Jeff Scheible - Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation

One of the more exciting aspects of writing this book is that it prompted many people who heard about it to send resources, ideas, and anecdotes related to punctuation from popular culture to media theory my way. Research and writing have in this sense felt rewardingly collaborative. I am indebted to the many friends, colleagues, and mentors I was privileged to meet at UC Santa Barbara. Edward Branigan, Nicole Starosielski, and Dan Reynolds have generously given their time and thought to read drafts of this manuscript and offer incisive, inspiring feedback. Constance Penley, Janet Walker, and Alan Liu have been smart, challenging, and supportive readers of my work, too. Other friends, readers, and teachers who have helped shape this project include Joshua Neves, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, Lisa Parks, Peter Bloom, Charles Wolfe, Regina Longo, Megan Fernandes, Rita Raley, Allison Schifani, Kevin Kearney, Athena Tan, Meredith Bak, Chris Dzialo, Rahul Mukherjee, Maria Corrigan, Anastasia Hill, and Hye Jean Chung.

My interest in punctuation emerged during my years working as a copy editor, then managing editor, of Camera Obscura. My rotating tasks included printing drafts of articles, marking them up with grammatical and spelling corrections, and writing editorial inquiries to authors. The marks I made often used punctuation as shorthand, suggesting ways in which these typographical symbols are semiotic codes we use to facilitate communication and consolidate complex commands. On other occasions my marks more literally corrected punctuation usages adding em dashes where authors did not know they belonged, inserting parenthetical page references, shortening sentences by substituting semicolons with periods, and so on. I developed a sensitivity to the topic of punctuation by working with writing on such a detail-oriented level. It is natural to overlook punctuation, but the more time I spent editing, the more I became intrigued by the ways it structures our thought and can open out onto thinking about not only language but about history, habits, personalities, style, visual culture, graphic design, rules, and, perhaps most appealing to me, breaking rules. I worked closely with many people I admire while there: Constance Penley, Patricia White, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Sharon Willis, Andrea Fontenot, Athena Tan, and Ryan Bowles.

A wider community of colleagues and audiences has given feedback to drafts of chapters and conference presentations that has directly and indirectly worked its way into the following pages. Thanks to Wendy Chun, Patricia White, James Hodge, Zach Meltzer, Brian Jacobson, and engaged audiences at UCSB, Concordia University, SUNY Purchase, University of Aberdeen, University of Chicago, SCMS meetings in Seattle and New Orleans, and the Visible Evidence XX Conference in Stockholm. Thanks also to Mara Mills for putting me in touch with George Kupczak from the AT&T Archives and to George for sharing Bell Labs documents with me. My relatively speedy completion of this manuscript would not have been possible without a generous Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship that granted me research time in Concordia Universitys Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, which Martin Lefebvre and Haidee Wasson were instrumental in helping me secure. While there, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez offered excellent research assistance in final stages. My writing in Montreal was bolstered by a new community of scholars and friends, including Tom Waugh, Marc Steinberg, Yuriko Furuhata, Michelle Cho, Luca Caminati, Masha Salazkina, and Katie Russell. Jocelyn Braddock, Matt Kaelin, Marc Boucai, Amy Robinson, the Blocks, Mathieu Leroux, and Sally Heller have offered perspective, stimulation, distractions, and care when they were needed.

It has been a pleasure to work with University of Minnesota Press, and I of course am also indebted to Danielle Kasprzak and the anonymous readers for the Press, who offered valuable feedback.