The networked book, as an idea and as a term, has gained currency of late. A few weeks ago, Farrar Straus and Giroux launched Pulse , an adventurous marketing experiment in which they are syndicating the complete text of a new nonfiction title in blog, RSS and email. Their web developers called it, quite independently it seems, a networked book. Next week (drum roll), the institute will launch McKenzie Wark’s “GAM3R 7H30RY,” an online version of a book in progress designed to generate a critical networked discussion about video games. And, of course, the July release of Sophie is fast approaching, so soon we’ll all be making networked books.
The institue will launch McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY Version 1.1 on Monday, May 15
The discussion following Pulse highlighted some interesting issues and made us think hard about precisely what it is we mean by “networked book.” Last spring, Kim White (who was the first to posit the idea of networked books) wrote a paper for the Computers and Writing Online conference that developed the idea a little further, based on our experience with the Gates Memory Project, where we tried to create a collaborative networked document of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates using popular social software tools like Flickr and del.icio.us. Kim later adapted parts of this paper as a first stab at a Wikipedia article. This was a good start.
We thought it might be useful, however, in light of recent discussion and upcoming ventures, to try to focus the definition a little bit more — to create some useful boundaries for thinking this through while holding on to some of the ambiguity. After a quick back-and-forth, we came up with the following capsule definition: “a networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.”
Ok. Hardly Samuel Johnson, I know, but it at least begins to lay down some basic criteria. Open. Designed for the network. Still vague, but moving in a good direction. Yet already I feel like adding to the list of verbs “annotated” — taking notes inside a text is something we take for granted in print but is still quite rare in electronic documents. A networked book should allow for some kind of reader feedback within its structure. I would also add “compiled,” or “assembled,” to account for books composed of various remote parts — either freestanding assets on distant databases, or sections of text and media “transcluded” from other documents. And what about readers having conversations inside the book, or across books? Is that covered by “read in a networked environment”? — the book in a peer-to-peer ecology? Also, I’d want to add that a networked book is not a static object but something that evolves over time. Not an intersection of atoms, but an intersection of intentions. All right, so this is a little complicated.
It’s also possible that defining the networked book as a new species within the genus “book” sows the seeds of its own eventual obsolescence, bound, as we may well be, toward a post-book future. But that strikes me as too deterministic. As Dan rightly observed in his recent post on learning to read Wikipedia, the history of media (or anything for that matter) is rarely a direct line of succession — of this replacing that, and so on. As with the evolution of biological life, things tend to mutate and split into parallel trajectories. The book as the principal mode of discourse and cultural ideal of intellectual achievement may indeed be headed for gradual decline, but we believe the network has the potential to keep it in play far longer than the techno-determinists might think.
But enough with the theory and on to the practice. To further this discussion, I’ve compiled a quick-and-dirty list of projects currently out in the wild that seem to be reasonable candidates for networked bookdom. The list is intentionally small and ridden with gaps, the point being not to create a comprehensive catalogue, but to get a conversation going and collect other examples (submitted by you) of networked books, real or imaginary.
* * * * *
Everyone here at the institute agrees that Wikipedia is a networked book par excellence. A vast, interwoven compendium of popular knowledge, never fixed, always changing, recording within its bounds each and every stage of its growth and all the discussions of its collaborative producers. Linked outward to the web in millions of directions and highly visible on all the popular search indexes, Wikipedia is a city-like book, or a vast network of shanties. If you consider all its various iterations in 229 different languages it resembles more a pan-global tradition, or something approaching a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it is only five years in the making.
But already we begin to run into problems. Though we are all comfortable with the idea of Wikipedia as a networked book, there is significant discord when it comes to Flickr, MySpace, Live Journal, YouTube and practically every other social software, media-sharing community. Why? Is it simply a bias in favor of the textual? Or because Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia — is more closely identified with an existing genre of book? Is it because Wikipedia seems to have an over-arching vision (free, anyone can edit it, neutral point of view etc.) and something approaching a coherent editorial sensibility (albeit an aggregate one), whereas the other sites just mentioned are simply repositories, ultimately shapeless and filled with come what may? This raises yet more questions. Does a networked book require an editor? A vision? A direction? Coherence? And what about the blogosphere? Or the world wide web itself? Tim O’Reilly recently called the www one enormous ebook, with Google and Yahoo as the infinitely mutable tables of contents.
