Category Archives: Transliteracies

the blog as a record of reading

An excellent essay in last month’s Common-Place, “Blogging in the Early Republic” by W. Caleb McDaniel, examines the historical antecedents of the present blogging craze, looking not to the usual suspects – world shakers like Martin Luther and Thomas Paine – but to an obscure 19th century abolitionist named Henry Clarke Wright. Wright was a prolific writer and tireless lecturer on a variety of liberal causes. He was also “an inveterate journal keeper,” filling over a hundred diaries through the course of his life. And on top of that, he was an avid reader, the diaries serving as a record of his voluminous consumption. McDaniel writes:
old men reading.jpg

While private, the journals were also public. Wright mailed pages and even whole volumes to his friends or read them excerpts from the diaries, and many pages were later published in his numerous books. Thus, as his biographer Lewis Perry notes, in the case of Wright, “distinctions between private and public, between diaries and published writings, meant little.”

Wright’s journaling habit is interesting not for any noticeable impact it had on the politics or public discourse of his day; nor (at least for our purposes) for anything particularly memorable he may have written. Nor is it interesting for the fact that he was an active journal-keeper, since the practice was widespread in his time. Wright’s case is worth revisiting because it is typical — typical not just of his time, but of ours. It tells a strikingly familiar story: the story of a reader awash in a flood of information.
Wright, in his lifetime, experienced an incredible proliferation of printed materials, especially newspapers. The print revolution begun in Germany 400 years before had suddenly gone into overdrive.

The growth of the empire of newspapers had two related effects on the practices of American readers. First, the new surplus of print meant that there was more to read. Whereas readers in the colonial period had been intensive readers of selected texts like the Bible and devotional literature, by 1850 they were extensive readers, who could browse and choose from a staggering array of reading choices. Second, the shift from deference to democratization encouraged individual readers to indulge their own preferences for particular kinds of reading, preferences that were exploited and targeted by antebellum publishers. In short, readers had more printed materials to choose from, more freedom to choose, and more printed materials that were tailored to their choices.

Wright’s journaling was his way of metabolizing this deluge of print, and his story draws attention to a key aspect of blogging that is often overshadowed by the more popular narrative – that of the latter-day pamphleteer, the lone political blogger chipping away at mainstream media hegemony. The fact is that most blogs are not political. The star pundits that have risen to prominence in recent years are by no means representative of the world’s roughly 15 million bloggers. Yet there is one crucial characteristic that is shared by all of them – by the knitting bloggers, the dog bloggers, the macrobiotic cooking bloggers, along with the Instapundits and Daily Koses: they are all records of reading.
The blog provides a means of processing and selecting from an overwhelming abundance of written matter, and of publishing that record, with commentary, for anyone who cares to read it. In some cases, these “readings” become influential in themselves, and multiple readers engage in conversations across blogs. But treating blogging first as a reading practice, and second as its own genre of writing, political or otherwise, is useful in forming a more complete picture of this new/old phenomenon. To be sure, today’s abundance makes the surge in 18th century printing look like a light sprinkle. But the fundamental problem for readers is no different. Fortunately, blogs provide us with that much more power to record and annotate our readings in a way that can be shared with others. We return to Bob’s observation that something profound is happening to our media consumption patterns.
As McDaniel puts it:

…readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much–perhaps more–than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s words, it is the need “to see more of what is going on around me.” And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.

(image: “old men reading” by nobody, via Flickr)

how the web changes your reading habits

An article in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor looks at two research projects currently underway in Palo Alto, California – one at Xerox PARC, the other at Stanford. Both are building tools and devising methods to improve online reading, albeit by different approaches. The PARC project is developing ScentHighlights, an “enhanced skimming” function based on keywords and the associative processes of the human brain. On paper, we highlight important passages, or attach sticky notes, to make them more readily retrievable later on when we’re re-reading, studying, or compiling notes. The PARC researchers are taking this a few steps further, exploiting the unique properties (and addressing the unique challenges) of the online reading environment. With ScentHighlights, the computer observes what the reader is highlighting and selects other passages that it thinks might be relevant or useful:

We perform the conceptual highlighting by computing what conceptual keywords are related to each other via word co-occurrence and spreading activation. Spreading activation is a cognitive model developed in psychology to simulate how memory chunks and conceptual items are retrieved in our brain.

