Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

Sign, Storage, Transmission

by Lisa Gitelman

Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Research, Academic, Cultural Studies, Grad School

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Lisa Gitelman is Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era and the editor of "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron and New Media, 1740–1915.

Reviews

[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few things in this world for which I'm capable of going down the rabbit hole of ever more esoteric knowledge, losing myself in the arcana of what they mean, what they do in the world, how they do those things they do. Almost all those things are in this book. To see them treated with this level of seriousness by someone other than me gave me hope. You'll laugh, but this book changed the course of my life.

Also, it's just plain old fascinating.

Also, I can't believe I forgot to add it to my shelves for as long as I did. For shame.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

i had to read this book for a class assignment where i make a book review for it;; ok so listen;; at first it sounded like the premise was up my alley: mundane, overlooked documentary genres??? the loserboys of the documentary world?? hells yeah
but then i actually started reading it 😐 sometimes loserboys are losers for a reason, and not in any sort of endearing way
if u write about a seemingly “boring” topic like xerox machines and pdfs, im sorry but u really have to like AMP it up to make it interesting;; half of this book is literally just a chronology of how these documents came to be, along with backgrounds on their creators;; if i wanted to do that id just go on wikipedia and save myself the time
the other half is gitelmans argument that we should pay more attention to overlooked documents because they play/ed large roles in information transmission! true!! but like isnt that also obvious 🫣
3 stars cuz ig i learned some stuff about pdfs but what can i say… it was boring af

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book on what could have been a very dry subject.

The topic as you would expect is well researched and explored thoroughly. What for me made this book eminently readable is the anecdotes and stories plucked from the various histories to illustrate and enforce the points made. They help infuse greater insight and make the book more interesting than perhaps it has the right to be!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to all.

It's taking it's place on my bookshelf, ready for a re-read in the future!

[Douglas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mundane history punctuated by flimsy thinking.

[Joe Olipo · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The hand-shaped cursor abets what Walter Benjamin calls the 'dictatorial perpendicular' of modern reading. [...] as if the dictatorial perpendicular could every fully refute 'the frightening anesthetic power of company [academic] papers,' as Primo Levi once put it." — Gitelman (130)

People that are really very [academic] can get into sensitive positions and have [no] impact on history.

The academic position isn't a sinecure (rather the opposite), but it does have the tendency to produce, for the most part, circumscribed texts. Per Gitelman, "It is [due] to the internal workings of scholarship in particular that, notoriously, scholarly publication stands at odds with marketplace demands, as scholars publish for academic rewards such as promotion and tenure that ensue." (52) So we find ourselves reading the work of a [perhaps very] bright mind on the subject of the Blank, the Typescript, Xenography, and the PDF, which, though conforming to all apposite demands of scholarly/historical writing, has not revealed its subject. We are reading, then, simple history, populated with occasional juicy bits, which is required reading for no one.

On Questions the Text Doesn't Answer
(I'm thinking of the historical progression from hand-writing to PDF and OCR (optical character recognition) progressing even further into text-to-speech, with response from the 'Benjamin-ian' perspective of "mechanical reproduction" (Gitelman does this) though with response from Adorno's Aesthetics in which Benjamin's un-reflected conception of "Aura" is debated. Also I'm wondering about the Deleuzian response to digitized reading machines (such as the one which has read this book, Body Without Organs and all that), the solicitation of writing/reading/text/speech from a Derridean Grammatological perspective. Also was hoping to read about the question/problem of the Archive (touched on briefly) with reference to Spivak and work on teaching/instruction/Interventionalism.)

On the Blank
What does the writing of Edgar Allen Poe have in common with the Chequebook?

"The nominal blanks of fictions like Poe’s, seem like a careful attempt to hold open a tale’s potential field of address. Such openness may have helped get Poe’s tales and poems published, and republished, effectively providing Poe with a "mobile form of capital.” Seen in this light, the typography of [Poe's Blank] works something like the typography of a job-printed checkbook, since both facilitate monetary exchange. One difference is that Poe’s typography works in part because his blanks can’t be definitively filled in, while a checkbook works presumably because its blanks can be." (29)

On Xerography
Now that we are in the era of corporate underdog sports films (Air (2023), Flamin' Hot (2023), Blackberry(2023)), I am putting together a script for Xerox (2025), in which the initial turn of dramatic irony occurs when the main character (Mr. Haloid Xerox) recognizes the surreptitious use of the Xerox machine, which is that the Xerox itself could be Xerox'd:
"[Users] not infrequently making as many Xeroxes in a month as the machines had been designed to produce in a year." (84)

On the PDF
What does the the mouse cursor have in common with the Medieval text?

William Sherman notes that the small pointing hand, or “manicule,” is “a visually striking version of the most common marginal notation of all— nota or nota bene." (129)

[Ishita Gupta · Rating 1 out of 5]

it sucks.

have no comment .the book is great. yeah. honestly that's all I have to say about it. Its one thing to laugh about how bolluks that text is but can you imagine sitting with that thing for literal hours.

Ive said enough dude honestly. Ive spent enough of my life with that books. stop. We should delete all of it and move on.

[Trevor Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! See my interview with the author here https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/...

[Zara Rahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderfully niche book for me - I didn't find it quite as fascinating as I had thought, though. And (though I guess I might be one of few) I found the chapter on PDFs to be slightly lacking - I had expected more of a discussion about it being non-machine readable (=closed data), but the chapter was more around how it came to be, and the role they have played up until now.

There were some really interesting nuggets of information though, especially around photocopying - I've interacted a fair bit with the Open Society Foundation, and found it fascinating that they originated from Soros' efforts to provide Xerox machines to copy banned texts.

Recommended if you're likely to find something like "a history of documents" interesting - especially if you have a more in-depth knowledge or passion for US history!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably the best treatment of "documents" and document culture to date... I've read a number of them. Gitelman gets to an appropriate socio-technical perspective through four case studies: 19th century job printers; early 20th century business typescripts; 1970s photocopy culture (via the Pentagon Papers case); and finally, the reign of the PDF. From a scholarly point of view, this is really first rate. It's unfortunate that it's written in such a dry, distanced tone, though... she's clearly brilliant and erudite, but she never lets you actually like the topic, or her, or her prose. So it's a bit tough slogging for a casual read -- and hence my low rating here.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with all of Gitelman's books, this one does an excellent job situating its subjects (i.e., documents) within the historical circumstances they emerged to look at the co-constitutive nature of documents and their producers/receivers. Despite her focus on artifacts, Gitelman never loses sight of the people who surround them, and her choice of particular document types (from job printing to PDFs) sheds light on parts of "print culture" (a term she problematizes) that are routinely ignored.

[amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The next title I'm reviewing for Hack Library School. Not sure if it's a) clear b) worth noting, but I choose the titles; am not assigned them.

UPDATE: Review published!

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good discussions of xerox and pdf. Chapters not as thematically unified as they could be, but an interesting read. Somewhat more institutionally oriented, but doesn't shy away from exploring the social implications in an institutional context, even if more could be done in that area. Ironically, the pdf offered by the publisher isn't terribly well-organized.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was most pleased to receive this book, which I enjoyed. I appreciated the fact that it was very, very through in it's approach, reseach, and points-of-view. I feel very bad about my late review - I thought I had previously reviewed it already!

[Miriam Kahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An academic approach to documents and printing. Several chapters were quite informative including the one about printing blank books.

[Mills College Library]

302.2244 G536 2014

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

talked about it here: http://www.5cense.com/14/378.htm

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read for archivists!