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Was Marshall McLuhan's greatest work not his published writing but his reading? This article examines McLuhan's annotation practices in his copies of James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and asks what kinds of evidence a prolific annotator like McLuhan might have left if he had done his reading digitally. The first half profiles McLuhan's annotation practices, illustrated by examples from books from McLuhan's personal library. The second half describes an informal experiment, in which the author tests McLuhan's annotation techniques against the capabilities of digital book platforms and formats, specifically PDF (using the Apple Preview app) and EPUB (using the Apple Books app). Overall, the article works through two questions that are relevant to book history, marginalia studies, and digital archiving. How will we understand the evidence left behind by readers when that evidence is in born-digital forms, as archived digital files? And what can we learn about digital reading and annotation from someone like McLuhan, who did those things exceptionally well in another medium? The conclusion reflects on prospects for the study of born-digital marginalia, and on the role of encyclopedism in understanding both McLuhan's and Joyce's media theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Eggert's The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Marshall McLuhan was not only a prolifc reader but also an expert annotator of his own books. Taking as a case study McLuhan's copies of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this article asks what we can learn about McLuhan's reading from close analysis of his own books. Analysis The article begins with a discussion of McLuhan's media theory as "applied Joyce, " with particular reference to Ulysses, and then turns to an overview of the annotation techniques and strategies visible in McLuhan's copies of the novel. Conclusion and implications The conclusion considers McLuhan's own books as hybrid artifacts that challenge us to rethink rigid distinctions between print and manuscript cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the Canadian band the Tragically Hip as a case study in pro-amateur digital music archiving and also considers the larger place of the band's music within the context of cultural memory. After lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie's cancer diagnosis in 2016, the band made the remarkable decision to undertake a Canadian tour, which became one of the most obsessively documented rock tours in Canadian history. Drawing on close readings of the band's performances and some of the digital records that capture them, the article argues for the importance of considering questions of evidence and memory together, especially in the context of archiving popular music. The article begins with a discussion of the Tragically Hip's value as an archival case study, which is based on the band's linking of composition and live improvisation. It then turns to the engagement of the band's songs with the materials of Canadian collective memory, the work of bootleg collectors and pro-am archivists in the documentation of performance history, and the documentation of the band's final Canadian tour in 2016. Throughout, the article examines how professional and pro-am archiving can complement each other in the case of a band like the Hip, whose music is so closely linked to the idea of Canadian collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the aspects of the infrastructure and digital modeling of twentieth century edition of the manuscript of poet and playwright William Shakespeare. Topics discussed include the mechanical nature of printing, the roles of basic editorial concept such as precision in the context of digital editing, and the comparison of dramaturgical practice and the practice of data modeling in digital context.

The article discusses the materiality of electronic books (e-books). The author argues that e-books must be analyzed through the forensic frameworks of bibliography and textual scholarship and the non-empirical framework of performance theory. He focuses on the contentious publication of the book "The Sentimentalists," by Johanna Skibsrud, and its relations to the materiality of text. The author questions whether readers of the electronic version actually engage with same novel as those who read the traditional print version.

Why should designers of digital reading environments study the history of the book? What can the continuities and discontinuities—the successes and failures—of new developments in the book's long history teach us about its possible futures! Questions such as these often go unasked in commercial e-book design and other domains that emphasize technical innovation as their only criterion for evaluating the past. However, new reading environments challenge us to understand the role of material forms in meaning-making, and to situate e-books and digital reading devices within the changing history of books and reading. This article explores that rationale as embodied by the Architectures of the Book (ArchBook) project, an online, open-access, and peer-reviewed collection of richly illustrated essays about specific design features in the history of the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that, just as an edition of a book can be a means of reifying a theory about how books should be edited, so can the creation of an experimental digital prototype be understood as conveying an argument about designing interfaces. Building on this premise, we explore theoretical affinities shared by recent design and book history scholarship, and connect those theories to the emerging practice of peer-reviewing digital objects in scholarly contexts. We suggest a checklist for subjecting prototypes directly to peer review: Is the argument reified by the prototype contestable, defensible, and substantive?Does the prototype have a recognizable position in the context of similar work, either in terms of concept or affordances?Is the prototype part of a series of prototypes with an identifiable trajectory?Does the prototype address possible objections?Is the prototype itself an original contribution to knowledge?We also outline some implications for funding agencies interested in supporting researchers who are designing experimental computer prototypes. For instance, if a series of prototypes functions as a set of smaller arguments within a larger debate, it might be more appropriate to fund the sequence rather than treating each project as an individual proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Designing an edition, digital or otherwise, is not a straightforward process of tool-building, but a creative act bound up with the cultural history of a text. This paper describes key features of a forthcoming digital edition of the Elizabethan play "The Taming of a Shrew" (first printed in 1594), but also discusses authorship and conflation as topics that cannot be ignored in such a project. As a so-called bad quarto of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" (first printed in 1623), "A Shrew's" textual and metadramatic idiosyncrasies raise questions of critical and editorial method with broad implications for representing dramatic literature in new media. With reference to the interpretive and editorial strategies of Alexander Pope, Edmund Malone, and Leah Marcus, this paper argues that "A Shrew's" troubled history exposes the kinds of conceptual and structural blind spots that can manifest themselves in scholarly tools like digital editions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the technological and social impacts of electronic books and electronic publishing. The authors examine the ways that intellectuals in the humanities fields interact with computerized information resources. The article calls for increased users studies to determine the ways that reading has changed when one interacts with digital texts rather than printed ones. Some of the topics discussed include the methods that scholars in the humanities conduct their research, the design and construction of online information resources, and how humanities scholars are different than scientists in the ways that they approach research tasks.