Paper knowledge : toward a media history of documents / Lisa Gitelman.

  • Gitelman, Lisa
Date:
2014
  • Books

About this work

Description

"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"--The publisher.

Publication/Creation

Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2014.

Physical description

xiii, 210 pages : black and white illustrations ; 24 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-204) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Paper knowledge -- A short history of ________ -- The typescript book -- Xerographers of the mind -- Near print and beyond paper : knowing by *.pdf -- Afterword: Amateurs rush in.

Languages

Where to find it

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780822356455
  • 0822356457
  • 9780822356578
  • 0822356570