Always Already New
- 224 pages
- 8 hours of reading
An analysis of the ways that new media are experienced and studied as the subjects of history, using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks.
Lisa Gitelman Books
Lisa Gitelman's work delves into the history of media, focusing on how documents and data shape our cultural understanding. She examines the evolution of technologies and their representation, offering insightful perspectives on how these elements influence our perception of the world. Her research provides a critical lens through which to analyze the dynamic relationship between media, history, and the very fabric of culture.
Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines
- 304 pages
- 11 hours of reading
This is a study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the 19th century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality. At the book's heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. schovat popis
Paper knowledge
- 224 pages
- 8 hours of reading
Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.