Commonplacing the public domain: reading the classics socially on the Kindle

Amazon leads the market in ebooks with the Kindle brand, which encompasses a range of dedicated e-reader devices and a large ebook store. Kindle users are able to share the experience of reading ebooks purchased from Amazon by selecting passages of text for upload to the Kindle Popular Highlights website. In this article, I propose that the Kindle Popular Highlights database contains evidence that readers are re-appropriating commonplacing – the act of selecting important passages from a text and recording them in a separate location for later re-use – while reading public domain titles on the Kindle. An analysis of keyness in a corpus of 34,044 shared highlights from public domain titles suggests that readers focus on words relating to philosophy and values to draw an understanding of contemporary society from these classic works. This form of highlighting takes precedent over understanding and sharing key narrative moments. An examination of the top ten most popular authors in the corpus, and case studies of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, demonstrates variation in highlighting practice as readers are choosing to shorten famous commonplaces in order to change their context for an audience that extends beyond the original reader. Through this analysis, I propose that Kindle users’ highlighting patterns are shaped by the behaviour of other readers and reflect a shared understanding of an audience beyond the initial highlighter

Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, commonplacing was a habitual practice of middle-class US households, undertaken by children and adults alike to record notable quotations and to cultivate their literary taste. Though it declined in popularity with the rise of the scrapbook in the midcentury, commonplacing was for centuries a standard feature of both educational curricula and domestic literacy, with generations of students instructed in the intellectual and moral benefits of selecting and copying passages culled from reading. Commonplace books offer a wealth of vital information about US literary culture, for they not only illuminate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading practices by allowing us to discern what US readers valued in various genres, but they also help to document what middle-class and well-to-do Americans were reading

‘My printer must, haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and crafting books

Given Isabella Whitney’s reputation as the first English professional woman writer, her books are fertile ground for the recent material turn in the study of early modern women’s writing. Women’s engagement in book production meant that their texts were mediated through the work of booksellers, printers, and other agents in the print trade. We need to remember that writers make texts, but books are made by publishers and printers. Whitney’s own working relationship with her printer-publisher, Richard Jones, is well-known. Yet, the precise nature of Jones’s role in the production of Whitney’s books and her fashioning as an “Auctor” remains shadowy, largely because questions of agency have not been explored through the technologies of book production. To understand the ways in which Whitney’s texts were mediated through print, and her participation in this process, this essay will focus on how her books of poetry were made, starting with the role of her printer-publisher, Richard Jones

Reading and Writing in Digital Age: Combining Analogue and Digital Methods in Teaching Humanities

The process of reading and writing sophisticated texts forms a vital part of education in humanities; however, instructors today routinely face the challenge of students often lacking elementary reading and writing skills. This fact can be explained by the change in dominant reading and writing technologies and their respecive affordances. Humanities students can be taught to read and write complex texts through the thoughtful use of ‘analogue’ experience of previous generations combined with the acute awareness of the new conditions and changes brought by the digital technologies.     Keywords: education, higher education, humanities, reading, writing, digital technologies, affordanc

"TEACHING WITH COMMONPLACE BOOKS IN THE AGE OF #RELATABLECONTENT"

An Essay about a Commonplace book assignment I wrote and tested in 2012 (published in Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy in 2014) and have since revisited and reflected upon. The essay goes into more detail about aspects of my assignment that I had not discussed in my earlier, and more practical, publication for JITP––more specifically, the way that its development had animated a kind of existential anxiety within me. As a result, this piece is an idiosyncratic and somewhat personal meditation, one that is as much about the expansiveness and limitations of my pedagogical thinking in the heady, “very online” days of 2013–2015 as it is about teaching Shakespeare or early modern book history

Commonplace Cultures: Mining Shared Passages in the 18th Century using Sequence Alignment and Visual Analytics

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the various practices associated with Early Modern commonplacing--the extraction and organization of quotations and other passages for later recall and reuse--were highly effective strategies for dealing with the perceived "information overload" of the period. But, the 18th century was also a crucial moment in the modern construction of a new sense of self-identity. Our goal is to examine this paradigm shift in 18th-century culture from the perspective of commonplaces and their textual and historical deployment in the contexts of collecting, reading, writing, classifying, and learning. These practices allowed individuals to master a collective literary culture through the art of commonplacing, a nexus of intertextual activities that we aim to explore through the concerted application of sequence alignment algorithms for shared passage detection and large-scale visual analytics on the largest collection of 18th-century works ever assembled

Interfaces of location and memory: An exploration of place through context-led arts practice.