Ok. So already we’ve opened a pretty big can of worms (Wikipedia tends to have that effect). But before delving further (and hopefully we can really get this going in the comments), I’ll briefly list just a few more experiments.
>>> Code v.2 by Larry Lessig
From the site:
“Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind.
“Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication.”
Recently discussed here, there is the new book by Yochai Benkler, another intellectual property heavyweight:
>>> The Wealth of Networks
Yale University Press has set up a wiki for readers to write collective summaries and commentaries on the book. PDFs of each chapter are available for free. The verdict? A networked book, but not a well executed one. By keeping the wiki and the text separate, the publisher has placed unnecessary obstacles in the reader’s path and diminished the book’s chances of success as an organic online entity.
>>> Our very own GAM3R 7H30RY
On Monday, the institute will launch its most ambitious networked book experiment to date, putting an entire draft of McKenzie Wark’s new book online in a compelling interface designed to gather reader feedback. The book will be matched by a series of free-fire discussion zones, and readers will have the option of syndicating the book over a period of nine weeks.
>>> The afore-mentioned Pulse by Robert Frenay.
Again, definitely a networked book, but frustratingly so. In print, the book is nearly 600 pages long, yet they’ve chosen to serialize it a couple pages at a time. It will take readers until November to make their way through the book in this fashion — clearly not at all the way Frenay crafted it to be read. Plus, some dubious linking made not by the author but by a hired “linkologist” only serves to underscore the superficiality of the effort. A bold experiment in viral marketing, but judging by the near absence of reader activity on the site, not a very contagious one. The lesson I would draw is that a networked book ought to be networked for its own sake, not to bolster a print commodity (though these ends are not necessarily incompatible).
>>> The Quicksilver Wiki (formerly the Metaweb)
A community site devoted to collectively annotating and supplementing Neal Stephenson’s novel “Quicksilver.” Currently at work on over 1,000 articles. The actual novel does not appear to be available on-site.
>>> Finnegans Wiki
A complete version of James Joyce’s demanding masterpiece, the entire text placed in a wiki for reader annotation.
>>> There’s a host of other literary portals, many dating back to the early days of the web: Decameron Web, the William Blake Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive, the Rossetti Archive, and countless others (fill in this list and tell us what you think).
Lastly, here’s a list of book blogs — not blogs about books in general, but blogs devoted to the writing and/or discussion of a particular book, by that book’s author. These may not be networked books in themselves, but they merit study as a new mode of writing within the network. The interesting thing is that these sites are designed to gather material, generate discussion, and build a community of readers around an eventual book. But in so doing, they gently undermine the conventional notion of the book as a crystallized object and begin to reinvent it as an ongoing process: an evolving artifact at the center of a conversation.
Here are some I’ve come across (please supplement). Interestingly, three of these are by current or former editors of Wired. At this point, they tend to be about techie subjects:
>>> An exception is Without Gods: Toward a History of Disbelief by Mitchell Stephens (another institute project).
“The blog I am writing here, with the connivance of The Institute for the Future of the Book, is an experiment. Our thought is that my book on the history of atheism (eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf) will benefit from an online discussion as the book is being written. Our hope is that the conversation will be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered; that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue. And we have an additional thought: that the web might realize some smidgen of benefit through the airing of this process.”
>>> Searchblog
John Battelle’s daily thoughts on the business and technology of web search, originally set up as a research tool for his now-published book on Google, The Search.
>>> The Long Tail
Similar concept, “a public diary on the way to a book” chronicling “the shift from mass markets to millions of niches.” By current Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
>>> Darknet
JD Lasica’s blog on his book about Hollywood’s war against amateur digital filmmakers.
>>> The Technium
Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly is working through ideas for a book:
“As I write I will post here. The purpose of this site is to turn my posts into a conversation. I will be uploading my half-thoughts, notes, self-arguments, early drafts and responses to others’ postings as a way for me to figure out what I actually think.”
>>> End of Cyberspace by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Pang has some interesting thoughts on blogs as research tools:
“This begins to move you to a model of scholarly performance in which the value resides not exclusively in the finished, published work, but is distributed across a number of usually non-competitive media. If I ever do publish a book on the end of cyberspace, I seriously doubt that anyone who’s encountered the blog will think, “Well, I can read the notes, I don’t need to read the book.” The final product is more like the last chapter of a mystery. You want to know how it comes out.
