Welcome address, land acknowlegment, and housekeeping with the Program Committee.

Hypertext technologies and methodologies underpin much of our modern communications infrastructure. Whether we approach Hypertext as non-sequential writing that branches and allows choices to the reader, or as a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be represented on paper (Nelson), thinking in Hypertext has become a ubiquitous part of our reading and publishing lives. Initially framed against the printed work - the selectiveness of book publishing (Bolter); engendered notions of authorial property (Landow); the comparative instability of the object (Delany) - Hypertext is better understood as a sibling category, generative of new ways of thinking, new opportunities, new threats. “Computers are not intrinsically involved with the hypertext concept,” clarified Nelson, citing the magazine as an example, and suggesting that hypertext has never lived up to its inventive potential. Employing a series of case studies, this panel investigates the manner in which Hypertext as approach has influenced our perspectives onapproach to book history and may continue to challenge it: in the webcomics publishing circuit, in communities of practice among queer authors of interactive fiction, in our reading of transmedia memory, in digital scholarly editions, and in wider studies of the book.

Computer vision has made significant progress in recent years, thanks in part to developments in machine learning (or ‘AI’), and is now an eminently practical tool for the book historian. Computers can now reliably match the same printed page or illustration, or visualise variant typesettings or images. More challenging applications, such as detecting illustrations, segmenting pages into meaningful parts and classifying their content, are within reach. This workshop will introduce participants to free and open-source software tools and demos maintained by the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group and developed in collaboration with book historians and others. Attendees will leave the workshop knowing how to match, differentiate, classify and annotate images of various kinds of books and prints. No previous knowledge of computer vision or coding ability is required.

In world where “library” and “book” have taken on vast new meanings, it's the last of Ranganathan's five "rules" of library science ("A library is a growing organism") that prompts us to continuously respond to changing environments and deeply interrogate the ways we curate, collect, organize, and preserve information for generations to come. Rule N° 5 is a new take on the artist’s book, an interactive experience that lives at the intersection of public humanities, critical librarianship, and installation art. This collaboration among library workers offers a sneak peek into the magical, mysterious, complicated, and controversial work happening inside a place–the library–users might not otherwise explore beyond its surface. Meticulously edited audio tracks draw upon over 50 interviews with library workers, dozens of archival recordings, and original music, including crowdsourced and curated voice and sound art submissions. Rule N° 5 sparks curiosity, wonder, and joy at the invisibility and vastness of library work but also engages listeners in difficult conversations about questions of labor, power, authority, and politics of seemingly innocuous labor, such as cataloging and information access.

This roundtable focuses on the nexus of the history of the comic book and digital humanities. It builds on significant, but infrequent, conversations between comics studies and DH that have emerged in the past decade. This panel explores potential futures for how comics studies and digital scholarship can meaningfully converge to enrich both fields. We examine ways that DH approaches can disrupt normative understandings of comics across time, of historical graphic narratives. Each participant will begin with a brief position paper describing their distinct methodological and theoretical innovations: media archaelogy and software emulation with DIY queer comics; social media reader-response engagement with historical comics; comics collections as datasets that can codify race and representation; and digital visualizations of graphic narratives on a distant scale. From these points of departure, the roundtable opens into a facilitated discussion of our experiences working with DH and comics, as well as our hopes and plans for future endeavors, with generous time for audience engagement. Ultimately, we explore the possibilities of what digital technologies reveal about an inherently visual medium, presenting a syncretic vision of what a digital comics studies might be or become.

Join us for a virtual brunch social. Enjoy your favorite weekend beverage and chat with other registrants.

Beginning with the computational contexts within which the term metadata was initially deployed, this talk first addresses ways that the idea may have achieved its belated power within the so-called archival turn and then explores its continued currency. If the notion of the archive can point us toward questions of power, truth, and fiction, then the concept of metadata stands to call our attention to matters of control. While suggesting the fantasy of a total description or a total ontology of information resources, the metadata concept helps to support a particular epistemic frame—vernacular, trenchant, inescapable—in which finding ostensibly equals knowing.