Microphotography: A Pre-Digital History of Digitization

Mary Murrell, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology. Murrell explores the thoughts and activities of notable librarians, scientists, bureaucrats and utopians who viewed the book as inadequate, and even detrimental, to the intellectual needs of modernity. By focusing on the period before the digital computer, Murrell seeks to establish a broad historical terrain for understanding mass book digitization as a practice of photographic reproduction and also as a critique of the book.