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Use the code BLOOM50 to receive nearly 50% off of every single Princeton University Press print book, e-book, and audiobook. The sale ends May 31st. go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the Library Science channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Astra J. Smith.
author of Transmediation and the Archive, Decoding Objects in the Digital Age, published by Arc Humanities Press in September 2024. Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive explores the possibilities of archival objects.
investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books death masks and a spirit photograph and a manuscript choir book This book interrogates not only what the objects are now but also asks what they were before taking material form and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. so astrid welcome to new books network i am so excited to chat with you about this book but before we get started
I would really love if you could introduce yourself a little bit. Maybe you can talk a bit about your background and what kind of path your education has taken and then the work you're doing now at Stanford Libraries. Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here and share about my book.
And I do talk about my background in what turned out to be a really long section in my book because my background took a lot of twists and turns before I kind of got to the point where I wrote this. I've always been a really curious person who loves to learn and follow my interests and hobbies wherever they take me.
art, music, history, philosophy, religion. So basically when I was in school I took way more classes than I ever needed to graduate and finish my degrees which are an Associates in Humanities. from Foothill College, a BA in Art from San Francisco State, and a Master's in Liberal Art. at Stanford and my focus in the art program was mixed media painting and drawing and book arts so making books from scratch.
exploring all the processes that go into art books and printmaking and that basically gave me the foundation of handling books and materials that I would take into my digitization practice. I also worked a lot of odd jobs traveling on a super low budget to places like the Arctic Circle in Sweden and an underground salt cathedral in Poland. It's Wieliczka, which you should definitely visit if you get a chance.
And I've done a lot of music projects, choirs, session recording, and I make art when I feel like there's something that I need to physically express. But I wanted to pause and ask you a question. Sure. What was your favorite childhood game? Oh. Yes.
As a preteen, I was introduced to a board game called The Farming Game, which is from the West Coast. It's like pretty obscure. It's hard to find folks who are eager to play it. It's kind of like... monopoly but with more farming and believe it or not maybe even more capitalism than monopoly has it's wow it's really hilarious I love that. Okay, so mine was Operation. Do you know the game? Oh, yes. There's this buzzer.
board where you have to extract hilarious pieces without making it buzz and essentially killing your character or I don't know, maiming them in some way. But I have a theory that your favorite childhood game kind of applies to
the mode of which you excel in your career. So I don't know about your farm game here, you'll have to think that one through, but with Operation, I was like, okay, so I like this kind of anxious... high stakes energy but also something where I feel like I'm doing good and So digitization definitely imparts all of those elements in that I'm working with extremely fragile materials.
usually taking high-resolution pictures of every page or every visual element and then translating these into a digital object that people can manipulate and work with online. So when I first started at Stanford Libraries in 2010, I was digitizing a particularly beautiful set of 100 noteworthy rare books and then later started working part-time in conservation.
And over the course of my career path, I expanded my responsibilities to become the Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization Specialist. focusing on particularly rare and fragile objects that might need special handling. and working with our lab staff. to train them on handling. And I'm also working as a project coordinator overseeing projects.
both large and small such as say digitizing 50 medieval documents or maybe 200 fine press rare books from One example is the period of the book arts revival, like beautiful William Morris embellishments, or maybe a few pages from a book that a scholar needs for. publication. So while I work in a library, I am not a librarian myself. I work very closely with librarians, curators, subject specialists on their projects, coordinating the effort.
to create beautiful versions of their treasures that can live in the digital realm. Thank you so much. I love hearing all of the experiences and skills that come together to get folks where they are. I'm also going to really be overthinking what the farming game says about me. It requires a lot of planning and strategy, which I do think I like. I can see that. So let's talk about your new book. Transmediation and the Archive draws a lot on your own experience with digitization work.
alongside your reflections on what an expanded understanding of transmediation can do for us. Can you talk a little bit more about the experiences and conversations that led you to this book? and your hopes for engaging people in reflection on transmediation. I'm curious why we need to be talking about transmediation more, especially in libraries and archives and cultural heritage spaces.
