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New Website Offers Window Into Daily Life in Civil War Tennessee (Digitized Images and More) - INFOdocket
Little-known stories of how Civil War-era Tennesseans lived their lives away from the battlefield are now accessible on the Shades of Gray and Blue website, which includes digitized images of historical art and other cultural material.
The unique educational website, which includes contributions from scholars across Tennessee, was created through a collaborative effort of Vanderbilt Libraries, Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) Walker Library and the Center for Historic Preservation at MTSU. Major funding was provided by the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area with additional support from Vanderbilt and Middle Tennessee State universities as well as Anode Inc.
![The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute: A literary history of word processing - New York Times
Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s.
“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”
[…]
The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)
Some scholars have argued that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” described in its introduction as cobbled together from a “mass of typewriting” dictated to the fictional Mina Harker, is really an allegory of the vampiric nature of modern communications media. Others have attributed the tangled style of Henry James’s late novels to his method of dictating them aloud to a “typewriter,” a term used at the time both to describe the machine itself and the person, usually a woman, operating it.
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