As seen in the recent Disability and Accessibility in Book Studies Bibliography published by SHARP News, there is not currently a lot of work published at the intersection of disability studies and book history; the scholarship that does exist primarily focuses on reading tools and techniques for people with visual impairments. Matthew Rubery’s Reader’s Block is the only book-length work at this intersection entirely focused on cognitive print disabilities. Rubery brilliantly connects these disciplines through an analysis of neurodivergent reading requirements, abilities, and habits.
Tag: reading & readership
Alt Text Guide for Book Historians
This guide will teach you the basics of what alt text is, why it’s important, and how to write it. The example images used are specific to book historians to help you write alt text for your course materials, your books or articles, and other presentations.
#reader-core: Aesthetics and Algorithmic Capitalism
Since Jane Austen’s publication of Sense and Sensibility in the 19th century, we’ve moved on from empire waist gowns, empire itself, and of course, industrial capitalism. And with these social, political, and economic changes, modes and practices of readership have also evolved in tandem with our contemporary platformed based economy. Reading itself has been transformed by these structural economic conditions. We are now reading within the landscape of surveillance capitalism, or as Susanna Sacks and Sarah Brouillette have phrased it, reading with, aside, and against algorithms (2023), a dynamic visibly captured via the rise of the reader-aesthetic.
Harrington-Lueker, Donna. Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading.
While we may sometimes remember particular “beach reads” and other vacation reading we bring with us, most of the light reading that dominates the myriad summer reading lists isn’t meant to last. Donna Harrington-Lueker has traced the origins of the phenomenon of summer reading in the late-nineteenth-century United States, highlighting the role of ephemerality and entertainment as publishers and reviewers developed the concept of “summer reading,” as well as how tenacious many of the practices of summer reading are, from reading in public spaces to stockpiling books in convenient corners of a hotel room or guest house.
Scott B. Guthery. Practical Purposes: Readers in Experimental Philosophy at the Boston Athenaeum (1827-1850)
Guthery’s objective is “to inquire as to what the books Athenaeum members borrowed can tell us about the influence they had on their community” during the period 1827 to 1850 (xix, 17). However, his concern is not solely with who those readers were and what books they borrowed, but the connections between what they read, what they built, and what they wrote. He then goes beyond this to explore what the specific books they selected (and did not select) can tell us about what they sought and what they valued in that literature and how they thought about what they were reading and building, making this truly a unique contribution to the academic literature.