Sign, Storage, Transmission

Toward a Media History of Documents

By: Lisa Gitelman

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Paperback | 1 April 2014

At a Glance

Paperback
226 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.0 x 15.2 x 1.3

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$56.75

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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.

Industry Reviews

"In this thoroughly media archaeological book, Lisa Gitelman folds media history and discovers its edges by diving deep into the flatland of documents, reading technologies of duplication and dissemination from 19th century job printing to today's PDF. With implications for archival and information science, comparative media, digital humanities, and the history (and future) of texts, Paper Knowledge will be read, referenced, and reproduced - which is exactly what we want our documents to do." - Matthew Kirschenbaum, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination "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 "Gitelman practices a kind of conceptual archeology without obeisance to the master, in an argument that stands well on its own... It's the first of the author's books I have read, but it won't be the last." - Inside Higher Ed

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