“It could ultimately point to a somewhat different model for both doing and evaluating scholarship: one that depends a little less on peer-reviewed papers and monographs, and more upon your ability to develop and maintain a piece of intellectual territory, and attract others to it– to build an interested, thoughtful audience.”
* * * * *
This turned out much longer than I’d intended, and yet there’s a lot left to discuss. One question worth mulling over is whether the networked book is really a new idea at all. Don’t all books exist over time within social networks, “linked” to countless other texts? What about the Talmud, the Jewish compendium of law and exigesis where core texts are surrounded on the page by layers of commentary? Is this a networked book? Or could something as prosaic as a phone book chained to a phone booth be considered a networked book?
In our discussions, we have focused overwhelmingly on electronic books within digital networks because we are convinced that this is a major direction in which the book is (or should be) heading. But this is not to imply that the networked book is born in a vacuum. Naturally, it exists in a continuum. And just as our concept of the analog was not fully formed until we had the digital to hold it up against, perhaps our idea of the book contains some as yet undiscovered dimensions that will be revealed by investigating the networked book.
“Does a networked book require an editor? A vision? A direction? Coherence?”
I’m reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism: “The age of writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”
To imagine a networked book might also mean reimagining the metaphor of the book – one from pages and chapters to one of the various items which comprise networks: ideas, moments, anecdotes, facts, speculations, writings, images, points, breakages, links, etc. all bound by a system which is comprised of hubs and connections, not chapters, encyclopedic entries, indexes, or other “book” related elements. Drupal, for instance, is a nice, powerful piece of software. But it is still bound by a book metaphor – chapters – and one can quickly see the limits of the metaphor.
although i’m not his biggest fan —
he’ll tell you i take him on regularly
— it is a huge omission here to forget
joe esposito and his “processed book”.
not only did he already write up the idea,
he went and had software created for it,
and put up a number of sample books…
> http://www.prosaix.com/pbos/links.php
> http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/esposito/
as for “pulse”, you say this:
> A bold experiment in viral marketing, but
> judging by the near absence of reader activity
> on the site, not a very contagious one.
i believe, as i’ve said before, this is likely to be
the fate of many networked books, especially as
the audience is diffused over an ever-increasing
number of such books vying for reader attention.
(in the same saturated space, i will add, as blogs.)
in the parlance, this idea won’t scale.
consider if:book itself. you have a group-blog that
is putting out some tremendously astute thought,
on an ongoing basis, but draw very few comments.
should that detract from your achievement? no sir.
i suggest again that most authors should be happy
that their books are _read_, even when those books
do not also spark a vigorous discussion by readers…
that’s not as “sexy” as a collaborative exercise, but
i don’t think it should be considered less important.
books have a glorious history as a vehicle for ideas,
and to extend that now with the omnipresence and
instantaneous nature of cyberspace will be awesome,
whether or not those ideas lead to visible vibrancy of
immediate results; ideas don’t always work that way.
of course, when a networked book _does_ take off,
the newness of the phenomenon will be exhilarating,
with its synergistic effects of zeitgeist and critical mass,
and i don’t mean to detract from the importance of that.
but since that will likely be the rare exception rather than
a common experience, i think we should resist an impulse
to make “the networked book” our new _expectation_…
the unique ability of cyberspace to nurture collaboration
is truly one of its most fascinating aspects, in my opinion,
but i think it will emerge naturally, without us forcing it.
let’s _enable_ it, yes, but not set up a situation where a
“failure” to obtain it comes to be seen as some liability…
having said all that, i am following your experiments
and the building of your tool-set with great curiosity…
-bowerbird
I’m interested by a lot of things about this, but what immediately jumped to mind on reading this (and Jeff’s comment) was the literary concept of poetic unities, set off by Aristotle’s Poetics, which talks about unity of plot, where I got caught up in his discussion of the proper scale of a drama:
(tranlated from the Greek by S. H. Butcher, from the Internet Classics Archive, which might be a broken networked book.) Aristotle’s talking about the aesthetic value of plots here, but his comments on scale and sensibility might be applied to to how we understand books by extension. A reasonable plot, says Aristotle, is something that can reasonably be compared to an organism. This isn’t dissimilar from the way we’ve been talking about networked books: Ben uses the word “organic” as a positive attribute, and suggests that networked books should evolve.
