kindle Direct 
Publishing. The story’s reputation spread through online word-of-mouth, 
and Howey was prompted to write additional installments, eventually pack-
aging them as a novel-length offering; after intense interest from conven-
tional publishers, he sold one-time rights for an edition of 500,000 copies 
to Simon and Schuster, but retains online distribution rights himself and has 
also negotiated foreign publishing rights and a film deal with 20th Century 
Fox. Customers who buy a copy of the Simon and Schuster edition, whether 
from a brick and mortar bookseller or an online e-tailer, will therefore hold 
in their hands a book whose existence as a printed object is a derivative 
outgrowth of the success of its digital forerunner. (In an “advice to writers” 
essay on his personal Web site, Howey encourages aspiring authors to lever-
age social media and to think of themselves as a “start-up” enterprise.59) 
Jennifer Egan, meanwhile, well established as one of the more significant 
voices in contemporary American fiction, has experimented with Twitter as 
a storytelling platform. In May, 2012 she began tweeting (yes, in 140-char-
acter installments) her short story “Black Box” from the New Yorker’s ac-
count. The serial tweets were broadcast nightly over the course of ten days, 
with the New Yorker’s followers replying and retweeting all the while. The 
complete piece was then published in the June 4, 2012 print edition of the 
New Yorker. What becomes especially interesting, however, is Egan’s dis-
closure in an interview that the story was initially drafted longhand in a 
Japanese notebook whose pages were ruled with rectangular boxes that 
could accommodate prose statements roughly the length of a tweet.60 The 
particular features of this notebook, then, were a material constraint for the 
project as much as Twitter. “Black Box” therefore is an artifact of multi-
faceted interchange, a generative friction, between print and digital writing 
platforms. (On Amazon, meanwhile, there is a German Kindle edition of 
the work available, a fact which serves to demonstrate that digital forms are 
no more self-identical than printed exemplars.) A “book history” project 
engaging the work of contemporary fiction writers such as J.K. Rowling, 
Hugh Howey, or Jennifer Egan will of necessity also be a software studies, 
platform studies, and media archaeology project.

No account of the interplay between digital and traditional forms of au-
thorship, reading, and the book market would be complete without the bête 
noire of contemporary publishing. We refer, of course, to Fifty Shades of 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 449

Grey (2012), whose author, E.L. James, famously displaced J. K. Rowling 
as the best-selling author of all time on Amazon.com UK. Besides its sensa-
tional sales records (for which e-books bear a disproportionate responsibil-
ity61), the novel is best-known for its supposedly daring content, which has 
sparked the predictable controversies and debates in the predictable venues. 
But its e-book sales are not incidental in this regard, since as many observers 
have pointed out e-books offer the opportunity for private reading in public 
spaces: in a crowded train car, no one around you can tell if you’re read-
ing E.L. James or Henry James. (Every book has the same non-judgmental 
cover.) Fifty Shades of Grey (hereafter FSoG) has an additional significance 
in the terms of our discussion, however. Its trajectory to print or screen 
makes those of Franzen, Pinsky, Egan, Danielewski, Howey, and others we 
have discussed appear straightforward. The story involves not just the usual 
binaries between print and the digital, but also relationships between fans 
and producers, between traditional publishing and viral content online, and 
between multiple layers of socially sanctioned forms of authorship. It is also 
a cautionary tale about the conduct of literary history in the present mo-
ment and the stakes for the future, since whatever one’s view of the novel’s 
content it is undeniably groundbreaking and historic as an illustration of 
just how complex the contemporary book’s media environment has become. 

