With October just around the corner, American universities and high schools are gearing up for homecoming celebrations, those unabashed nostalgia fests. There’s just one problem: the yearbook, one of nostalgia’s favorite vessels, is obsolete.
This summer, the Economist reported on the slumping sales of college yearbooks, rightly citing the ascendancy of social networking sites as a major factor in the decline. The article, otherwise well-reported, is sullied by some editorializing in its final paragraph:

Although today’s students find yearbooks old-fashioned, they may one day miss their vanished youth. Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Callers on an NPR Digital Culture segment had similar misgivings, as did those interviewed by the Toledo Blade. Though I’m by no means a Facebook apologist, their argument strikes me as specious. It conflates intangibility and impermanence; because we can’t hold the website in our hands, it says, those electronically-stored memories are liable to disappear on us overnight. While I’d never bet that Facebook and its ilk will be around forever, I believe its information can and will persist at one venue or another — there’s little to suggest that digitized content is somehow more ephemeral than its print counterpart. In fact, at present, more users are concerned about their ability to destroy that information than to preserve it. If anything, Facebook might be too permanent. So much for that pesky electron ether-dispersion…
Despite the presence of “book” in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader “social network” applications. That’s all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right?
Like its conventional print brethren, Facebook chronicles the lives of a certain network’s members. It’s teeming with photos and groups; its wall posts are the digital equivalent of those slangy well-wishes from your friends and acquaintances (and maybe a stranger or two).
Since users provide the data, it’s matchlessly comprehensive — and most of this data, if not all of it, is driven by nostalgia and memory-making, the desire to memorialize your glory days. Certainly it’s no coincidence that, when it launched, Facebook catered exclusively to college students, with high-schoolers hot on their heels. This demographic overlaps perfectly with “the yearbook years.”
One of the yearbook’s biggest drawbacks has always been its linearity: how many people do you know who read them from start to finish? Facebook’s search bar bypasses that structural issue, providing a degree of accessibility that strikes fear in the hearts of yearbook indices everywhere. Facebook’s contents are individually tailored, fully customizable, and unconstrained by timeframes.
It’s also totally free.
The site, then, is a better yearbook than any yearbook can be. It suggests that the networked screen is, at least for this purpose, an infinitely more versatile medium than the static page. In considering Facebook as an electronic book rather than as a mere web franchise, we see how this new medium can improve upon the tried-and-true formulas of the print age.
To be sure, I’m not championing the sort of navel-gazing, quasi-addictive Facebook usage that consumes some of my generation. (Full disclosure: I’m 22.) Nor am I claiming that social networking sites are the only cause of waning interest in yearbooks as an institution. I’m just saying that the turning point has come and gone. Consider that a Bethesda, Md. high school recently republished Facebook photos in its yearbook; consider that DePauw University’s 2008 yearbook modeled itself after Facebook to woo buyers. If this isn’t the simulacrum replacing the original, I don’t know what is.
There’s arguably another, bleaker lesson to be learned here, which is that Facebook’s true victory over print is predicated on its ability to massage our narcissism. Perhaps MicCalifornia, a commenter on the Economist piece, says it best: “The first thing we do when we get our yearbooks is see how many pictures we are in. Who needs it when with Facebook, I am in all the pictures.”

