librarypunk - 060 - Secure the Bagford

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

This week we have Whitney Trettien to talk about John Bagford, a biblioclast of the early modern period and how changes in technology and access shape our interaction with information and its formats.  https://twitter.com/whitneytrettien “Cover” in “Cut/Copy/Paste” on Manifold @uminnpress  Media mentioned John Bagford, bibliophile or biblioclast? - Medieval manuscripts blog The Bagford Collection | British Library - Picturing Places  Eros in the library: Considering the aesthetics of knowledge organization | Art Libraries Journal | Cambridge Core

Arthur, what do you see, buddy? Arthur's just so curious, look at him. Arthur, do you see yourself? He knows what we're talking about him. He's very smart. I'm Justin. I'm a Sculcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him.

I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Whitney Tritene. I'm a professor of English. at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work on book history and digital humanities. Welcome. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So we have, let's see, how did this all come together? Me and Jay went to a webinar you presented about digital humanities a while back, and I think this had something to do with our digital humanities episode a while ago.

That and like the digital garden stuff I'm into maybe. Yeah. Yeah. We were both just vibing with it, though, I remember. Yeah. And also, I believe you know Dot Porter? Yes. Yeah, fabulous digital, humanist, codicologist, book historian person, colleague here at Penn with me.

Yeah. Yeah. She came on and talked about the article finder network. Awesome. I wonder if that's still going. Probably is. Very cool. Yeah, we're working on a project next year to extend some of her work.

work on kind of digitizing collation formulas into this thing I've been working on called Manicule, which is a way of publishing old images of old books online with kind of rich annotations and things like that, but also visualizing the structure. So yeah, I'm excited to work a little more closely with her next year. Yeah, that makes sense talking about, I mean, the problem is like a codex is very hard to display in digital formats. You know, we have these things we call pages, but they're not pages. And they actually, in fact, function more like scrolls, really. Totally. Yeah. And we get the kind of flattened vertical scrolling of pages as opposed to seeing page openings or understanding the book as a three-dimensional object. So thinking about ways to

visualize that better using digital tools. Yeah. Put it on the internet. Put it on the internet. And that'll make you understand it three-dimensionally. You put it in a scanner, put it in a microwave Web scanner scans. Anyway, so we do talk about digital humanities and stuff. We all have different interests and it comes up once in a while. But I wanted to talk about your research because we talk a lot about constructing information and meaning and changes in technology. And I think the subject we're going to talk about today is very interesting as a person

who lived in a time that was where information access was changing. And also the way people related to how they accessed information, how they stored it, how they preserved it, was all changing at once, sort of in a similar way that's happening now. Yeah, and we've mentioned at least definitely once in depth, but we've mentioned, like, medieval or just in general pre-reformation libraries and, like, information relationships. Oh, fun. So, yeah, we did a whole episode on the name of the Rose movie. That was super fun. Nice. Nice. We were both, well, at least two of us, I hope Sadie is also hype.

I'm really excited to hear all about this. Yeah, very cool. So we have a new segment I've been working on where I will generate AI texts, and everyone will guess if they are a real text or written by an AI. And it's called Bot or not. So instead of tweets this week, I had it generate articles about John Backford. So I will generate a random number so that way, Jay can't medigame me by guessing if I'm going to swap from AI to humans. So I've numbered them all and I'm just going to generate a number.

I still lost last week, even though I was meticabing. True. Backford's collection of manuscripts and printed books was acquired by the British Museum in 1753. However, many of the books in the collection had been. damaged by his careless handling, and some of the manuscripts were found to be forgeries. Today, John Backward is largely remembered for his destruction of rare and valuable books and manuscripts. His legacy is one of carelessness and greed, not scholarship or preservation.

It's long, so I'll put it in the chat, too. For your forensic detecting. If this is a human, it's the same kind of person who gets mad at the Internet Archive. Oh, snap. Yeah, I'm going to say human, too. I think it's human. It sounds like the same kind of person gets really pissed off when libraries get rid of books. The dubs are full of books.

Which we will probably talk about. That one is AI. Damn. Okay. I didn't guess I abstained. You didn't? I didn't. I didn't.

I said, yeah. I said, if it's human, it sounds like this, but I didn't say what I thought. Okay. Well, you don't gain a point either way. Yep. Okay. John Bagford is one of. of the most controversial figures in the history of book collecting.

His collecting methods were often criticized by his contemporaries and his habit of destroying older books and manuscripts in order to make room for his own collection was viewed as highly destructive by many. In addition, Bagford was known for his poor recordkeeping and many of the books and manuscripts in his collection were lost or remain unidentified. I'm going to wait for the expert to weigh in on this one. I'm a little scarred now, but I want to say, I think I want to say it's a bot because the last one, because the last one was a bot and I didn't think it was. Metagaming? Yeah, exactly.

I got in trouble last week for doing that. I don't know. I was trying to think of like the patterns you pointed out last week. Like is it switching something halfway through? I'm going to say human again. Yeah, I'm going to go with human this time.

Okay. That one was AI. Justin, I thought of a new name for the segment, though. Or a new song for it. It should be more human than human. And then you should play a white zombie. Hmm. Okay.

Pretty fun. That'd be fun. Just because I keep singing it while we do this. Wait, so that means AI as well. Yep. Okay. The patron saint of perverted book lovers is John Bagford, an 18th century antiquarian who set it upon himself to compile a history of printing. With this in mind, he traveled across Britain, visiting libraries and bringing home a few title

pages of old books from each visit, having torn them out as souvenirs. It sounds like my 18-month-old, so I don't know, maybe I'll go with human this time. But I did like the, what was the first line? The patron saint of perverted book lovers. It's kind of a weirdly perfect description. I love it. Yeah. I want like a little saint candle of him now.

So it's like perverted saint. Exactly. Light the candle to bag. Perverted book lovers. Yeah. Oh, that could be homemade merch idea. How do you make prayer candles? I have a Shakespeare one, but I bought it at a library.

