For our session at the 2025 MLA Convention, ACH will gather a group of scholars for a roundtable on the intersections of book history and digital humanities.
How have developments in digital humanities informed the study of the history of the book? How do digital humanities scholars draw upon book history methods, tools, and ways of thinking in their work to advance the study of technology? Presentation information follows.
Speakers
- Ryan Cordell (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
- Natalie McGartland (U of Maryland, College Park)
- Élika Ortega (U of Colorado, Boulder)
- Whitney Trettien (U of Pennsylvania)
- Alexandra Wingate (Indiana U, Bloomington)
Session 119. Book History and Digital Humanities
Thursday, 9 January 5:15 PM-6:30 PM, Salon 19 (Hilton Riverside New Orleans)
More Information
Ryan Cordell
Ryan Cordell posted his talk here.
Bio: Ryan Cordell is Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. Cordell serves as a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and also directs UIUC’s Skeuomorph Press & BookLab.
Topic: My provocation, “Circuits & Stacks: the Infrastructures of Book History & Digital Humanities,” will collate the idea of the “communications circuit”—which arguably founded the field of book history—with the “full stack” of technical systems that Alan Liu has argued should be more central to digital humanities research, under the rubric of “critical infrastructure studies.” The goal of such collation is to demonstrate considerable overlap in the two fields’ concerns with the complex interplay of technology in cultural production. In the blurry areas of distinction, however, we can spot areas the two fields might learn from each other, as DH scholars seek to more consciously interrogate the social, political, and economic underpinnings of contemporary technical systems and BH scholars wrestle with the complex materiality of computational systems and cultures.
Natalie McGartland
Bio: Nat McGartland is a PhD candidate in English working in digital studies and the history of the book. She is particularly interested in the affordances of technology—both print and digital media—and our affective responses to its material and visual properties. As a BookLab Graduate Assistant, Nat works on critical making and craft activism. Her protest art has been featured in the New York Times, Reuters, Politico, and more. As an instructor, she teaches introductory writing, media studies, and digital humanities. Nat is also the chair of the Graduate English Organization (GEO).
Topic: For this panel, I’m thinking about making connections to the visibility theme through feminist historical recovery—like Daniela Rosner’s work on the Little Old Ladies of the Apollo mission. Women’s craftwork as material condition for technological development. I’ve also been interested in textiles specifically.
Text of McGartland's Talk:
Hi, I’m Nat and I’m working on my PhD in English at the University of Maryland. Part of what I do there is work at BookLab, which is our makerspace dedicated to book history and the book arts. So my angle on this question of crosspollination between DH and book history is really shaped by my makerspace experience, thinking about how we teach these skills through critical making and really valuing learning by doing.
I’m also interested in other material studies like textiles and fiber arts (so I’m kind of shoehorning that in too). Across these three fields, I view them as having really similar methodologies and ways of thinking. The two main approaches I want to talk about today are my pedagogy angle of experiential learning and my research angle of feminist historical recovery. That’s an oversimplification of course but you see where I’m heading.
To start with background, I view DH, book history, and textile studies as having a lot in common in the sense of being studies of material objects (obviously) and the material conditions of manufacture. In DH, I’m really interested in the physical makeup of technology, the hardware. In that same sense, book history is about the material text—the book is the hardware, and the same goes for textiles. The connection there is really apparent when you think about the Jacquard loom as the precursor for punchcard programming.
So with weaving and punchcards, you can automatically see the connection to so-called “women’s work,” and that’s where feminist historical recovery comes in. Women were the first programmers; women’s craftwork like woven textiles and bookbindings are overlooked in the world of fine art; and the histories of women in technology are ignored. The first example I want to bring up of that are the Little Old Ladies of NASA, who physically wove the core memory of the Guidance Computer for the Apollo mission. You can read more about this in Daniela Rosner’s book Critical Fabulations, by the way. But these women—they literally hired old ladies who could weave because they needed to understand and create this extremely detailed, intricate technology by inserting wires, threading them through or around these cores, these rings, to encode binary. These women were essential to the mission but their contributions and achievements are overlooked because it’s considered unskilled labor, despite the complexity. It’s one of infinite examples where women’s practical knowledge and skills are overlooked as not serious or important or academic or artistic or what have you. But women’s craftwork like this is the material condition required for technological development.