FSoG has its origins as an instance of so-called “fan fiction,” briefly men-
tioned above in relation to the Harry Potter series. Fan fiction, as the name 
implies, involves original storytelling (emphasizing prose, but also illustra-
tions and other media) undertaken by the devotees of popular film, TV, 
and book franchises; its quality varies widely from the sophomoric to the 
sophisticated, but with leading fan authors garnering formidable followings 
of their own on the sites and portals where their work is disseminated and 
discussed. Various franchises take different views of fan fiction, some (in-
cluding Rowling) accepting it, while others actively seek to discourage the 
phenomenon. E.L. James began writing fan fiction set in the Twilight vam-
pire universe under the penname “Snowqueens Icedragon ” in 2010. Her 
work was sexually explicit, something different fan sites and communities 
have varying degrees of tolerance for; James opted to remove her work from 
the FanFiction.net hub where it was being distributed and to instead serve 
it from her own personal Web site, FiftyShades.com.62 By this time she had 
already garnered a substantial readership, hundreds of thousands of readers 
by some reasonable estimates.63 Crucially, at this point James also began 
rewriting the text, which had originally been published under the title Mas-
ter of the Universe; all vestiges of the Twilight universe were expunged. She 



Book History450

then brought the revised story to The Writers’ Coffeehouse, an Australian-
based print-on-demand company. It was published there as Fifty Shades of 
Grey in May 2011; a year later James sold the rights to Random House’s 
Vintage Books, the move which yielded its now meteoric sales figures. Thus 
a book which began as the derivative work of another fiction franchise now 
commands even larger assets. (As of this writing a FSoG movie is on the 
way, with its own attendant controversies). 

Today, of course, FSoG is no longer available from The Writers’ Coffee 
House; James’s original FiftyShades.com is a standard author’s platform, 
with no trace of Master of the Universe; and her profile has been scrubbed 
from FanFiction.net. No doubt whatever unease a successful writer (or a 
protective publisher) may feel upon encountering reminders of a work’s in-
auspicious origins is greatly exacerbated in this instance by its relationship 
to the Twilight universe. A scholar of the future, then, whether interested 
in so-called “Mommy porn” or the fan fiction phenomenon or James’s ca-
reer will have a difficult if not impossible time amassing the primary source 
materials required to do his or her work. Likely they will have to rely on 
a network of individuals who may, improbably, still have a copy of the 
original files sequestered on some piece of now obsolescent media (PDFs of 
the original Master of the Universe remain in circulation, though they are 
wholly dissociated from the FSoG brand); they may have some luck with 
content crawlers like the Internet Archive (though its archived crawls of 

Figure 8.  E. L. James’s Master of the Universe as it was presented on her Fif-
tyShades.com site in December, 2010 under her original penname “Snowqueens 
Icedragon.” Screenshot from GalleyCat.com.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 451

FiftyShades.com have now been removed); or else they will have to rely on 
a smattering of screenshots and third-person accounts. One could argue that 
this is no different from the kind of sleuthing and serendipity good research 
has always required; but we believe the combination of technologies, distri-
bution networks, and the legalities of blockbuster properties spanning mul-
tiple media platforms renders the situation qualitatively different. We have 
suggested that the various approaches we have surveyed from digital studies 
and media theory can serve to offer some traction on these questions, and 
this is true. But more fundamental issues remain, chief among them that the 
scholarly and archival apparatus for contemporary book studies is quite 
simply unequipped to accommodate the particulars of today’s book publish-
ing landscape, necessitating as it would the use of technologies such as Web 
crawlers, torrent sites, screen scrapers, social media feeds, and sometimes 
even trafficking in illicit file trading.

