Syllabus

Week 01 - Monday January 21
NO CLASS since CLASSES BEGIN TUE JAN 22

  • Send out email about class: Assignments, readings, topics, project,
    expectations
  • Ask students for their preferred group for iBooks Author project: editorial, design, or technology

Week 02 - Monday January 28 - 9am
INTRODUCTION - VISIONS OF THE FUTURE OF PRINT

  • Discussion with the Professor about the class theme and operation
  • Screen Printless (38 min.) with guest James P. Danky and discuss

Readings to complete before class:

  • Vannevar Bush, "As we may think," Life (1945); reprinted in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader (2003).
  • Thompson Webb, jr., "Developments in variant forms of the book," Library Quarterly (1955).
  • Marshall McLuhan, "The printed word," in Understanding Media (1964).
  • Anonymous, "The Office of the Future," Businessweek (30 June 1975).
  • Paul Starr, "The electronic reader," Daedalus (1983).
  • J. Jacobson et al.,"The last book," IBM Systems Journal (1997).
  • Stuart F. Brown, " Library to go," Scientific American (June 2008).
  • Reif Larsen, "The crying of page 45," in Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, eds., The Late American Novel (2011).

Week 03 - Monday February 04 - 9am
TOOLS TO EXPLORE THE FUTURE OF PRINT I

Readings to complete before class:

  • Robert Darnton, "What is the history of books?" Daedalus (1982).
  • Christine Pawley. "Seeking 'significance' - Actual readers, specific reading communities," Book History (2002).
  • Ted Striphas, "E-books and the digital future," in The Late Age of Print (2009).
  • John Thompson, "Introduction," in Merchants of Culture (2010).

Week 04 - Monday February 11 - 9am
TOOLS TO EXPLORE THE FUTURE OF PRINT II

Readings to complete before class:

  • Paul Duguid, "Material matters: The past and futurology of the book," in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (1996).
  • John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2000) chapter 7, "Reading the background."
  • David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An Introduction to Book History (2005) chapter 7, "The future of the book."
  • Leah A. Lievrouw, "New media design and development: Diffusion of innovations vs. social shaping of technology," in Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone, eds., Handbook of New Media (2006).
  • Debra Benita Shaw, Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008), chapter 1, "Introduction: Technology and social realities."

Week 05 - Monday February 18 - 9am
TOOLS TO EXPLORE THE FUTURE OF PRINT III

Readings to complete before class:

  • Pablo J. Boczkowski, chapters 1 and 7 from Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004). These chapters are entitled "Emerging Media" and "When we were print people."
  • Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "What we need from the 'next journalism,'" in Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload (2010).
  • James Fallows, "How to save the news," The Atlantic (June 2010).
  • Bill Reader, "Free press vs. free speech? The rhetoric of 'civility' in regard to anonymous online comments," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2012).

Week 06 - Monday February 25 - 9am
DECIDING ON OUR SIX THEMES AND TOPICS (and iBooks Author training)

No readings; come ready to brainstorm.


Week 07 - Monday March 04
THEME ONE

Amateur or nontraditional publishing in print and online, with the goal of reaching a specific community of interest or affiliation

Readings to complete before class:

  • Mark Cenite et al., "Doing the right thing online: A survey of blobbgers' ethical beliefs and practices," New Media & Society (2009).
  • Stephen Duncombe, selections from Notes from underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture (1997).
  • Mike Gunderloy et al., selections from The world of zines: A guide to the independent magazine revolution (1992).
  • Paul Levinson, "Blogging," in New New Media (2009).
  • Lori Kido Lopez, "The radical act of mommy blogging: Redefining motherhood through the blogosphere," New Media & Society (2009).
  • Clay Shirky, "Everyone is a media outlet," in Here Comes Everybody (2008).

Week 08 - Monday March 11
THEME TWO

State-sponsored education and literacy efforts, with the goal of bringing the tools for personal and economic advancement to the public in an equitable way.

  • Siobhan Stevenson, "Digital divide: A discursive move away from the real ineqiuties," The Information Society (2009). (Don't be afraid of the heavy theory in this article; it contains a lot of good historical information about how digital divides have been conceptualized over the last 15 years.)
  • Deborah Brandt, "Accumulating literacy: How four generations of one American family learned to write," in Literacy in American Lives (2001).
  • Renee Hobbs and Amy Jensen, "The past, present, and future of media literacy education," Journal of Media Literacy Education (2009).
  • Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (2006). (This is a long report; read the executive summary at a minimum.)

Bonus

  • Dana Goodyear, "Letter from Japan: I [heart] Novels," The New Yorker (22 December 2008).
  • Gabriella Lukacs, "Dreamwork: Cell phone novelists, labor, and politics in contemporary Japan," Cultural Anthropology 28:1 (2013).