Just came upon a Guardian piece looking at the underwhelming quality of ‘e-lit’. In my comment on the discussion I found myself reviewing a number of themes that have recurred in my if:book research over the last couple of years: the emergence of net-native storytelling, the failure of the literary establishment to detach sufficiently from aesthetic criteria overdetermined by the print form to be able to grasp the potential of the Web, and the increasing power of brand-funded patronage in digital cultural production.
So, with apologies for cross-posting, I’ve added my comment on the article (well worth reading, by the way, as is the ensuing debate) here for discussion.
In January of last year I posted on if:book an essay which argued that alternate reality games (ARGs) were the first genuinely net-native form of storytelling. This, I suggested, is because ARGs make good use of intrinsic qualities of the Web (boundlessness, fluidity, participation and so on) rather than attempting to reproduce a book-like entity within something that’s pushing in another direction.
While I’ve seen ARGs take off in many forms since then I have seen little discussion of the form within ‘literary’ circles, whether digital or otherwise, the only exception being Naomi Alderman, who is both a prizewinning novelist and a writer at London ARG studio SixToStart.
I’ve argued elsewhere on if:book that this – and other disconnects and category errors around the relationship between literature and the Web – is because the received understanding of ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ is at odds with the way the vast majority of Web users approach digital media. But even as the balance of cultural power tips ever more steeply in favour of the Web, these received ideas about what ‘literature’ is stubbornly refuse to budge.
The Web operates increasingly on an assumption that in most cases content will only be read if it is free, a fact usefully illustrated by comparing the Guardian’s declining print readership with its growing online presence and intelligent cross-marketing partnerships there (dating, a deal with LoveFilm etc). But this demand for free content removes at a stroke the writer’s and publisher’s business model, forcing a rethink of the ways we bankroll cultural production (see here and here for more on this).
But this hasn’t been taken on board by the proponents of ‘e-literature’. Much ‘e-lit’ discussion takes place within academia and grant-funded bodies, which allows a misleading focus on ‘artistic’ value in digital cultural production without taking into account the need most professional creators of fiction have to produce something that sells. This perception gap is frustratingly evident in the lack of a commercial angle in the roster of sources quoted in the article above. But meanwhile, a hugely dynamic new industry is emerging that uses participation, co-creation, multimedia and more to involve large audiences in digitally-delivered narratives. The hitch is that these narratives are inevitably brand-funded – for example Where Are The Joneses?, a semi-crowdsourced sitcom funded by Ford but genuinely entertaining in its own right; most ARGs; and a slew of other projects I know of in production.
While time will tell whether output such as WATJ has enduring value and real impact, the point here is that the discourse of ‘e-lit’ is too heavily embedded in a set of assumptions and aesthetic criteria that evolved for print literature to see what’s right in front of its nose: that ‘e-lit’ exists, but doesn’t look anything like ‘lit’. And, furthermore, that it has abandoned literature’s ostensible decoupling of artistic creation and commercial intent and become a vehicle for corporate engagement with the audiences. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps no more so than the great artistic patrons of the Middle Ages. Will it eclipse the minority pursuit of print-style creations with multimedia bolt-ons in online cultural impact? It has already done so.

Views of Wikipedia are decidedly mixed in academia, though perhaps trending slowly from mostly negative to grudgingly positive. But regardless of your view of Wikipedia – ?or your political persuasion – ?you can’t help but be impressed with the activity that occurs on the site for current events. (The same holds only slightly less true for non-current events, as Roy Rosenzweig pointed out.)

It’s instructive, for instance, to follow at this moment the collaborative production on the open encyclopedia for the entry on Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for Vice President. My best guess is that there are currently around 1,000 edits being made each day, by several hundred people. I actually started tracking this before Palin revealed the pregnancy of her teenage daughter, so the frenzy has probably increased, but here’s the schematic I came up with for the progress of the “Sarah Palin” Wikipedia article.

The graphic below shows every edit from 8am EDT on Sunday, August 31, 2008, to 8am EDT on Monday, September 1, 2008. These 24 hours (on a holiday weekend in the U.S.) produced over 500 edits, many of them quite large. The blocks show individual edits, ranging from a single word to three paragraphs. At the same time these edits were being made, scores of Wikipedians were also debating 80 distinct points for inclusion (or exclusion) from the article. They also added over a hundred footnotes pointing to print, Web, and other non-Wikipedia sources (seen at the end of the graphic, right after the “finished” article).



This entry was originally posted on Dan Cohen’s website, and he has kindly agreed to let us share it.

Natura Morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1956 (via The Met)

There is little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds himself seeing and considering the things of so-called nature and the works that have preceded and interested him.
-Giorgio Morandi, written in 1926, published in 1964

Morandi exhibits have popped up all over the city: in the Met, Lucas Shoorman’s, and Sperone Westwater (thanks, Dan). I attended the Morandi exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend. While the Met presented him on paper as a quiet and introverted artist (they even had a quotation about how he was a testament to what you can find when you look inside yourself), the most striking quality of this collection is how much he was influenced by outside sources. His brush strokes grow agitated and thick in one oil painting, then light and Cezanne-like in the next. He has watercolors and charcoals and experiments with shadow and light. He has a series of cubist still lifes. But the subject matter hardly changes: it is almost always a white vase or a stack of bowls in muted colors. It is as though he spent his whole life trying to see the same objects in a thousand different ways, borrowing eyes from his friends when he needed them.
Reading is not much different than that. We are reading so in hopes of seeing a fresh take on the same old, same old. Occasionally readers pay homage to the story by passing it on, verbally or musically or artistically.
In “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem describes receiving a copy of his own first novel as a gift. Artist Robert The had cut Gun, With Occasional Music into the shape of a pistol. Lethem was charmed by this reincarnation of his work. “The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me – ?the strange beauty of its second use – ?was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The’s gun-book. There’s no need to choose between the two.”
When I met Margaret Atwood last year, she said she has been pleased with the things she had inspired others to create. “Your work gets away from you and takes on a complete other life. People go to Halloween parties dressed as the Handmaid’s Tale,” she said. “I am very much not against it.”
“Who Built America?,” software published in 1991 that I previously blogged about, uses a word instead of a “back” button. The word is “Retrace.” I think this is a lovely precursor to the modern arrow. There is an art to the way we retrace each step of a book’s life. Stories are often recycled, and we can understand them when we understand the way they were cut and tailored by each author. Both Lethem and Atwood embrace the idea that their work will take new form beyond their words – and that this is a compliment.