V

If book history is the study of how platforms shape and deliver texts, then 
today’s platforms of pixels and plastic are as much a part of those stud-
ies as paper and papyrus. How many of us encounter the objects of our 
study unmediated through subsequent technologies? Even in special collec-
tions, what we find is presented to us through the thresholds of catalogs, 
phase boxes, and call slips. We all experience this, even if we do not always 
theorize it. But what might we learn if we do think about the entrance of 
old media into the platforms of new media? Whitney Trettien’s explora-
tion of print-on-demand copies of Areopagitica suggests that such debased 
“zombified” books can teach us more about how texts are circulated today 
than most deliberately translated or hybrid works can. English Reprints 
Jhon Milton Areopagitica, as one of these POD books is titled, is a mish-
mash of bad metadata and worse Optical Character Recognition, but its 
“remediated, dismediated strangeness brings the increasingly normalized 
processes of digital archiving into sharp relief.” Through her engagement 
with the long history and digital and physical presences of these works, 
Trettien shows how “these moments of engaging with the printed material-
ity of digital texts point to the multiform ways digitization is altering the 
weight of history.” And through her clever coding, Trettien’s online Digital 
Humanities Quarterly essay performs the deformation it discusses, disrupt-
ing the normal mediation of code we have come to expect.64



Book History452

Meanwhile, works such as the story of @MayorEmanuel reveal all the 
messy interplay between text and real life that exclusively fictional stories 
like Jennifer Egan’s do not capture. A parody twitter account that emerged 
during Rahm Emanuel’s campaign to be elected the mayor of Chicago in 
the 2010-2011 winter, @MayorEmanuel appeared at first to be a one-note 
joke. (Rahm Emanuel swears. He swears a lot.) But over the course of the 
campaign, the account began to introduce recurring characters, to respond 
to events happening in the real campaign, and to weave together a fictional 
narrative that played out in real time. @MayorEmanuel’s conclusion came 
the day after the Emanuel’s election and, uncannily, played off a hailstorm 
happening in Chicago. After the account’s creator was revealed to be the 
founder of the music ’zine Punk Planet and journalism professor Dan Sink-
er, the @MayorEmanuel story was retold in articles and released as a book.65 
But what the book fails to capture is what made the story so exciting: it 
was a narrative that coincided with real life. The tweets played out over five 
months, and the story it told happened over the same five months; when the 
Bears lost, @MayorEmanuel mourned; when @MayorEmanuel was stuck in 
the sewer pipes for seven hours, the tweets played out over seven hours. The 
details of @MayorEmanuel’s campaign were interspersed in followers’ feeds 
with the details of their other friends’ feeds, with no visible demarcation be-
tween fact and fiction. The platform on which the text of @MayorEmanuel 
was created and through which it was delivered made possible not only the 
mechanisms of its reception but the shape and meaning of its story. If that’s 
not “book” history—think of the analysis of Christian adoption of the co-
dex as the form through which to receive the Bible—then what is?

So what can we say about today’s objects of tomorrow’s book history? 
Books themselves are transmedia properties, franchises spanning multiple 
formats, media channels, and distribution networks. Today’s texts are also, 
inevitably, hybrid artifacts, migrating back and forth between digital and 
analog states. Importantly, the print does not always precede the digital; in 
fact the norm may be the other way around. Moreover, the digital is no lon-
ger exclusively a presentist form, if it ever was: the digital itself is now his-
torical. A work such as Mindwheel is now more than thirty years old. Like 
textual scholarship, then, the book history of tomorrow will consist in the 
application of techniques from fields like digital forensics, as archivists and 
other experts work to stabilize, authenticate, and index the born-digital ma-
terials that now function, indisputably, as primary records in and of them-
selves. But scholars will also need to understand something about network 
effects, the massive assemblages of data that will be susceptible to analysis 



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 453

through text mining and visualization rather than traditional close reading. 
There can be no other way to evaluate the thousands of user reviews on a 
site like Amazon, for example, other than in aggregate, as streams which we 
will sift for patterns and anomalies.66 Nor will the material circumstances 
of the digital be homogenous: they will encompass an array of different 
platforms, systems, formats, and standards, some of which will interoperate 
and some of which will not, but all of which a future scholar will have to 
contend with in the same way as the complex imbrications of printings and 
editions (all of which will also still obtain). Finally, our scholarship will have 
to confront the reality that its largest challenges may not be technological 
but legalistic. Intellectual property, digital rights management, terms of ser-
vice, end-user license agreements will govern access at least as much or more 
than media obsolescence, bit rot, or curatorial neglect. Legalities, material 
hybridity, network effects—contemporary book studies shares many fea-
tures in common with its predecessors, but we ignore the marked material 
differences at the peril of our scholarly legacy.