Interfaces of location and memory is a conceptual framework that invites an understanding of context-led arts practice that is responsive to the particularities of place, rather than a model of practice that is applied to a place. ‘Socially engaged’ and ‘relational’ practice are examples of contemporary arts field designations that suggest a modus operandi – an operative arts strategy. The presence of such concepts form the necessary conditions for investment in public art sector projects, biennales, community outreach and regeneration programmes. The problem here is that the role of the artist/artwork can be seen as promising to be transformational, but in reality this implied promise can compromise artistic integrity and foreclose a work’s potential. This research project proposes that a focus on operative strategies applied to a situation (as a prescribed or desired effect) is counter-productive to the context-led processes of responding to the relational complexities of a particular place. As such, Interfaces of location and memory calls for an integrative conceptual framework to make sense of the immersive, durational and relational processes involved. Practices and theoretical texts concerned with place and process within the fields of arts, geography and anthropology inform the development of the research and the fieldwork project – caravanserai – an arts residency based at a caravan site in Cornwall, UK. Expanding on Lippard’s educative proposal for ‘place ethical‘ arts practice (1997: 286-7) Interfaces of location and memory offers a contribution to existing knowledge in the field of contemporary public arts; as well as being of interest to disciplines beyond the arts, concerned with the understanding and future visioning of the places we inhabit

The Legal Education of a Patriot: Josiah Quincy Jr.\u27s Law Commonplace (1763)

This article is based on the exciting discovery of a never before printed Law Commonplace, written by the 18th-century lawyer and patriot, Josiah Quincy, Junior. Quincy was co-counsel with Adams in the famous Boston Massacre Trial, a leader of Committee on Correspondence and the Sons of Liberty, and author of the first American law reports. His Law Commonplace provides an exceptional window into the political, racial and gender controversies of the evolving American legal system, and profoundly challenges our conventional views on the origin of American legal education. In certain areas, particularly jury trial, it also has present constitutional significance, as compelling evidence of the state of the law referenced by the Seventh Amendment

Reading in the 21st century; reading at scale

Essay from a festshrift that was originally published in: Reading for faith and learning : essays on scripture, community, and libraries in honor of M. Patrick Graham / edited by John B. Weaver and Douglas L. Gragg. Abilene : Abilene Christian University Press, 2017

Romantic Women Writers and Their Commonplace Books

Women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed the genre of commonplace books. During the Romantic period, women shifted emphasis away from classical texts and conduct literature toward colloquial, individualized compilations. This generic shift, fostered by the advent of print culture, suited women’s practical needs and creativity. Scholarship has often excluded the commonplace books of women— especially Scottish, Welsh, and Irish women--from discussions of genre or textual studies. Building upon the scholarship of David Allan and Earle Havens, I redress this oversight. I analyze literary, financial, and political compilations, as an emerging trivium in commonplace books, comprising significant subject areas in women’s commonplacing. Case studies of women writers in this dissertation demonstrate the significance of commonplace books as workspaces for composing and revising self-authored and other-authored literary works—especially poetry. Angela Reyner, Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock Castle, and Dorothy Wordsworth included various modes of poetic expression and emendation in their commonplace books. Wordsworth’s commonplace books, correspondence, and journals suggest how and why she edited and versioned her poetry, which circulated through social networks and coteries. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (the Ladies of Llangollen), Rose, and Wordsworth exemplify in their commonplacing how and why women compiled shopping memoranda, registers, and asset inventories. Ponsonby’s commonplace book especially demonstrates how property was recorded using cartographic accountancy, which conflates sketching, surveying, and mapping with accounting. Women’s commonplacing suggests that they kept valuatory records of ownership or stewardship that indicate what women valued, revealing their long-term investment perspectives. Women valued sociability and included the public sphere of shared ideas in their commonplace books. In crafting commonplace books with resources from periodicals and the domestic sphere or commonplacing the domestic domain itself, women expressed cultural, economic, and socio-political opinions and voiced controversies in relation to identity and community. Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Ponsonby, and Butler resisted English hegemony by incorporating into their commonplacing Celtic inter-linkages, Gothic artifacts, or cultural-political awareness of new nationalism. Commonplace books continue to evolve. On digital Internet sites, such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, commonplacing maintains the relevant need to share and retain ideas—informing social networks of communication