Jennifer Church

December 2, 2015.

Jennifer Church, Professor of Philosophy at Vassar, talks about perception, imagination, and her book Possibilities of Perception, published in 2013 by Oxford University Press.

"Possibilities of Perception is a stimulating, wide-ranging treatment of perception in its many guises that should be of interest to a commensurately wide audience." --The Review of Metaphysics  

45:10 minutes.

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Johanna Drucker

October 29, 2014.

Scholar, artist, printer, and visual theorist Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses her book Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard 2014).

"Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production."

48:20  minutes

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Lisa Gitelman

September 17, 2014. (SEASON OPENER):

Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, will discuss her book Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014).

"Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: 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."

42:10 minutes.

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Robert DeMaria, Jr.

March 5, 2014.

Robert DeMaria, Jr., Henry Noble McCracken Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about the paragon of eighteenth-century English scholarship and letters Samuel Johnson, Johnson's reading habits, his monumental Dictionary of the English Language, scholarly editing, and the final installments of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

33:42 minutes.

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R. David Lankes

September 18, 2013.

R. David Lankes, Syracuse University Professor, Dean's Scholar, and Director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, will talk about his vision for a new conception of librarians as

"radical agents of positive change" in their role as facilitators of community learning and knowledge-building, and his books Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World (2012), and The Atlas of New Librarianship (MIT, 2011), winner of the ABC-CLIO Award for the Best Book in Library Literature.

"The Atlas is not a book; it is a manifesto, a set of principles and convictions aimed at shaking new life and belief into a field that too often fears for its own future. Read it and be prepared to act." -- Andrew Dillon, University of Texas at Austin.

59:44 minutes.

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