(Aristotle couldn’t possibly have known that organisms were composed of cells: even a small animal is composed of millions and millions of cells. We can’t possibly imagine a billion cells or so, each doing their own job— that might as well be Aristotle’s animal that’s a thousand miles long. But: we can very easily imagine a puppy that contains those billion cells. Likewise: if Aristotle had had Google Maps, he could have looked at his thousand-mile long animal from above and seen an animal.)
We can conceive of the Wikipedia as a “book” because it’s an encyclopaedia, and we know that encyclopaediae are books. I don’t know how many volumes the Wikipedia would take up if you printed it out and bound them, but I suspect that if you included all of its translations, it would be closer in size to a small library than to a print encyclopaedia. We have trouble thinking of the Internet as a “book” because we have nothing with which we can compare it.
David Small created The Talmud Project in 2000 and it showed at the Cooper Hewitt in New York. With multiple displays of text and innovative navigation, it took this early analog networked book and made it digital.
It’s so perfectly apropos that I ran across you guys when I did. Of late, I’ve been having trouble reading – I can’t concentrate on the text when I’m surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a networked life, and yet I’m increasingly frustrated by the book’s inability to afford me those things hypermedia does so very easily.
On top of this, I’ve become all but unable to think of the objects around me except in terms of Actor-Network theory, as sort of depositions or instantiations of a great deal of matter, energy and information moving through the world. And of course, a book is nothing but a snapshot in that regard; you have to do a lot of extra work if you want to prise out and examine the flows it is a part of, or even those it has set up.
So in both senses, I think the time is ripe for some new literary technology. My only surprise is that the first things that come to my mind in this regard are so retrograde – the ideas have a musty and by no means entirely unpleasant odor of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson to them. So I’m really, really looking forward to see what you come up with here.
You should also know that you’ve inspired me to write “The city is here for you to use” as a networked book…whatever that turns out to mean.
I think a real networked book will allow some way to reference any section of it. A HREF for each page/paragraph. That way a discussion in hyperspace should be able to quote text and the quote would be the link to the original context.
This is related to annotations, but is a stand-alone issue as well.
In fact, if each section were treated as a target for comment/trackback, it might be interesting to visualise the book as clusters of discussions with color intensity indicating the number of references to the particular section.
Thanks for posting such a detailed survey of what’s happening with networked books. These are exciting times. I’m always struck by the way conceptualizations or what Jeff calls metaphors enable us to move forward. The familiar, e.g., encyclopedia, book, map seem to be necessary or at least helpful organizers at this stage in the process, but who is to say what might eventually replace them in, as you say, an evolving manner. One experiment might be to take the twin conceptions set up in the notion of the networked book and lay a kind of sliding scale over them. Perhaps “network” is the new metaphor and including “book” in the construction represents our carrying forward the familiar scaffolding we need to work. Slide the scale back toward the book and reap the benefits of stability, stand-aloneness (yes, there are benefits, I think), predictability; slide toward the network and try mutability, intervocality, multimodality. At some point we may be able to slide things all the way toward network and the book will no longer be part of the construction, though this is not something I’m pushing.
This makes me think of another example to throw into the mix–Second Life. I have not participated in Second Life, but have thought about it some and can easily imagine reading it as a book.
Another old idea about unity: a couple weeks ago, I came across this bit about architecture, architects, and urban planning in Descartes’s Discourse on Method, which can be usefully applied to thinking about whether non-hierarchical groups can create networked books:
(beginning of Discourse 2, pp. 35-36 in the translation of F. E. Sutcliffe.) This idea has become commonplace: you can’t get good design out of a committee. But the network seems set on contradicting this: famously, ideas about architecture will be reconceptualized and applied to the world of software and the network by Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral & The Bazaar. But Descartes’s insistence of the value of authorial unity had already been contradicted by Bernard Rudofsky in Architecture without Architects, a 1964 book (based on a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). As the title suggested, Rudofsky’s work documented architectural works that had been produced by amateurs and groups rather than trained architects; he found these works to be coherent and beautiful, despite their lack of unity that Descartes desires.
