Leaving Something Behind: Reading Socially Through Book Traces

 By E.L.

Alderman library stacks at the University of Virginia

Follow Book Traces on Twitter @booktracesuva, on Tumblr, and on the official website.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in libraries lately. As a grad student and inveterate skimmer of books, this is not rare. But for the past six months, I’ve been working as a project intern for Book Traces, where I systematically inspect my university’s circulating book collection for evidence of how past handlers have used, modified, and engaged with their books.

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Link Roundup!

Good reads and important feeds from around the interwebz. Most are new, some are old, all are mind-expanding.

• Thanks to my girl Maya for bringing this to my attn: The Huffington Post’s Barbara Sostaita writes on the anxieties, costs, and considerations of being a WOC in academia. “To do scholarship is to do autobiography.”

• Chloe Wyma writes for the Brooklyn Rail on The Guerilla Girls Broadband, activists and artists who take the names of historically forgotten women and “have carried on the Guerrilla Girls’s tradition of wit and righteous anger while embracing digital activism to expand their critique beyond the confines of the art world.”

• From Gimlet Media: Starlee Kine takes on the small, beautiful mysteries in life through a great new podcast called “Mystery Show.” Her second case is one of my favorite radio stories, in which she tracks the intersection of one soon-forgotten book and pop queen Britney Spears.

• An old one but a good one: novelist Vikram Chandra on elegant language, the beauty of code, and sublime programming that combines both.