If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones – ?more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths – ?The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.
-Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence”

As Johanna Drucker calls it, the “e-space of books” – the space in an author’s brain that we have the privilege of exploring through the text – is under-served by the printed page. In a way, the works that have been plundered will have the chance to be credited again. Why not link from Ovid to Shakespeare to The Simpsons? Why not allow the worlds that exist in e-space to nestle into the archives of cultural consciousness?
I’m a very greedy reader. I want more of everything: I want to know how the literature is related to current events, how it’s perceived by critics, who helped to edit the book, who the author’s friends were, who was writing upon a similar theme at that time, whether the fiction is grounded in fact, and what other readers thought of the ending. To my delight, plenty of readers have usually broadcast their thoughts in a dozen formats.
It’s hard to stay in print or on television for more than a minute, but entering readers’ minds is a very real way to stay alive. While the doom and gloom of recent articles has made it sound like readers are on the verge of extinction, we could scarcely be further from it.

In fact, we are more literate, more capable, more connected, and more potentially engaged than at any time in human history.
–Mark Bauerlein

Imagine for a moment the possibilities a story might present. Cain and Able alone could lead you to the Wandering Cain of Mormon folklore, to 15C representations of the characters, to the history of martyrdom, to Lord Byron’s poem “Cain,” to John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, to Bloc Party’s “Cain Said to Able” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain,” to the Simpson’s clip of the Flanders kids playing Cain and Able in a home movie. This is a copyright nightmare, but sometimes authors have to let go. Otherwise they’ll never see people at Halloween parties dressed as their characters, and they’ll never allow themselves the breadth of information available with this kind of free exchange.
But Morandi’s work benefited from the network of visionaries he knew. Without them, all he had was a white vase. Networked books aren’t a new concept, they’re just a new way to display the relationships between texts and other media.
There has always been a network in art and storytelling. And that network doesn’t fit cleanly between two covers.

This morning, I went to Samuel Johnson’s house (now a museum dedicated to 18th-century London) in the old City of London. Today is (or would have been) Samuel Johnson’s birthday; the occasion was the launch of Wordia, a new startup that lets users define individual words in video and upload them to the site.
(The launch invitation came, cheekily, in the form of a Times obituary for the dictionary.)
Wordia aims to create an ever-evolving ‘dictionary’ of vox-pop word definitions: “a democratic ‘visual dictionary’ […] where anyone with a video, webcam or mobile phone can define the words that matter to them in their life.” Founded by TV producer Ed Baker, the site is supported by HarperCollins, the UK’s National Literacy Trust and the Open University amongst others, and already boasts a veritable glossolalia of video’d word definitions.
It started me thinking about the relationship between dictionaries and power – who claims the right to be the determiners of ‘acceptable’ usage and definition? One of the functions of Johnson’s original dictionary was to standardize spelling – which, in Shakespeare’s era, was pretty much a free-for-all – and to enshrine ‘proper’ or ‘Standard English’ as one of the markers of those permitted to access the centers of power. At that level, a democratic dictionary is in some senses a contradiction in terms: if a dictionary is where you go to settle disputes about definition, then what happens when a ‘dictionary’ becomes the locus for those disputes?
One possible answer is that its strongest field may end up being neologism – or, to put it another way, slang. At the launch, I asked a member of Wordia’s team: aren’t you worried that the most popular area for definition will be those where language is most in flux – ie slang, obscenity and insult? (I’m thinking, amongst other things, about (NSFW link) Dan Savage’s attack on Joe Santorum through the medium of neologism…). While the avowed intent – democratizing the power to define – is a laudable one, won’t moderation be a major concern? And doesn’t that invalidate the whole exercise?
Arguably, though, Urban Dictionary has already cornered the market in this kind of demotic definition. For one thing, it has the advantage of anonymity: the submission form urbandictionary uses is a far more appealing interface for uploading foul language than Wordia’s, which requires each submission to be spoken to camera. And Wordia’s mission – at least as far as I can gather from the About pages – is more high-minded than Urban Dictionary’s brutally relativist ‘Define Your World’, and reflects instead enthusiasm for language generally and an ambition to broaden our understanding of what literacy is.
I’ll be following Wordia with interest- will they get enough videos to generate a satisfying mass of content? Are other people’s definitions of words interesting enough to browse? Time will tell. But the site reflects a general online trend away from the playful (and often base and ugly) anarchy of unmoderated chatter towards tidier, better-managed and more mainstream approaches to user-generated material. Perhaps the Web is growing up. And in any case, Wordia provides one more link between the language/power debates of the Augustan print boom, and today’s ongoing struggles to learn just how much, how little (or just how) language, power and the Web will interact to shape our culture.