While the PARC team is focused on deepening the often fractured experience of reading online, where the amount of text is overwhelming, the Stanford project is experimenting with a method for sustained reading in an environment that can barely handle text at all: the tiny screens of cell phones and mobile devices. Using a technique called RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), BuddyBuzz flashes words on the screen one at a time. It takes some getting used to, but apparently, readers can absorb up to 1,000 words per minute. Speed is adjustable, and the program is already set to make the tiny, natural pauses that come at commas and periods. The initial release of BuddyBuzz will syndicate stories from Reuters, CNET and a handful of popular blogs.

transliteracies: the politics of online reading

Warren Sack presented two interesting diagrams yesterday at Transliteracies. The first was a map of how political conversations happen in newsgroups:

a map of a conversation in a political newsgroup

The work is that of John Kelly, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith; it shows conversations on the newsgroup alt.politics.bush. Blue dots are left-leaning participants in the newsgroup; red dots are right-leaning participants. Lines between dots show a conversation. Here, it’s clear that a conversation is predominantly taking place across the political lines: people are arguing with each other.

The second is a map of how conversations (represented by links) happen on political blogs in the United States:

a map of the political blogosphere

This is the work of Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance and it shows connections between political blogs. Blue dots are leftist blogs; red dots are rightist blogs. One notes here that the left-leaning blogs and right-leaning blogs tend to link to themselves, not across the political divide. People are reinforcing their own beliefs.

Obviously, it’s a stretch to claim that American politics became more polarized and civics died a death because internet conversations moved from newsgroups to blogs. But it’s clear from these diagrams that the way in which different forms of online reading take place (and the communities that are formed by this online reading) has political ramifications of which we need to be conscious.

serendipity

the pinpoint accuracy of computer-searches, leaves those of us lucky enough to have spent time in library stacks, nostalgic for the unexpected discovery of something we didn’t know we were looking for but which just happened, serendipitously, to be on a nearby shelf. George Legrady, artist and prof at UC Santa Barbara, just showed a project he is working on for the new public library in Seattle that gave the first glimpse of serendipity in online library searching which lets you see all the books that have recently been checked out on a particular subject. Beautiful and Exciting.

blog reading: what’s left behind

The basement of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge sells used books. There’s an enormous market for used books in Cambridge, and anything interesting that winds up there tends to be immediately snapped up. The past few times I’ve gone to look at the fiction shelves, I’ve been struck by a big color-coded section in the middle that doesn’t change – a dozen or so books from Jerry Jenkins &Tim LaHaye’s phenomenally popular Left Behind series, a shotgun wedding of Tom Clancy and the Book of Revelation carried out over thirteen volumes (so far). About half the books on the shelf are the first volume. None of them look like they’ve been read. They’re quite cheap.

Since the books started coming out (in 1996), there’s been an almost complete absence of discussion of the books in the mainstream media, save the occasional outburst about this lack of discussion (“These books have sold 60,000,000 copies! And nobody we know reads them!”). I suspect my attitude towards the books is similar to that of many blue-state readers: we know these books are enormously popular in the middle of the country, and it’s clearly our cultural/political duty to find out why . . . but flipping through the first one in the basement of the Harvard Bookstore, I’m stricken by the wooden prose. I can’t read this. Also, there’s the matter of time: I still haven’t finished Proust. The same sort of thing seems to happen to other civic-minded would-be readers.