Yes, thank you. I love this question because I think it really gets to the core purpose of the book, which is to draw attention to the importance of transmediation in those spaces. The book definitely drew deeply on my digitization experience. and how focused that is on the liminal space. the space between the physical and the digital and how to bridge that divide by turning single photographs of say every page of a book into a digital
object that provides some aspect of that material essence. In fact, Welsh medievalist Elaine Traharn calls the digital object the digital aspect, which I find very apt. And transmediation is a term borrowed from semiotics. It's the act of translating meaning from one sign system to another. And Danielle Blackmar and Peter Mencall describe it as the movement of motifs, most commonly from text to picture or object.
I've been thinking about that theory for a long time and when I was working on my master's at Stanford I wrote up what It must have seemed like an absolutely nonsensical proposal, but I feel so grateful that the Master of Liberal Arts program saw potential there. And it was Elaine Shaharn who wanted to work with me and really championed me turning that thesis into this book, which is a greatly expanded version of my original thesis.
And Aline is truly such a generous scholar and supportive person. I've been so inspired by her own work in manuscript studies and archival research, and she's really deeply impacted my career and life. So, like I said, by applying the framework of transmediation to archival objects, we can think of objects both as what they are now and what they once were and what they might be in the future.
My book proposes that transmediation, while initially used to describe an existing form or sign system being translated into another, it can be expanded. to encompass reformatting of any type, including the conceptual being made physical. It can be used to articulate the relationships between formats. I have a little diagram in the book which I'll describe. If you picture an author kind of sitting there, his hand on his chin thinking, and he's like thinking up a concept for a book.
The next image is he's writing it on paper, manuscript pages. The next one is he hands those pages to a printer who selects the type, sets the type and creates. printed version of the book and then you'd have to see it in the book but there's a scribbly cartoon of me with a camera like my hair everywhere, taking a photo of the book, and then a laptop where that book becomes a digital object, maybe a flipbook viewer, something people can navigate.
So that illustration shows the arc of transmediation from concept. through all the different formats um and i'd also like to share a quote from the book the creative act a way of being which was written by record producer rick rubin He says turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. The imagination has no limits. The physical work does. The work exists in both.
Conversations about transmediation will remove some of the hierarchy where people tend to place emphasis only on the physical, which I believe limits our understanding of the full breadth of meaning. Thank you for giving some great definitions there. And I think maybe we should dig more into this term and concept of transmediation. In the first chapter, you explain where you think the arc of transmediation begins.
And you outline this transmediation path framework that you developed. Can you explain that framework for listeners and talk about how the framework creates space to recognize relationships, people, and also labor through the transmediation process? Yes, great. I'll start by defining some of the terms. Transmediation is the entire process by which an object takes form, beginning with its conceptual genesis and continuing in perpetuity through any subsequent forms or state.
meaning is translated across sign systems. And then remediation is the process by which an object is created through the transmission. of an idea to form or the translation of an existing object through new media. So this is where digitization would fit in. Another definition of remediation is to remedy or fix. So context is important. It's not that one. This is not the intended usage.
And instantiation is any individual instance of a form, including those which have been translated through new media. So the Transmediation Path Framework is a method of analysis that acknowledges and investigates all of those elements using the transmediation informed approach for research, which is what the book is all about.
And I realize these are really complicated ideas and nowhere in current citation models do we express how objects we're researching relate to other instantiations in its network. of relationships. So within the transmediation path framework, I created the transmediation path. reference model, which is kind of like a you are here map to show where your object fits.
Kind of like the breadcrumb links at the top of a webpage so you can see how the page you're on relates to the other webpages of the site you're visiting. And this is explained in detail in an entire section of the book, and there's also a cheat sheet in the appendix that will describe exactly how to implement this in your research. And I should note it's not meant to replace proper citation. It's meant to stand alongside it and offer further insight.
It also builds in space to note the makers involved in the different versions of these objects.
