Implications of a Digital Revolution

Notably absent in the current rush to digitize newspapers and books are critical investigations of the processes and products of this work. Such examinations are forestalled, Bonnie Mak argues, by a rhetoric of revolution that determines how the phenomenon should be constituted and studied, just as it continues to do for the so-called printing revolution of the fifteenth century. Her analysis of digitizations exposes the ways in which historical sources are being reconfigured for digital transmission as part of the “information revolution,” and considers the consequences of this reconfiguration for humanities scholarship, cultural heritage, and the making of meaning.