Book Review: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, by Lisa Gitelman

Abstract

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Lisa Gitelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 224 pp. $22.95 pbk.When my mother died, I learned the importance of the certified-not an ordinary copy-death certificate. Every bank and insurance company required one as proof she was dead, and at a cost of $21 each, one rightfully would expect these certified documents to be worth their weight in gold.Indeed, as Lisa Gitelman observes in the preface to Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, death certificates today feature a baroque complexity of security features that make them official and provide the aura of serious documents. Gitelman, a professor of both English and Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, points out that all of this elaborateness is part of an escalating governmental battle against unscrupulous parties who might play dead and use digital tools to get ahead in the scriptural economy. Documents, ranging from death certificates to Super Bowl tickets to university diplomas, for knowingshowing, and [t]he epistemic power of the know-show function is indisputable. Documents, as such, are not meant so much for reading as they are for showing and proving.The book's subtitle (Toward a Media History of Documents) suggests that Gitelman's work is a sort of call-to-arms for media studies scholars to plumb a new area of study. She writes that her focus on a particular genre [documents] works to decenter the media concept precisely in order to evolve a better, richer media studies. She makes clear her thesis too-the project of this book is to explore media history further, not just by juxtaposing one medium with another but also by working a selective history of one especially capacious genre-the document-across different media.She divides that history neatly into four realms, each of which constitutes its own chapter. Chapter 1 starts around 1870 and concentrates largely on so-called job printers and job printing (as distinct from book printing and newspaper/periodical printing). Much ink is spilled here regarding printed blanks-yes, documents and forms with blank spaces meant to be filled in. Gitelman nails it on the head when she writes that [b]y dividing mental labor, blanks make bureaucracy, directing and delimiting fill-in entries that form the incremental expressions of the modern, bureaucratic self. And she correctly points out that we frequently encounter such blanks today online where the interface is often designed to look like nineteenth-century job printing on paper.Chapter 2 turns to the realm of scholarly expression starting in the 1930s and the typescript documents, while Chapter 3 focuses on the impact of the Xerox copy machine. She explains that while documents have a long history, what is so important here is that in addition to reproducing documents, xerography both identifies and creates them. Xeroxing became a way-part of a whole repertoire of ways, really-of seeing documents as documents. Chapter 4 centers on digital documents, especially the portable document format or PDF. The book's afterward concludes by addressing amateur production of zines and other publications. …