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Cutting and Pasting Digital Book History with Whitney Trettien

Whitney Trettien, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss several experiments in digital book history, drawn from her forthcoming book on radical publishing with scissors and paste in early modern England. The first experiment is a digital edition of a 17th-century woman’s commonplace book, made using Digital Mappa. The second is an Omeka-based digital network tracking the source prints and texts pasted into the biblical harmonies made at Little Gidding. The third is a social network visualizing Humphrey Moseley’s publishing circle. As this presentation argues, digital tools bring into relief the creative interventions of long-neglected early modern publishing projects at the fringes of the London book trade.

Date:
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Time:
4:30pm - 6:00pm
Audience:
  Member of the Public  
Categories:
  Events  
Registration has closed.

Trettien researches the history of the book and other text technologies from print to digital. Her work is invested in exploring the past to better understand our present media environment. Trettien received her PhD from Duke University and has an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT.

Her forthcoming book "Cut/Copy/Paste" — being staged on the Manifold Scholarship platform through University of Minnesota Press — identifies three fringe communities that assembled books from fragments of paper media in the seventeenth century. Using digital methods, Trettien's work places these seemingly idiosyncratic textual practices and their materialist poetics within a broader field of literary production. She has published on textile metaphors in the poetry of Isabella Whitney, print-on-demand publishing and Milton's "Areopagitica," and digital humanities, and has co-edited "Provoke!," a web-based collection of sonic scholarship. A print companion, "Digital Sound Studies," is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is also the co-editor and co-designer of "thresholds," an occasional digital zine for creative/critical interventions. 

This event is part of the RBWG & CDH Spring Speaker Series. 

To receive announcements of future events and opportunities from the Rare Book Working Group, contact Jessica Terekhov at terekhov@princeton.edu

To request disability-related accommodations for this event, please contact pulcomm@princeton.edu at least 3 working days in advance.