Bonnie Mak, associate professor, will visit Yale University to participate in two events this fall.
She is an invited discussant in the symposium of the Yale Program in the History of the Book. Mak will participate in seminars that explore how handwritten notes or visual elements added to books affect the relationship of those books to specific locations and times. The symposium, “Time and the Book,” will be held on September 12-13 at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
In her symposium talk, “Time Suspended,” Mak will explore how inscriptions, annotations, bookplates, and even coffee stains, often overlooked as accidental or dismissed as extraneous, may contain information of scholarly interest regarding the performance and use of a given book over time. Likewise, the elements that structure and provide access to databases and electronic resources can be studied as evidence of how information is constituted, configured, and disseminated, by whom and for whom.
Later this semester, Mak will speak at the workshop, “Diaspora and the Digital,” which considers the challenges and opportunities faced by born-digital literary archives and projects in the digital humanities. The workshop is the closing event of the collaborative research network, Diasporic Literary Archives, led by the University of Reading with international partners in Trinidad and Tobago; the Centro di Ricerca sulla Tradizione Manoscritta di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei at the University of Pavia; the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine in France; the National Library and Archives Service of Namibia; and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the event will be held on October 23-24. Mak will participate in a session on the preservation of and access to born digital archives.
Mak, who joined the GSLIS faculty in 2008, is jointly appointed in the Program in Medieval Studies. Her research interests include manuscript, print, and digital cultures; the cultural production and circulation of knowledge; palaeography and diplomatics; manuscript studies; book history; medieval and early modern collecting; and the history of archives and libraries. At GSLIS, Mak co-chairs the History Salon. She is currently a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of Information & Culture and the Editorial Board of the online and open-access journal, Architectures of the Book. Her first book, How the Page Matters, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011, and she is at work on her next book-length project, Culture in an Age of Data, a cultural history of digitizations.