And in 2023, medieval codicologist Bridgette Wirti and I co-authored an essay called all the work you do not see labor digitizers and the foundation of digital humanities which appears in debates in the digital humanities And I know Bridget was on your show and that was a really great segment and in our essay we talk about invisibility and labor which is a topic that's especially important to me as someone who's typically in a dimly lit lab very much out of the out of the
the public scene and in the transmediation path reference model, those people, our labs are noted for their roles in the process and how they contributed to the trajectory. Yeah, I loved how the model that you give... lets us show so much more about What?
what object exactly we're looking at and how it relates to other versions of the object. I've definitely looked at citations for things and thought this doesn't match the thing i'm looking at i don't think they were looking at the same scan or the same you know and i really appreciated how you've laid out a way to reflect more of that
Thank you. I think you just touched on another aspect, which is people sometimes unintentionally insinuate they were looking at the physical when maybe they were only working with the digital. So I hope that the model can also... shed light on that totally Yeah, and so then in the rest of your book, the bulk of the book, you explore three different case studies. And in the first, you look at a spirit photograph and a set of death masks in the Stanford University Special Collections and Archives.
So I would love you to explain what an understanding of these objects and their transmediation process gives us, not only about the objects themselves, but about the richness of the processes. in terms of how we understand them. Great. So it wasn't until I looked back on the objects in my book that I had selected that I realized just how creepy and macabre they all were. I was like, oh, oops.
But sorry, not sorry. I love all of them and I definitely let that kind of tingly sense of what the heck is this and why does it exist guide my decisions for which objects to research and dive into because That kind of that tingle, that curiosity is really what drives well researched and exciting material, I think.
So in the case of the spirit photograph, which was made in 1909 by Augustus Bersnell, we get not only a particularly interesting example of transmediation, but a lovely pun, philosopher and media theorist. Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message, meaning the media used to create the object is part of its content. And the photographers for Victorian spirit photographs were also acting as mediums of sorts.
and that they were purported to be able to include ghosts in their images. So this came out of the Victorian obsession with death and dying and it was part of the Sanford collection by way of Thomas Walton Stanford, who was a big part of the spiritualist movement at the time.
But in the day when Photoshop trickery and AI are so convincing, it's hard to imagine these types of photos which were created through analog manipulation and can look strange and comical um but let me read a quote that describes it um the silver gelatin print depicts two figures within a murky dimly lit space their juxtaposition immediately causes some tension through the readily apparent differences in lighting their reflection.
the image is hazy with little contrast the darkest part of the exposure being the hair on the female figure and the lightest whites being the crisp color of the man's shirt At first, it's difficult to make sense of what's transpiring in the scene. It's seemingly with a mixture of amazement, confusion, shock, and even amusement that the thickly mustachioed Victorian gentleman gazes fixedly toward the apparition of a beautiful young woman.
in contrast her expression is serene and knowing and her dark eyes look out into the distance not acknowledging her observer so it sounds funny right they don't fit together it's it's very compelling but when you look at it you're just sort of like what i can't quite process what's happening here they're not looking at each other but it's such a wonderful example of making the conceptual into a physical object. This is transmediating misery and mourning into something tangible.
which would have been extremely powerful, especially for the person who knew who this apparition was. So in that same way, the death masks are stand-ins, physical substitutes for the missing people that they represent. And in the book, I share about the death masks of Leland and Jane and young Leland Jr.'s masks. and talk about how they were made. The process involved putting plaster on the cadaver's face and using it as a mold to create a perfect replica.
And having imaged these in the lab to produce 3D models, I can honestly say that they're some of the most startling and unsettling objects I've ever handled. You can imagine lifting a perfectly proportioned human head out of a box, staring at their face. seeing all the pores, seeing some hairs even. And so that was just a very unique experience. And we worked with these when we were training on photogrammetry, which is a technique
of taking many, many still images and still photographs and piecing them together to create a 3D model. And we were in training with cultural heritage imaging out of San Francisco. So I think understanding the way that these objects were made tells us so much more about the evaluation of the objects themselves, and that's hopefully something that the Transmediation Path Framework helps guide people to do. Definitely. Yeah. And that example kind of, I think like.
really does such a great job of taking us back to the beginning of the process. So to move on to a different macabre thing, in your second case study, you look at Schatz's Physica Curiosa. It's digitization and then specifically the illustration of the monster of Krakow that we find within it. And I would love if you could talk about how these objects are part of a much larger tradition of transmediation.
Maybe you can talk about some of the different objects and illustrations you'd point to in this larger process and how the broader perspective helps us better understand Shot's own work as well as the role that this monster has played for various audiences.
