Gitelman 2014

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Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Michael de Certeau -- "scriptural economy"

"totality of writers, writings, and writing techniques that began to expand so precipitously in the nineteenth century" (x)

Paper Knowledge

"Documents are epistemic ob- jects; they are the recognizable sites and subjects of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in the long human history of clues." (1)

know-show function: knowing wrapped up with showing, showing wrapped up with knowing

genre: "a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse" (2)

"Documents be- long to that ubiquitous subcategory of texts that embraces the subjects and instruments of bureaucracy or of systematic knowledge generally." (5)

similar to Latour, "inscriptions"

"Thinking about documents helps in particular to adjust the focus of media studies away from grand catchall categories like “manuscript” and “print” and toward an embarrassment of material forms that have together sup- ported such a varied and evolving scriptural economy." (6)
"Like Jonathan Sterne’s recent book on a particular format (the mP3) or Bonnie Mak’s recent book on a particular interface (the page), my focus on a particular genre works to decenter the media concept precisely in order to evolve a better, richer media studies." (6)

pushing toward digital but never fully reaching it

"A second, related argument advanced here is that the broad categories that have become proper to the history of communication and that increasingly have a bearing on popular discourse are insufficient and perhaps even hazardous to our thinking." (7)

discouraging use of term "print culture" (7)

printer used to refer to the person doing the printing; now printer is the machine that prints (8)

"print culture and the cultural meanings of printedness risk chasing each other, cart and horse, explanation and explanandum, like modernization and modernity." (9)
"Better instead to resist any but local and contrastive logics for media; better to look for meanings that arise, shift, and persist according to the uses that media—emergent, dominant, and residual—familiarly have.42 Better, indeed, to admit that no medium has a single, particular logic, while every genre does and is. The project of this book is to explore media history further, not just by juxta- posing one medium with another but also by working a selective history of one especially capacious genre—the document—across different media." (9)
"Considered as an admittedly heterogeneous class, telegram blanks, account book headings, menus, meal tickets, stock certificates, and the welter of other documentary forms that issued in such profusion from jobbing houses in the nineteenth century suggest a corrective addition to—or perhaps an additional negation of—the histories of authorship, reading, and publishing." (11)
"In their sheer diversity and multiplicity, documents originating with job printers point toward a period of intense social differentiation, as Ameri- cans became subject to a panoply (or, rather, a pan-opoly) of institutions large and small, inspiring a prolific babble of corporate speech. " (12)

on method:

" The brief chronological windows and the jumps between them represent both a more calculated methodology and a stra- tegic appreciation of media archeological perspectives that have been so productive—and so fashionable—in recent scholarship.68 I have aimed to make each episode exacting in its detail while also reaping the benefits of its contrastive separation from the other episodes. A contrivance, per- haps, yet one that productively displaces to the level of method the breaks or ruptures in media historical narration that must forever warrant our concerted critical attention: every supposedly new medium is only ever partly so. Being self-conscious about the ways that historical narratives work is essential to media studies, especially because of the reflexive bur- dens of studying documents by means of documents, for instance, or of understanding media from within an always already mediated realm." (19)

A Short History of ______

blank books -- mobility of subjects, identities, ideas, bodies, but also stasis and inertia

"These blank books were meta-microgenres, one might say, documents establishing the parameters or the rules for entries to be made individually in pencil or ink. Rules, like habits, were broken, of course—as notebooks became scrap- books, for instance, or as ledgers became the illustrated chronicles of in- digenous tribes—but rules there were; that is what made one class of blank book distinguishable from another." (22-3)

job printing as "the site of surplus meanings otherwise left out by the history of communication as well as by “print culture studies” or “the history of the book.”" (25)

  • 1/3 of printing work was job printing -- but left out of history of book/print
"nineteenth-century job printing and its fillable blanks offer a glimpse of an extended history of information, presenting one context (certainly among many) for the supposed distinction between form and content—for the imagination of data as such—on which con- temporary experiences of information technology so intuitively rely." (26)

nominal blanks in 18c fiction

job printing as representing the centripetal and centrifugal forces of 19c American life -- being pulled together into a community through print or pushed away from each other (30)

"Job-printed forms didn’t have readers, then; they had users instead. Users have subjectivities too, without question, but they are not exactly readerly ones." (31)

Baker v Selden and the "idea-expression dichotomy" (34) -- "Ideas are free to all; a copyright protects not the ideas, but the way they are expressed."

job printers like locksmiths; trust them within a system of exchange (48)

"More clearly than other forms of printing, preprinted blank forms help triangulate the modern self in relation to au- thority: the authority of printedness, on the one hand, and the authority of specific social subsystems and bureaucracies on the other hand." (49)
" Job printing in general and blank forms in particular offer a glimpse into the incidental, everyday occasions on which the authority of printedness was and is con- tinuously and simultaneously produced, deployed, tested, reconfigured, and reaffirmed in reflexive relation to the competing and imperfect structures of social differentiation—the credit economy, civil procedure, municipal governance, medical practice, institutionalized education, voluntary asso- ciation, and so on. Those evolving structures, one must imagine, work as so many loose and chaotic cross-stitches over and against the public sphere, helping to tack it together even as they also potentially worry it apart." (49)

19c writers struggling with need for printer as intermediary (50)

rise of amateur printers using small platen presses to make their own business cards, etc

The Typescript Book

Robert Binkley, historian -- worried about preservation of cultural heritage

offers deeper history of digital humanities by examining Binkley's work and a moment of upheaval for the humanities (1930s)

crisis of documents being lost -- ephemera not being saved in any standardized way; printed on cheap and easily-destructible paper

crisis of publishing -- scholarly monographs having increasingly narrow readerships; how to recoup the costs of publishing?

bound up in issue of reproduction; reproducing materials gives access, access produces new knowledge (60)