So this also goes for women’s labor in other industries, like women bookbinders, typewriters, punch card programmers, telephone switchboard operators. And much of the reason we ignore contributions is due to sexism, but I also think a lot of it is due to the fact that people truly do not understand how complicated some of these tasks are. And that’s where experiential learning also comes in.
So my first example there is, I’m a fiber artist myself so I know how to knit and crochet and sew and embroider. But I didn’t know how to weave, and it was really affecting my ability to understand how this process works. So I took a workshop. And I can describe all day long how it works to have the warp and the weft and move the heddle up and down to open the shed and send the shuttle back and forth. But actually understanding what I’m talking about and seeing how it becomes a binary pattern by going over or under with the movement of the heddle, that really requires seeing it, or better yet, doing it. And that’s just regular, very simple weaving—from there you need to look at pictures of the Apollo core memory to see the rings and wires, and how small it all was, and so on.
To sort of zoom out from the Little Old Ladies of NASA and wrap this up really quickly, I think you can see how important hands-on activities are to my research and teaching. In the makerspace and in the classroom, I think it’s really important to have students doing their own investigations of hardware. For me that means typesetting and papermaking and bookbinding and programming and circuitry and taking things apart and putting them back together.
Élika Ortega-Guzman
Slides from Ortega-Guzman's Talk
Bio: I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and Core Faculty at the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks at Northeastern University.
I write about digital literature and media, cultural hybridity, reading practices and books, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. My projects include A Handbook of E-Lit Reading, an archive of instructions to read electronic literature works; and Binding Media: Print-Digital Literature 1980s-2010s, my monograph investigating print-digital works of literature from a hemispheric perspective.
Topic: The description of Binding Media -
Far from causing the "death of the book," the publishing industry's adoption of digital technologies has generated a multitude of new works that push the boundaries of literature and its presentation. In this fascinating new work, Élika Ortega proposes the notion of "binding media" — a practice where authors and publishers "fasten together" a codex and electronic or digital media to create literary works in the form of hybrid print-digital objects. Examining more than a hundred literary works from across the Americas, Ortega argues that binding media are not simply experimentations but a unique contemporary form of the book that effectively challenges conventional regional and linguistic boundaries. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that binding media have remained marginal in the publishing industry due to technological imperatives like planned obsolescence and commercial ones like replicability and standardization that run counter to these bespoke literary projects. Although many binding media and other hybrid publishing initiatives have perished, they've left behind a wealth of material; collecting and tracing the residues of these foreshortened projects, Ortega builds a fascinating history of hybrid publishing. Ultimately, this essential account of contemporary book history highlights the way binding media help illuminate processes of cultural hybridization that have been instigated by the expediency of globalized digital technologies and transnational dynamics.
Whitney Trettien
Bio: Whitney Trettien is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (Manifold and University of Minnesota Press, 2021), uses digital methods to track the history of writing with scissors and paste in the seventeenth century.
Topic: For this MLA panel, I’ll be discussing recent work on Printing in Prisons, a digital project that investigates the complicated role of printing presses in prisons as a technology of both exploitation and creative expression. This collaborative research project is engaged in collective pedagogy through courses, hands-on assignments, and mentorship. We also thoughtfully curate historical data on our website. Finally, we tell the stories of these individuals through art and archival research that values their complexity, creativity, and humanity. In all our work, we collaborate across our differences to approach history not as a passive archive but as a dynamic and messy process that implicates us all.
Alex Wingate Alex Wingate posted her talk here.
Bio: Alex Wingate is a PhD candidate in Information Science at Indiana University. Her dissertation titled, "Los libros contenciosos: provision and use of books in Navarre, 1558-1700," examines the practices of circulation and use of books in early modern Navarre, Spain by combining book history, information science, and digital humanities. She is also the bibliography editor for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project and SHARP News.
Topic: My research generally fits into one or more of three categories: the application of quantitative and digital methods to book history, the intersection of information science and book history, and best practices for book historical data. Digital humanities and book history intersect in the first and third. For this MLA panel, I'll discuss how these two areas of my research support each other in my dissertation work on early modern Navarre and projects like the Chymistry of Isaac Newton as well as how each relies on the confluence of book history and DH.