So I fell in love with this book. When I first saw it, it was just so striking and bizarre. I saw it first at the University of Edinburgh's rare book collection when I was traveling. And when I got home at Stanford library I paged it to look at it and the version that we have is is just huge. It's Physica Curiosa. Curiosa is an early modern book written by the German Jesuit polymath Gaspard Schatz.
And the copy I worked with from Stanford is 1697. Like I said, it's so huge with so many pages that it's practically a cube. It's extremely difficult to handle. And I have to admit at the time that it was... part of a digitization project. We set it aside and said we were not going to image it because it was too challenging at the time. I would love to revisit that. Challenge accepted. I think with our current equipment, which digitization equipment is constantly evolving.
I think we could do it. I want to try again, but we didn't do it at the time. However, I did research it extensively in this book. takes almost a journalistic account of monsters, demons, angels, ghosts, and other creatures. But many of the entries include a striking illustration, which in itself is an example of transmediation, turning a description into an image. And the one I focus on
is, like you said, the monster of Krakow. And just to sort of describe him for you, it's a full-grown monster from the appearance of his proportions. appears to be maybe Six feet tall, he's got a long, bruboscis, trunk-like nose, feathery shapes coming from his eyes. On his chest are ape faces. On his elbows and knees are little dogs, which I called him puppy knees while I was doing my research because that was just.
a little way to have some fun while I was deep in this research. He's got webbed feet and hands and kind of a sad expression. They're like, The swamp thing-like creature seems pretty downright depressed. But then I translated the description of him and kind of tried to figure out what was going on and it is a really sad story. It turns out that this is a depiction of what was a malformed infant that only lived a few hours.
So if you think about this one instance where this is just a gross misrepresentation of what's happening in the description, imagine what's happening with all the other illustrations in this book. And it makes you think of... a game of telephone. Schott does refer back to other versions of the book. He's citing his references like a good author. However,
who got it right and where did this all go wrong? And I look at other versions dating back to the 1500s. There's a manuscript version and some later etched versions. And each of these depictions is different and it's showing kind of the aesthetic values of the time. Like the early one is beautifully painted. There's a later one where the monster has a jaunty sassy pose with his arm or his little hand on his hip.
And then an even later one in the Lissetti version where there's cool webs and demons in the background and you're just each one is like a microcosm for transmediation where you're seeing They're telling you more about the time than they are about the monster themselves. And there's even a Netflix series right now called The Monster of Krakow, which is continuing to transform and transmediate the story for new audiences still today.
Wild. That's totally wild. Yeah, and that broader perspective on things. It's just like a book that we pick up with an illustration is more than just that one thing on the page. Well, then getting to the third case study, I was really intrigued. You made use of Bill Brown's conception of thing theory a few times in the book.
it comes up first in the introduction and then you come back to it in your third case study where you're discussing uh junipero serra's choir book of mission music So could you give listeners a bit of context on that choir book and then explain how sing theory is useful for discussing not only this object, but also for enlarging our understanding of transmediation? Yes, absolutely. So the Mission Choir book, it dates to somewhere between 1770 and 1784.
And it is a huge object, maybe the size of a small coffee table, because it was meant to be read from afar as a choir was singing. It has wooden covers and parchment pages, animal skin, painted with red and black notes and lyrics. And interestingly, as I was doing my study I noticed that these were painted using stencils. So I talk about that in the book because I had never seen that before.
It belonged to the infamous Spanish missionary priest Junipero Serra, and music was one of the many tools that the missionary system used to control indigenous Californians. part of the mission network and mission goals there. Thing theory is a very useful thought exercise for every object. that we're considering. And I think I can best explain it in a couple analogies.
Thing theory was largely the creation of Bill Brown in his book A Sense of Things, and it also goes back to German philosopher Martin Heidegger's ideas about human-object interactions. so my first example I've always been a bit of a magpie and as a teenager I was walking on the train tracks as a moody, gothy teenager might do. And I found a spoon that had been crushed by a train. So I kept it and I put it in a vase with some flowers and a feather.
