If you’re interested in learning more about the topics discussed on ScratchTap, you may want to check out the following books. These are just a few books on topics of ScratchTap interest that I’ve read and will vouch for—the field is vast and there are always new books coming out, but these are a few key books to get you started. They’re presented in more or less random order within each category.
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Documents and Information
- What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text, by Suzanne Briet
- Deflating Information: From Science Studies to Documentation, by Bernd Frohmann
- Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data, by Ron Day
- The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
- Networked: The New Social Operating System, by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman
- Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife
- The Information, by James Gleick
- Information and Society, by Michael Buckland
- The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Shaping Human Reality, by Luciano Floridi
- Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, by David Levy
The Entanglement of Word and Support in Written Language
- The Stuff of Literature: Physical Aspects of Texts and Their Relation to Literary Meaning, by Edward Levenston
- Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot
- Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, by W. J. T. Mitchell
- Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics, by Johanna Drucker
Writing Systems and History
- The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet, by Amalia Gnanadesikan
- The Routledge Handbook of Scripts & Alphabets, by George Campbell and Christopher Moseley
- The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter Daniels and William Bright
- The Disappearance of Writing Systems, edited by John Baines, John Bennet and Stephen Houston
- Orthography As Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, edited by Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson
- The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change, by Stephen Houston
- Phonemics: A Technique for Reducing Languages to Writing, by Kenneth Pike
- On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World, by Alexander and Nicholas Humez
- El bálsamo de la memoria: Un estudio sobre comunicación escrita, by Mateo Maciá
- The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst
- Spelling and Society, by Mark Sebba
Written Language and Digital Technology
- Language and the Internet, by David Crystal
- Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide, by David Crystal
- Always On, by Naomi Baron
- Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading, by Naomi Baron
- Digital Discourse, edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek
- Cyberpragmatics: Internet-Mediated Communication in Context, by Francisco Yus
- The Multilingual Internet, edited by Brenda Danet and Susan Herring
- Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction, by Rodney Jones and Christoph Hafner
- Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Lives for the Better, by Clive Thompson
- Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, by Naomi Baron
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
- Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, by Michael Heim
Literacy
- Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, by Walter Ong
- Becoming Biliterate: Identity, Ideology, and Learning to Read and Write in Two Languages, by Bobbie Kabuto
Linguistics
- Towards an Ecology of World Languages, by Louis-Jean Calvet
- The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron and Ceil Lucas