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Question Formation and Analysis 4
jhcollier3 |
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, Feb 15 2008, 10:19 AM EST
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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | ||
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| danleelawson | I want my digital cake and hard-copy eat it, too | 8 | Feb 25 2008, 11:28 PM EST by taloy | ||
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Thread started: Feb 18 2008, 2:26 PM EST
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“Why not both? Why can’t we have the benefits of the new and extravagantly expensive digital copy and keep the convenience and beauty and historical testimony of the original books resting on the shelves, where they’ve always been, thanks to the sweat equity of our prescient predecessors?” (67).
While Baker’s question here is purely rhetorical and sets up his argument for later in the “Already Worthless” section. I’m asking you to consider it an actual question. What privileges Baker’s research over the research of others such as Lemberg and Lesk? If their assessment—that from a strictly cost-benefit view it will save money to digitize texts—holds true, what does this do to the bulk of Baker’s argument? What consideration is there for the tax-payers who sponsor libraries if it is indeed cheaper to “destroy to preserve?” Are the physical texts works in their own right that ought to be preserved due to the mere fact of their physicality? |
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| Olympiakos | Quest Formation 4 | 1 | Feb 20 2008, 1:39 PM EST by mvbutera | ||
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Thread started: Feb 18 2008, 2:42 PM EST
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Q 4.
1. Baker laments upon the fact that contemporary readers are not being offered the opportunity to actually interact with an old issue of a newspaper or book (they cannot, say, hold or feel the artifact as such). Although I respect Baker’s point, the issue I would like to raise here concerns accessibility. Specifically, I am not sure whether it is preferable to keep a few hard copies of an old issue –which would be available to some people- or to create microfilms or electronic libraries that would make the text available to more users. 2. I understand that Baker is trying to make of something out of his invoking of the materiality of texts. Why I do not understand, however is his hostility toward professional librarians. By reading Baker, one, almost has the impression that it is them who oil the engines of digitization, even sustain the “military industrial complex”. 3. Finally, I have a question that maybe irrelevant but cannot help thinking about. Is it not the content and not the format that we have to be taking into consideration when talking about intellectual products? Again, I see where Baker is coming from, but when I read Aristotle it is his thoughts that I am most interested in and not the form of the text. |
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| grete | A Brand New Form | 1 | Feb 20 2008, 1:21 PM EST by Megfish | ||
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Thread started: Feb 16 2008, 10:15 AM EST
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On p. 77, Baker quotes Fremont Rider saying that micro-materials were fundamentally different than books, that they are “a brand-new form, an utterly and completely and basically different form.” What are the fundamental distinctions between books and the type of media discussed in this book? This question might be related to one of the basic questions we have been asking in class: Is digital rhetoric something altogether distinct from other rhetorics?
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