Choice Reviews Online· 2014
Paper knowledge: toward a media history of documents
- 222citations
- 2014year
Short summary
Lisa Gitelman's "Paper Knowledge" offers a media history of the document, tracing its forms from 1870s letterpress to today's PDFs.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Examines the document as a media form across 150 years of technological change.
- Covers technologies including letterpress, typing, mimeograph, microfilm, photocopying, and PDF.
- Discusses the interplay between technological innovation, paper management, and computer programming.
- Highlights vernacular uses and the transition between old and new document technologies.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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 authors' abstract, as published at the source. Choice Reviews Online, 2014 · DOI ↗
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