It’s only a partial list–titles from Pittsburgh, Southern Illinois, and Parlor–collected into a PDF after gathering them at the most recent CCCC book exhibit. Got me thinking about how it would be nice to have such lists compiled and aggregable, year after year, a kind of time series list amenable to isolating years or small clusters of years just for noticing what was circulating at the time. I’d picked them up in the first place because we have a tiny sliver of funding for supplying rhetoric and composition/writing studies focused books to Halle Library on campus, but when I mentioned this to a colleague, she asked for the complied PDF, too, because it carries over readily to placing more direct requests to libraries for end-of-budget-year acquisitions.
Tag: order
Narrative, Database
Today I read Ed Folsom’s PMLA article, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” and the better part of the five responses to the piece and even Folsom’s response to the responses. I won’t attempt a full summary in this entry, but I wanted to note a few initial impressions and lingering questions.
The lead article discusses Folsom’s efforts to develop The Walt Whitman Archive, a growing digital collection of Whitman’s works–works not easily or summarily identifiable as narrative or as poetry. Folsom characterizes Whitman as a forerunner, noting that “[f]or him, the works was a kind of preelectronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars–sights and sounds and names and activities–that he dutifully enters into the record” (1574). The identification of Whitman as an “early practitioner…of the database genre” (1575) doesn’t, as far as I can tell, explain why his work should be any more appropriate for digitization and databased setup than any other, but it does give us the background on Folsom’s insights into database as genre.
Miscellaneous Notes
David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous (Amazon
| blog)
accounts for
the overhaul of classificatory efforts brought about through various
digital platforms–del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Flickr, and so on–as each affords
nearly limitless reorganization. This third order, the digital, amplifies miscellany,
and with it characteristics of mayhem, disorderliness, and pandemonium
that distinguishes the digital from contending orders. Weinberger tabs this
condition the "new order of order," and he ends the book’s prologue with a
gesture that brings information to life, infuses it with desire: "[information]
wants to be miscellaneous" (7).