Week 1: January 25
These will be referenced in class; you needn’t read them yourself — although you’re certainly welcome to.
- Clay Shirky, “It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure” O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo NY (2008) [video].
- Ann Blair, “Information Overload, Then and Now” The Chronicle Review (28 November 2010).
- Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload” Journal of the History of Ideas 64:1 (January 2003): 1-9.
- Borges, “The Library of Babel” The Garden of Forking Paths
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Week 2: February 1
- Georges Perec, “Think/Classify” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1997): 188-205.
- Roy Boyne, “Classification” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 21-30.
- G. G. Chowdhury & Sundatta Chowdhury, “Organizing Information: What It Means,” “Ontology” & “Information Organization: Issues and Trends” In Organizing Information: From the Shelf to the Web (London: Facet Publishing, 2007): 1-15, 171-85, 213-24.
- Clay Shirky, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” Shirky.com (2005).
- David Weinberger, “Everything is Miscellaneous” [video] Google Tech Talks (10 May 2007) [please pardon the initial stammering].
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Week 3: February 8
- “Library” Oxford English Dictionary (2010).
- Matthew Battles, Excerpts from “Burning Alexandria, “ “The House of Wisdom” & “Books for All” In Library: An Unquiet History (New York: W.W. Norton 2004): 22-81, 117-155.
- Quickly skim (just for fun!) Library Bureau, A Handbook of Library and Office Fittings and Supplies (Library Bureau, 1890).
The following will prepare us for our field trip:
- Charles E. Pierce, Jr., “Private to Public: Opening Mr. Morgan’s Library to All” In Paul Spencer Byard, et. al., Eds., The Making of the Morgan: From Charles McKim to Renzo Piano (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008): 21-32.
- Shannon Mattern, “Collected Notes on the Morgan Library for an Article I Meant to Write in 2003 But Never Did” [it’s exactly what it says it is!] (15pp.)
- The Morgan Library & Museum, “McKim Building Restoration.”
- Holland Cotter, “Let There Be Light, and Elegance” New York Times (28 October 2010).
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Week 4: February 15
- Georges Perec, “Brief Notes on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1997): 148-55.
- Rob Giampetro, “On Arranging Books by Color” Design Observer (27 August 2006).
THE WARBURG LIBRARY
- The Warburg Institute Library and Classification Scheme
- Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Mind” The Library at Night (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006): 193-212.
- Anthony Grafton & Jeffrey Hamburger, “Save the Warburg Library!” New York Review of Books Blog (1 September 2010).
THE PRELINGER LIBRARY
- Megan Shaw Prelinger, “To Build a Library” Bad Subjects 73 (April 2005).
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “A World in Three Aisles” Harper’s (May 2007).
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Week 5: February 22
- Daniel Mendelsohn, “God’s Librarians” The New Yorker (3 January 2011): 24-30.
- Anthony Grafton, “Future Reading” The New Yorker (5 November 2007). [He covers some terrain that’s familiar to us, but it’s a worthwhile read since it sums up our “library unit” quite nicely.]
- Anna Klingmann, “Datascapes: Libraries as Information Landscapes,” In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 406-23.
- Robert Darnton, “Can We Create a National Digital Library?” The New York Review of Books (28 October 2010).
- Daniel Punday, “Ebooks, Libraries, and Feelies” Electronic Book Review (February 2010).
- Geoff Manaugh, “The Atomized Library” BLDGBLOG [blog post] (11 February 2010).
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Week 6: March 1
- NYC Municipal Archives + Collections (Spend some time w/ the WNYC, 1936-1981 Collection; this is the collection Dr. Robinson works with)
- Mike Featherstone, “Archive” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 591-596.
- Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. Smith (Harper & Row [1969]1972): 126-31.
- Jacques Derrida, “Note” + “Exergue” Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago 1996): 1-23.
- Terry Cook, “Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan” Libraries and Archives Canada (n.d.).
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Week 7: March 8
- Wolfgang Ernst, “Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?” In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Thomas Keenan, Eds., New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006): 105-123 [focus on pp. 105-6, 108-10, 112-14, 116-20; skip “A Forerunner of the Internet?,” “The Silence of the Archive,” “Global Memories,” “Retrograd…,” “Between Reading and Scanning”]
- Shannon Mattern, “Infernal Archive: Medial States of Matter in the Institute for Sound and Vision” Flow (21 May 2010).
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Week 8: March 22
- Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts” Archival Science 1:1 (2000).
- Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Acts of Governance” Archival Science 2:1-2 (2002): 87-109.
- Diana Taylor, “The Archive and the Repertoire” In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 16-33.
- Diana Taylor, “Archiving Performance: The Digital as Anti-Archive?” Animating the Archives Conference, Brown University [video] (3-5 December 2009)
- Search iTunes for “Animating the Archives,” choose “Keynote,” fast-forward to 22:00, and watch through 1:03:56
- SKIP the Raqs Media Collective + Atlas Group readings in Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006) and browse through their websites instead: Raqs Media Collective +The Atlas Group
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Week 9: March 29
- Sue Breakell, Introduction, “The Archival Impulse: Artists and Archives,” Tate Modern [audio] (16 November 2007): Search iTunes for “The Archival Impulse” + Tate ==> choose Part 1 ==> listen from 2:00 to 11:30 [see also this]
- Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.
- SKIP Susan Stewart, “Wunderkammer: An After as Before” In Ingrid Schaffner & Matthias Winzen, Eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (New York: Prestel, 1998) [Sadly, my pdf of this chapter erased itself. Damn you, digital archives! Now, if I had a hard copy, we wouldn’t be having this problem…]
- Amei Wallach, “A Conversation with Ann Hamilton in Ohio” American Art 22:1 (2008): 53-77.
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Week 10: April 5
- No reading this week.
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Week 11: April 12
- Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books [1970]1994): xv-xxiv.
- SKIP Manuel DeLanda, “The Archive Before and After Foucault” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 8-13.
- “Database” Oxford English Dictionary (2010).
PAUL OTLET
- Alex Wright, “The Web Time Forgot” New York Times (17 June 2008).
- Molly Springfield, “Inside the Mundaneum” Triple Canopy 8.
VANNEVAR BUSH
- Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” The Atlantic (July 1945).
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Week 12: April 19
- John Vaughn, “A Short Database History”
- Ted Byfield, “Information” In Matthew Fuller, Ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008): 125-32.
- SKIM Chaim Zins, “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58:4 (January 2007): 479-93.
- OPTIONAL: Alan Liu, <preface type = “general”>, <preface type = “technical”> + <argument title = “technologic” subtitle = “the blind spot on the page”> In “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” Critical Inquiry 31:1 (Autumn 2004): 49-63 [note: you’re reading only half the article].
- OPTIONAL: Scott Lash, “Information Flows and Involuntary Memory” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 194-205 and Eugene Thacker, “Database/Body: Bioinformatics, Biopolitics, and Totally Connected Media Systems” Switch 5:3.
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Week 13: April 26
- Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media” AI & Society 14:2 (May 2000): 176- 83.
- Christiane Paul, “The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives” In Victoria Vesna, Ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 95-109.
- “Database Imaginary,” Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Center, 13 November 2004 – 9 January 2005. [Banff’s own exhibition site is down, but Steve T. found an archived site!]
- Brian Droitcour, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Danny Snelson” Rhizome (3 February 2010).
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