2/26 @ 6 PM – Book History Colloquium: “The Future of the (Digital) Book”

Digital Book

Diana Taylor, Professor of Latin American Studies and Performance, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Latino Studies, New York University and Alexei Taylor, interactive designer

Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 6:00 PM

Butler Library, Room 523

This talk addresses two major quandaries regarding the future of the (digital) scholarly book. The first has to do with the concept of ‘book’ when applied to books written for the screen and read on phones by generations that have grown up with the internet and touch screen devices. What role does a press have when ‘books’ are designed and coded by technologists, preserved on the cloud, and disseminated through social media? What implications does this have for the classroom? For academic institutions grounded in libraries? For legal and classification regimes such as copyright and ISBNs? The second question has to do with the changing understanding of scholarship itself. The speakers will provide examples from the digital books they have created to address these issues.

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Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of the award-winning Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Outstanding Book from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for Best Book in Latin American and Hispanic Studies from the Modern Language Association. She has received many awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar award (2012-13), and the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship (2013-2014). She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Alexei Taylor is an interactive designer of screen-based publishing and authoring systems. As the co-founder of TypeFold, a company that develops digital publications and software, Taylor’s focus is on a variety of authoring systems for classrooms, e-books, interactive journals, and virtual museums that utilize maps, augmented reality, streaming data and community. He has taught graduate and under graduate classes in design and technology and uses this experience to challenge the role of interactivity, collaboration and media in pedagogy. Taylor holds an M.P.S from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

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Co-sponsored with the Hispanic Institute of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University

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The Book History Colloquium at Columbia University, open to any discipline, aims to provide a broad outlet for the scholarly discussion of book history, print culture, the book arts, and bibliographical research, and (ideally) the promotion of research and publication in these fields. Our presenters include Columbia faculty members and advanced graduate students, and scholars of national prominence from a range of institutions.

Questions? Email Karla Nielsen.

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All sessions take place 6pm in 523 Butler Library, Columbia Morningside Campus, unless otherwise noted.

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