Hmm. I want an Oscar Wild one. Okay, bot or not? Or more human than, I can't ask you if it's more human than human. I'm going to say bot just because that means it'll be human. Okay. I want it to be a human because I want to be friends with whoever came up with patrons

said a pervert of book lovers. That one is. is human. Yeah, who was it? Be my new best friend. It's from an article called, I actually saved who it's from this time, to break a book bibliophiles as book enemies.

Are they pro or anti, this guy? No, this is unhinged. So I cheated a little bit because the number generator told me five, but this one was number six. But those were both humans, so it's fine. So it was going to be human either way. Here's the next paragraph.

I'll put it in the chapter. Yeah, because it's like, I want to be their friend if they're like pro him. And they're like, yeah, perverted book lovers. Nowadays, however, the scrapbooks merely serve as a testament to the author's barbarity. I have no idea how Backford pulled this off, given that even when I imagine librarians weren't exactly indifferent to people tearing out pages from library books. Perhaps Bagford was helped in his enterprise by having been one of the three founding members of the Society of Antiquaries. I imagine him as the society's equivalent of Salazar Slytherin, one whose dark influence still continues to...

Friendship redacted. Friendship redacted. They're fucking Harry Potter nerd. Friendship redacted. Offer rescinded. Who is this? A bibliomaniac and book enthusiast from a small country called Slovenia. All right.

I've never even seen this blog. Fascinating. Fascinating. Good find. No longer friendship ended. with that it's author. This is a very long article for like a very, this is a work of passion.

Notes on book collecting bibliomania and libricide. Oh my God. I want libricide as like knuckle tats. It's very traumatic. It wouldn't fit. It wouldn't fit. If you had six fingers on one hand, it would. Yeah.

Yeah. get a thumb in there. Anyone who has six fingers on one hand, go for it? Get lebricide, yeah. Okay. Well, that was bought or not. What did you put in? You're not the right.

What did you put in to like cue this? Did you say like just article about John Bagford? Oh, yeah. I did save my prompts too, so people can play around. Yeah, there's a prompt. Write an academic article about John Bagford destroying books and then write an academic article critical of John Bagford. That was all I told it. And what did you feed it?

It's GPT3, so it's already pre-fed. That's the scary thing. You don't have to give it any food. It just lives off the internet. But I do want to learn how to train GPT3. I want the sharks in the ocean that are eating the internet to eat the internet so that this thing doesn't go terminator on us. I hate it.

Speaking of, we had an internet outage at work the other day, and it was because squirrels get you? No, squirrels chewed through the fire. driver lines to like half of our branches and took down the public internet. And I was like, that's what we get. Comrade squirrels. Eco-terrorism. I'm waiting for someone to write the book on how animals interrupt media. Like this is a big problem with lines actually all around the world,

different kinds of animals interrupting the physical infrastructure of the internet or electricity or trees, you know, how you have to carve the trees out. fit around the lines. That's a book waiting to be written. I would read the shit out of that. I know. It'd be a really great book. Yeah.

Someone announced a book that they're releasing. It was just one of those things where I saved it for later. I just like favored it on Twitter and like I'll get back to this. But they're writing a book about water, electricity, and internet. And it's just a book about systems. Sharks. Sharks. And I'm like, that is probably one of those books that's just going to like terrify you.

But it sounds really boring. It's one of those things It's like this is all hanging on like A razor's edge A dude in the woods Who runs all of Linux And then the trucks Who eat the internet

I mean Log for Shell happened And that was just because It was that XKCD comic Where it was like The whole structure And then there's like the one block And it's like one dude

Who turned off his pager for a weekend And it's like yeah Like the people who created Log for J were just like It was like five dudes maintaining this and then everybody put it in everything. And yeah, the internet is incredibly rickety. So Whitney, thanks for coming on to talk about AI. Good night. So, no, tell us a little bit about John Bagford. Who was he and why did you want to write about him? Yeah, the patron saint

of perverted book lovers. John Bagford was an antiquarian of the, later 17th century. He was born, I believe, in 1650 in London. And he worked as a shoemaker originally. So he was a working class person, not somebody who had any formal education, but he ended up moving into the book trade and became one of the most important kind of intermediaries between a lot of collectors, libraries, and other kind of book, you know, bibliographical spaces in the last decade or two of the 17th century. But in his kind of role as this intermediary between all these different bookish spaces that were emerging in and around London like coffee shops, libraries, private collections, emerging kind of museums and cabinets of curiosity, he was also gathering up

waste, trash, old title pages from discarded books, literally the ream wrappers off of reams of paper, like the stuff used to wrap the paper, playing cards, anything he could get his hands on that related to a history of technology, really, he collected and he gathered them into these hundreds and hundreds of albums, most of which are now at the British Library. So he's, he's, um, my colleague, um, Zach Lesser recently said he might be called a magpie of book history. He's just collecting lots of stuff. He's got. gathering it, he's holding it. But because he collected all this stuff, this is why later

bibliographers thought he was so perverse. Like, what are you doing with all this waste? Why are you storing it? This is weird. It's like it becomes so much that you can't even process it, right? Like the modern cataloger can't catalog this stuff, right? You have to chop away at it in small bits and pieces. But in its overwhelming nature, he actually ended up, in its kind of capacious collecting approach, he ended up. He ended up, collecting a lot of really cool stuff that we otherwise wouldn't have. Of course, now it's actually hard to find that stuff because it isn't cataloged. So it's this kind of interesting case study of somebody making visible a history that otherwise would have been invisible. Then I think his working

class background actually really contributes to what he was able to see as important or not important. But it's also a history of how sometimes things that are intended to elucidate, you know, the past or historical materials actually can obscure it in weird ways. And if we don't have the, you know, archival infrastructure to access this stuff, then what use is it to the modern historian? So this is the kind of things that got me interested in Bagford as a problem of kind of perverse book history, I guess. Yeah. I desperately need like a t-shirt now.

