Overdue Conversations

This episode grapples with the many implications of one big question: what happens to literary archives when most of the work and communications around book publishing now occurs digitally? Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Lise Jaillant–an author, researcher, and lecturer at Loughborough University–to discuss this. Lise Jaillant’s research lies at the intersection…

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Trevor Owens, the head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. Trevor is the first person to hold this position because it’s new— in fact, digital content management is new to most institutions. Lina and Trevor discuss the many, sometimes contradictory, challenges…

As the COVID-19 pandemic compelled libraries and archives worldwide to close their doors indefinitely, stranded researchers were compelled to radically reimagine what a visit to the archive might look like. Rather than scrutinizing text amid the dust of decaying paper in a Special Collections Reading Room, these researchers found themselves poring over digitized documents bathed…

Publishing houses make the study of literature possible in more ways than one. Not only do publishing houses make literary texts available as finished goods for our cultural consumption, the archival holdings of these publishing houses also contain evidence of literature in its myriad unfinished, intermittent, exploratory forms before and after publication. Publisher archives house…

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with historian and curator of NYU’s AI Now Institute and author of A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin. Lina and Joy discuss urgent questions about the social history of computing; the ethical dilemmas posed by the power of tech…