I thought that I had a good idea developed for a proposal for HathiTrust, but they did not think that it worked for them. I had started thinking on how it could fit into my disseration. Now I am at a loss, truthfully, Does this mean I should rethink my dissertation substantially, or just forget the whole thing. Part of the problem is that it connects to my expertise finding stuff in digital archives but almost nothing else that I have studied. I keep cutting back the number of my case studies. If my focus is libraries, academia, and American power, it is hard to leave out ethnographic studies. Maybe it should be something on the power of the book. How we only respect cultures that produce books.

Reworking the Book Mines Medieval, Early Modern Printing in Vernacular, American Conquests, American Empire Collecting, Extracting, Reworking