Butterfly Hunt

My first entry as guest blogger for this awesome project at the University of Stirling. 

Essential reference! 

via @melissaterras.

This article typically fails to engage with the semantic aspects of books which cannot be digitised: it’s not the cliché that ”what one loves about books is the grain of paper and the scent of glue;” it’s the fact that not all books are the same and that the physical qualities of some books and manuscripts, which are not only the ‘contents’ of a page, provide important information. The typically metaphysical take on digitisation— that what is digitised is the ‘soul’ of a book, leaving the ‘body’ behind— is a caricature of the sociology of texts and of how materiality is a matrix of meanings of different orders. The widespread idea, popularised by articles like this, that any defence of the material aspects of books is fetishism (or technophobia) needs to be actively rejected. This denial of the importance of the materiality of books and other cultural objects fits perfectly within a lack of critique of the political economy of digital technologies. Who are the direct beneficiaries of a trigger-happy acceptance of information as merely 1s and 0s? Who benefits from the lack of appreciation and therefore forgetting of the material conditions of cultural and artistic production? 

“We are going to rescue your shit”. 

Proceedings of the conference organized by the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section
Munich, 19-21 August 2009
edited by Bettina Wagner & Marcia Reed
Berlin/Munich: De Gruyter Saur, 2010
ISBN 978-3-11-025324-5

More information about their methods, here.