Like, you know the t-shirts of that meme that's like John Brown, South is a fuck? like, however many dead Confederates that, but with like, Backford, and like, this is how many dead books. Totally. Yeah. Hero. He's my new hero. Exactly. I mean, there's something odd about thinking. I think of him as

a hero. I'm kind of really, he's the one person in the book that I do these case studies of that I really think needs more attention, like drawn to him because of how cool his work is. But, you know, it wasn't always thought to be that way. In the 19,

century, he was really, like, taken to task over and over again for, you know, being a biblioclast, a bibliomaniac, somebody who destroyed books, right? So, and, and there are still people out there who are buying up books and breaking them to make a profit, right? I mean, so this is a terrible practice as well. So there's this kind of, like, I don't know, there is this kind of fine line with him of, like, is this a good thing or not? I fall on with him, it's a good thing, but does it feed into later things that we as people who care about, you know, collecting and storing the past might see as perverse or, you know, unethical. Yeah, I think there was a story that just made the news about, wasn't it someone's,

someone from famous musician, their letters and things were stolen and sold off to different places? We'll have to do a whole episode on it. Magician or musician? musician. So I think it was stuff from the Rock and Roll Hall fame archive. I can't remember who. But yeah, it was you basically, when you auction these things off, you have to sell them in different pieces. Plus, there's the whole antiquities black market, which is a huge problem in the United States because it's mostly funded by Christian fundamentalists, funneling money into mostly jihadists, which is, you know, fun. So don't forget Hobby Lobby's homerobby robbing hobby. That's just a fun little way to remember. it. I drive by a hobby lobby on my way to work every day and I curse them. It's like a hobby lobby and a chick filet like right across the street from each other. And I'm like, I'm too, too queer for this. Like you're going to come for me in the night. With her sewing needles,

they're live, laugh, love. Oh, yeah, we'll have to talk about scrapbooking stuff too. With Bagford, there was something I wasn't getting my head around. So are there two folios of his work or are there like dozens of folios? Because there's something like 40 something volumes at someone mentioned? How is it actually collected? Yeah, it's a good question. There's hundreds of of his materials. There's a ton of manuscript materials. He has things that are cataloged under as commonplace books, but are really just kind of working notebooks. He has account book. He has entire just kind of things that have been bound that once were loose pamphlets where he's, you know, he's collecting these materials to write a history of the book, a history of printing. And he's,

He's very interested in the history of librarianship, the history of collecting, the history of cataloging. He's trying to grab anything that can tell us about this history. But he ultimately wanted to actually write a printed book, a monograph. And, you know, there's a way in which he kind of wasn't up to the task. I mean, he didn't have the formal education of the people of the time who are in the Royal Society, the emerging scientists who are writing these monographs. And so he wasn't as his form of writing was not as acceptable. to those societies. And in fact,

and I think I talk about this in the chapter, when he did submit some drafts of materials to be published in the philosophical transactions, which was a very important journal at the time. It's like the premier scientific journal of the time. It was heavily edited by the editors who didn't see his writing as up to par, it seems. So he wasn't really like up to the task

according to the standards of the time. But instead, he would create these notebooks. So he's got like huge volumes of manuscripts where he's writing out these drafts and correcting them. But then he gets kind of distracted and he starts writing about something else. Like he'll talk about how, you know, playing cards are really important in the history of printing because it's an early form of kind of block printing that well predates movable type in Western Europe. And so he loves playing cards. And he'll mention that as part of the origins of printing, but then go off on a rant about like the history of gaming.

So he can't really kind of stay on topic in the way that was drilled into, it drilled into most of us now, like, you know, as part of our schooling, which I kind of love. And alongside of these manuscripts, he has these huge albums. They're very large folios that have pasted on them these scraps. And many of them are organized thematically and arranged in ways where you can kind of see the history that he's trying to tell you. So I kind of, you know, what I was thinking about a lot when I was working with his materials was, you know, he's not, he's not up to the standards of the writing of the time to produce the history he wanted to write, but he was, he was collecting in ways that narrate nonetheless the histories that he wanted to tell. So it made me think a lot about how like, what kind of possibilities around historical storytelling open up to us if we change the media.

or modes in which we're working. Like if we're open to somebody telling you a story by arranging things in a book, you know, what does that do to the kinds of stories we can tell? And you could connect this to other histories of like the museum or gallery wall or the cabinet of curiosities and things like that. But then I thought we should be more open for that, you know, to that in our scholarship as well. Or, you know, just how we write history in academic, historical, you know, historical monographs.

Have you ever heard of or read the article, Eros in the library by Melissa Adler? No. She is a metadata scholar. I believe she's just teaching at like an high school now. But it's about this one woman in ancient Greece who sort of would classify, who would like collect and classify bits of like history.

and stories of the men who would like visit her husband and all this stuff. And the way that it, she arranged it was kind of compared to like weaving and embroidery because of how she would like, not literally, like physically, but like because of the way she would connect things and how aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment was a part of that classification consideration that it was like fun to look through and whatnot. I'm probably butchering it. but as like thinking of like feminist modes of, of classification and curation.

I think you would like it. I'll love that. Yeah, I'll like find those. I'm going to check that out. Yeah. No, that's exactly,

I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing that sparked my interest in figures like Bagford is this, this idea that like, you know, organization, organization, classification,

these are forms of knowledge making. You all know this very, very well. Scholarship we don't, necessarily always know this as well. But, you know, those are forms of knowledge making. And if we take that seriously over time, what emerges, like what modes of interacting with the world, what ways of organizing the world? Like, what differences do we find in the past that don't just lead inevitably to what we expect to see today, if that makes sense? Yeah, I'll definitely

check that article out. Yeah, I was reading through the chapter and I'm curious the differences in how early modern people thought about collecting and how that was probably changing in the 17th century. How do we think about book preservation differently from how Bacford would have been thinking about it? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, you're, you know, at the end of the 17th century in London, You're in a moment where you're starting to see people thinking about public libraries. Before that, really libraries are only private collections, university collections, or like kind of these club-like spaces. But you're starting to get people theorizing what a public library would look like, what its

collections should include. Like, do you, like simple, simple questions that actually still perhaps vex us. Like, do you have one copy of an item or two, right? something is used. Do you want the used copy or the new copy? So you're getting like a rich discourse around this at the end of the 17th century, but you're also getting private collectors becoming really serious about antiquarian, when it's becoming known as antiquarian materials or rare books. So you're starting to get a secondhand book market. Like before that, you go out, you buy a print book, you use it up or you don't use it up. It stays in your library. You bequeath it.

