i seek the sun

This is a recording of Appalachian historian Barbara Ellen Smith's 1981 article, "Black Lung: The Social Production of Disease." It describes the history of black lung as a medical diagnosis and an occupational disease, and places decades of medical denial and dismissal of black lung in the context of the labor and class relations of twentieth-century West Virginian coal camps. Smith's account ends with the successful worker-led effort to create a federal black lung benefits program, and contends that these efforts hinged in part on a radical redefinition of the disease itself. Read the full article online (jstor; drive).

documents were produced on parchment by hand in noticeable volume in europe for like. literally a millennium. there's huge variation in what they look like & also the context of their production across the continent in that time. um, duh? but internet manuscript aesthetic often kind of mixes together different manuscript features freely. this isn't illegal or anything but it's sometimes confusing. it's interesting which features jump out at you if you have had any formal training in looking at a manuscript (i have the like, smallest indivisible unit of manuscript education. i'm a clown) vs. what stands out if you only look at them casually or occasionally

part of what's going on here is that there are a lot of wonderful fully digitized manuscripts. BnF, e-codices, stuff through the getty & the morgan library, trinity college; the british library is still working on getting back online after a devastating cyberattack. there's a lot of good shit out there completely for free. yay! fun! everybody go spelunking in the online manuscript databases right now

what is the internet manuscript aesthetic supposed to stand in for? i think the aesthetic of the manuscript is supposed to stand as a kind of shorthand opposition to or comment upon the near-infinite reproduction of text & images online. it's so easy to make & copy things digitally, which is the product of a huge investment of resources & ingenuity; well, there's some tension around whether that outcome is good. AI fight, right? what's the opposite of that but some humble monastic scribe performing his labora along with his ora? an art object made not only by meticulous hand labor, but literally imbued with prayer?

a bunch of the really sumptuous manuscripts that people like to look at & features of which are often adapted were actually not produced by monks at all, though, & we can argue about how much genuine religious sentiment they reflect, given that a lot of manuscript history (like, knowing who had what when) comes from, like, loan documents & treasury holdings. it's not just endearing monastic library catalogs

a lot of manuscripts, especially books of hours, were made by professional artisans and towards the late medieval period those artisans were increasingly systematic in their approach, or perhaps i should say that there was the growth of a midrange market, rather than pure custom luxury. there were consumption trends that created the demand for the western printing press, is what i'm saying