Pardon me for plagiarizing Churchill, but the victors aren’t the only ones writing history these days. At the Institute, we’re re-imagining the American History Project’s “Who Built America?”, hoping to re-imagine the sort of information in this CD-ROM from 1991, converting now into a more malleable form. Dan Piepenbring blogged about this as well. The CD-ROM, as a point of reference, is impossible for us to go in and edit or update. What was there in 1991 is there today; it’s stagnant.
A networked history book changes everything. We are moving past the pretense of a single objective history, and moving into a discourse constructed by historians, teachers, and students. It has been said that to study history is to participate in it. We can add another layer of truth to this: those who study history will simultaneously write history. As they read, they may add links, annotations, comments, etc. Wikipedia has done this, but not in such a way that it is trusted as an academic resource. We need to blend the prestige of historians and the wealth of available original sources into a multimedia form that is easy to navigate and change.
This is beneficial because history books are so quickly outdated; history is happening, well, every minute, and of the millions of news stories published daily, each one has archiving potential. And our hunger for analyses of everything that’s happening has never been more important. No one can navigate through all of the information of The Information Age on her own; editors and shared links are essential. Newspapers are supposedly dying, whereas the demand for subjective accounts of news (blogs, etc.) is thriving.
What “Who Built America?” does best is linking sections of the book to original sources. Where a textbook may say, “Frederick Douglass was a great orator,” the networked book can present audio clips from Douglass’s original speeches. The reader will ostensibly conclude that Douglass was an orator, but the reader comes to this conclusion herself rather than trusting the author’s adjective choice. While one could always formulate a case for some sort of bias based on the limits of the audio clips available and those the editors of the network book first choose to present, dissenters would have their own say in the comment bar. If a book is linked to internet sources supplied by readers, there would be limits to what is presented but not many. Like Wikipedia, one could never sit down and read all available information in a single day.
And rather than sitting down to read the material in a linear way, the reader could zip from one medium to the next, perusing many areas of interest simultaneously.
The power of synthesizing these media is that one can study history through Hemingway’s letters and Zora Neale Hurston’s first short story, through Charlie Chaplin films and “The Birth of a Nation,” through Woodie Guthrie songs and FDR’s fireside chats. With scholars’ input, we could view these simultaneously through a kaleidoscope of critical lenses. It’s like opening many tabs within the browser of your brain. And far from “making us stupid,” the diversity of perspectives and formats ought to enrich our comprehension of the material.
We read history because the range of experiences we have in one life is never enough to teach us what we could learn in a thousand lives. Reading in a networked format requires a similar humility.
As Bob asked recently, what does an editor do in this brave new world? Let’s assume for now that there is a single person monitoring comments and links. The role of the editor, then, is to aggregate scholarly references and call the reader’s attention to the most germane comments. I think there is a market for this: a trustworthy source is worth an investment. (Perhaps this is not true of everyone, but I find myself inclined to buy wine from the shop-owner who can tell me what will compliment exactly what I’m having for dinner that evening; I like to tell my haircutter that I have an interview and a vacation coming up, and let her decide what style is both easy to maintain and professional-looking; I talk to people in bookstores who share favorite fiction writers so that I can get their recommendations before I purchase something. Kevin Kelly is right. Technology like this may be viable if it’s done in a personalized and findable way. There are many types of readers, and with more media available to them, we can cater to the needs of casual readers as well as serious academics. Schools are laden with both. This raises an issue of how we best suit the needs of each reader, but that will have to be borne of a dialogue with the readers in question.) It may be that the editor’s task is simple: to listen to the readers, and mediate conversations they want to have with one another inside the text.
Because we the readers are limited in time and space (such a pesky bug in the network of the universe), we will presumably edit and annotate differently as time moves forward. We will have to account for these contradictions; truth is a slippery thing. Right now a book exists within a liminal space, and history books are able to ascribe a narrative to the information they present. But that backbone of literature will have to stretch and curve when symbols and events are constantly changing, and when we are constantly changing our minds.