I know next to nothing about architectural history, but I suspect that it might be a good place to go looking for ideas about how to think about networked books–.–.–.
I’ve often wondered if urban planning as a practice has viable applications in the virtual networked space. Architecture is a highly regarded font of ideas for creators of digital space/interfaces. We’ve got that most aspirational of titles: Information Architect. But we also have a practice formed out of an architect’s theory: Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language.” From his website:
The book had a lot of traction in the web world five to ten years ago, though it’s impact had been long established in the world of programming.
What I’d like to do is get a hold of Jane Jacobs book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and compare the early theorists of web space to the doyenne of urban planning, and see what shakes out. Anybody done this yet?
It is useful, as Dan and Jesse point out, to acknowledge the networked book as emblematic of an emergent “way of thinking” rather than simply a form arising out of new tools or technologies. I would look to science’s three biggies: Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s theories of relativity, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious as conceptual groundwork for the networked book. There are interesting parallels. The nbook is constantly evolving. The nbook is not to be read as finite and linear but as relative to a network. Finally, the nbook’s real fuel comes from social networking sites. It can be thought of as an expression of the human engine in all of its conscious and unconscious, ID and Superego glory.
Sorry to post two comments back-to-back, but I had a few more thoughts that I’d like to add to the stream. It’s probably a chicken/egg question about which comes first the tools and technology or the forms and behaviors. But let’s imagine for a moment that we have been moving toward the “idea” of a networked book for a long time. Theories and concepts already discussed in this comment stream may attest to this. So I’m just going to riff for a moment on the networked book as a way of thinking.
Bare with me, I’ve got an anecdote. …Last week, I was walking past an extraordinary garden on my way to work. Everything was in bloom and the sun was sliding in at a low angle, lighting up the flowers from underneath. I wanted to take a picture, but I wasn’t carrying my camera. So I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if someone invented a contact lens that would allow me to blink and take a picture of whatever I am looking at? The picture would be sent to my wireless device (laptop/cellphone) and I would have the freedom to document my experience whenever I felt like it. I think the feeling behind networked books is similar to the contact-lens camera sensibility. That is, we are beginning to want and need “books” that can mediate the spontaneous, non-linear, hyper-networked chaos of organic life and the non-linear, hyper-networked chaos of the information age. I need the network of my real life (walking in the garden) to interface seamlessly with the networks of my online work life.
Just to go back in time for a moment to the Gates Memory Project. We conducted that experiment on the threshold of the social networking explosion. Flickr, My Space, You Tube and others, are marvelous testimonies to our desire and drive to document experience, but these repositories were designed for individual users to post and share content. What happens when we try to represent the big picture? How can the content in these repositories be organized into a “book” that tells the story of the group’s experience? The Gates Memory project brought up the question of knowledge production in the networked age. Massive amounts of documented experience are appearing on the web, but how are these documents mediated? How are they transformed into knowledge? The problem for authors and readers of networked books is more editorial than authorial. This is something Bob understood instinctively. When we were trying to decide how to present the archives, he also understood that the editorial task should not be left to a single authority. We imagined ways of allowing multiple editors to curate the archives. So the community creates content, edits/curates content and then must organize the curated collections, thereby creating more collections, and so on to infinity. Healthy networks produce new networks, unhealthy ones lay fallow. The problem for those of us used to linear books is that there is never a final word. There is death or dormancy, or there is life and growth.
The problem really becomes how to navigate these pathways and remain open to the constant flow of information. The networked book grows in a way that the linear book cannot. If you consider all the links as “parts” of the book, then one connection can double or triple its size, posing a huge challenge for the reader.
It also might be useful to distinguish between digital archives or repositories and “networked books.” Is Flickr just a repository with a front-end? Is the UI the book? Or is it just a gigantic collection of individual photoessays?
Kim,
both of your posts are wonderful. keep going.
i do feel a pang of honesty coming on though and need to own up to the fact that while i may have instinctively understood the need/desire for powerful editorial tools vis a vis the gatesmemory project, that it was you and Ben who argued most strongly for the power of the network. one of the things i liked best about working with you, ben and dan last year was the constant tension between my old-school tendencies to rely on the value of the solitary editor (or even author) and your conviction of the additive value of multiple voice on the network. i’ve come around of course to your way of seeing things, but hopefully have brought some of what’s good about the “old book” world with me.
