John Unsworth, with Tanya Clement, Sara Steger and Kirsten Uszkalo (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
How Not To Read A Million Books
Thursday, 5 March (5 p.m. Alexander Library, SCC Auditorium)
Abstract:
"The Spectacles"
Christian Morgenstern
Korf reads avidly and fast.
Therefore he detests the vast
bombast of the repetitious,
twelvefold needless, injudicious.
Most affairs are settled straight
just in seven words or eight;
in as many tapeworm phrases
one can prattle on like blazes.
Hence he lets his mind invent
a corrective instrument:
Spectacles whose focal strength
shortens texts of any length.
Thus, a poem such as this,
so beglassed one would just -- miss.
Thirty-three of them will spark
nothing but a question mark.
("Die Brille" from Galgenlieder, 1905)
Korf is the kind of reader for which some text-mining tools are intended: someone who would surely approve of text-summarization technology, for example--the sort of thing that tells you what a newspaper article is about, so you don't have to go through the tiresome and ink-stained exercise of actually reading it.
In the Mellon-funded MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) project, we have tried to use text-mining techniques as a provocation for reading, as well as to cast the net for that provocation much more broadly than one could do without computers. In other words, although users may end up reading, even reading closely, they begin by not reading, or by doing what Franco Moretti calls distant reading, pointing out that when we begin by reading, we can only take into account "a minimal fraction of the literary field . . . a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain . . . but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows--and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so" (Maps, Graphs, and Trees).
John Unsworth will also conduct a seminar titled, "The last professor, the new public, and too much information"
Thursday, 5 March (1 - 4 p.m. SCILS, Huntington House)
Due to space limitations, participation in this workshop is limited to 20 faculty and graduate students, and is by reservation only. Please contact Curtis Dunn at: 732.932.8426, or curtis.dunn@rutgers.edu.
Galen Brokaw (University at Buffalo)
Indigenous American Polygraphy and the Dialogic Model of Media
Thursday, 9 April (5 p.m. Alexander Library, Pane Room)
Abstract: Indigenous American societies pose serious problems for traditional theories of orality, literacy, writing, and semiosis in general. Based on our understanding-albeit incomplete-of American media, this presentation attempts to deconstruct the orality-literacy dichotomy that characterizes anthropological thought (whether it be by anthropologists, historians, literary critics, or others). Using indigenous American media such as the Inca and Wari khipu, Moche fine-line painting, and Mesoamerican iconography as a starting and ending point, it proposes a dialogic model of literacy and subsequently a dialogic model of media that constitutes a revision of the traditional anthropological and historical theory relating to the role of writing/media, its relationship to the development of socio-economic and political complexity, as well as its cognitive effects.
2009 Series Organizers:
Marija Dalbello (SCILS), Meredith McGill (English), and Lorraine Piroux (French)
{dalbello at scils.rutgers.edu} {mlmcgill at rci.rutgers.edu} {lpiroux at rci.rutgers.edu}
Book History Reading Group Meetings:
Dates to be announced
Please visit this page for more information about the talks and accompanying events, including Rutgers graduate student participation at the Princeton Center for the Study of Books and Media Graduate Student Conference on April 4. (more information forthcoming soon!)
Last updated: February 9, 2009
