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Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book

Category 4

Category 4 — Engaging in a discussion IN the margins
(online, formal, synchronous or asynchronous, persistent)

Permalink for this paragraph 6 Putting a dynamic margin on the page of a book enables people to carry on a deep extended conversation. CommentPress, DigressIt, and BookGlutton are three early examples of what happens when readers are able to leave comments attached to specific paragraphs, pages, and chapters or to user–defined subjects and themes that cross an entire work. As opposed to blogs, where comments appear beneath the author’s text, CommentPress and similar platforms place reader’s comments in the right–hand margin. This design makes the conversation an integral part of the text, in effect extending the notion of “content” to include the discussion it engenders.

Permalink for this paragraph 2 Teachers who have used these platforms report that discussions which previously ended at the classroom door, now flow seamlessly throughout the day, as students, doing their homework, continue the conversation in the margin. Examples: a high school Spanish class;
an English class at the University of North Carolina (20 students entered over 500 comments during a week–long discussion.

Permalink for this paragraph 10 The ability to carry out a conversation in the margin turns out to be particularly useful for scholars who are using it to conduct new forms of open peer review. Notable examples are MIT Press’ experiment with Noah Wardrip–Fruin’s book Expressive Processing and MediaCommons’ publication–for–comment of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The face–to–face advantages of book groups that meet in someone’s living room are often out–weighed by the fact that busy schedules or the fact that the people you most want to read with are spread over many timezones, making it impossible to meet in person. When the conversation moves to the margins of an online book, online book groups become viable. For example, seven women read Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook together over a six week period, leaving as many as 20 comments on a single page.

Permalink for this paragraph 2 One very interesting factor in Category 4 social reading is that it may reduce the need to apply draconian and universally hated digital rights management (DRM) that ties files to specific hardware devices. If the teacher expects you to do your homework in the margin of the book or document being studied, you have to buy “your own copy” so that you can show up in the margin as yourself. It won’t do to get a pirated copy or a password from another student. It’s the same with book groups, where readers must pay in order to appear on the pages as themselves. From a broader perspective, social reading at this level enables a redefinition of content to include the conversation engendered by the text.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Category 4 has a decidedly back–to–the–future aspect. Centuries before print, people would gather around books at universities and monasteries and make group notes in the margin as they read and studied together.

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