Making Media Manifest
The following are my brief remarks for the ACH’s MLA 2025 roundtable on “Book History and the Digital Humanities.”. As you will see, I went in a slightly different direction between my abstract and the actual roundtable.
At the 2011 MLA, Stephen Ramsay delivered a provocation in the “History and Future of Digital Humanities” panel. He began by noting that “with only three minutes…you can’t do much of anything except piss off half the people in the room,” and a single line from Stephen’s talk not only pissed off people in the room but became the bogeyman of the great DH debates:
Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say “yes”.
The way this line was excerpted and sound-bitten and outrage farmed still upsets me—even in this compressed form, if you read just the next few lines it’s clear Ramsay was talking about how DH practice differed by program and institution. But I can’t unpack that history in the four minutes I have left.
Instead, I want to focus on Ramsay’s followup, where he posited making as “a new kind of hermeneutic” common among the many strands of DH work, from coding to building digital editions to mapping to network analysis. Under this more capacious framework, one codes to inculcate richer engagement with software—not as a consumer only, but as a practitioner who understands the infrastructure and labor—both intellectual and technical—that enable software to function.
Which leads me to Darnton’s “communications circuit” and perhaps the most famous diagram in humanities scholarship:
This depiction of book production has been much debated, amended, and rebutted—including by Darnton himself—but the key insight which arguably launched the field of book history was that understanding books requires an infrastructural perspective that includes not only authors and editors but the laborers whose craft and technical expertise carried texts to readers. Book history argues that interpreting only the words inside books obfuscates or erases many of their political, economic, environmental, and cultural meanings.
While Darnton directed scholars’ attention to compositors and printers and book binders, we could look further backward, to the private press and bibliographical press movement, to find scholar-practitioners who advocated for hands-on experience with bookish technologies. We can talk more about these movements in the Q&A, but I will over-simplify and claim that they largely responded to the industrialization of textual production, and largely focused on one end of the spectrum of print culture: the careful production of highest quality books through elite craftspersonship.
In 2024, we find ourselves in the midst of a new book lab movement, led by scholars from book history and—tellingly—digital humanities. Last year we published a whitepaper studying the growth of “humanities maker spaces,” many of which are bookish in focus; the Rare Book School now runs a regular course, taught by Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kari Krauss, about building such programs; and a recent call for a symposium on the subject received so many applications we are scrambling to expand the event.
While these new labs share family resemblances with earlier movements, I would argue they respond to the digitization and algorithmization of culture. In Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles argues that early twenty-first century literary criticism was “shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print” that only began “clearly coming into view” as electronic texts cast the mediation of print in sharp relief (30). Accordingly, today’s book labs emphasize material engagement and hands-on labor across a wider variety of media and texts—e.g. posters, postcards, bookmarks, broadsides, zines—and focus more on tactile experience than producing flawless prints.
21st-century book labs explicitly value markers of materiality that might in previous eras been flaws: e.g. uneven inking patterns, chatter, or visible wear and damage to type or cuts. Notably, the media of contemporary book labs perhaps better reflects the material realities of historical print culture, where books made up just one part of an industry and profession shaped much more by job printing, and where fine art was often secondary to more practical production.
Book history and digital humanities intersect in these book labs through infrastructure. Like Ramsay argued of DH in 2011, teachers and students in book labs find “that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise”—that making a book, or a poster, or a pamphlet, “is an entirely different experience” from reading one. Importantly, the materiality of that experience illuminates in two directions: making the technologies, materials, and laborers of historical communications circuits more visible, yes, but always pointing—by comparison or contrast—to the “full stack” of technical systems that underly our own historical moment.
Alan Liu has asked, “what kind of cultural criticism is uniquely appropriate and purposive for the digital humanities?” a question he answers with “the critical study of infrastructure.” It is here where I see the most opportunity for cooperation between digital humanities and book history, 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. Both projects will require us to get building. Do we need need more digital humanists setting type and more book historians coding? I’m a tenured professor of something or other, and I say “yes.”