And that's really it. You're not really going and looking for like the cool old William Caxton rare edition of something that's, you know, very early. So you're starting to get people doing that, though, and they're doing it by going to coffee houses and looking at auction catalogs. They're going to book auctions of private libraries. And so you're getting this kind of historical consciousness around what a really old archival material is. So, you know, I was interested in Bagford because he's right there at the cusp of all this stuff that seems so like normal. We're just living in it now to like the rare book trade or special collections or whatever. He's like living in that moment of its emergence. So yeah, he's part of that effort to come up with what are the classification schemes that we need, right? And people do all kinds of horrifying things to their collections according to modern standards at the time. So like Samuel Pepys was one of the people who, was, you know, in addition to being the notorious masturbator and diarist, he also was somebody who

collected a lot of rare books. And he collected ballads and broadsides and all this kind of ephemera that before that, everyone thought was kind of ridiculous. And like, why would you collect that? That's not, like, this is ephemeral trash. Why would you collect it, right? But he's starting to see, oh, this is part of popular culture. It's worthy of collection. So he goes around and he's gathering them up. He's even making deals with printers who are printing these ballads and saying when it comes off the press, bring them to me. But then how he collects them is he cuts them like up. He cuts them in half and stuff and then paste them on these massive sheets, which now, if like a library ingested a large collection of historical materials, they would not cut them up and rearrange them into books, right?

But that was what he thought was the way to do it. And then he would annotate the book with like the information that he had about it because there was no such thing as a kind of centralized cataloging infrastructure like all that kind of stuff that we're very accustomed to having available wasn't there um any kind like imagine any kind of like classification scheme that would be like standard in the profession today that's not that kind of stuff's not really available to anyone so you're seeing a lot of people experimenting with like how to organize stuff and i always think that's cool because you know it gets you out of the hardened mindset that we have of, oh, this is just the way things should be and makes you see as possible that it

could be done a different way. Yeah, I think the expansion of the rare book trade was pretty interesting in terms of thinking about books as historical objects and then constructing a history about them saying, like, oh, this is valuable, it's worthwhile. It's not just a thing that I'm going to recycle consistently as you would have over most of the medieval period. So you'd recycle writing scraps, you would recycle faded manuscripts. So once you use them into binding materials, and there's a lot of stuff that you would even write over that was quite old. So I remember that a lot of, we've, people have x-rayed certain manuscripts in order to see the Greek and Roman manuscripts that were underneath them because those were being constantly scraped and regretted over

for a very long time. Also, they were seen as theoretical, so probably attributed some of the scraping as well. Totally. And you're starting, it's, it's, In the 17th century that you start to see people interested in those like the binders waste, the little fragments of medieval manuscript that sometimes are found in early printed books, people are trying to like bring to the Bodleyan Library proposals to collect these things because they're like, no, this is historical information. We shouldn't discard it. You know, whenever I hear those stories or read about this stuff, I'm always thinking about what is the thing that we're discarding now.

Like nobody cared about floppy disks until fairly recently. and suddenly we're all like, oh, we have to have a, you know, a means of preserving and saving these things. And now on eBay, you know, quote unquote, old technologies that are 20 or 30 years old, you know, go for a high amount because there's a need for them and an interest in them that when they were only recently old, there wasn't, right? Like, you don't need, like, your iPhone 6, but you're probably interested in a cell phone from, like, 1998 now, right? So it's like, what is it that we don't care about and what are we not saving is always in the back of my mind with this stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I definitely think about it a lot more practically because there's also physical limitations, spatial limitations. And also there's, you know, people do sometimes look over these things go, look,

there's no real useful information here. Like, this is all, I've definitely thrown out computer rolls from the 70s because it was mostly course scheduling information. And it's like, well, we have the syllabi collection.

So we've still got all that from the 70s, which I also weeded pretty heavily too. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff we can't keep. But we do get a regular sort of upro against weeding and recycling books, though, especially whenever libraries tend to get rid of lots of repeat copies, high circulation copies that we no longer need, that no one really wants popular titles, things that no one's going to remember in about four or five years. People imagine these will somehow become extremely rare. if we don't preserve every single copy.

And so you see these very strange libraries that people make. Whereas if you wanted to collect something now that's weird that won't be around, go to like queer spaces, go to black spaces, save those zines and manuscripts and ephemera, because that's all going to be interesting in 50 years because no one else will have thought to have saved it. But, you know, Amazon top sellers probably not a problem. We don't need to keep every single.

single, is his name, John Grisham says his name. We don't need to save every single one of those, I promise. No, definitely not. And libraries do cut up books, actually. When you do get historical collections, sometimes we do chop off spines to do high-speed scanning if there's lots of copies. And I know some ways of preserving newspapers and broadsides, you have to cut them in half to scan them. But you get the copies back. And sometimes you'll cut the edge of the paper off for like, repairing and conservation work, and then like ironing it and shit. Yeah, I mean, those are all really great points.

I, you know, my first job was at a public library shelving books. And I remember the uproar of people, you know, when they learned that we would regularly call the books and then put them in the dumpster out back. You know, people would go and try to save them from the dumpster. But you're right. I mean, I would shelve 10 John Grishams in like, you know, every cart. So you don't need all of those John Grishams. Like, you know, what is what is worthy of being saved is exactly, you know, exactly the question here. I mean, I have, this reminds me also. I'm in a neighborhood that has like a million little libraries. And every time I walk by one, I'm always like, what, you know, I've gotten a book for my kid out of one, you know, but mostly it's like trash that people didn't want, but it makes us feel. good that we're saving it in this cute little birdhouse. You know, I mean, not to disparage the little libraries. No, we don't like them.

