I have to confess that this post is a little bit of a “cheat” for today because I’m sharing a document that is going to be a part of the final exhibit for the book projects as part of this NEH Institute. See, all of the institute participants have to write a commentary for the exhibit on what we’ve learned from this institute and why what we’ve learned is important both for our own scholarship and for the work that we’ll do in our lives after the institute is over. Writing a reflective commentary was an interesting meta-experience for me because it struck me that I was getting to put myself in my students’ shoes! I often assign reflections, so writing one myself was a good reminder of what it feels like to reflect on my experiences. It turned out that writing this commentary was an affirming pedagogical exercise insofar as it helped me see that reflection really does help me synthesize ideas. (I hope that the same is true for my students who write reflections, but because I’ve already “bought into” the concept of reflection’s value, the exercise is inherently useful for me; I think there’s often still persuasive scaffolding I need to do when I assign reflection work to my students).
As part of this reflection, I went back to definitions: a joke in our institute has been the fact that we’ve been constantly circling back to the question, “what the hell is a book?” Indeed, the further we’ve dug into historicizing books, considering books outside of the “codex” form from audiobooks to multimedia books, and exploring the various ways that books are used, we’ve found ourselves increasingly confused! The confusion itself is not a bad thing, but in this reflection, I consider why we don’t really need to define books at all, and why, instead, we can frame our understanding of books based on the users, not the objects themselves. (That might sound a little crazy, but hopefully the reflection below is helpful!).
Without further ado, the commentary I’m sharing below is, I hope, a rather nice summary of some of my reflections on the institute so far and how I’ve tried to articulate what’s been important about this institute for my thinking about reading, literacy, and book history:
“What the hell is a book?” we’ve asked ourselves since Day 1 of this National Endowment for the Humanities institute on “The Book: Material Histories and Digital Futures.” For a long time, a part of me has understood that the concept of “a book” could be unpacked in a variety of ways, and that even the design that we typically think of when we imagine a book – a stack of papers bound by glue – is a relatively recent invention of the book. We are well into nearly three decades of the ubiquity of computing technology and yet, in both popular culture and in academia, we still struggle to figure out the relationship between an old technology, like the printed book codex, and a new technology, like an e-reader or a computer or even a smartphone.
To these ends, I think it has become clear to me that it doesn’t really matter what a book is at all. We could talk in circles for a long time in order to define and delimit a book, but those definitions would always inherently fall short and they would never be able to anticipate what technologies might come next to replace, supplant, or evolve our conceptions of the book. In short, definitions inherently limit what is possible, and in its ideal form, a book should expand our notions of worlds, peoples, and ideas.
What is more important than defining a book, then, is understanding the people who read books across the ages. Who is using a book? Why do their uses matter? How do their uses impact our shapes and conceptions of what is possible in communicating an idea? How do people distribute and circulate ideas to create our so-called “books?” The readers, after all, are the ones who get to decide which books survive and which don’t.
One of the most important concepts I’ve wrestled with at this institute is accessibility. Because I think the readers are the participants in a book’s circulation that matter the most, it is a challenge to ensure that as many readers can access books as possible. Indeed, the thing that we think of when we imagine “a book” is not accessible to blind or dyslexic readers, among others who perhaps suffer from print reading disabilities. If we limit our understanding of a book to one particular form, we inevitably exclude particular kinds of readers from participating in the content that a book holds. I’m excited to think more about what happens with a book when we can think more inclusively about which kinds of books forms might accommodate which kinds of readers differently.
As I think ahead to how I will use what I’ve learned from this Institute in my post-Institute life, I can think of numerous applications, both to my scholarship and my pedagogy. I’m especially excited to think about historical conceptions of disability and reading and compare those conceptions to my current investigations of embodied anxieties over reading in a digital age. I also am excited to apply the concepts of “making” to my pedagogy, encouraging more of my students to play with material forms as a way to work through and conceive of research-based concepts differently. What this institute has showed me is that we need to think of our form and our content as combined; our content should always inform the form that our writing takes, and our students should understand more clearly how much is possible in communicating their ideas.
As a teacher-scholar, I’m excited to defamiliarize the notion of what a book is, so that we can be less hung up on what the hell a book is, and more invested in the question, “Who the hell are readers and how do we reach them?”