Xerographers of the Mind
The Lost Idea of the Photocopy
Part of a larger in-progress project on textual interface, “Xerographers of the Mind” seeks to recover the idea of the photocopy, an idea so lately corrupted by our intuitive knowledge of things digital. To do so, it addresses famous photocopies of the 1960s and 1970s — especially the Pentagon Papers — illustrating ways in which documentary reproduction is a construct both dynamic and diverse. Your reflections and suggestions will be welcomed.
Speakers
Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her second book, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She has a recent edited collection, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013), and a recent monograph: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014). Gitelman holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and she helped to create the Department of Media Studies at Catholic University. She is currently appointed in NYU’s Department of English and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
