Mary Murrell, Townsend Fellow

Mary Murrell’s dissertation in Anthropology examines mass digitization and the “future of the book.” Ms. Murrell has conducted ethnographic research among technologists in California involved in effecting “the transition” between print and electronic forms. In addition, she has studied closely the public contestation around Google’s book digitization effort across the country. In an attempt to identify and anatomize emergent ethical metrics around digital forms, her dissertation investigates arguments made for the “open” digital and against the “closed” print. Engaged in an “anthropology of the contemporary,” Ms. Murrell explores how the book in its various forms and remediations may (or may not) continue to figure “the human.”