UW Press: Intermediate Horizons

Intermediate Horizons
Book History and Digital Humanities
Edited by Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha

“Book history and digital humanities are increasingly entangled, and it makes sense why: we cannot understand our digital moment without knowing the technologies and textual cultures that came before. Intermediate Horizons shows how these fields speak to each other, and why we need to pay attention.”
—Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania

Centering intermediation in the study of book history and digital humanities

This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.

Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.

Mark Vareschi is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the author of Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Heather Wacha is a former University of Wisconsin fellow and CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and associate coordinator of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She is the coauthor of The Cartulary of the Abbey of Prémontré: A Dual Print and Digital Edition.

“Intermediate Horizons offers a vital set of reports on the history and future of the book. Traversing the shared territory of the digital humanities and book-historical studies, the essays in this volume provide fresh perspectives on the wonderful complexities of media and mediation.”
—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

“Impressively informative and thought-provoking throughout.”
—Midwest Book Review

“Offers something for every book historian, regardless of familiarity with or enthusiasm for digital integration. . . . As we continue to reflect on the intersections of bibliography and digital humanities, we must also reflect on what we want new technologies to do and why. Book historians have long been reflecting on technologies of the past, highlighting the disruptive nature of text. These same book historians also need to turn their heads towards the future. Intermediate Horizons represents a sharp glance in the right direction.”
—The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword: Intermediate Horizons (Matthew Kirschenbaum)

Introduction (Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha)

Section I. Approach
1 Benjamin Franklin’s Postal Work (Christy L. Pottroff)
2 Linking Book History and the Digital Humanities via Museum Studies (Jayme Yahr)

Section II. Access
3 Material and Digital Traces in Patterns of Nature: Early Modern Botany Books and Seventeenth-Century Needlework (Mary Learner)
4 Opening the Book: The Utopian Dreams and Uncertain Future of Open Access Textbook Publishing (Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright)
5 Books of Ours: What Libraries Can Learn about Social Media from Books of Hours (Alexandra Alvis)

Section III. Assessment
6 Whose Books Are Online? Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Online Text Collections (Catherine A. Winters and Clayton P. Michaud)
7 Electronic Versioning and Digital Editions (Paul A. Broyles)
8 Materialisms and the Cultural Turn in Digital Humanities (Mattie Burkert)

Contributors
Index

Also in the Series
Against a Sharp White Background Infrastructures of African American Print Edited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne	Protest on the Page Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865 Edited by James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky