Biblioculture: Diagrams, Informatics, Visualizations

Hello AH6130 Students,

Sorry for this late post. The following link will take you to some examples from a previous semester of this same exercise:  Diagrams and Visualizations

The assignment itself is fairly straight-forward: make a visual representation of some feature (large or small) of print culture. You can try to make a global account such as Darnton and Adams attempt (see Howsam) or you can choose a whimsical and often-overlooked minor feature. Have fun, it won't be graded.

I apologize for not getting this to you in writing earlier. My oral description at the end of class last week is susceptible to being forgotten, misheard, or otherwise ignored. As we're learning, throughout history scripted print almost always carries more cultural power than spoken words.

In class today we'll talk about the increasingly complex networks of production, consumption, and distribution (among other things) that went into the transformation of a text into a book, and the transformation from the book as an object to the book as socio-cultural agent. It's fascinating to think about how so many of these same networks still exist, albeit in modified forms, and how many of them seem to on their way out. We'll talk about these issues today in response to the questions and ideas that your diagrams elicit.