Intermediate Horizons

Description

This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.
 
Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries. This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities. “Book history and digital humanities are increasingly entangled, and it makes sense why: we cannot understand our digital moment without knowing the technologies and textual cultures that came before. Intermediate Horizons shows how these fields speak to each other, and why we need to pay attention.”—Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania “Intermediate Horizons offers a vital set of reports on the history and future of the book. Traversing the shared territory of the digital humanities and book-historical studies, the essays in this volume provide fresh perspectives on the wonderful complexities of media and mediation.”—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia Mark Vareschi is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
Heather Wacha is a former University of Wisconsin fellow  and CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and associate coordinator of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the coauthor of The Cartulary of the Abbey of Prémontré: A Dual Print and Digital Edition. List of Illustrations
Foreword: Intermediate Horizons