And then, on the Internet, Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist gallops in to save the day. For the past year and a half, Mr. Clark has been engaged in a close reading of the series, explicating the text and the issues it raises in an increasingly fundamentalist America. This project isn’t a full-time project; his blog has other commentary, but once a week, he stops to analyze a few pages of Left Behind. It helps that Mr. Clark is a fine writer; his commentary is funny, personal – recollections from a Christian childhood pop up from time to time – and he has enough of a theological background to elucidate telling details and the history behind Jenkins & LaHaye’s particular brand of end-times fever.

It’s an admirable project as well because of the shear magnitude of it. In his first year and a half, he’s made it through 105 pages, working at the rate of roughly six days a page. By my calculations, it will take him eighty more years to finish the 4900 pages of the series, though additional prequels have been declared, which will take the total up somewhere over a century. Lengthwise, he seems to be running about neck-and-neck, though it’s hard to tell on the screen. This can’t help but remind one of “On Exactitude in Science“, the parable by Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares about the map that became the size of the territory it set out to survey. And of course, when a map gets this big, you’re going to have issues with organization.

How do we start reading something like this? I was forwarded a link to the blog itself – http://slacktivist.typepad.com – and found the top entry dealing with Left Behind. Not all of Slacktivist deals with Left Behind – but enough of it does that Mr. Clark has made a separate category for it, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind. Clicking on that gets you a single page with all of the Left Behind posts, from newest to oldest. Being interested (and a fast reader) I decided to read the whole thing. To do this, you have to start at the bottom, scroll down a little bit (these are long posts), and then scroll up to get to the next chronological post. This does become, at length, tiring.

One point that’s important to remember here: the Left Behind component of Slacktivist differs from the majority of blogs in that its information is not especially time-sensitive. While there are references to ongoing current events (the Iraq war, for example, not without relevance to the text under discussion), these references don’t need to be read in real time. A reader could start reading his close reading at any time without much loss. (Granted, there is the question of relevance: it would be nice if in ten years nobody remembered Left Behind, but that probably won’t be the case: Clark points out Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth from the 1970s as prefiguring the series – and, it’s worth noting, it still sells frighteningly well.)

A further complication for the would-be reader: Mr. Clark’s posts, while they form the spine of his creation, are not the whole of it: his writing has attracted an enormous number of comments from his readers – somewhere over thirty comments for each of his recent posts, occasionally more than sixty. These comments, as you might expect, are all over the place – some are brilliant glosses, some are from confused Left Behind followers who have stumbled in, some declare the confused Left Behind followers to be idiots, and there’s the inevitable comment-spam, scourge of the blog-age. Some have fantastic archived conversations of their own. Some are referenced in later posts by Mr. Clark, and become part of the main text. It’s almost impossible to read all the comments because there are so many of them; it’s hard to tell from the “Comments (33)” link if the thirty-three comments are worth reading. It’s also much more difficult to read the comments chronologically: some older posts are still, a year later, generating comments, becoming weird zombie conversations.

What can be done to make this a more pleasant reading experience? Because blogs keep their entries in a database, it shouldn’t be that hard to make a front end webpage that displays the entries in chronological order. It also wouldn’t be hard to paginate the entries so that Mr. Clark’s more than 50,000 words are in more digestible chunks. I’m not sure what could be done about the comments, though. Seventy-five posts have generated 1738 comments, scattered in time. Here’s a rough diagram of how everything is connected:

This is a graph that I made. It is red and blue. I am sorry that you evidently cannot see it.

The bottom row of blue dots represent Mr. Clark’s posts over time (from earliest to most recent). One post leads linearly to the next. The rows above represent comments: the first red row are comments on the first post (an arrow which leads to the first), which are frequent at first and then tail off. This pattern is followed by all the other comments on posts. Comments tend to influence following comments (although this isn’t necessarily true). But, unless you have eagle-eyed commentators who make sure to click on every comment link every day, different comment streams will probably not be influencing each other over time. The conversation has forked, and will continue forking.

A recent study seems to indicate that the success of a blog (as measured by advertising) is directly related to the feeling of community engendered, in no small part, by the ability to comment and discuss. But that ability to comment and discuss seems to get lost with time. What’s happening here might be an inherent limitation in the form of the blog: while they’re not strictly time-sensitive, they end up being that way. This could perhaps be changed if there were better ways into the archives, or if notifications were sent to the author and commentators on posts as new comments were posted. But: especially when dealing with an enormous volume of comments, as is the case at Slacktivist, the dialogue becomes increasingly asynchronous as time goes on.

We don’t think of physical books as having this problem because we assume that we can’t directly interact with the author and don’t expect to be able to do so. With electronic media, the boundaries are still unclear: we expect more.

the cramped root: worshipping the artifact

A plant in a container grows differently than a plant in open soil. The roots conform to the shape of the pot. Similarly, our very notions of reading, of books, of knowledge classification are defined by the pot in which they grew. The texture of paper, the topography of the library, the entire university system – these were defined by restraints. Physical, economic, etc. And to a significant extent they are artifacts of their times. An example: the act of reading in bed, as Dan mentions, is frequently invoked as the ideal, as the supreme pleasure of reading, something that computers could never match. But this supine, passive reading stance is not pre-ordained. It is in many ways an artifact of the growth of the novel – a grand, fictional creation to be read in leisure settings. Lying down works well. It’s pleasurable. You get lost in rich, immersive worlds. But there are immersive worlds that require a different posture. And there are kinds of reading that are more active.
The computer, too, in its current stage of development, is an artifact of the paper book, the typewriter, and the supercomputer terminal. These define the “pot” in which the computer has grown. And so far, the questions about online “reading” are defined by this cramped root structure. Even though the pot has shattered, we continue to grow as though the walls were there.
Another analogy: the horseless carriage. For years after its invention, the automobile was known as “the horseless carriage.” People could define it only in terms of what had come before. You could say that online reading is the territory of “the horseless book.”

transliteracies: the pleasure of the text

A lurid French poster for the film version of Peyton Place which I have, alas, not seen.Two books on my bookshelf: the first, a Penguin paperback of The Recognitions by William Gaddis, the spine reinforced with tape, almost every one of the 976 pages covered with annotations in several different colors of ink, some pages torn, many dogeared, some obvious coffee stains. It’s a survivor of a misbegotten thesis project. The second, an old copy of Grace Metalious’s soapy Peyton Place which I found on 6th Avenue two years ago & read cover to cover over the course of six delirious hours when I had taken more DayQuil than I should have. It’s a cheap paperback from the late 1950s, and its yellow pages have clearly passed through any number of hands, but they’re almost entirely unmarked. (God only knows why I decided that I needed to read Peyton Place. I can’t recommend it.)

An anguished shepherd painted by Hugo van der Goes, from the Portinari altarplace I think. I used to hate this cover, but not any more.One of the themes that arose in the first session of Transliteracies was that there are several different types of reading. When academics talk about reading, they tend to mean an intensive activity; there’s typically a lot of writing involved. A great deal of reading, however, isn’t anywhere near as intensive: like my copy of Peyton Place, the text escapes unmarked by the pen. When we talk about moving reading from the printed page to the screen, this is an important consideration: the screen needs to accommodate both of these. Why can’t we curl up with an electronic book? has been a persistent question since electronic reading became a possibility, but it misses the important point that we don’t want to curl up with every book we read. We can only curl up with something if we’re reading it – to some degree – passively.

