A good interface isn't supposed to get in the way of what it conveys. Paradoxically, that is precisely what books and interfaces do by transforming, translating, converting and representing. The contributors to Conversing the Book engage with questions of digitality, literature, legibility and literacy, contesting along the way any concept of the interface as a mere threshold to a dematerialised data-world. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, they inquire as to how the materiality of the digital can be identified, how it mediates the relation to research objects, what forms of agency the interface has, and in what way we need to reconsider the performativity of the digital when we conceive of it in material terms. 

Conversing the Book was initiated by the EXC 2020 event What is the Digital Doing? A Workshop in the Interface. For the open-access publication in the Interface Critique Journal, editors Lindsey Drury (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities) and Nina Tolksdorf (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters) brought together contributions from several Cluster members, fellows and other colleagues from Germany and abroad. This special issue marks only the second time that a chapter from François Dagognet's influential book Faces, Surfaces, Interfaces (1982) has been translated into English. Last but not least, graphic designer Nada Ezzeldin's layout highlights the layers of materiality in book culture and its reproduction.

Lindsey Drury and Nina Tolksdorf (Eds.): Conversing the Book. Interface Critique Journal 5 (2025). (Open Access) 

 

Contributions by Cluster members 

Johanna Drucker & Roberto Simanowski (Research Area 4: Literary Currencies): 
What Do We Discuss When We Discuss the Interface? A Conversation

Jan-Erik Stange (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities): 
The Data Practitioner as Author: Conversations with Data 

Beatrice Gründler (Research Area 3: Future Perfect / Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities) & Mahmoud Kozae: 
Human Intuition and Computational Clustering: Tackling a Fluid Textual Tradition 

Lindsey Drury (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities): 
Pellicle and Portrait: A Historiography of Face, Race, and Interface in Media Theory (Thinking into the Cracks Between Lavater, Dagognet, & Galloway) 

Katherine Bode (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities) & Alexander Galloway: 
#NOTALLDIGITALHUMANITIES: A Conversation