Think of the “book” as the data container, whether it’s a tablet, a scroll, a codex, or files on a server.
The UI is the way you access that data–whether it’s the spine, the table of contents, the index, the page numbers, or things that may be clicked, touched, dragged or triggered by voice or movement.
I’d argue that text is itself a network, with or without cables or radio signals. Think about canon tables in text or image, as well, of course, as the Torah or any other heavily glossed text. Even the function of literary allusions to other texts within a given text creates a network of ideas within the user/reader, and the community of users/readers.
yes, of course all books or texts occur in the context of a social network. the networked book is a “new thing” because the connections between works and between readers and readers and author come from the background to the foreground. also the networked book changes over time as it adapts to feedback.
Bob, so nice what you say. The way I remember it, you were interested in crafting an uber-story from the archives and you wanted to do so by allowing a select group of editor/curators to tag and group the photos. Ben and I were curious about how to organize the groupthink using software and information visualization. I think we had cooked up some game-like scenario where six thousand photos were arranged on a grid and visitors had to click and view them to keep them alive. If the picture went un-looked-at for long enough it would fade and die These were fun ideas, but not necessarily books. I think the aspect of the old book that will persist is the impulse to tell a story and to say something very specific to an audience. The Flickr users were passionate enough about the Gates to upload their photos, and to tell their own stories on their blogs, but it takes a much different set of skills and talents to cull a larger narrative from these individual experiences.
In response to Lisa’s comment: while linear books do create networks of responses, glosses and allusions, they are still fixed objects that don’t change. The Torah might have commentary affixed to it, but its core text has remained the same for millenia. Indeed, this very steadfastness is the source of its authority. The networked book, by contrast, has no fixed center. It undergoes constant change and is vulnerable to graffitii, link rot and erasure. It poses a new challenge for archivists and scholars because its iterations are perpetual.
oh good, lisa’s here! i like lisa… :+)
kim said:
> I think the aspect of the old book that will persist
> is the impulse to tell a story and
> to say something very specific to an audience.
i agree. and i think that — to some extent anyway —
that story has to become “fixed” at some point in time.
if the base is ever-shifting, how can it be built upon?
the story that comes _after_ the story, however,
might well continue to grow and grow forever…
take “catch-22” as an example. what a great book!
the story itself doesn’t need to be “improved” by
interaction with its audience. but the story _after_
the story, the tracking of effects as they propagate,
especially in conjunction with surrounding effects,
well that could be an awesome and amazing study…
-bowerbird
All texts are in flux. The question is when and where and how often they are fixed, and then, for how long they remain fixed before a new layer is added or a new version rendered. Oral culture had all sorts of tricks for fixing texts in the mind. Modular units of text that were easier to memorize, tropes and epithets that could be easily plugged in at impromptu junctures (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea”). Writing got rid of the mental taxation required for the transmission of texts, opening the door for more complex forms of argumentation and new kinds of literature. Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan and others have argued that this fundamentally reshaped the cognitive makeup of humans, as did the invention of the printing press. We may be going through an equivalent cognitive reordering now. As Jeff said in the first comment in this thread, quoting McLuhan: “The age of writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”
We have numerous artifacts from the days of orality, but they are like fossils of once living things — screenshots of a flow. Without minds and ears as attuned as those of preliterate peoples, we have little hope of carrying these epics through time in the way they were originally transmitted. So we nail them down into stable forms. Like salting meat for a long sea voyage. To an ancient Greek, how alien would the Fagles version of the Iliad, published in paperback by Penguin seem? (Leaving aside the fact that it’s in English) would it bear any relation to the version they had heard sung the night before, when their ears lapped up poetry like water, the words existing only because vocalized? What does this block of dried, dye-stained pulp tell him about anything living? About as much as one of Prelinger’s Internet Archive servers, unearthed from the rubble of San Francisco a thousand years from now, would tell some post-digital human about the pulsing networks of exchange that were the everyday experience of the world wide web.