transliteracies begins.. reading is complex

Over the next couple of days, we’ll be posting live from the Transliteracies conference..
The conference kicked off with a rich historical lecture by Adrian Johns, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of The Nature of the Book. Johns examined three revolutionary moments in the development of scientific knowledge – Galileo, Newton, and James Clark Maxwell – and their relationship to the evolving print medium and the social practices of interpretation and transmission that were then developing. Beginning with the iconoclastic moment of Galileo’s theological collision with the Catholic church, moving through Newton and the incipient system of journal production – “philosophical transaction” – in authoritative matrices like the Royal Society, up to Maxwell at Cambridge University, his breakthroughs on electricity and magnetism, and the development of written examinations. The overriding lesson: reading is complex. We should not overestimate the power of the book purely as the “container of meaning.” The surrounding social reading practices, the charismatic human deliverers of certain texts, are no less important. Each book has a sort of periodical system that follows from it – its ideas move through local systems of perusal, reinterpretation and dissemination. It gets continually “re-published” through this human ecology.
Then there is the scientific revolution going on today: information technology and medical information. Medical error – diagnostic and prescriptive – kills thousands each year, largely due to interruptions in information flow. Info tech could create seamless systems that greatly reduce error. But Johns points out that a good half of the systems implemented so far fail to solve the problems. In fact, all of them create new kinds of errors – confusions between the different groups in the massive medical tangle. So here we have a kind of online reading that has been tested in a highly consequential setting. Johns suggests that medical reading is more like literary reading than we think. For instance, physicians and pharmacists read differently. They have differences in training, worldview, sense of self. Seemingly cosmetic features of the text – fonts, color, layout – are of great consequence.

transliteracies: research in the technological, social, & cultural practices of online reading

Bob’s post last week about changing patterns of media consumption kicked off an interesting discussion, one that leads up perfectly to the “Transliteracies” conference we are attending this weekend at UC Santa Barbara.
Alan Liu, director of the Transliteracies project, posted this response, which very elegantly lays out some of the important questions. He’s allowed me to re-post it here..
BEGIN: The relationship between “browsing” and the “sheer volume” of information is complicated. To start with, I think there is much to be gained in complicating our usually uniform concepts of “browsing” (all shallow, fragmented, attention-deficient) and “volume” (“sheer,” as in a towering, monolithic cliff).
We get a sense of the hidden complexity I indicate if we think historically. Below is a passage from Roger Chartier — the leading scholar in the “history of the book” field — that should give us pause about making any quick associations between browsing and today’s information glut:

“Does this reaction toward the end of the [18th] century indicate a consciousness that reading styles had changed, that the elites in western Europe had passed from intensive and reverent reading to a more extensive, nonchalant reading style, and that such a change called for correction? . . . In the older style: (1) Readers had the choice of only a few books, which perpetuated texts of great longevity. (2) Reading was not separated from other cultural activities such as listening to books read aloud time and again in the bosom of the family, the memorization of such texts . . . , or the recitation of texts read aloud and learned by heart. (3) The relation of reader to book was marked by a weighty respect and charged with a strong sense of the sacred character of printed matter. (4) The intense reading and rereading of the same texts shaped minds that were habituated to a particular set of references and inhabited by the same quotations. It was not until the second half of the eighteen century in Germany and the beginning of the nineteenth century in New England that this style of reading yielded to another style, based on the proliferation of accessible books, on the individualization of the act of reading, on its separation from other cultural activities, and on the descralization of the book. Book reading habits became freer, enabling the reader to pass from one text to another and to have a less attentive attitude toward the printed word, which was less concentrated in a few privileged books.” — Roger Chartier, “Urban Reading Practices, 1660-1770,” in his The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 222-24

