Paper Knowledge

Toward a Media History of Documents

Lisa Gitelman

   “Four intriguing essay make up this tantalising and ambitious short book. Each starts at a vivid point in the overlapping history of media and technology, and proceeds to meander around an ink-stained group of colourful characters and long-forgotten committees [...] Through these windows on the recent past, [Gitelman] subjects printing, copying, documents and paper to an analysis that is both fresh and grounded in the practices and prejudices of media studies […] The strength of this bold volume is in its argument that we can learn a great deal if we focus, not only on what information they contain but what institutional and social function they serve; not what they’re bound about but what they do.”—Times Higher Education

   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.

Duke University Press

May 2014 224pp 11 photographs 9780822356578 PB £14.99 now only £11.24 when you quote CS0714PKNO when you order

 

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