Microsoft Multimedia Schubert was published fifteen years ago, in 1993. Developed by the Voyager Company, the program was one of many in an early “Microsoft Multimedia Catalog.” It allows users to engage in a close reading of Schubert’s Trout Quintet, illuminated with Alan Rich’s moment-by-moment commentary. Rendered in text, Rich’s comments are programmed to appear at specific instances during each movement.
Though such multimedia CD-ROMs are commonplace by today’s standards, MS Schubert and its ilk came at a time when designers were seriously rethinking what was possible in the realm of multimedia. There’s much to learn from their spirit of innovation.
For instance, Voyager, Rich and co. flesh out their disc with a glossary of musical taxonomy, a brief history of the sonata form, and encyclopedic accounts of Schubert’s life and work; there’s even a modest Schubert game, in which listeners attempt to identify randomly-generated audio fragments of the Trout Quintet. (My high score: zero.) All in all, I think the CD-ROM constitutes an elegant combination of aural, textual and visual elements. It’s an inspired precursor to more comprehensive CD-ROM encyclopedias like Encarta, and its close reading is still valuable today. Not too shabby, for ’93.

Obviously, the intervening years have seen enormous advancements in computing and the rise of the Web, which could give the Schubert multimedia suite a new lease on life. In the coming months, we’ll ask scholars and musicians what they want out of a multimodal close reading, and how a new generation of electronic books can serve those needs. How can we abet in-depth listening and foster a discussion of music’s nuances? For that matter, which musicians and works ought to be included in an initial library of close readings, and who (if anyone) should lead them?
Of course, not every ’90s idea was an earth-shattering success, but there are lessons in the failures. In 1995, for instance, Microsoft debuted its oft-derided Bob operating system, which immersed novices in a house-like virtual environment where program icons took the form of everyday domestic objects: shelved books, rolodexes, bank ledgers left on coffee tables. Was it horrendously executed and functionally flawed? Yes. Tacky, juvenile? Those, too. But the Bob OS was also giddy with multimedia possibility – it was a dicey proposition in an industry with damn too few of them. See for yourself:

The thought of spending my days in Bob’s syrupy universe is a frightening one. But I wonder: did it flop because of its gung-ho cuteness, or because of its experimental premise?
It’s crucial, I feel, to approach our new projects with the “what if…?” mentality that reigned, however briefly, in early-’90s projects like Schubert and Bob. The latter bombed, yeah, but it was a well-intentioned failure. In some ways, it attempted to change how operating systems should look, feel and perform – even if those attempts were half-hearted and immediately superseded by Windows 95.
As the norms of our gadget-usage continue to cement themselves, it’s going to get harder and harder to abandon our preconceptions of what multimedia can accomplish, i.e., of how stuff should work. In revitalizing and updating projects like Schubert, we have a perfect opportunity to learn from the past: what it got right, what it botched abysmally, and its wide-eyed awe as to the future’s potential.

Preface

I’ve been exploring the potential of “new media” for nearly thirty years. There was an important aha moment early on when I was trying to understand the essential nature of books as a medium. The breakthrough came when i stopped thinking about the physical form or content of books and focused instead on how they are used. At that time print was unique compared to other media, in terms of giving its users complete control of the sequence and pace at which they accessed the contents. The ability to re-read a paragraph until it’s understood, to flip back and forth almost instantly between passages, to stop and write in the margins, or just think - this affordance of reflection (in a relatively inexpensive portable package) was the key to understanding why books have been such a powerful vehicle for moving ideas across space and time. I started calling books user-driven media - in contrast to movies, radio, and television, which at the time were producer-driven. Once microprocessors were integrated into audio and video devices, I reasoned, this distinction would disappear. However – and this is crucial – back in 1981 I also reasoned that its permanence was another important defining aspect of a book. The book of the future would be just like the book of the past, except that it might contain audio and video on its frozen “pages.” This was the videodisc/cdrom era of electronic publishing.

The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes Reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret. The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned during our experiments with networked books over the past few years is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

So…

I haven’t published anything for nearly twelve years because, frankly, I didn’t have a model that made any sense to me. One day when I was walking around the streets of London I suddenly I realized I did have a model. I jokingly labeled my little conceptual breakthrough “a unified field theory of publishing,” but the more I think about it, the more apt that sounds, because getting here has involved understanding how a number of different aspects both compliment and contradict each other to make up a dynamic whole. I’m excited about this because for the first time the whole hangs together for me. I hope it will for you too. if not, please say where the model breaks, or which parts need deepening, fixing or wholesale reconsideration.

key questions a unified field theory has to answer:

• What are the characteristics of a successful author in the era of the digital network?
• Ditto for readers: how do you account for the range of behaviors that comprise reading in the era of the digital network?
• What is the role of the publisher and the editor?
• What is the relationship between the professional (author) and the amateur (reader)?
• Do the answers to 1-4 afford a viable economic model?

so how exactly did i get here?