List of Digital Resources

Annotated Books Online (Utrecht University): http://www.annotatedbooksonline.com/ 
The Archimedes Palimpsest (Walters Art Museum): http://archimedespalimpsest.org/
The Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa Library): http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
The Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Rhode Island Histori-

cal Society): http://www.rihs.org/atlas/index.php
Bill-Crit-O-Matic (Patrick Murray-John): http://billcritomatic.org/
Bodleian Ballads Online (Bodleian Library): http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/; to search using 

ImageMatch http://zeus.robots.ox.ac.uk/ballads/page0
The Dickinson Electronic Archives (Dickinson Editing Collective): http://www.emilydickin-

son.org/
Early English Books Online: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home [subscription only]
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker (Benjamin Pauley): http://www.easternct.edu/~pauleyb/

c18booktracker/
Eighteenth Century Collections Online: http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-

collections-online/ [subscription only]
Emily Dickinson Archive (Harvard University): http://www.edickinson.org/
English Short Title Catalogue: http://estc.bl.uk/
Folger Digital Texts (Folger Shakespeare Library): http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (University of Western Sydney): http://fbtee.

uws.edu.au/main/
Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France): http://gallica.bnf.fr/
Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke Database (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin): http://www.gesamt-

katalogderwiegendrucke.de/
Google Books: http://books.google.com/books
The Great Parchment Book (London Metropolitan Archives): http://www.greatparchment-

book.org/



Book History454

HathiTrust Digital Library: http://www.hathitrust.org/
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (University of Victoria): http://inke.ca/ 
Impos

i
tor (Folger Shakespeare Library): http://titania.folger.edu/impositor/

Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (British Library): http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/
Listen to Wikipedia (Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi): http://listen.hatnote.com/
Mapping Colonial Americas Publishing Project (Brown University): http://www.stg.brown.

edu/projects/mapping-genres/index.html
The Open Utopia (Stephen Duncombe): http://theopenutopia.org/
Reading Experience Database (Open University): http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive (Bodleian Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and MITH, 

University of Maryland): http://www.quartos.org/ 
The Shelley-Godwin Archive (New York Public Library and MITH, University of Maryland): 

http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/
A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (INKE): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_

Devonshire_Manuscript
Visualizing Variation (Alan Galey): http://individual.utoronto.ca/alangaley/visualizingvaria-

tion/
What Middletown Read (Ball State University): http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr/
The William Blake Archive (IATH, Unversity of Virginia and Carolina Digital Library and 

Archives): http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 116.
2. Michael Joyce, “Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, ‘The Ends 

of Print Culture’ (A Work in Progress),” Postmodern Culture 2.1 (September 1991): http://
pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/joyce.991.

3. See Steven E. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 2013).

4. Kirschenbaum, “The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, 
and the Future Literary,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013): http://www.digitalhuman-
ities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html. See also McGann’s The Textual Condition (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

5. Released in 2012, First Draft of the Revolution is available at http://lizadaly.com/first-
draft/. The work is subtitled “an interactive epistolary story.” For Device 6, see http://simogo.
com/games/device6/. 

6. As was widely reported in the press; for example: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/19/
that-was-fast-amazons-kindle-ebook-sales-surpass-print-it-only-took-four-years/ 

7. See http://www.futureofthebook.org/ for Bob Stein (of Voyager publishing fame) and 
his colleague’s ongoing work and thought in this field. The 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair featured 
a “Sprint Beyond the Book” organized by the Arizona State University’s Center for Science 
and the Imagination, and sponsored by Intel; over the course of 72 hours a group of writers 
collectively authored an online “book” exploring the titular theme: http://www.sprintbeyon-
dthebook.com/.

