This book is an interdisciplinary collection of concise investigations into everyday artifacts that matter to writers and writing.
With the collection’s 31 contributors and through the lens of material culture studies, the editors make a case that the study of writing is the study of artifacts. Each chapter centers on a distinct artifact, including an 1899 course notebook, the delete key, the graffiti spray can, Indigenous paper, the Ouija board, and a retirement home noticeboard, as a means of exploring what each says about writing culture and writing lives. Together, the chapters show that, even if at first we don’t understand how or why, the artifacts that populate our lives deserve close attention. The close attention paid to artifacts in this book demonstrates both the particularity of possessions (this Ouija board or my delete key) and their universality, as so many people’s experiences with writing depend on similar possessions. In this way, each represents a moment in writing’s story and timeline, while also living in many stories and timelines, begging for artifactual study. While readers will easily recognize some artifacts in this book as writing artifacts, others illustrate how writing must be understood expansively, to capture the range of symbolic human expression and mirror the complex ways writing is experienced in people’s lives, beyond the moment of inscription.
An accessible, cross-disciplinary archive of contemporary and historical writing artifacts that matter to writing practice, this book will be of interest to writers of all kinds, as well as students and scholars of writing in fields including Writing, Literacy, and Rhetoric Studies; Material Culture Studies; Art History; History and Communication Studies.
Chapter 21 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
Foreword 1. Introduction: The Study of Writing is the Study of Artifacts A-D 3. ArcGIS Survey 123 on the Front Porch 4. Atlas of Dewitt County, Illinois, 1875 5. Entrepreneurial Card Catalogue 6. The Course Notebook of Margaret Kane, 1899 7. Cross-Stones 8. My Delete Key 9. The Desk 10. Digital Clutter 11. My Dolly Parton Prayer Candle E-M 12. Embroidery 13. A Facilitating Literacy Artifact: The Roller Skate 14. A 1950s Christmas Gift Card 15. The Graffiti Spray Can 16. The Hourglass: A Tool to Create Timeless Time 17. Birchbark: Indigenous Paper 18. The Ink Cake 19. Decoding the X: The Katrina Cross 20. The Microcomputer Kit and Electric Pencil N-Z 21. The Noticeboard: Object Gatekeeper and Lifeworld Montage 22. The Ouija Board 23. The Pager 24. Photographs and Music 25. A 50th Wedding Anniversary Memory Quilt 26. Shorthand 27. Sports Cars 28. The Feminist’s Typewriter 29. The Soviet Vinyl Collection 30. Voice-O-Graph, 1954 Postscript: A Writing Artifacts Heuristic
About the Author :
Cydney Alexis is Associate Professor of English in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at Kansas State University, USA. She is the co-editor of The Material Culture of Writing (2022) and her work has appeared in publications such as Bad Ideas about Writing (2017); Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things (2017); and Slate.
Hannah J. Rule is Associate Professor of English in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina, USA. She is the author of Situating Writing Processes (2019) and co-editor of The Material Culture of Writing (2022).
Review :
"Writing Artifacts’ succinct chapters are scholarly investigations, yes, but they are also love letters to the materials we use to record, compose, and create. I came away from this one-of-a-kind book re-enchanted with the everyday artifactual world."
Kate Viera, University of Wisconsin, USA
"Alexis and Rule stretch the bandwidth of artifactual research and the fluency of thought and writing that emerges from artifacts. Insightful and moving, the experience of reading this book is intimate, archaeological, and ethnographic."
Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell, Manchester Metropolitan University and King's College, England, UK
