Spring2016-Kumari
Spring 2016 - The Photographic Apparatus
[REVIEW] Lisa Gitelman: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
Ashanka Kumari
Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge provides a detailed account of moments in the history of the document that expand Michel de Certeau’s concept of “scriptural economy,” which reflects “the ‘endless tapestry’ of writing and writings that work as both discipline and myth."1 Gitelman repurposes this concept through a focus on “the document” as it functions through diverse media in the nineteenth century. Additionally, Gitelman wants scholars to reconsider the “broad categories that have become proper to the history of communication” as they “increasingly have a bearing on popular discourse” and, thus, refuses the use of the term “print culture.”2 Ultimately, Gitelman argues for a more refined history of print. This refined history enables scholars of media studies to refocus from “grand catchall categories like ‘manuscript’ and ‘print’ and toward the embarrassment of material forms that have together supported such a varied and evolving scriptural economy.”3
Paper Knowledge is divided into four chapters bookended by a preface, introduction, and an afterword. Each chapter focuses on a moment in the last 150 years that reflects material forms in today’s digital texts and scholarship, on “unsung and offbeat heroes,” while also building on Siegfried Zielinski’s model of “deep time of media.”4
In the first chapter, “A Short History of ______,” Gitelman emphasizes the power of “fillability” in nineteenth century life through a detailed account of blank books (e.g., address books, hotel registers, reporter’s notebooks) and the field of job printing. Job printers reference both a profession and articles such as tickets, receipts, or letterheads that are regular parts of a functioning society though often left ignored as they are often relegated to our unconscious daily norms. Job printers “cater to bureaucracy, knowledge work, and for the state, but also of and for other residual and emerging forms of incorporation.”5 Gitelman determines that blank books aided users with uncovering themselves and their work as well as in organizing their daily lives. Through an analysis of the confounding story of Oscar H. Harpel, a job printer who published a “specimen book,” or “the catalog of type founders, who offered different fonts and supplies to the trade,” Gitelman argues for the value of producing print as well as circulating “in the construction of an occupational consciousness.”6
“The Typescript Book,” the second chapter, centers on Robert C. Binkley, a scholar who published a volume titled Methods of Reproducing Research Materials in 1931. Gitelman argues that Binkley’s notion of “methods of reproducing” aligns with contemporary work in the digital humanities, one in which scholars frequently stress the significance of digital media and “methods of reproducing” to the field.7 Gitelman connects Binkley to Walter Benjamin, who was writing in the same year, and his concept of “aura.” Specifically, Benjamin’s extension “beyond the realm of art” correlates with Binkley’s work with the “documentary record” as such that “clarifies the conditions of technological reproducibility that helped prompt both men to such appealing idealism and helped make the 1930s such an extended and important moment for documentary expression.”8 Reproducibility, in Gitelman’s view, means greater and more immediate access, which then works toward the construction of scholarly knowledge.
Gitelman’s third chapter, “Xerographers of the Mind,” moves ahead another thirty years and concentrates on the photocopy. Specifically, Gitelman highlights the story of Daniel Ellsberg who famously Xeroxed what became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1969. Gitelman notes that Ellsberg’s photocopying depended on “xerography as an unacknowledged form of cultural production.”9 In fact, Ellsberg went as far as to remove words like “top secret” from the tops of pages so “clerks wouldn’t be suspicious.”10 The Pentagon Papers scandal significantly incited new policies on government transparency. Additionally, Gitelman connects xerography and the digital through her second chapter example of John Lions’s “Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System.” Commentary on software documentation, such as Lions’, reflects the “quintessential xerographic subject of its day.”11 Manuals of the time were always subject to change, while today’s manuals live in editable forms such as Wikipedia pages. Xerography’s impact in this media history comes through the way Xeroxing not only reproduces documents, but also generates them. Gitelman further notes the power of Xerox in making fun of the document genre it reproduces. This form of mockery continues to be exposed in contemporary television on the British and U.S. versions of The Office, a show that parodies “contemporary office politics according to its own clichés which the camera’s documentary mode of address helps to paint as all the more ridiculous and retrograde.”12 Ultimately, the concept of the photocopy reflects the question of copyright and intellectual property in the 1960s and 1970s while exhibiting the issue of access to documents.
In the fourth chapter, Gitelman moves our attention to the portable document format, or PDF, a form that represents a print document more so than others as reflected in the chapter title “Near Print and Beyond Paper.” Unlike previous chapters in which Gitelman has focused on specific cases of the document genre in question (i.e. blank books, typescript book, photocopy), she notes a failure in finding such an example. Instead, she focuses on a founder of Adobe Systems – John Warnock – along with other “founding fathers of digital work processes and the networked personal computers that support them.”13 The PDF’s significance lies in the way it reimagines the “genre of document mobilized within the digital environment.”14
In sum, Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge draws attention to four document genres, working toward a media history of documents as she alludes in the subtitle of her book. This text draws us to the significance of print production that circulate in a variety of ways based on time and technological constraints. Despite the radical evolution of the document Gitelman charts here, and the sweeping uses documents are put toward, the document remains central to our writing economy today. Gitelman concludes her text with a brief detailing of the fanzine genre, rounding out her analysis of previously unrecognized moments in the history of the document. This conclusion lends the text as a whole to discourses surrounding DIY publishing in that it provides some of the historical contexts that have shaped this present movement.
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19. See also Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print. See also, MASH 1.1. for more conversation on Zielinski.
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