8. See Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Con-
sequence (2007), available at http://arts.gov/publications/reading-risk-survey-literary-reading-
america-0 and http://arts.gov/publications/read-or-not-read-question-national-consequence-0 
respectively. Each generated considerable media coverage, debate, and attempts at rebuttal.



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 455

9. See last year’s State of the Discipline report on the subject: Meredith L. McGill, 
“Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 16, no. 1 
(2013): 387–427.

10. Those readers wishing for an introduction to digital humanities will be well served 
by the following collections, all of which exist in print and in freely available online editions: 
Matthew K. Gold’s edited collection Debates in the Digital Humanities [Minnesota, 2012; 
http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/]; Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan 
Schreibman, Ray Siemons, and John Unsworth [2004; new edition pending; http://www.digit-
alhumanities.org/companion/]; and Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited 
by Ray Siemons and Susan Schreibman [2008; http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion-
DLS/].

11. British Museum, Catalogue of Books in the Library of the British Museum Printed in 
England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Books in English Printed Abroad, to the Year 1640, 
ed. George Bullen (London: By order of the Trustees, 1884); Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. 
Redgrave, A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of 
English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926). The URL 
for the English Short-title Catalogue, along with all other online resources discussed here, are 
provided in the projects cited list at the end of this essay.

12. Mitch Fraas, “Mapping Books: Mapping Pre-1500 Printed Books Today,” Mapping 
Books, July 29, 2013, http://mappingbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/mapping-pre-1500-print-
ed-books-today.html.

13. See also Fraas’s exploration of the dispersal of medieval British libraries: Mitch Fraas, 
“Mapping Books: The Dispersal of the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain,” Mapping Books, 
November 12, 2013, http://mappingbooks.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-dispersal-of-medieval-
libraries-of.html.

14. For a list of these projects, see Eleanor Shevlin, “SHARP 2013 Digital Projects and 
Tools Showcase,” Early Modern Online Bibliography, accessed October 31, 2013, http://ear-
lymodernonlinebib.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/sharp-2013-digital-projects-and-tools-show-
case/.

15. Ben Schmidt, “Sapping Attention: Do Revolutionaries Really Read History?” Sapping 
Attention, July 11, 2012, http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/07/do-revolutionaries-re-
ally-read-history.html; Ben Schmidt, “Sapping Attention: Making and Publishing History in the 
Civil War,” Sapping Attention, July 12, 2012, http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/07/
making-and-publishing-history-in-civil.html.

16. Ben Schmidt, “Sapping Attention: Women in the Libraries,” Sapping Attention, May 
8, 2012, http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/05/women-in-libraries.html.

17. David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Infectious Texts: 
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers,” Proceedings of the Workshop on 
Big Humanities, accessed November 11, 2013, http://www.viraltexts.org/infect-bighum-2013.
pdf.

18. Ryan Cordell, “‘Taken Possession of’: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Haw-
thorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Antebellum Religious Press,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 
7, no. 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000144/000144.html.

19. Gadd points to Arber’s A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of 
London, 1544–1640 A.D. (London, 1875–1894), volume V, p. xxi, and volume I, p. xvii, for 
support of these points. 

20. British Museum, Catalogue of Books in the Library of the British Museum Printed in 
England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Books in English Printed Abroad, to the Year 1640; 
Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ire-
land and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640; Donald Goddard Wing, Short-title 
Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of 



Book History456

English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (New York: Index Society, 1945); ESTC 
(Project) and British Library, Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) (London: 
British Library, 1981); “English Short Title Catalogue,” accessed October 31, 2013, http://
estc.bl.uk/. For a helpful overview of this history of the ESTC, see Ian Gadd, “The Use and 
Misuse of Early English Books Online,” Literature Compass 6, no. 3 (May 2009): 680–92, 
doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00632.x.

