User:Simon/Trim4/Thesis outline third draft

TASKS OF THE CONTINGENT LIBRARIAN

1. ACQUIRING TEXTS

• why do we need texts? what is their function?
  • the technology of language and its evolution through orality > literacy
  • preservation of memory - language inscribed in oral traditions, and in writing
  • social - the recollection of this memory forms narratives that constitutes subjects
• ways of reading: browsing vs searching, skimming vs scanning
• access to texts (or lack thereof) - where do they come from?
• copyright law and authorship - Eva Weinmayr’s essay
• technical methods of digitising printed texts
  • scanning, processing text, redesigning, reprinting, make-do workflows
• personal experience of using libraries?

2. CLASSIFYING AND CATALOGUING THEM

• aspects of classification
  • social, linguistic, semiotic, political
  • collections of texts
    • professional, amateur, critical librarianship practices and how they relate to these aspects
• what connects the books and the readers
• how does locality relate to the collection?
• proximity
  • in the infrastructure of the library (the catalogue, the shelves, the folders, the interface)

3. MAKING TEXTS ACCESSIBLE

• conversion between formats for diverse reading needs (academic/technical/social etc)
  • how do people read texts? how do machines read them?
• knowledge distribution methods and networks (distinction between digital and analog methods is blurry as they are often combined)
  • social
    • distribution of objects arranged through a social network:
  • governmental
    • copyright law and its restrictions on distribution of knowledge
  • municipal
    • public libraries, social initatives (e.g. Leeszaal)
  • pirate
    • bootlegging, samizdat, warez, zine culture, unofficial/uncatalogued publications
• the importance of locality (in both physical and virtual domains) and its relation to a library's survival
  • making it public vs making it private
• pirate vs commercial models - what’s at stake?

4. CREATING A SYMBOLIC LINK BETWEEN TEXTS AND READERS

• a definition of the symbolic (Lacan’s example of a door and its uses outside of binary open/closed)
  • what are the conditions for this symbolic link to resonate and persevere?
• what strategies can be adopted to initiate and maintain this?
  • associating texts with the people who read, annotate, and discuss them
    • written & oral discourse around texts - how can these be published?
  • shifting power relations from top-down to bottom-up models of library infrastructure
  • supporting the sociability of libraries through
    • collectively organised cataloguing and classifying systems
    • bootlegging and "unofficial" publishing practices
    • localised distribution methods

Bibliography

Austin, J.L., Urmson, J.O., 1971. *How to do things with words: the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955*, Oxford paperbacks. Oxford Univ. Press, London.

Bangma, A. and Piet Zwart Instituut (eds.) (2009) Resonant bodies, voices, memories. Berlin: Revolver Publ.

Burroughs, W.S., 1970. The Electronic Revolution. Expanded Media Editions, Gottingen.

Butler, J., 2014. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity : Tenth Anniversary Edition. Routledge, London ; New York.

Carrion, U., 1980. Second Thoughts. VOID Distributors, Amsterdam. https://monoskop.org/log/?p=14521

Connor, S., 2000. Dumbstruck: a cultural history of ventriloquism. Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

Cramer, F., 'Language' in Fuller, M. (Ed.), 2008. Software studies: a lexicon, Leonardo books. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Dolar, M., 2006. A voice and nothing more, Short circuits. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Gitelman, L., 1999. Scripts, grooves, and writing machines: representing technology in the Edison era. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.

Hall, S., 'Encoding, Decoding' in During, S. (Ed.), 1999. The cultural studies reader, 2nd ed. ed. Routledge, London ; New York.

Hayles, N.K., 2005. My mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago ; London.

Ong, W.J., Hartley, J., 2012. Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, 30th anniversary ed.; 3rd ed. Routledge, London ; New York.

Pennycook, A., 2008. English As A Language Always In Translation. European Journal of English Studies. 12. 33-47. 10.1080/13825570801900521. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233322759_English_As_A_Language_Always_In_Translation

Zuckerman, E., 2013. Digital cosmopolitans: why we think the internet connects us, why it doesn’t, and how to rewire it. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.