Mak discusses the sensorial document in Sydney keynote

Bonnie Mak
Bonnie Mak, Associate Professor

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak presented the keynote address at "What is a Document? A Symposium on Documentation, Records, and Evidence," which was held November 8-9 at University Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia. The event was sponsored by the UTS Faculty of Law and is part of a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council to examine the document from the perspective of laws of evidence. The symposium featured speakers from institutions across Australia in such diverse fields as government and international relations, design, art history, and law.

Mak's keynote, "A Sensorial Document of Scholarship," considered how documents and the systems in which they operate might be modified if knowledge-production and -transmission were understood as practices that engage all the senses.

"By tracking a sensorial publication through the processes of creation and dissemination, my paper investigates how such research is received by the academy, whether current institutional infrastructures are equipped to support such performances of scholarship, and who should bear the costs," Mak said.

Mak is jointly appointed in the iSchool and the Program in Medieval Studies at Illinois. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines the interface of the page as it is developed across time, geographies, and technologies. A second book-length project, Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib, examines the digital texts and images that are increasingly being used as resources for humanistic scholarship. She was an inaugural Senior Fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information at the Pennsylvania State University and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP).

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Smith authors paper for newly relaunched ARIST

A paper by Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith, "Reviews and Reviewing: Approaches to Research Synthesis," is one of seven papers included in the relaunch of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), a collection of peer-reviewed, comprehensive, and systematic reviews on topics relevant to information science.

Linda C. Smith

Hu defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yuerong Hu successfully defended her dissertation, "Complexities and Nuances of Online Book Reviews in Scholarly Research," on March 6.

Yuerong Hu

Knox named to IJIDI editorial board

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been invited to join the editorial board of The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). The quarterly, open-access online journal is sponsored by East Carolina University and the University of Toronto and hosted on the servers of the University of Toronto Library.

Emily Knox

iSchool projects receive campus funding to address racism and social justice

Three of the twelve projects that recently received funding through the Chancellor's Call to Action Research Program to Address Racism and Social Justice are led or co-led by iSchool researchers. The program is a $2 million annual commitment by the University of Illinois to respond to the critical need for universities across the nation to prioritize research focused on systemic racial inequities and injustices that exist not only in communities but in higher education itself.

Anita Say Chan