I see we came back to Jewish scripture and rabbinic writings. It’s undoubtedly among the richest examples of a multi-layered textual tradition, and arguably the first hypertext system. It also shows us a pretty ingenious way of creating flow in a static corpus. The Talmud displays layers of commentary like the rings of a tree. At the center is the Mishnah, the redaction of orally delivered law (flow into fixture), beneath it the Gemara, the first phase of commentary and explication by early post-temple rabbis. Then comes, in a slender column to the right, the commentary of Rashi, the great medieval French rabbi. Then, cupping the central texts on the left, is a column of commentary from Rashi’s disciples. To the left of that, the commentary of a renowned Tunisian rabbi, Nissim ben Jacob. Other later scholars, ranging up to the 19th century, fill in the nooks and crannies that remain (there’s a good illustration of this here).
I love how the columns of text represent people, the major respondents having earned their place in close proximity to the core texts. Rashi’s column is like a body, or a long beard, lain alongside the Mishnah. It’s a physical embrace. Compared with this, present-day textual representation on the web is still painfully primitive. How can we represent the voices and even the physical presence of a networked book’s participants? Wikipedians would do well to ponder Talmudic page design.
Kim said: “The problem for authors and readers of networked books is more editorial than authorial.” The Talmud poses a similar problem: how to make a usable compendium that registers multiple layers of development over time and clearly explains the relationships between the layers in the visual organization of the page? The Talmud may be composed of stills, but if you know how to read it, it is full of motion. Masters engage with other masters, meanings are prised apart and debated tirelessly through time. It’s a map of a huge conversation.
So it seems one kind of networked book, conceptually derived from the Talmud and other textual traditions, is the nesting of an artifact or series of artifacts in a living web of discourse. For that web to be coherent and powerful, new editorial and design strategies must be conceived.
Another kind of networked book is the creation of structures in which free flow can take place. Here we come back to books built out of shifting databases and social software platforms like the Gates Memory Project. I think the questions Dan, Jesse and others raised earlier of architecture and urban planning are on the right track here. A networked book may not have a fixed core, but it ought to have some structure that will guide or lend meaning to the flow. That’s what distinguishes it from being just a bunch of disparate web pages — a pile of disconnected images of Christo’s Gates. There are, after all, great virtues in stability. Those rocks in the stream that we can step across. I’m interested in seeing how various time signatures can operate within a single book — a sliding scale from fixed to flux.
Take New York. Its street grid has been fairly stable over the past century and a half, yet the buildings on that grid have been continually razed and built over. And through each of those buildings and neighborhoods has flowed, quicker than the demolition-construction cycle, an ever-changing stream of human characters. And through each of these characters an even quicker stream of thoughts and attitudes toward the city around them. And all of it, when sensed by the murky, ageless intelligence of the Hudson River, in the blink of an eye.
To try to sum up this overlong comment, the networked book seems to be about a partial return to the flow of orality, but carrying of some of the structure and fixity of writing with us. This new negotiation between flow and fixity will be the challenge of not just a new kind of author and a new kind of reader, but a new kind of editor and a new kind of architect.
It might be important to remember that, as Adrian Johns argues, the fixity and authority of texts were notions put forward by early modern printers in an effort to outdo each other in the book market. They used these constructs to negotiate their own positions in society, and we should not mistake their claims for fact.
The issue of what should be preserved given the fluidity of text is a tricky matter. Whether a text appears in a manuscript, printed book, or “networked book” (I take issue with this term, but that’s another conversation), it is a question of which layers/versions to privilege, as Ben rightly points out. As so many studies in the history of the book have shown, texts have multiple iterations in all sorts of forms, each instantiation unique and valuable in its own right. Obviously, not every single instance can be preserved, and to that extent, we will have an incomplete picture. So, too, will be the case with your networked book. Which momentary pause do you wish to preserve?
bonnie said:
> it is a question of which layers/versions to privilege
and that, i’d submit, is a decision that should
(can only?) be made by the teller of the story…
-bowerbird
I think the decision will be made by the teller of the story only if he/she is also the architect of the space in which the story is told. When you participate in communal spaces (such as this blog) the landlord (and his/her various robotic, spam-eliminating henchmen) decide who gets to maintain residence and who will be edited.
I like Ben’s image of the networked book as an ever-changing city grid because it suggests that the nbook is a space you visit rather than a thing you read. The idea of a book as a complete and durable object that must be preserved, will not map over onto networked books.
Preservation, I think, has more to do with a human urge than with the characteristics of the objects themselves. Books don’t have to be preserved, and yet they frequently are – not because of the nature of their construction, but because of human nature.
