About the event
Books are not dead as was once feared. But they are not the same either. With digital processes and workflows now thoroughly integrated into the art and industry of publishing and printing them, books are altered by the post-digital moment in which we have arrived. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s lecture will pay particular attention to questions of textual stability, a concern of publishers and readers since before the advent of printing. How stable are texts when the book is now manifest as a collection of digital assets, a network which only might, at times, assume the physical and tangible form of the familiar codex?
Speaker
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where he is also co-founding director of BookLab, a makerspace for letterpress printing and the book arts. His work and interests range widely across digital media and culture as well as book history and the conditions of contemporary authorship and publishing. His most recent book is Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); prior to that, he wrote Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). Follow him on Twitter at @mkirschenbaum.
Booking information
Booking is required for this event. Once you have booked your place, the ticketing system will send you an automated confirmation.
Location
Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG
Wheelchair access
The Weston Library is wheelchair accessible.
