It is rare for me to delve into a dictionary when reading. However, I did this several times whilst reading Mandell’s manifesto, Breaking the book. It is a challenging read, less because of esoteric vocabulary, than because it contains a complex argument which questions unacknowledged assumptions in the print vs. digital debate. Mandell examines the claim by proponents of print that digital humanities is focused on the tools and not the essence of humanities studies. To describe that essence as solitary reflection leading to critical judgement is to oversimplify the argument.
Mandell’s approach is twofold: she examines the book as medium and how it reifies the voice of the author, lending it an apparently omniscient authority, and, as she does so, compares the current transition from print to digital to two earlier transitions: from manuscript to small print-run, coterie printing, and from coterie printing to mass-production print runs. This is clear in the organisation of the book, divided as it is into three parts: Pre-Bound (manuscript), Bound (print), and Unbound (digital).
In considering the book as medium, Mandell points to the impact that the medium has on the reception of its contents. In original manuscripts, she argues, the hand of the author reveals the voice of the author. With coterie printing, she reminds us that authors like Pope and Swift were effectively talking to a small audience who were expected to comment on, amend and adapt the books they were given. With mass print production, however, the voice of the author emerges as omniscient, judging and establishing a canon of accepted works. She notes also that book language is not ordinary language and that attempts to impose more scientific ways of speaking failed. On this latter point, she is particularly harsh: such attempts fail as, even in our current era of mass-print and e-books, the majority of humanities texts have very small print runs and consequently small audiences, even though humanists like to think they are making a very big impact. She also criticises those humanists who accept funding from (for example) the Mellon Foundation whilst rejecting funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Marxist grounds. Yet, the only difference between them is that one is old money and the other new money.
Yet, Mandell’s aim is not simply to decry the diehards of the print era. Rather, her aims are to examine the medium of the book and how it affects the humanities and to identify ways in which the transition from print to digital may help the humanities evolve. Her concern is that if they do not, they face a grave risk of being ‘dismantled’. However, it is not all doom and gloom. Mandell believes that the humanities can find ways of utilising the new digital media to change not only the way books work but also how humanists can work.
For librarians, it is this latter hope that is of most importance. As experts in the tools, it is up to us to help our fellow academicians to find new ways of working. It is worth noting that, here in Australia, we have been successful in that regard with Trove which has been acknowledged as transforming the work of the humanities.
I note also that although I consulted a dictionary whilst reading this book, it was an online dictionary and not the large dictionary sitting on my bookshelf. In that simple act lies a major difference in how this particular humanist now works.
Adelaide Central School of Art
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© 2016 Catherine E. Kerrigan
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2016.1236383