Notebooks and new technology

Available for over a year

Novelist Jonathan Coe joins book historians Roland Allen, Prof Lesley Smith and Dr Gill Partington and presenter Lisa Mullen. As Radio 3’s Late Junction devotes episodes this September to the cassette tape and the particular sound and way of recording and assembling music which that technology provided, we look at writing. At a time when there’s a lot of chat about AI and chatbots creating writing, what does it mean to write on a page of paper which is then printed and assembled into a book. The author Jonathan Coe’s many books include The Rotter's Club, What a Carve Up! Mr Wilder and Me and his latest Bournville is now out in paperback Roland Allen has worked in publishing and has now written The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper Gill Partington (with Simon Morris and Adam Smyth) is one of the founding editors of Inscription: Journal of Material Text, which brings together artists, book historians, and academic theorists. After editions looking at beginnings, holes and folds, the new issue coming soon looks at touch. Lesley Smith is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Harris Manchester College, Oxford and has chosen a selection of handwritten documents from the collections of the Bodleian Library published as Handwritten: Remarkable People on the Page. Producer: Ruth Watts Available to download as an Arts & Ideas podcast and on BBC Sounds are discussions about Paper with Adam Smyth, Nicholas Basbanes, Therese Weber and Emily Cockayne AI and Human creativity: Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, Anders Sandberg from the Future of the Human Institute at Oxford, artist Anna Ridler and Sheffield Robotics' Michael Szollosy Concrete poetry: Matthew Sweet and guests discuss the work of Dom Houédard. Experimentation in the arts: with the winners of the Goldsmiths Prize 2022, poet Stephen Sexton and composer Matthew Herbert, Shahidha Bari reflects on what it means to push boundaries and be experimental