A practical focus for the issues raised by the lecture is the recent opening of Europe’s largest public lending library, the Library of Birmingham.
In an increasingly digital information context, does it make sense to invest in a building housing physical books?
For further reflections on the contemporary meanings of archives see:
Featherstone, M. (2000) “Archiving Cultures”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 161-184
You should also reflect on your own experiences of both accessing and perhaps increasingly producing information. To what extent do you document and store aspects of your life? Has the balance between physical and digital items changed as you’ve grown older? Do you prefer studying through screens or with pen and paper?
For reflections on digital self-archiving see:
Good, K. (2013) “From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives”, New Media and Society, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 557-573 and
Keightley, E. and Pickering, M. (2014) "Technologies of memory: Practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography", New Media and Society, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 576-593.
Beyond the realms of education and self-archiving what are the implications of digital payments systems such as Bitcoin and Apple Pay?
For a case study of mobile payment systems see:
Maurer, B. (2012) “Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space”, Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 48, No.5, pp. 489-504
The implications of digitisation have been acutely felt in the realm of recorded music. There is a burgeoning field of ‘sound studies’ documented in
Sterne, J. (Ed.) (2012) The Sounds Reader, Abingdon: Routledge
And Sterne has produced a fascinating history of the MP3 format:
Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: the meaning of a format, Durham: Duke University Press
Pre-figured in a 2006 paper you can download directly from Sterne's site.
Sterne, J. (2006) “The MP3 as cultural artefact”, New Media and Society, Vol. 8, No. 5, pp. 825-842
Underlying many of these developments in recording technology is the infrastructure of software, and there is an emerging field of software studies which may challenge the notion that digitisation means dematerialisation.
Several of these works are (appropriately enough) available as E-books via the Library catalogue, for example:
Chun, W. (2011) Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Electronic Readling List
In a practical move that raises many of the issues to be explored in the lecture, via the module's Moodle page if you scroll down on the right hand side in the resources block you should find a link to an online version of the reading list with 'real time' links to the Library catalogue.
Finally, on 3-D printing see:
Birtchnell, T. and Urry, J. (2013) “Fabricating Futures and the Movement of Objects”, Mobilities, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 388-405