They're cute, but like, you know, what's happening here? Also, like, it's not actually a library, but that's another story. But yeah, so, I mean, I, yeah, it's interesting to think about, like, you know, so I, you know, we have to obviously be discriminant in what we save, but the indiscriminate saving of someone like Bagford introduces like a new relationship that's kind of interesting. like what happens if somebody just like collects all of their trash for a week now a librarian in 50 years probably doesn't want to deal with a box full of somebody's trash for a week from 2022 right but it does offer an interesting snapshot of what life is like at this particular moment for a particular demographic of person right so i you know there's it's i'm interested in all these questions i'm a dork like so i i don't like capital p productivity but i'm very into the like note taking knowledge management productivity niche scene online. And especially in the like personal knowledge management and note taking conversations right now,

there's this like anti-collectors fallacy thing where it's like you don't take a highlight of everything that's good because then you just have a million highlights and don't, you don't have to write and know it about everything and you don't need like, you know, because you're never going to go through them and they're not going to be useful. They're not going to be actionable. And then there's also the group that's like, it doesn't matter, like, just the act of collecting it, like, the joieissance, you know, like joie de vivre. Like, you know, it doesn't matter if you don't use it later. It's digital anyway. You know, you can forget about it later. And so these conversations of, like, even personally, like, digitally, even so it's not even considering the space in your house, right, of, like, what you're going through.

but what you in a virtual digital space consider worthy of capturing and holding on to. I feel like maybe that's also like we're seeing like a shift in that discourse right now as well and how that's different on like the personal level versus the institutional level mayhaps. Because I know there's the like, yeah, we weed things and we throw things away and that's fine. but then there's also because there's this perception that digital is preservation, that there's also the sort of like anti-digital pushback kind of happening in libraries where we're like wanting to hold on to physical things more because we're like, no, the digital's going to break, the sharks are going to get at it.

Like we don't we don't trust like that. So I don't know if you have been saying that kind of paradigm shift, like you like would have happened around when Bagford was doing all this stuff. If you had thoughts on that. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a great point. I'm immediately just thinking how much, like what you're saying, how much our technological milieu that we find ourselves in is going to affect these habits, right? And that that you're constantly like in this dance with the technology and that that dance changes over time as the technologies change. Right. And so like tracking that is part of what, you know, when we track what is interesting or not interesting over time, you are tracking what is technologically like accessible available made possible over time. So, you know, with regards to the digital note taking, for instance, like I recently got an iPad

because I'm starting a new project and I wanted to like write on a tablet. I was like, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to like set it all up just to be my reading tablet. And I set it up so that my, the things I highlight get sent directly to my wiki, right? And so now every time I highlight something. I have like, like, thousands of words of notes from even just like a short article. So I've highlighted half the article. I've like published it now in my wiki, which is probably like not actually legal, but whatever, right. So it's, you know, it's this whole weird thing. But the affordance of the media wiki that I use to track my notes means that I can search. So if I'm like, I was interested in the history of the lead pencil, I can search lead pencil and find the paragraph where, you know, you

you know, whereas I used to like remember where something was on a page and have to thumb through the book. Now I can like use that keyword search. So it's like, you know, and I feel my brain changing. Like I'm an elder millennial. I feel how my brain has changed from the 90s to now in terms of like my own personal reading and writing habits. And then which is what what also makes me think about someone like Bagford's like what was his mind scape? Like what was his like how was his brain infested with the technology of the time and how did it affect the way he thought and worked. Yeah, it definitely sounds like he has ADD. Or some sort of hoarding.

Possibly, yeah. I've definitely known people who can collect but can't synthesize. I've actually worked on collections like that where you get someone who's extremely good at collecting things but would never in a million years be able to write a historical article about it. So that was something I worked on in grad school when I was working in special collections. I processed a collection and was just like, wow, there's all the information you need here for a nice, tight article. Just clean 10 pages, easy. But then I met the guy who collected it.

He just, you know, just rambled, just talked, sort of, that's how he was. I was like, oh, this guy's never going to, like, write an article about it. Mood. Yeah. I'm trying to be better. I have, like, good subtle cost. everything now. Yeah.

I'm thinking about plugging GPT into my obsidian so that it will, and then trying to train it on certain things in my notes to actually give me better auto-generated stuff in my notes. But I do like the idea of everything you highlight going to one place. But that would require I'm only on one device, which would never happen. No, I have that. I have this thing called readwise, and I have various things synced with it, and then it all goes into my log seek. So I have that, Justin.

Yeah. It's a good system. I mean, you know. Yeah. But then you're beholden to the highlight, like, and the annotation and you have to, it makes you change how you actually highlight something or like what you want to extract to as opposed to. Because you have to think more about context. Yeah.

To make sure when you see the highlight, it's not out of context. Exactly. Yeah. I mostly use highlighting to so that I don't go back and read something I've already read. So I highlight a lot. So that way I can easily scroll back up and go, oh, okay, that's where I was. So it's sort of a memory aid in that way because I just never finish an article in one sitting anymore. We did an episode about scrapbooking, which I know this is not technically scrapbooking, but it is similar in some ways.

Although I have been curious this whole time since, I mean, did he make a lot of money from the book trade? I mean, how was he really able to afford this habit that he had? Yeah, that's a good question. He probably did make a decent income from selling these books, but also he was working with a, bookseller who would just offer him access to material. Like if something wouldn't sell, you know, Bagford could have it. Like literally just stuff in his, his trash can. So I think that really helped feed his habit.

Um, yeah, the scrapbooking question is interesting. So all of the examples that I talk about in copy paste, they often fall under this rubric of scrapbooking. It doesn't, I mean, as, as you know, it's not something that actually becomes a practice until the late 19th century, mid-19th century, late 19th century. Scrapbooking is in my mind a function of the industrialization of print and having access to lots of materials.

