Practicum on Research Techniques: The Book Lab
ENG-L 504 with Professor Patricia Clare Ingham
Throughout the recent history of Higher Education, the lab model has been almost exclusively identified with research techniques in the sciences. And yet, in the early decades of the 20th century, John Matthews Manley (scholar of the literary works of Chaucer and medieval authors and early president of the Modern Language Association) and Edith Rickert (scholar of texts of Chaucer and medieval romance) collaborated at the University of Chicago on “The Chaucer Laboratory,” a collaborative research center dedicated to the production of scholarly editions of Chaucer’s corpus and other key medieval texts. On the one hand, this example urges attention to the long history of collaborative research methodologies in medieval studies; on the other hand, it suggests an exemplary model that might extend beyond the specificities of Chaucer, and help us to consider the power, pleasures, and politics of collaboration of the kind now again in vogue in all kinds of humanities fields.
In this course we will engage the lab model for work in Book History and Book Arts. My own expertise resides in late manuscript culture and early print, but students will be welcome to work in whatever period or bookish modality suits them. We will 1) think methodologically about the uses of the ‘lab’ for Humanities Research and Teaching, reading some recent work on its uses in media studies, digital humanities, and elsewhere. What features of early humanities laboratories might we revive or redirect? What liabilities to the lab model are legible either from the example of the Chaucer Laboratory, or in other examples today? 2) But our primary focus will be on the material book, its history and the current efflorescence of homemade books and private presses. And we will, explicitly, draw on the capacities available via IUB’s ‘Book Lab’ to experiment with how immersive experiences might fuel research and making. Precise projects will develop as we proceed, so be ready for some experimentation, with trying on various possibilities that may involve going out on a limb or working outside your comfort zone.
We will work with some materials in the Lilly Library, but we will also attend to varying features of book design, to IU’s collection of Art Books, to possibilities for digitization, and even master some specific book-making skills: how to fold a folio; how to sew a signature; or some skills related to book repair and preservation. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to report on how their own experiments with material books (of all kinds) fuel research projects.