Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
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Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On November 4, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Lisa Gitelman (New York University) will present: “Typographical Hallucinations.”
The architects of today’s image-generating artificial intelligence—such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 3—admit that these systems struggle with text. They hallucinate mangled typographic forms even as they generate plausible contexts for typography. What can mistakes like these tell us about AI, and is there anything that they can tell us about typography? Is there something that DALL-E 3 “knows” about typography, in short, that we don’t? This talk activates questions like these in part by turning to the history of the printing trades in the nineteenth century and to specimen books published by type founders. Using the language of today’s computational neural networks, we might say that specimen books stitch together sequences of “tokens” based upon all of the sequences previously observed amid oceans of training data: anything their printers had read or set. Lisa Gitelman teaches English and media studies at New York University, where she is among the founding members of NYU’s Digital Theory Lab, a group which began to study deep learning in 2018. She is the author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and Always, Already, New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, both recently translated into Chinese.The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.
The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.
Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.