It’s pretty certain that browsing in the face of sheer volume were deep habits of literacy (specifically, of high print literacy). By contrast, one might ask: who read so intensely and deeply — to instance the extreme — that they only really read one book? There were probably just three classes of such people: the very poor (I remembe r, but can’t find at present, an essay by Chartier about people in the past who owned just one book, which was found on their body after a coach accident in Paris), the extremely pious (who read the Bible), or the “genius” author. (Think of Blake, for example: no matter how many books he read, he really only had one or two books on his mental bookshelf: the Bible and Milton.) By contrast, everyone else browsed.
Mass literacy in the twentieth century, perhaps, may be a phenomenon of browsing. Think of Reader’s Digest. After my family immigrated to the U.S. in my childhood, we were a kind of microcosm of assimilation (into English literacy) in this regard. There were two major investments in books in my household: the Reader’s Digest series of condensed books (a kind of packaged browsing) and The World Book encyclopedia (a veritable lesson in reading as browsing-cum-volume). I drank deeply from both founts as a child, since these were the main books in the house. I was intense in my browsing.
So now let’s snap back to the present and the act of browsing cyber- or multi-media volumes of information. I’ve started a project (combining humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists) called Transliteracies to look into “online reading.” It’s my hypothesis that there are hidden complexities and intelligences in low-attention modes of browsing/surfing that we don’t yet know how to chart. Google, after all, is making a fortune for algorithms enacting this hypothesis. Or to cite a historical googler: Dr. Johnson, sage of the Age of Reason, was famous for “devouring” books just by browsing them instead of reading “cover to cover.” (To allude to the titles of the two serial magazines he was involved with, he would have called browsing Rambling or Idling [The Rambler, The Idler.)
Just as “browsing” is complex, so I think that there are hidden complexities in the notion of “sheer volume.” Some of the digital artists I know — e.g., George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories — are “database artists” whose work asks the question, in essence: what happens to the notion of art when we gaze not at one work in rapt wonder but several thousand works — when, in other words, the “work” is “volume”? What if quantity, in other words, was a matter of quality? Aren’t there different kinds of “volume,” some more intelligent, beautiful, kinder, humane (not to mention efficient and flexible, the usual postindustrial desiderata) than others?
I’d better stop, since this comment is too long. As Blake said about volume: “Enough! or too much.”

web marginalia

NYTwikalong.jpg About a week ago, I attended a fascinating workshop at USC on Social Software in the Academy – a gathering of some of the most interesting thinkers, teachers and innovators at the intersection of technology and education. I learned a great deal, much of which I’m still processing and will be posting about this week. I also found out about some exciting new tools. One of them is Wikalong, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Wikalong makes it possible to write notes in the margin of a web page (something we take for granted in paper books). Reviews, rebuttals, conversations, subversive commentary, a “roving weblog,” or just plain old notes – all of these are possible in the little sidebar wiki notebook that Wikalong places to the left of any web page you go to. Online reading enhanced.
A great part of history is written in the marginalia, and I suspect that networked marginalia is territory worth exploring. Wikalong might be just a literal-minded stepping stone to more interesting forms, but the profundity of the margin (which lies in its spacial relationship to the primary text) shouldn’t be underestimated. 180px-Talmud.png Sparks fly between juxtaposed texts. While hyperlinks enable the reader to leap between textual worlds, they suck you down a wormhole to a distant place. Sometimes it’s better to be in both spaces at the same time (like keeping two browser windows open at once). Think of the Talmud, the great Jewish compendium of law and exegesis. On each page, commentaries are arrayed around a core text. Wikalong may seem insignificant next to this ancient hypertext system, but it points to a related sort of spatial intertextuality that should theoretically be possible in the new medium. If a flat page can be so multi-dimensional, think of how far we might be able to go in a virtual space.
Another handy tool is PurpleSlurple, which provides granular addressability for any existing web page. In other words, it inserts links for paragraphs and headers, allowing you to reference specific sections of text on a given page. Each “slurped” page gets its own URL, as does each individual element that has been anchored with a reference number. It’s primitive, but could come in extremely handy. For bloggers, this provides another way to reference a particular passage in a long web document. Just slurp the page, then link to the specific section.

Nils Peterson, of Washington State University, presented these tools, along with del.icio.us and a visualization application from Tufts called VUE, as a “juxtaposition of technologies” – a toolkit enabling a web reader or writer to more effectively annotate, reference and quote within the web.