The Material Culture of Writing: Why the Objects We Write With Matter

We tend to think of writing as something that happens in the mind. Two scholars of writing argue that it is just as much a matter of things — desks, keyboards, printers, baby books — and that those things deserve serious study. In episode 154 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), Catherine Cooper spoke with the editors of The Material Culture of Writing:

The episode: "The Material Culture of Writing", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

• Cydney Alexis, associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Kansas State University;
• Hannah Rule, associate professor of English and composition and rhetoric (sometimes called writing studies) at the University of South Carolina.

What follows summarizes the conversation in our own words.

How the book began

A colleague, Laura Micciche — Rule's mentor — introduced the two, convinced they should work together. They gave a joint conference presentation roughly eight years before the interview, and the book grew from there.

Alexis had been drawn to objects since childhood, when she spent hours over the small labeled people and things in Richard Scarry's Best Story Book Ever! She discovered she could study objects seriously as a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which offered a program in material culture — a field that draws on art history, archaeology, historical archaeology and many other disciplines.

Rule came at it from studying how people actually get writing done. Her starting point: writing is a human invention that exists only through things. It could not exist unless people used objects to make it material, something that circulates in the world. Her own conference talk was about how stable the keyboard has stayed through decades of technological change — a topic she wasn't sure anyone would care about. Encouraging each other that such interests had real stakes, they say, is what made the collaboration work.

Whose objects survive?

Working on the book during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement sharpened two themes for the editors:

• Access. Micciche's foreword reflects on who has access to writing and its tools — a thread running through the book that the editors realized deserved more attention.
• Preservation. Many chapters deal with historical lives, and the editors came to see how much power and money it takes for someone's belongings to survive at all.

The clearest example is a chapter by Diane Ehrenpreis, a curator of decorative arts and historic interiors at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, about Thomas Jefferson's writing furniture. Its objects have been carefully preserved — which raised the question of whose lives at Monticello have not been, and how the chapter could tell those stories at the margins while seeing Jefferson honestly in a deeply fraught context.

Everyday things

The editors lean on scholars such as the historical archaeologist James Deetz and the folklorist Henry Glassie, whose work shows why ordinary, everyday objects matter. Deetz, for example, read old house deeds and farm sale lists to learn how people lived — people, often poor, whose lives went largely undocumented. Since the '70s, material culture scholars have argued that such objects belong in the story even when museums leave them out.

The book tries to do the same. One chapter, by Alexis's graduate student Emilie Merrigan, examines the Victorian baby book, an object once found in countless homes — and a mix of writing, images and page layout that stretches the usual idea of what writing is.

What counts as writing?

That question runs through the conversation:

• Alexis presented a paper on the roller skate, which doesn't write anything itself but set off a flood of writing on Instagram and TikTok as skating boomed in many communities during the pandemic. A chapter on conservators' files likewise broadened the book's idea of writing.
• Rule points to the idea of multimodality — the other symbol systems people use to make meaning — and to the scholar Patricia Dunn, who argues that written words are overvalued as the main way of doing intellectual work. The difficulty is knowing where writing's boundaries lie.
• Alexis cites "Chronotopic Lamination" by Paul Prior and Jody Shipka, which treats everything done along the way — gardening, walking, laundry while mulling a problem — as part of writing. She has her students record those in-between moments.

What's next

The pair have drafted a proposal for a second book built from shorter pieces, inspired by the brief "communications" scientists publish, so that more people can contribute histories of writing artifacts quickly. They note that publishing by parents — mothers especially — dropped sharply during the pandemic, and underrepresented groups suffered from unequal access to health care; shorter pieces would open the door to more voices, across disciplines. Even Alexis's father-in-law wanted in: he wrote about office printers from the 1980s.

Their main message is simple: writing objects matter. They make writing, work and personal life possible, and paying attention to them is serious scholarship.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training: "Podcast 154: The Material Culture of Writing," Preservation Technology Podcast, with Cydney Alexis and Hannah Rule, hosted by Catherine Cooper. The guests' remarks are summarized here, not quoted.
• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.