Matthew Battles
Associate director of metaLAB
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matthew Battles (born 1968) is a writer, artist, and since 2022 the editor of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum magazine, Arnoldia.[1] Until 2022 he was the associate director of metaLAB at Harvard University.[2] Battles is the author or co-author of six books, most of which are on the topics of writing or libraries.[3] He was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2004.[4] He has been called "a gifted stylist" by the Christian Science Monitor which commended his "beautiful writing about writing."[5]
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Battles also sees the institution of the library as more than just the building's contents. He headed a team which created a data visualization of the printing locations of books published in early-modern Europe, shown over time.[6] He also worked with artist Sarah Newman on the video installation Your Story Has Touched My Heart which drew heavily on Harvard's photo archives.[7][8] His "feral copyright project" at metaLAB looked into how copyright is lived and understood by regular people.[9]
Personal life
Battles was raised in raised in Petersburg, Illinois. He received a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1992, and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University in 1996.[4] He is married and has one son and one daughter.
Bibliography
- Library: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2003) ISBN 9780393351453
- Widener: Biography of a Library (Widener Library, 2004) ISBN 9780674016682
- The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade, 2012) ISBN 9781935869122
- The Library Beyond the Book (with Jeffrey Schnapp, 2014) ISBN 9780674725034
- Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (Norton, 2015) ISBN 9780393058857
- (Object Lessons) Tree (Bloomsbury, 2017) ISBN 9781628920512