School of Journalism and Communication faculty member Liam Cole Young’s book List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed was published by Amsterdam University Press on May 22, 2017. The book marks the culmination of Dr. Young’s research into the history of listing as a technique of administration and imagination.
An official launch event was held on June 1st at the annual meeting of the Canadian Communication Association at Ryerson University. Professor Mark Hayward of York University hosted the event, offering a generous and engaging series of impressions from his reading of the book.
For more on List Cultures, listen to an interview with Cole Young by RTE’s lyric.fm, see below or visit the websites of Amsterdam University Press and University of Chicago Press
About List Cultures
We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to clickbait. Given its current popularity, listing feels uniquely digital, but it is as old as civilization. Exploring a history that moves from Mesopotamia to Silicon Valley, List Cultures asks key questions about the quotidian forms and techniques that make culture.
‘Lists stretch across cultures and epochs, doing work both administrative and poetic, absorbing every conceivable thing – from virtues to vegetables, ingredients to illnesses – into their capacious form. In richly indexing the list’s operation across time and space and media, Liam Cole Young demonstrates how this humble discursive structure has profoundly shaped our sense of what composes and orders our world, of what matters.’
– Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School, New York
‘Liam Cole Young argues eloquently for the need to pay close attention to the role that cultural techniques like list-making play in making sense of the material circumstances of everyday life. List Cultures is a significant contribution to the growing body of research on the structure and function of information genres, and will find eager readers in too many fields to enumerate.’
– Darren Wershler, Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature
‘Like the list itself, List Cultures travels around the world and across history, bringing together techniques from ancient writing to algorithmic operations. It bridges disciplines and infiltrates the world of art, literature, and administration. By following the humble list form, Liam Cole Young exposes the massive logistical underpinnings of culture, and in doing so, transforms our understanding of classification, data, and knowledge. List Cultures is an expansive, imaginative book that rethinks the organization of both media and media studies.’
– Nicole Starosielski, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University Steinhardt
Thursday, August 31, 2017 in Communication News, News, Research
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