21. For a description of what is included in the ESTC and what bibliographic standards 
are used, see Adrian Edwards, “English Short Title Catalogue—Content,” accessed November 
5, 2013, http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/catblhold/estccontent/estccontent.html.

22. For an overview of the different copies available as online facsimiles and for an assess-
ment of the various interfaces, see Sarah Werner, “First Folios Online,” The Collation, April 
22, 2013, http://collation.folger.edu/2013/04/first-folios-online/; Sarah Werner, “What Do We 
Want from Online Facsimiles of Shakespeare?” Wynken de Worde, May 4, 2013, http://sarah-
werner.net/blog/index.php/2013/05/what-do-we-want-from-online-facsimiles-of-shakespeare/.

23. Liz Bury’s article in The Guardian provides an overview of the conflict and reflects 
the way in which the story appeals to the media today: Liz Bury, “Emily Dickinson Legacy 
Fuels War of the Archives,” The Guardian, October 25, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/
books/2013/oct/25/emily-dickinson-legacy-archives-online.

24. Paul Duguid addressed these issues early and compellingly in “Inheritance and Loss? 
A Brief Survey of Google Books,” First Monday 12.8 (August 2007): http://pear.accc.uic.edu/
ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1972/1847.

25. “The ESTC as a 21st Century Research Tool,” The ESTC as a 21st Century Research 
Tool, accessed November 8, 2013, http://estc21.wordpress.com/.

26. “About EEBO,” accessed November 11, 2013, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/
about.htm.

27. Giles Bergel et al., “Content-Based Image Recognition on Printed Broadside Ballads: 
The Bodleian Libraries’ ImageMatch Tool” (presented at the IFLA World Library and Informa-
tion Congress, Singapore, 2013), http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/209.

28. Tom Malzbender, Dan Gelb, and Hans Wolters, “Polynomial Texture Maps,” Pro-
ceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 
(2001): 519–28.

29. “Cultural Heritage Imaging | More RTI Examples,” accessed November 17, 2013, 
http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/more_rti_examples.html; “RICH (Illumi-
nare) | Portable Light Dome,” Portable Light Dome, accessed November 17, 2013, http://
portablelightdome.wordpress.com/category/rich-illuminare/; “Cultural Heritage Imaging | 
Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI),” accessed November 17, 2013, http://culturalher-
itageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/.

30. R. MacGeddon [pseud. Randall MacLeod], “An Epilogue: Hammered” in Pete Lang-
man, ed. Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book (Ashgate, 2011), 137–99.

31. Kathryn Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts 
Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, no. 1–2 (June 2010), 
doi:10.5092/jhna.2010.2.1.1. 

32. Matija Strlič et al., “Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books,” Analytical 
Chemistry 81, no. 20 (October 15, 2009): 8617–8622, doi:10.1021/ac9016049; Ann Fenech et 
al., “Volatile Aldehydes in Libraries and Archives,” Atmospheric Environment 44, no. 17 (June 
2010): 2067–73, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2010.03.021; Sarah Werner, “Where Material Book 
Culture Meets Digital Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities, October 2, 2012, http://
journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-3/where-material-book-culture-meets-digital-humanities-by-
sarah-werner/.

33. Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Con-
trol (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).



Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies 457

34. See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/01/jonathan-franzen-freedom-uk-
recall.

35. Indeed, ever more information about individual user’s reading habits is being collected 
by these devices, on the one hand raising obvious questions about privacy and personal data 
security, but also creating truly unprecedented opportunities for the study of public reading 
habits at scale. See, for example, David Streitfeld’s story on the phenomenon in the December 
24, 2013 New York Times: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/technology/as-new-servic-
es-track-habits-the-e-books-are-reading-you.html?hp=&_r=0. 

36. See Lev Grossman’s “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist,” April 10, 2010: 
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2010185,00.html.

