This dissertation research, supported by the Science, Technology, and Society Program at NSF, investigates the mass digitization of books as a significant transformation not only in the form of the printed book but also in the social apparatus of the book. It seeks to explore Marshall McLuhan's pronouncement nearly fifty years ago that "the content of any medium is always another medium" by exploring what happens to the book when it becomes the content of networked computers.
The research project is organized around three intersecting questions: How is the book being rematerialized through digitization? How is it being revalued? And, finally, how is the book being re-regulated? These questions are pursued first through extended field research at one mass digitizing organization, where the researcher will engage in participant observation, interviewing, and other data collection. One goal at this site is to understand the material practices of digitization and the materiality of digitized books. Another goal is to identify and chart the "emergent assemblage" around the digitized book--librarians, publishers, authors, search engine firms, copyright lawyers, authors' organizations, "openness" advocates, the state, and others. The project will track, document, and analyze the controversies, contestations, and practices emerging around the digitized book.
The intellectual merits of the research are that: it will be one of the few social scientific studies that focuses on the book in the contemporary moment; it provides a holistic perspective of the book derived from careful, multi-sited empirical inquiry; and it anatomizes an important social form in flux, before new practices are codified or stabilized. To maximize its broader impact, the published research will lay out, in a detailed, carefully documented way, the technical, legal, economic and cultural issues around book digitization so that those involved in the regulation of emergent digital forms can be more fully aware of what is at stake as existing (or traditional) institutions and practices for the circulation and preservation of knowledge are challenged and called into question.