I was thinking about Who Built America, a 1993 Voyager cd-rom based on a wonderful 2-volume history originally published by Knopf. In a lively back and forth with the book’s authors over the course of a year, we tried to understand the potential of an electronic edition. Our conceptual breakthrough came when we started thinking about process – that a history book represents a synthesis of an author’s reading of original source documents, the works of other historians and conversations with colleagues. So we added hundreds of historical documents – text, pictures, audio, video – to the cd-rom edition, woven into dozens of “excursions” distributed throughout the text. Our hope was to engage readers with the author’s conclusions at a deeper, more satisfying level. That day in London, as I thought about how this might occur in the context of a dynamic network (rather than a frozen cd-rom), there seemed to be an explosion of new possibilities. Here are just a few:

• Access to source documents can be much more extensive free of the size, space and copyright constraints of cd-rom
• Dynamic comment fields enable classes to have their unique editions, where a lively conversation can take place in the margins.
• A continuously evolving text, as the authors add new findings in their work and engage in back and forth with “readers” who have begun to learn history by “doing history”, and have begun both to question the authors’ conclusions and to suggest new sources and alternative syntheses. Bingo! That last one leads to . . . .

b) Hmmm. On the surface that sounds a lot like a Wikipedia article, in the sense that it’s always in process and consideration of the the back and forth is crucial to making sense of the whole. However it’s also different, because a defining aspect of the Wikipedia is that once an article is started, there is no special, ongoing role accorded to the the person who initiated it or tends it over time. And that’s definitely not what I’m talking about here. Locating discourse in a dynamic network doesn’t erase the distinction between authors and readers, but it significantly flattens the traditional perceived hierarchy. Ever since we published Ken Wark’s Gamer Theory I’ve tended to think of the author of a networked book as a leader of a group effort, similar in many respects to the role of a professor in a seminar. The professor has presumably set the topic and likely knows more about it than the other participants, but her role is to lead the group in a combined effort to synthesize and extend knowledge. This is not to suggest that one size will fit all authors, especially during this period of experimentation and transition. Some authors will want to lay down a completed text for discussion; others may want to put up drafts in the anticipation of substantial re-writing based on reader input. Other “authors’ may be more comfortable setting the terms and boundaries of the subject and allowing others to participate directly in the writing . . . .

The key element running through all these possibilities is the author’s commitment to engage directly with readers. If the print author’s commitment has been to engage with a particular subject matter on behalf of her readers, in the era of the network that shifts to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a particular subject.

c) As networked books evolve, readers will increasingly see themselves as participants in a social process. As with authors, especially in what is likely to be a long transitional period, we will see many levels of (reader) engagement – from the simple acknowledgement of the presence of others presence to very active engagement with authors and fellow readers..

(an anecdotal report regarding reading in the networked era)

A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy’s reading behavior: “He’ll be reading a (printed) book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. Then, he’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and google a query that’s occurred to him.” I’d like to suggest that we change our description of reading to include the full range of these activities, not just time spent looking at the printed page.

continuing…

d) One thing i particularly like about this view of the author is that it resolves the professional/amateur contradiction. It doesn’t suggest a flat equality between all potential participants; on the contrary it acknowledges that the author brings an accepted expertise in the subject AND the willingness/ability to work with the community that gathers around. Readers will not have to take on direct responsibility for the integrity of the content (as they do in wikipedia); hopefully they will provide oversight through their comments and participation, but the model can absorb a broad range of reader abilities and commitment

e) Once we acknowledge the possibility of a flatter hierarchy that displaces the writer from the center or from the top of the food chain and moves the reader into a space of parallel importance and consideration -? i.e. once we acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation -? we can begin to redefine the roles of publisher and editor. An old-style formulation might be that publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject.

f) So it turns out that far from becoming obsolete, publishers and editors in the networked era have a crucial role to play. The editor of the future is increasingly a producer, a role that includes signing up projects and overseeing all elements of production and distribution, and that of course includes building and nurturing communities of various demographics, size, and shape. Successful publishers will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how AND be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences. [I know I’m using “publisher” to encompass an array of tasks and responsibilities, but I don’t think the short-hand does too much damage to the discussion].

g) Once there are roles for author/reader/editor/publisher, we can begin to assess who adds what kind of value, and when. From there we can begin to develop a business model. My sense is that this transitional period (5, 10, 50 years) will encompass a variety of monetizing schemes. People will buy subscriptions to works, to publishers, or to channels that aggregate works from different publishers. People might purchase access to specific titles for specific periods of time. We might see tiered access, where something is free in “read-only” form, but publishers charge for the links that take you OUT of the document or INTO the community. Smart experimenting and careful listening to users/readers/authors will be very important.

h) The ideas above seem to apply equally well to all genres -? whether textbooks, history, self-help, cookbooks, business or fiction – particularly as the model expands to include the more complex arena of interactive narrative. [Think complex and densely textured online events/games whose authors create worlds in which readers play a role in creating the ongoing narrative, rather than choose- your-own ending stories.]

