Lower East Side Librarian

Avid Reader

One of last week's class discussion topics was reading, and reading is one of my favorite things, mostly to do. I hadn't thought about thinking about it. I'm a pleasure reader, so concerned about literary scholarly apparatus only in the sense that I am also a librarian and think publishers who release nonfiction books without a bibliography and index should be given a vicious wedgie.

Now that I am thinking about reading in a more academic way, my mind is spinning with it. I woke up this morning contemplating the concept of print books as "old media," literature being read in the one-vs.-many paradigm, whether social reading is merely social or also pedagogical, and how brains process text vs. computers. Further, I got to a topic that my group touched on but didn't explore in the report back, which is note taking.

Blog Post #1 for Digital Humanities Praxis

I'm calling this post "People with Fingers and Toes” because when I announced on Facebook that I was starting a program in digital humanities, and I inevitably got the “what does that mean?” question and didn’t have a great answer, one of my friends suggested it was the study of humans’ digits–people with fingers and toes. That may not be an original joke, but it was new-to-me, and while I didn’t laugh myself silly over it as my friend Kate did, I thought it was cute. What I didn’t think was that it had any bearing on the topics I’d be exposed to in class.