My book, Transmediation and the Archive, has just been published!
Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age,"
by Astrid J. Smith, 2024
"Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, this study interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. Blending insights from museum, library, archives, and media studies with experiential research, Astrid J. Smith examines the activities that shape the making of heritage objects, and asks how an awareness of digitization practices can inform our knowledge of both their digital and physical form. She proposes a new methodological framework for evaluating the way materiality and media can affect our relationship with historical artefacts and book culture and demonstrates its fascinating application."
Purchase a copy at Arc Humanities Press
Purchase a copy on Amazon
by Astrid J. Smith, 2024
"Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, this study interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. Blending insights from museum, library, archives, and media studies with experiential research, Astrid J. Smith examines the activities that shape the making of heritage objects, and asks how an awareness of digitization practices can inform our knowledge of both their digital and physical form. She proposes a new methodological framework for evaluating the way materiality and media can affect our relationship with historical artefacts and book culture and demonstrates its fascinating application."
Purchase a copy at Arc Humanities Press
Purchase a copy on Amazon
Other writing
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Chapter 2: "All the Work You Do Not See: Labor, Digitizers, and the Foundations of Digital Humanities," by Astrid J. Smith and Bridget Whearty, 2023
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 "Before the Stanford Literary Lab could perform large-scale quantitative analysis on thousands of nineteenth-century novels, someone had to do the work of digitizing those volumes. Before the William Blake Archive could “provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility,” teams of specialists had to do the hands-on labor of creating stable digital images of those works (“About the Archive”). As a field, digital humanities is fueled by the labor of many individuals who are largely absent from the conversations about the research that their labor yields. Digitization, Melissa Terras argues, is “the bedrock of both digital library holdings and digital humanities research”—and therein may lie the problem (“Digitisation and Digital Resources,” 47). Bedrock is the foundation on which everything stands, but it is generally hidden from view. Unless you are traveling at the edges of cliffs, or deliberately observing the terrain, it can be easy to overlook—until you take the opportunity to explore it face-to-face. ...." (see link above for full chapter) |
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Chapter 1: "What it is to be a Digitization Specialist: Chasing Medieval Materials in a Sea of Pixels," by Astrid J. Smith
Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, Edited by Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley, Elaine Treharne, 2021 "Digital images of medieval objects have a tremendous dualistic power to both represent and conceal. When working with digitized objects, it is important to consider not only how and why those pixels came to be arranged just so but also to recognize the many individuals who facilitated and contributed to their creation. As the rare book and special collections digitization specialist for Stanford Libraries' Digital Library Systems and Services, specifically within the Digital Production Group...." (see link above for full chapter) |