Throughout history, there have been instances in which authors, artists, and performers wished their work to be understood as transient and ephemeral. But in many of these cases, we still attempt to document and preserve something of their repertoire. A recent example that comes to mind is the Tibetan sand mandala that has been on tour throughout the U.S. and Canada. The sand painting is meant to be destroyed after its completion to suggest the impermanence of life, but we can find it preserved in various ways by various people (e.g., here, here, or here). Thus, the sand mandala becomes a part of the work of these new authors and storytellers.
Whether the authors or landlords of nbooks want their spaces preserved is one thing. Foucault and Barthes would probably argue that the intentions of the authors are not, in the end, of importance in the broader span of history. Returning to my first point about preservation being a human urge, no matter what was intended in and for the nbook, some part or version of it will be saved by someone. This, too, can be a dynamic element of its story and social history.
Bonnie said: Preservation, I think, has more to do with a human urge than with the characteristics of the objects themselves.
I agree with that completely! I didn’t quite connect up my two thoughts in that brief comment, so let me give it another try. Ben’s NYC metaphor got me thinking about nbook preservationists as archeologists digging through an enormous pile of detritus to recover shards and fragments. Which, even when painstakingly reconstructed, will have considerable gaps and holes that will leave much to the imagination. I should have said: the expectation of a book as a complete text that can be preserved, more or less intact, for hundreds of years, will not map over to networked books.
kim said:
> the nbook is a space you visit
> rather than a thing you read
i thought we decided we no longer “visit”
cyberspace, as we live here all the time.
oh no, i’m getting all my futures mixed up! :+)
anyway, what its creators (and fans) are
doing with the t.v. show “lost” seems more
how you are describing “a networked book”
than any _book_ out there…
-bowerbird
if:book in library journal (and kevin kelly in n.y. times)
The Institute is on the cover of Library Journal this week! A big article called “The Social Life of Books,” which gives a good overview of the intersecting ideas and concerns that we mull over here daily. It all…
Preservation, I think, has more to do with a human urge than with the characteristics of the objects themselves.
I think you’re right, Bonnie, but that doesn’t mean that we have to let go of all desires to reproduce or extend the pleasures of the literary object in the nbook (as opposed to representing them), does it?
I think we’d all agree that, more than occasionally, objects have pedigrees or provenances that wind up informing the experience of use significantly, and in resonant and meaningful ways. A Speed Graphic camera that was once owned by Weegee probably means something different to the person using it than one bought at random off Ebay. So while preservation qua material lockdown may fall by the wayside, I see no reason to dispense with the notion that an object might contain a history of its use.
About Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Rudofsky, their ideas, and the use and misuse of those ideas in the hands of digital designers and information architects…I literally have a book’s worth of things to say about this, and this thread probably isn’t the place to drop it. I am encouraged, though, that there’s apparently some healthy interest in what I had imagined a fairly arcane topic.
My book is going to be about a Veteran, who was declared dead for no reason and no proof, by our Government.He has fighting this issure since 1994. He is good enough to fight for country and get wounded, but he is not good enough to meet with his Congresswoman here in Washington, DC where he now live. Please go to http://www.mistreatedvets.com and http://www.forgottenvets.com and see for yourself. 202-232-2133 John Evans
bonnie said:
> it is a question of which layers/versions to privilege
and that, i’d submit, is a decision that should
(can only?) be made by the teller of the story…
-bowerbird
kim said:
> the nbook is a space you visit
> rather than a thing you read
i thought we decided we no longer “visit”
cyberspace, as we live here all the time.
oh no, i’m getting all my futures mixed up! :+)
anyway, what its creators (and fans) are
doing with the t.v. show “lost” seems more
how you are describing “a networked book”
than any _book_ out there…
Bonnie said: Preservation, I think, has more to do with a human urge than with the characteristics of the objects themselves.
I agree with that completely! I didn’t quite connect up my two thoughts in that brief comment, so let me give it another try. Ben’s NYC metaphor got me thinking about nbook preservationists as archeologists digging through an enormous pile of detritus to recover shards and fragments. Which, even when painstakingly reconstructed, will have considerable gaps and holes that will leave much to the imagination. I should have said: the expectation of a book as a complete text that can be preserved, more or less intact, for hundreds of years, will not map over to networked books.