Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Women/Gender Minorities in Print/Publishing in the Long 20th Century

Last month on July 17, 2019 I went to a one-day conference at Stanford:

Women/Gender Minorities in Print/Publishing in the Long 20th Century 

It was my first time at Stanford, and my first time taking CalTrain. The group of individuals I met at the conference were welcoming, friendly, funny, interesting, and magnetic! In fact, they sort of made me want to do a PhD in literature, they were that fun.



The plenary started off the day by introducing and discussing the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a new repository for harvested scans from works having to do with Hogarth Press. The project also incorporates biographies and people connections that are unearthed from consulting archival sources... linked data! This made me realize the importance of archival stakeholders doing useful work to make collections visible and usable. Move over digital collections librarians! Some English PhDs are doing some interesting work here! (Love the cross over in these worlds demonstrated here.)









The panel presentations and discussions were less like a printing/archival workshop and more like English Literature scholars telling us about engaging with texts intellectually and physically through their archival experiences (either digitally or in person). Yet I found the conference to be great for networking and seeing how scholars utilize the work us archivists and librarians do, while simultaneously connecting my two "identities" of writer and librarian. I found the panel that investigated literary representation of the library to be a great mental exercise (finally, someone I could talk about Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore with!) and I mulled over one scholar's ideas of the serif as phallus as he analyzed Vanessa Bell's feminist calligraphy. In addition to the Stanford English Department faculty and doctoral students at the conference, there was an MFA student from SJSU, a cataloger from the Folger Shakespeare Library, a publisher from Spain, and other scholars from the Bay Area. It was truly a group of relatable academics interested in feminist issues in printing, publishing, and activism, and we all experienced at least a little bit of archive porn/archive mania!




As a librarian, archives worker, poet, and artist, I was able to personally apply the food for thought the conference presented me, and I share my notes here:

I'm rebelling (--> reclaiming my own agency) against established power structures by writing on my own website, keeping my own archive, etc. 

The space in which a person reads/encounters a book affects their experience with a book --> why it is so important that I create a warm, welcoming environment in the RR [reading room] free of bias as much as possible.

 Above all this conference has cemented for me the power & importance of books (almost eternal) and that there is a place for me here, in various niches, and that I have been doing important work and have so much more I could do --> keep creative & don't get depressed/complacent. Goal: to make as much of an interesting CV/biography for myself as possible. Don't limit myself to traditional librarian trajectory -- so many ways my SCU A&SC [experience] can be interesting, a spring board/groundwork/background to future interesting work. 


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