 


Week 09 - Monday March 18
THEME THREE

For-profit news publishing in print and online, with the goal of producing an informed public

  • Paul Starr, "Goodbye to the age of newspapers (hello to a new era of corruption)," The New Republic (04 March 2009).
  • Ken Doctor, "The newsonomics of zero and The New York Times," Nieman Journalism Lab (14 February 2013).
  • James Baughman, "Wounded but not slain: The orderly retreat of the American newspaper," in David Paul Nord et al., A History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (2009).
  • Eric Alterman, "Out of print," The New Yorker (31 March 2008).

Bonus

  • Ernesto Priego, "Comics scholarship in the digital age," The Arts Pages (24 August 2012).
  • Scott McCloud, "The 'Infinite Canvas'" (February 2009).
  • Bob Callahan, "No more yielding but a dream," in From Crumb to Clowes: The New Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Stories (2004).
  • A short piece by comics artist Chris Ware.

Week 10 - Monday March 25
NO CLASS since SPRING BREAK MON MAR 25 - FRI MAR 29


Week 11 - Monday April 01
THEME FOUR

Non-profit librarianship encompassing both print and digital information organization practices, with the goal of providing information for a diverse community

  • Peter R. Young, "Librarianship: A changing profession," Daedalus (1996). Nearly twenty years old, this is a pre-millennial view of how new media might affect the uses and meanings of the library.
  • Wayne A. Wiegand, "Libraries and the invention of information," in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (2007). An overview from a former professor of LIS here at UW-Madison.
  • Kenneth Cmiel, "Libraries, books, and the information age," in David P. Nord, Joan S. Rubin, and Michael Schudson, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (2009). Compare to Wiegand's story.
  • Elizabeth Losh, "Reading room: The nation-state and digital library initiatives," in Virtualpolitik (2009). Wide-ranging, but provocative. Compare to Young's ideas from a decade before.
  • David A. Bell, "The bookless library," The New Republic (12 July 2012). One vision of the future of libraries today.
  • Kathryn Zickuhr, Lee Rainie, and Kristen Purcell, Library services in the digital age (2013). A long, detailed survey report of the Pew Research Center; another vision of the future of libraries today. Compare to Bell's arguments.

Week 12 - Monday April 08
THEME FIVE

Local business or community service marketing to a target public through print or online means

  • Jon Goss, "'We know who you are and we know where you live': The instrumental rationality of geodemographic systems," Economic Geography (1995).
  • Richard K. Popp. "Making advertisements material: Checking departments, systematic reading, and geographic order in nineteenth-century advertising," Book History (2011).
  • David M. Henkin, "City streets and the urban world of print," in Scott E. Casper et al., eds., A history of the book in America, vol. 3 (2007).
  • Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Arcelia Hernández, "Talking the walk: Children reading urban environmental print," The Reading Teacher (1999).
  • Joseph Turow, "The customized store," in Niche Envy: Marketing discrimination in the digital age (2006).
  • Sara L. Wimberley and Jessica L. McClean, "Supermarket savvy: The everyday information-seeking behavior of grocery shoppers," Information & Culture: A journal of history (2012).

Week 13 - Monday April 15
THEME SIX

Scholarly knowledge production and publication for research and teaching in both print and online venues

  • John Willinsky, "Opening," in The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2006).
  • Yochai Benkler, "The university in the networked economy and society: Challenges and opportunities," in Richard N. Katz, ed., The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing (2008).
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Texts," in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (2011).
  • Michael Stratford, "'Predatory' online journals lure scholars who are eager to publish," The Chronicle of Higher Education (04 March 2012).
  • Jennifer Crewe, "We're definitely not in Kansas anymore — but are we in Oz?" Cinema Journal (Winter 2013).
  • Richard Van Noorden, "The true cost of science publishing," Nature (28 March 2013).

Week 14 - Monday April 22, 2013
GROUP WORK SESSION


Week 15 - Monday, April 29, 2013
STUDENT PRESENTATIONS to EACH OTHER


Week 16 - Monday, May 06, 2013
STUDENT PRESENTATIONS to UW EXPERTS

The presentation (and discussion) session will begin at 9:30am and continue to 10:30am.  After a 15 minute break, the class will reconvene at 10:45 for a final debriefing and discussion until 11:30.

Confirmed attendees:

  • John Hawks, Professor of Anthropology and Chair, L&S Curriculum Committee
  • Bruno Browning, L&S Chief Information Officer
  • Bruce Maas, UW-Madison Chief Information Officer
  • Edward Van Gemert, Director, UW-Madison Library
  • Jon McKenzie, Professor of English and Director, DesignLab
  • Jonathan Senchyne, Assistant Professor of Library & Information Studies and Associate Director, Center for the History of Print & Digital Culture