Because even though Bagford is in a changing media environment, he doesn't have access to the kind of materials you have in the 19th century. He's still scrounging around for playing cards and stuff like that to include in his books. But there is a scrapbook like quality to, them, which is really attractive to me. I think of him, like, he sits alongside a range of other books that I have seen in many different libraries, large and small, in the U.S., in the U.K., that are what I tend to think of as design portfolios. There's no good, like, form, genre term for them, but they are books where somebody has taken either a blank album or some kind of found

notebook, like an old manuscript, and assembled something thematically. So I've seen a lot of these that are like, somebody got really interested in woodcut initials or interested in typography, and they like cut them out and paste them into these albums. We have one here at Penn where some 19th century Italian person got really obsessed with printer's devices and woodcut borders and just like cut a bunch of them out and pasted them into an album. And so he kind of falls within that where, you know, which now you might find in like a design library or design collection. But at the time, like a scrapbook is something for your memory, speaking of like note taking and aid memoir and stuff like that.

But it like often is personal and like evokes a connection to a particular subject. Whereas I see these design portfolios as more somebody who's interested in something, like some feature. And they're drawing out that interest through collection. and pasting them down because they didn't have any other media in which to do it. Like a book's a very useful storage medium. A codex is a very useful storage medium. If you have a lot of loose prints or woodcut initials, it's a great place to like glue them and keep them. And then give them to your sons or daughters or whoever, right?

So yeah, it's scrapbooks not like, it's part of scrapbooking. But I think in the popular, I will say this is my one negative thing. about scrapbooking, which is that in the popular imagination, scrapbooking has been taken to mean all things like pasted into a book. And I think that dilutes the power of understanding it as a particular genre that does particular things. And it obscures the many other ways that people have collected, use the codex to collect stuff over time. Yeah, we definitely talked about the ideology of scrapbooking. I really enjoyed that. episode. Yeah, she's a feminist scrapbooker. This is her thing. And she's against like big,

big scrapbooking. Very good industrial complex. Big scrapbook. Very similar to zines. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was, I can't, I've already lost my train of thought because I wrote a note, but I didn't write the note well. But we were talking about the how Bagford sort of was sorting materials into these books. And I was thinking about how. Kristen talked about using things around the house as materials. So that's how you figure out the everyday collection of things that are actually meaningful. You use the back of tickets. You use envelopes.

You use pieces of paper you've already bought. You don't go out and buy materials for scrapbooking. You use the materials you already bought because that's what you gravitate towards. So that's what you build your scrapbooks out of. So, yeah, I have like this like paper that I'm not using. So I just cut it up into like note cards. this was something I was trying to make stencils out of, it's the wrong size. So it's like, okay, I could turn this into a scrapbook.

Instead, I'm just using it to write notes. But, you know, I am curious about, one, how he had the time to do all this, but two, sort of, if there was an ideological frame for, like, you know, why preserve things in this particular way? Is he unique in the way that he's collecting? I mean, obviously, collects a lot of everything, but were there other people doing similar things? There are people in the 18th century who are making similar kinds of albums, but he's one of the earliest that I found that's actually interested in collecting what I would call specimens. He calls them specimens, like halfway between a specimen and an experiment. And I think what he means by that is it's like a little material piece of something that puts you in touch with the history that that thing evokes, which is, similar to scrapbooking and finding things around the house, which can be evocative in certain ways, but they're often more like personally evocative and you have an aesthetic goal behind what you're doing

or memorializing, like you want to memorialize something. Whereas Bagford, I think, was really trying to tell history. I mean, you're seeing a historical consciousness around the history of technology come into being in his notebooks, one that you don't really see before. So to give it a, kind of counter example, you have a very important collector, Robert Cotton, working at the end of the 16th century, about a century before Bagford. He's one of the earliest people to collect really old manuscripts, like most famously, the Beowulf manuscript is in his, is in his collection. And also became one of the founding collections of the British Museum slash Library in 1753, along with some of like Harley and these other people that were Bagford's clients.

So anyways, Cotton's working 100 years before Bagford. He's also collecting stuff. But the way that he collects things is pretty weird. So like he has this one manuscript that has, I don't remember it because I am not, I'm neither like a medievalist or an ancient person who works in ancient times. But it's one of the earliest forms of the gospel that's like on purple vellum.

He has two leaves of it. He also has a piece of papyrus that I believe is a Gregorian text that was written contemporaneously with Gregory. And he also has a 15th century, I believe, breviary of Margaret of York. So he's got like things from across about a thousand year time span in multiple media, papyrus, vellum, this beautiful medieval illuminated breviary. And he doesn't seem to have whole pieces. because this book is like a couple pieces of the purple vellum, and it's the papyrus fragment that he pasts on the middle of a leaf. And then he cuts out some of the illuminations from the prayer book,

the 15th century prayer book, and then like pasts them around the papyrus. So he's doing something like Bagford, where he's creating these media assemblages, these scrappy kind of things. And there seems to be an almost aesthetic interest. like why would he paste the decorations around this piece of papyrus if not to show this is a really important thing. But it's not like there's no there's not the same historical consciousness that you see in Bagford.

Like Bagford is like like almost mounting things that he's like these are important specimens. Like preserve this, you know, title page, preserve this piece of vellum, preserve this parchment. It shows you what parchment is like, right? that's not the same as like creating this little like cool papyrus framework. So, you know, Cotton is also an antiquarian, but there's just something different about his use of fragments. And that's what I was trying to get at with Bagford, this rise of like, and I think it has to do with the rise of classification schema as like public librarianship, collecting habits around secondhand materials that is not really like in place when Cotton's doing his work. Can I go off about Cotton's classification system and how this relates? Oh, yes.

Of course. Yeah. Very interesting. So as far as the like aesthetic aspect, because like his, he classified, like, you know, there were, he has call numbers and those call numbers are still used for those items that are in the British Library. They weren't based on meaning, not that I can tell. So the Sir Robert Cotton System is he, for all of you who haven't taken an English 101 course at university when you were getting your English degree

and happen to have a medievalist as your professor. The Sir Robert Cotton System, he would have like bookcases, and what he would do is he would have busts of various Roman emperors on the top of each case. And then books were on the shelves, right? And so what the call number for each of the manuscripts or items in his library was the name of the Roman emperor. what shelf it was on and what number it was over.