And I kept it on a jar for many years. I probably still have it somewhere. So here's the question. You can't really eat with it. It's not a functional object per se. Is this a spoon or is it really kind of just a thing at this point? And the other example is, for my Pinterest folks out there, if you think about decor using books, where they've been selected for maybe the color of their spine, or maybe they're even turned backwards on your shelf. So you have just a spread of beige.
text blocks looking at you. Are these books or are these things that are just being used as decoration. What about you? Because you mentioned when we first talked that this is one of your favorite theories. So how would you describe it or what kind of examples would you give? i i mean i don't know if i can claim it as a favorite but like because i still feel like um Your examples are better than any I could give. But for me, it's been really useful. I was first introduced to Thing Theory in
Kathy Ferguson's book, Letterpress Revolution, which I got to chat with Kathy about on this podcast as well. And she used it in looking at anarchist print culture and I found it such a useful framework lens for thinking about human interaction with material culture broadly and how in spaces like archives where Archivists and other folks who work in these spaces are often doing a lot of work with material culture. The thingness of these things has perhaps more impact on us.
than we recognize all the time. It's playing many different roles than we might ascribe to it on the finding aid that we make, for example. And so I was really excited to see you posting theory into your discussion here. Yeah. Perfect, yeah. And like you said in your question, I think this object is such a great example of that because only about 100 years after it was made, the choir book was rendered a thing. It was no longer being used as a choir book.
It was given to Jane Stanford by Father Angelo D. Casanova in 1888. It became a status symbol for Jane, a powerful head of an institution that was growing in notoriety. And what was an object that was a symbol for holy devotion became a symbol of legitimacy in a mission for education.
And it was later digitized in my lab and I write about that experience in the book too. But basically the transmediation arc allows us to learn how and why the book was made, how its purpose was altered, and how it later came to exist in digital form as well. Yeah, I really like that as an example.
Well, I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up, I would love to give you a chance to share anything else that you're working on now that you've wrapped up this book are there other research projects digitization projects other kinds of artistic projects that you'd like to share about with listeners
Oh my goodness. I always have so much going on. I'm also still really interested in transmediation. I'm seeing more pop up on the subject. There's sort of this... shared interest in growing on the subject and I want to stay informed and possibly write more and hear how this topic gets carried forward by others. I'm also extremely interested in hearing what other people think about my book. I know
Bridgette Wirti is reading it currently and I know a couple others that I mentioned in the book. Carrie Thomas, Dot Porter, Suzette Van Heren are reading it. I want to hear what they think and I'm also extremely hopeful that people will implement the tools I provide in the appendices in either teaching or in their personal research. and to hear about how that goes. But honestly, most of all, anyone listening, I am so excited to hear what you think.
you were all in my minds while i was writing it that was part of this book's transmediation is you know you're kind of aware or maybe humoring myself but picturing all the people that are later going to be receiving it. So in the professional realm, I'm currently heading an investigation of multi-spectral imaging at work so experimenting with taking pictures of objects using all the different lights.
colors in the color spectrum and seeing if anything mysterious pops out, if there's hidden information or things that were altered or if faded documents actually yield some information. I'm also helping advise on cultural heritage imaging self-assessment tool. initiated by Dan Zellner, head of imaging at Northwestern. And that is such a cool idea. It's basically a couple, one or two representatives.
would go to an institution and kind of check out how their lab is performing their work and see if it how it fits in with kind of the generally understood um quality metrics like FADGI, which is the Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines. and just sort of talk to them and see what they could be doing differently or give them a gold star.
I'm planning to write a paper with my colleague Chris Hacker about the sort of more subjective nature of imaging, like capturing materiality and making observation shots rather than the kind of
top-down, flat digitization that you tend to think of. Because I think we're reaching a point where we're looking back at imaging that happened years ago like microfiche and early digitization some of that stuff is getting digitized again and it's very different this time so we're moving into like the historiography of digitization and i'm excited to be a part of that conversation.
And personally, I just recorded some violin and string arrangement for a black metal band, Bose DeNage. Their album is forthcoming, so I'm really eager to hear how that sounds once it all gets mixed and mastered. and I joined a small vocal chorus. staying busy yeah that's amazing wow so many great projects and um yeah things things for us to look out for too it sounds like some really really neat things coming out of all of that
Thank you. Well, thank you so much for talking today. Once again, I have been chatting with Astrid Smith, author of Transmediation and the Archive Decoding Objects in the Digital Age. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books Network.