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The Books That Count: Big Data Versus Narrative in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers

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The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture

Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History ((NDBH))

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Abstract

Regina Schober examines the changing cultural status of the codex in the context of the emergence of Big Data and the concurrent emphasis on quantified knowledge. She analyzes two recent “novels of the information age” by Robin Sloan and Joshua Cohen that cast the printed book ambivalently both as an alternative to and as part of a new media culture that prioritizes numerical and statistical knowledge. Schober’s analysis reveals how the novels’ fictional portraits of writers and readers self-reflexively affirm the cultural significance of material book culture while they also rework data aesthetics. By highlighting specifically literary strategies for negotiating scale and complexity while appropriating structuring principles gleaned from data mapping, the novels offer new modes of response to the knowledge culture of Big Data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (2009): 465.

  2. 2.

    Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 14.

  3. 3.

    See the essays by Kley, Pressman, Gibbons, and Schmitz-Emans in this collection.

  4. 4.

    N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 62.

  5. 5.

    Hayles, How We Think, 62.

  6. 6.

    Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 3–4.

  7. 7.

    Anne Burdick et al., Digital Humanities (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012), 38.

  8. 8.

    Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

  9. 9.

    David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  10. 10.

    Burdick, Digital Humanities, 38.

  11. 11.

    Burdick, Digital Humanities, 70.

  12. 12.

    Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers (New York: Random House, 2015), 1.5.

  13. 13.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.5.

  14. 14.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.5.

  15. 15.

    The concept of “Big Data” refers to the massive shift in scale of data sets available in the information age, especially due to the technological advancements in data storage capacities. New information processing technology has made the accumulation and analysis of massive amounts of data easier, faster, and affordable. Yet, the term “Big Data” refers not only to the technologies of generating, storing, and analyzing data but also implies a general shift in analytical perspective, as the analysis of large data sets increasingly enables the functional evaluation of global economic, ecological, social, and personal statistical patterns. Big Data practices tend to give preference to correlative over causal explanations and generally shift reading agency from human to machine. For historical and critical discussions of Big Data and its value as a form of knowledge see Ramón Reichert, Big Data: Analysen zum gesellschaftlichen Wandel von Wissen, Macht und Ökonomie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014); Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–279; Klaus Mainzer, Die Berechnung der Welt: Von der Weltformel zu Big Data (München: Beck, 2014).

  16. 16.

    Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 5.

  17. 17.

    Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 6.

  18. 18.

    N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21.

  19. 19.

    Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 228. See also Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 196–200 for a useful conceptual discussion of “embodiment ” in relation to texts and media. I follow Hayles in using embodiment in conjunction with the printing book as denoting a complex process “enmeshed within the specifics place, time, physiology, and culture” (196).

  20. 20.

    Lev Manovich, Language, 219.

  21. 21.

    Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell, 2007), 14.

  22. 22.

    Hayles, How We Think, 177–78.

  23. 23.

    Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9.

  24. 24.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 136.

  25. 25.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 225.

  26. 26.

    Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin, 2013), 5.

  27. 27.

    Morozov, To Save Everything Click Here, 6.

  28. 28.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 225.

  29. 29.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 225.

  30. 30.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 288.

  31. 31.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 288.

  32. 32.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.22.

  33. 33.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.100.

  34. 34.

    Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1984, in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 231.

  35. 35.

    Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 232.

  36. 36.

    Manuel Castells, “Informationalism, Networks, and The Network Society. A Theoretical Blueprint,” in The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Manuel Castells (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publ., 2004), 23.

  37. 37.

    Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 2.

  38. 38.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 0.265.

  39. 39.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 0.406.

  40. 40.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 0.265–266.

  41. 41.

    John R. Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 177.

  42. 42.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 0.368.

  43. 43.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.98.

  44. 44.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.99.

  45. 45.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.99.

  46. 46.

    Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 249.

  47. 47.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 0.191.

  48. 48.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.154.

  49. 49.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.39.

  50. 50.

    Sloan, Mr. Penumbra, 59.

  51. 51.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.549.

  52. 52.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.549.

  53. 53.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.549.

  54. 54.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.549.

  55. 55.

    Cohen, Book of Numbers, 1.548.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. American Studies, Mannheim University, Mannheim, Germany

    Regina Schober

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  1. Regina Schober
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Education Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Heike Schaefer

  2. Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Alexander Starre

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Schober, R. (2019). The Books That Count: Big Data Versus Narrative in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_2

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