So there's this fun element of him getting to decorate with all his like nerdy Roman busts. And then there's not any sort of like subject association or anything. It's just like where they are physically within that. So my license plate is literally what the call number is for the Sir Gowan and the Green Knight manuscript from him, which is a Cottonero, A.S. because it was in the Nero bookcase on the first shelf ten over. That's a deep cut. It's a deep fucking cut, right?

I don't remember what the Bay Wolf one is, but the Bay Wolf one is singed because there was a fire at his library. And it almost burned the Bay Wolf. The only Bay Wolf manuscript we have, we almost lost it because his library caught a fire or something. But yeah, so this idea of, like, play and enjoyment, like, did you, like, you know, there's this, like, mounting and preservation. that you're talking about with Backford, but is there a sense of play there as well? Absolutely. And this is, you know, he he includes, for instance, like, what's a good example, like a letter from his son as one of his specimens, right? So there's kind of like little personal gesture. I think that, you know, at one point in one of the manuscripts that I talk about

at length in the book, he has this description of a famous writing. master in London and has some examples of his advertisements. But then this guy dies. And there are some ballads out there kind of making fun of him for dying from being an alcoholic. And he like paced one of the ballads like next to his advertisement. Right. So so there's definitely these little moments of like, yes, it's a history and yes, it's collecting historical materials. But the juxtapositions like bring to the four other little micro histories that you could pull from the albums. And yeah, I think the play also comes through just an interest in design, right? Like, having three emblems that all incorporate trees are like three copies of the same printer's

device, like next to each other, like not just looking for the singular specimen, but like an interest in reproduction and like do these three things. Are they really the same or not, right? Like spot the difference. I think there's a lot of that out. That's some deluge shit right there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's rhizomatic, right? Like, the albums totally are just little, like, rhizomatic networks, which is what I was trying to pull out is like, if you actually look at these things and don't just like take the description of him as a biblically class, like, what are the networks that emerge that really give evidence of his creativity, of his playfulness, of his imagination? Like, how can we honor the work that he did rather than just saying like, oh, he couldn't, he didn't completely. complete his, you know, he didn't complete his book. Like, he must be, you know, incapable of it or something. I had to stop myself from doing like the peewey Herman, like, Peewey's Playhouse, Word of the Day thing when he said, Rise of Back. There was a part in the chapter and chapter three about Melvin Wolf's work and trying to catalog all of the works that are in Bagford. And I thought this was pretty interesting. Could you give us a quick overview of what Melvin Wolf was trying to do?

Yeah, this is an early digital humanities project. Melvin Wolf was a young assistant professor. I forget where he was at the time, but he knew about Bagford's books and was really interested in the title pages because for, you know, an English literary historian, the title pages might have evidence and in fact they do have evidence of books that we don't have anymore. So he was like, let's catalog the title pages. It might tell us something about, you know, what was saying. what wasn't, what's behind, what was left behind. So he makes this catalog. He goes to the British Library. He works there with them. But he realizes he needs bigger technologies than just writing this out by hand. So he develops a relationship with the catalogers there and basically takes every title page and puts it on an individual punch card that has, I think, nine different categories where he's like listing out like what is the imprint on the title page what's the date like different metadata categories then the punch cards go back to where he is and at that point I think he's at Penn State Harrisburg and he has access this is I believe

the 1970s he has access to time sharing on a massive kind of like IBM computer there and he uses he uses the system to, and with like some simple Fortran programming to produce this catalog, prints it out and then they create, you know, like photo, they basically like take, the British Library takes photographs of it and then like prints

the photographs effectively of the printout of the catalog. So really early digital humanities project in one of the earliest digital humanities journals and really important catalog that needs to be digitized, but here's one of the ironies. So I work I was trying to digitize it, so like scanning it and stuff.

But the 1970s, like, typography doesn't OCR super well. And also is not, like how the catalog was printed is not in a super easy, like, format to figure out. Plus, he's using non-standard like codes that then have, like his own encoding system that then has to be translated. So like he puts, he's like referencing other catalogs, which you then would have to like kind of go in and handling. link to. So it ended up being like too big of a project. It's one of my like failures in that chapter. Actually, I would love to follow up with it. But too big of a project to digitize what should have is digital and should have continued to be digital all the time. Um, I had one of my best parts of researching that book was I called him because he's, he is still alive,

although well retired and said, you know, I'm so interested in this project. Do you still have the punch cards? And he was like, oh, I just threw them out. like last year. So I missed the opportunity to like see the punch cards of this original project. But all props to Melvin Wolf and some of these early digital humanities people who did really detailed work to produce some of this stuff that is still underutilized because it's invisible to the web, right? If something's not on the web now, it's not thought to be digital.

So yeah, really, really fascinating little history at the end of that chapter that is worth, you know, looking back to the, you know, with these early forebears of digital humanities, like how they worked and where their catalogs and stuff like that are these days. You would hate to get like halfway through the project and realize you needed like 11 categories on your punch card. Like, I just imagine that because I classify, I'm working on classifying some surveys right now and we have to, I mean, luckily we can just use Qualtricks and fix the survey. But we're trying to digitize these old surveys going back to like the 80s or so and trying to

figure out the best way to do it. and instead of digitizing them, we're just going to re-input all the data anonymously. So that way we don't have to keep all of the Social Security numbers and stuff that people felt they needed to take because researchers are insane people who think they just need data that they don't need. IRBs, man.