This is not to say that one size will fit all. For example, different subjects or genres will have different optimal community paradigms – e.g. a real-time multi-player game vs. close readings of historical or philosophical essays. Even within a single genre, it will make a difference whether the community consists of students in the same class or of real-world strangers.

other thoughts/questions

• Authors should be able to choose the level of moderation/participation at which they want to engage; ditto for readers.
• It’s not necessary for ALL projects to take this continuous/never-finished form.
• This applies to all modes of expression, not just text-based. The main distinction of this new model is not type of media but the mechanism of distribution. Something is published when the individual reader/user/viewer determines the timing and mode of interaction with the content and the community Something is broadcast when it’s distributed to an audience simultaneously and in real-time. Eventually, presumably, only LIVE content will be broadcast.
• When talking about some of these ideas with people, quite often the most passionate response is that “surely, you are not talking about fiction.” If by fiction we mean the four-hundred page novel then the answer is no, but in the long term arc of change i am imagining, novels will not continue to be the dominant form of fiction. My bet now is that to understand where fiction is going we should look at what’s happening with “video games.” World of Warcraft is an online game with ten million subscribers paying $15 per month to assemble themselves into guilds (teams) of thirty or more people who work together to accomplish the tasks and goals which make up the never-ending game. It’s not a big leap to think of the person who developed the game as an author whose art is conceiving, designing and building a virtual world in which players (readers) don’t merely watch or read the narrative as it unfolds – they construct it as they play. Indeed, from this perspective, extending the narrative is the essence of the game play.
• As active participants in this space, the millions of player/readers do not merely watch or read the unfolding narrative, they are constructing it as they play.
• Editors should have the option of using relatively generic publishing templates for projects whose authors, for one reason or another, do not justify the expense of building a custom site. I can even imagine giving authors access to authoring environments where they can write first drafts or publish experimentally.
• A corollary of the foregrounding of the social relations of reading and writing is that we are going to see the emergence of celebrity editors and readers who are valued for their contributions to a work.
• Over time we are also likely to see the emergence of “professional readers” whose work consistus of tagging our digitized culture (not just new content, but everything that’s been digitized and in all media types . . . . books, video, audio, graphics). This is not meant to undervalue the role of d.elicious and other tagging schemes or the combined wisdom of the undifferentiated crowd but just a recognition of the likelihood that over time the complexity of the task of filtering the web will give rise to a new job category.
• As this model develops, the way in which readers can comment/contribute/interact needs to evolve continuously in order to allow ever more complex conversations among ever more people.
• How does re-mix fit in? as a mode of expression for authors? as something that readers do? as something that other people are allowed to do with someone’s else’s material?
• It’s important to design sites that are outward-looking, emphasizing the fact that boundaries with the rest of the net are porous.
• Books can have momentum, not in the current sense of position on a best-seller or Amazon list, but rather in the size and activity-level of their communities.
• Books can be imagined as channels, especially when they “gather” other books around them. Consider, for example, the Communist Manifesto or the Bible as core works that inspire endless other works and commentary – a constellation of conversations.
• Successful publishers will develop and/or embrace new ways of visualizing content and the resulting conversations. [e.g. imagine google searches that make visible not just the interconnections between hits but also how the content of each hit relates to the rest of the document and/or discipline it’s part of… NOTE: this is an example of imagining something we can’t do yet, but that informs the way we design/invent the future]
• In the videodisc/cd-rom phase of electronic publishing we explored the value and potential of integrating all media types in a new multi-medium which afforded reflection. With the rise of the net we began exploring the possibilities of what happens when you locate discourse in a dynamic network. A whole host of bandwidth and hardware issues made the internet unfriendly to multimedia but those limitations are coming to an end. it’s now possible to imagine weaving the strands back together. (perhaps this last point makes this even more of a unified field theory)