37. In Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 145–46.
38. “There is No Software” has been reprinted many times; here the source is the elec-

tronic copy available from the CTheory site: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74. 
39. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 3.
40. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 7.
41. Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 3.
42. The Internet Archive’s Historical Software Collection is available here: https://archive.

org/details/historicalsoftware. Exemplars range from Wordstar and Visicalc to games such as 
Adventure, Pac-Man, and Pitfall. The BitSavers collection of software documentation, current-
ly consisting of over 25,000 individual items, may be accessed here: http://bitsavers.informatik.
uni-stuttgart.de/. 

43. See Knuth, Literate Programming (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Lan-
guage and Information, 1992).

44. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and 
Software Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 422.

45. Dennis Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Origi-
nal ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2 (2007): http://
www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html. 

46. A complete PDF edition of 10 PRINT is available here: http://10print.org/. 
47. See the Platform Studies Web site for the full discussion: http://platformstudies.com/

levels.html. 
48. Alan Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” 

Book History 15 (2012): 210–47, at 247, doi:10.1353/bh.2012.0008.
49. The MAL has a Web presence here: http://loriemerson.net/media-archaeology-lab/. 

“The MAL is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using obsolete 
tools, hardware, software and platforms, from the past.”

50. See The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2002).
51. From their introduction to the collection Between C&D: New Writing from the Low-

er East Side Fiction Magazine (Penguin, 1988), ix.
52. See Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), and 

Stallybrass, “Printing and the Manuscript Revolution,” in ed. Barbie Zelizer, Explorations in 
Communication and History (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–18, and 
“‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture 
Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor 
F. Shevlin (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 315-41.

53. Paul Zelvansky’s artist’s book The Case for the Burial of Ancestors (1984), John Mc-
Daid’s HyperCard fiction Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1992), William Gibson, Dennis 
Ashbaugh, and Kevin Begos, Jr.’s Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) and Ian Bogost’s A Slow 
Year (2012) are all subsequent exemplars. Of these, Agrippa has the most notoriety. See the 
Agrippa Files Web site for complete documentation: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/. 

54. See http://linkeditions.tumblr.com/howse.



Book History458

55. See Kirschenbaum, “The .txtual Condition.”
56. See “The Book-Writing Machine,” Slate (March 1, 2013): http://www.slate.com/ar-

ticles/arts/books/2013/03/len_deighton_s_bomber_the_first_book_ever_written_on_a_word_
processor.html. 

57. In “Where Money and Energy Gather: A Writer’s View of a Computer Laboratory,” 
Research Directions in Computer Science: An MIT Perspective, eds. Albert R. Meyer, et al. 
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): n.p.

58. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, 156.
59. See http://www.hughhowey.com/my-advice-to-aspiring-authors/.
60. See http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/coming-soon-jennifer-

egan-black-box.html.
61. One source cites 50% ebook sales against the usual 20%: http://www.theguardian.

com/media/2013/mar/26/fifty-shades-random-house-record-profit. 
62. See http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/fifty-shades-of-grey-wayback-machine_

b49124 for screenshots of the original FiftyShades site.
63. See http://fiftyshadesofpopculturetheory.blogspot.com/2012/03/full-exchange-with-

jason-boog-for.html for the reasoning behind this figure.
64. Whitney Anne Trettien, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English 

Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013), http://
www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html.

65. The revelation of the account’s author came from Alexis Madrigal in the essay that 
best captures the nature of the narrative: “Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel,” The 
Atlantic, February 28, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/reveal-
ing-the-man-behind-mayoremanuel/71802/. The full series of tweets was later published in 
book form, along with Sinker’s narratives about writing it: Dan Sinker, The F***ing Epic 
Twitter Quest of @Mayor Emanuel (Scribner, 2011).

66. Ed Finn has done some excellent preliminary investigation of “distant reading” the kind 
of user data housed on Amazon and GoodReads for contemporary fiction; see his “Revenge of 
the Nerd: Junot Díaz and the Networks of American Literary Imagination” in Digital Humani-
ties Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000148/000148.
html.