Title: Paper Knowledge
Subtitle: Toward a Media History of Documents
Author: Lisa Gitelman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Format: 224 pages, 0.8 x 5.8 x 8.8 inches, English
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5657-8
From the introduction:
“The document is a particularly important vernacular genre, both sprawling and ubiquitous. We know it by its diverse subgenres—the memo, for instance, or the green card and the promissory note—as well as by its generalized, cognate forms, like documentary and documentation. This book is about the genre of the document glimpsed selectively in four episodes from media history. Each episode concerns a different medium for the reproduction of documents, since reproduction is one clear way that documents are affirmed as such: one of the things people do with documents is copy them, whether they get published variously in editions (like the Declaration of Independence, for instance), duplicated for reference (like the photocopy of my passport that I carry in my suitcase), sort of or semipublished for internal circulation (like a restaurant menu), or proliferated online (mirrored and cached like the many documents in Wikileaks).”