The Orwell Prize has recently unfurled their project to post George Orwell’s personal diaries online, in blog form, and in real time, seventy years after each entry was originally written.
Why they’ve elected the blog format and the seventy-year anniversary is left unsaid, but they’re questions that I think are not only interesting but important to consider for a project of this kind. There’s little discussion of the motivations behind the project and readers are asked only to “gather [their] own impression[s] of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries.”
But what happens when (a famous author’s) personal diaries get remediated in blog form?
In the case of Orwell’s diary, it walks and talks like a blog, but it isn’t quite a blog. The site uses a standard template from WordPress, with a double banner– one for the Orwell Prize and the other announcing the site as the “Orwell Diaries” in a sans serif font above an image of a few lines from the diaries. (Speaking of which, I’m curious as to the singularizing of what, in its original form, is plural– will each new diary be presented in a different format or be somehow marked? Or will the blog unify several diaries into one, continuous format?) To the right of the title banners is an image of the author at work at his desk. And running down the far right of the page are links to the about page, archives, categories, and a series of media pieces on the project. The first two posts announce the arrival of the blog, and it is not until the third post that Orwell’s writing begins.
In that post, the diary entry has been transposed almost exactly from Peter Davison’s edition of Orwell’s Complete Works, footnotes included. What’s different is the addition of tags (in this case, “animal” and “snake”) as well as a category (“domestic”), a link to Richard II in Sparknotes, and a place for reader comments. I think, from this and the following few posts currently online, it’s safe to say that the blog format is being used here to replicate the printed book, with a few bonus add-ons.
But because the publishers have decided to release the entries in real-time, I have to think that the intentions for the blog may have been more than just that. By publishing the entries in correlation with the days in which they were written, the blog brings the writer’s thoughts into our time. These aren’t a fossilized and completed set of prestigious memoirs, but rather quotidian reflections just like our own (an impression assisted by the sometimes-banality of Orwell’s entries).
My question is what can be done to enhance the present-ness of Orwell without altering the entries themselves? What font choice would you select? Different fonts to reflect different moods? Would you find a self-reflexive piece of his writing and stick that on the “about” page? What about the banner? Would you include links to the day’s weather forecast in Morocco? What about links to current or contemporary news articles for the more political entries to come? Despite 70 being a nice, round year, I’ve never ceased to be astonished by the prescience of Orwell’s political insights, and how much more relevant this project might be if we brought the author further into our time by associating his personal thoughts with current events–in this case, via links to those events.
Above all, if one is going to remediate Orwell’s work, why not translate it creatively instead of using the web as a book with heightened intelligence?
That said, I think it’s an interesting way to bring Orwell’s diaries to a larger audience, and I’m certainly glad to get a daily fill of his thoughts and observations.

I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings.” After glimpsing into BBC’s giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums:

Why are so many of these priceless documents out of print? Because the market for spoken-word recordings is too small for them to be worth reissuing on CD. So why don’t the BBC, HarperCollins and Sony BMG (which now owns the Columbia Masterworks and RCA catalogs) make their spoken-word archives available for digital downloading via iTunes? Imagine being able to click a few keys on your laptop and listen to, say, Truman Capote reading excerpts from “In Cold Blood” or Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Jessica Tandy and David Wayne performing Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie.” Wouldn’t you pay 10 bucks for that privilege? I sure would.

But what about poets.org and Penn Sound? Both websites host catalogs of sound clips and boast thousands of mp3s, for free nonetheless. In fact, archived audio exists across the internet, in fabulous–even if sometimes hidden–pockets. Over at Slate, all weekly poems are accompanied by author readings. On Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, you can listen to Ezra Pound reading at the Harvard Vocarium, experience Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and even enjoy a rare 1929 recording of James Joyce.

Earlier in the summer, I raided Penn Sound’s archives for Robert Creeley audio files. I adore Creeley’s readings – ?how he ascended each stanza, how he stumbled through an enjambed line. In his voice, you can hear when his poetry is downright mean, irresistibly tender, and forever hesitant. Having listened repeatedly to Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” I was disappointed in Teachout’s treatment of what author readings tell the audience. Tsk, Teachout writes to all literary critics that picked up that popular “unfortunate habit” of using “voice” when they mean “style.” Teachout’s lead forgets that poetry began as an oral/aural tradition, a tradition which PennSound is looking to revive. Director Al Filreis hopes that the project “has already had an impact on the way poets, critics, teachers, and students talk about the sound of poetry, which is, after all, its most fundamental quality.”
Is there scholarship on how poets read their work? The space between how a reader interprets the text and how an audience hears the words is often vast – ?a canyon of blank page and intentional pauses. Shouldn’t we consider the poet’s performance? When I listen to Creeley read, the way he forfeited line breaks and rushed toward conclusions frequently changes my sense of the poem. On poets.org, John Berryman starts The Dream Songs, introducing his Huffy Henry, grumbling and gruff. Berryman takes a sharp breath, and his voice goes staccato, “It was the thought that they thought/they could do it.” Then, there is a pause and he proceeds, “made Henry wicked & away.” In Berryman’s vocal staggering, you can almost hear the departure from when the world was once like a woolen lover…
How can we use our listening experiences with our readings of texts? Or, maybe the more practical question: what should these hybrids look like? In the end, I do agree with Teachout; I want more. After hearing “Dream Songs 1,” I am greedy to hear Berryman tackle “Dream Songs 4.”