Course 5: Digital Book Studies

Gerhard Lauer · University of Mainz

Lecturer

Gerhard Lauer is Gutenberg Professor of Book Studies at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and deputy director of the Mainz Centre for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (mainzed). He previously held a professorship in Digital Humanities at the University of Basel (2017–2021) and founded the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities in 2010. His research spans literary history, reading studies, cognitive poetics, and the computational analysis of book culture, including the social and historical dimensions of print from the fifteenth century to the present. He is a leading voice on how digitization and structured data transform the study of books, reading behavior, and literary communication.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Lauer situates digital book studies in the much older field of book history. Starting with Gutenberg, he shows how book studies examines print as a social and cultural medium, then explains how digitization and structured data allow the field to become increasingly computational.

Main Points

Book studies is concerned with communication through print and with the cultural, social, and technical history of books.
Lauer emphasizes that books can be historically transformative, using clandestine print and the French Revolution as a major example.
He traces two important traditions behind digital book studies: philological and historical work on print culture, and bibliographic work on catalogs, indexes, and structured book data.
Digitization expands the field by making metadata, collections, circulation records, and large publication corpora computationally analyzable.
At the same time, the lecture stresses methodological caution: research questions, sampling, and the difference between available data and the full historical population must be made explicit.

Examples Mentioned

Gutenberg and the invention of movable type
Clandestine printing before the French Revolution
Library catalogs and book trade classifications
Lending and sales data from historical and modern book markets

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 5_Lauer_DigitalBooks.txt

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