Flinders University Library presents: Digitization as a cultural practice: infrastructure and the immersive literary experience with Dr Tully Barnett

Course description

Flinders University Library Director, Prashant Pandey, welcomes you to an exciting webinar exploring the intersection of cultural, literary and digital realms with Dr Tully Barnett.

Dr Tully Barnett considers digitisation as a cultural practice and asks what is the impact of digitisation and digitalisation on reading, book cultures and the literary experience. What does it mean to be immersed in digital objects, networks, conditions and interfaces within which the digitized/digitalized literary texts exists.

Reading studies (and Librarians) have much to learn from digital humanities, comparative textual media studies and infrastructure studies approaches and, important, the reverse is also true. Central to this has to be a better understand of the story of digitization as it shapes up to be the most significant project for humanities scholarship into the future.

Dr Barnett uses the micro-examples of the journey of a text from material to digital to take into account the broader systems and infrastructures within which that digitization occurs. 

She analyses examples of digitized objects where the material qualities of the original book disrupt the digitality of the digitized book and inflects this analysis with a growing body of interviews with librarians, project managers and technicians about the process of digitization practices. 

This session will be presented online and a link will be sent to participants prior to the session.

Type of course

Information session

Presenters

Who should attend

All welcome. 

What you will learn

This presentation considers some of the factors at the heart of this interdisciplinary challenge, considering the hybridity of the digitized literary object within a developing cultural history of mass digitization projects and critical infrastructure studies. The object rendered by digitization is neither exactly electronic nor print but is, rather, a hybrid object displaying elements of both. Dr Barnett draws us in illuminating these discussions in fruitful ways through the lived experiences of people working in diverse digitization projects.