They're around for a reason. But I thought what was really interesting you mentioned was when Wolf did this categorization, he's interested in the titles and everything, but Bagford's collection are, it leaves out a huge category, of things that are miscellaneous. So like the playing cards, the scraps, the day-to-day objects. And that's basically more or less uncharted territory for someone who wanted to do research

on that. Yeah, this is another one of the ironies of Wolf's catalog is like it made, again, I'm interested in that visible, invisible line. Like it made visible a lot of materials that that we now can see like this book doesn't exist, but the title page still does. What's up with that? that can spur more research, but it actually, in some odd way, like, obscured the fragments that resist that kind of cataloging, right? So, like, if there's just a little piece of a decorative woodcut border in that book, it just gets cataloged as miscellaneous, and it might say like woodcut initial or something in Whoops Catalog. And then, yeah, you're right. All the other, many, many other albums that Bagford has full of things like playing cards and ream wrappers are just, like not

not classifiable in this way at all. So, but he was, you know, he was linking each title to a short title catalog number. So he was trying to like plug Bagford's work into the stuff that was being used by bibliographers and literary historians at that time in the 1970s. Our interests have, you know, some of our interests have moved on and we want the ephemeral, you know, weird trash. And how do we catalog that in a way that makes it visible? is an interesting question.

Towards the end of this project, I realized that some of Bagford's albums have been microfilmed and are now, as a result, on EBO, early English books online, as part of the Thomason tracks, I believe, where E.EB or whatever, whoever was responsible at the time for Ebo,

went through and microfilmed ephemeral stuff in these tracked collections at the British libraries to try to fill out EBO, or EEB at the time, I believe. And so now there's like weird microfilmed fragments that as a result have been cataloged, but they've been taken out of their context. So there might be a page with three fragments on it

and you just see like one fragment, which of course the whole point of Bagford's work was showing through visual layout and design and assemblage of materials. So the whole like undercurrent of his story is how constraining the digital is and how invisible actually it makes a lot of materials. And classifying in general.

I mean, with those cataloging rules, I mean, you've got to catalog the microfilm somehow. And so you get all these half records and pointless records to point you around in circles and happens all the time. We like to end on an action-oriented question, and I know we have a lot of graduate students who listen to the show. If they were interested into pursuing work like you do, a lot of them are in digital humanities,

some of them are, I mean, most of them are involved in libraries, but we've got people all over the place. What would you advise them to do if they wanted to look into if this is something they want to do? Yeah. Oh, great question. One thing that I was told by one of my advisors in grad school, Kate Hales, she said to me, this was a great thing that I've never forgotten. She probably doesn't remember it at all. But she said, what you're interested in, there's connections between them. So you have to keep probably a physical list. of the things you're interested in. And it might seem like they're totally disconnected. Like, why am I, you know, interested in like this 14th century manuscript,

but also, like, really want to learn this coding language to do this certain thing, right? But there's a reason why you're interested in those things. You just haven't found the kind of overarching, like, question that you're actually asking. So keep track of that stuff, and then you'll get to your question. It's like a lifelong thing. It's not a, like, a thing that happens in five or ten years. it's a lifelong process of figuring out, like, what are, what are your questions? And then something even more tangible is if you're interested, especially in, like, weird old library bookie stuff, find the

keywords that you want to search on. Like, find your method of searching in libraries. So, like, every time I go to a city, I'll try to visit whatever is the local special collections. And I will search on cut, pasted, inserted, interleaved, like all these things that show up in the copy-specific notes that indicate something cool has happened with this book or manuscript. And that, like, I've come across so many weird, random things because the form genre terms don't really work for a lot of interesting materials. And like the, like, libraries, as you all know, are like this, like, iceberg, and you only see the tip of it. Like 10% of the materials get used over and over again. And there's this, like, the great unread 90% that nobody's looking at.

And there are stuff out there, like, waiting to have its story told once you figure out how to find it. Definitely. No, that's good advice. I try and always get my student employees to bring their interests into the work because my work is pretty flexible. So I can tell them to work on whatever they want. So I always try and get them to bring, like, whatever you think is cool, you can suggest a project about. and we'll try and figure out a way to make it work. But you just spend a couple months getting used to doing the work here.

And then if your brain starts making connections, we can follow those to wherever they'll go. So I have a digital heritage intern I'm allowed to hire for. And my first choice was actually a med student. Because I just thought, that'd be fun. Let's see if we can get a med student to think about digital collections. Yeah, I'm really excited because I work at a music conservatory and I get graduate fellows as student workers.

And I am going to be the cool hip supervisor that's like, hey, you person who plays harpsichord, if you come up with a cool idea, let's do your cool harpsichord idea in the library. So that's great advice. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I work with a lot of undergraduates as research assistants, and I've had many good ones. One of the best ones that I've worked with, her name is Zoe Bratia. And she helped me a lot with all the digital resources for this project.

And when I was interviewing to hire her, I interviewed like 12 different people. And there were people who had a lot more interest in expertise in women's literature and early modern literature. And she was just excited. And like what she brought to the project was immense. I mean, she saw things in the materials that I didn't see precisely because she was curious but non-expert. So I think like curiosity actually is more valuable sometimes than like the expertise

and in a subject matter, which will come, you know, with time. Yeah, as I was saying to, to my grad assistant, I always try to explain, like, the processes. And I was explaining the hiring process I was going through. And I was like, I almost always get nothing but qualified candidates. So, you know, and sometimes I might as well just flip a coin because, like, they're all equally as worthy of the job. But it's sort of just trying to figure out, like, okay, whose CV is basically going to

look the best from doing this at the end of the day? because like history students don't get a whole lot of opportunities to get cool stuff on their CB. And so that's always a consideration. But I mean, go into a whole thing about hiring ethics. It's, I wish I didn't have to deal with it, but I guess it's better to deal with it than be a supervisor who doesn't care. So we are good to wrap up.

Is there anything else you want to plug? Do you want to plug your social media, any upcoming work, or do you want people to leave you alone? I'm happy for anyone to find me online. You can read the book online open access with lots of pictures of Bagford stuff if you want to find that. And yeah, my new stuff is the history of electronic textuality and looking at different coding things in the 19th century telegraph codes, but also like different ways of encoded printing and punch cards and the Jakard loom and all that kind of stuff. So if you have any cool things related to that or just want to chat.

about it, I'm like in the early stages and love to talk about this stuff. I'm sure there's tons of people who listen to this to be interested in talking with you more about it. Okay, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Good night.