All Comments
Comments on the Book
-
Category 4 (20 comments)
-
My experience with this website is the first time I’ve encountered and used this new commenting approach. I think it has many positive elements–contextuality, ease of use, etc.–the most remarkable of which I expect will be the fostering of more sustained commentary and interaction. In the standard approach, where (as you described) the comments appear in a chronological stream at the bottom of the page’s main content, I think that readers become less likely to contribute as the discussion string grows longer (which is non-intuitive) and as the time between the last comment and the present increases. In this case, I don’t see the timestamp of the commentary until I’ve already engaged the paragraph specific link, which means I’m obviously less motivated by a sense of proximity in time to the activity of the conversation, and more by the content itself–a good thing. Also, by distributing the commentary in this way, one is less likely to be intimidated by a long string of comments that may or may not have already covered your points. Very nice.
The one thing I am left wondering about is how this will either enable the focusing of reader attention on the material, or perhaps the opposite, fracturing it. I wrote an article back in August proposing a more simplified approach to the way we design web pages in order to promote reader attention based upon my observation that web information design is (especially on the mass media level) trending toward the opposite, where over complicated templates fracture the reading experience and contribute to this widespread sense of attention deficit (which I think has been debunked plenty, but here’s my two-cents on that with some interesting data from the last 20 years of book sales/film sales/televsion ratings).
All in all, I’m very interested in and excited by what you’re proposing, and what you’re already demonstrating here! -
Aha, interesting. I just commented in the previous paragraph that I expected this format to encourage a more sustained period of engagement, which seems proven by your examples.
Now I wonder something else: Because I caught on to the ability to add comments to specific paragraphs, I acted upon that before reading the full page. Had I read everything first, I imagine my comments (in general) would have been much different. The “standard” format (the long string of comments below the article), probably does encourage people to read fully before commenting, though obviously at the risk of less engagement.
Still, I think I prefer this method… -
Not just scholars. I guess you would place Mortal Ghost by L Lee Lowe (http://mortalghost.blogspot.com/2006/07/chapter-one.html) in this category as comments were accepted and used as the novel grew in the blog (it is now complete). What about the slightly curious Flight Paths (http://www2.netvibes.com/flightpaths)? Or Citizendium?
-
Libertary does something similar, although it is not beside the page.
-
Perhaps this is Social Writing or Social Authoring, falling outside this taxonomy??
-
I think this speaks to my problem with the taxonomy as it stands, as it seems to be blending phenomenological modes of interacting with texts with genres of communication (whats going on between readers and authors).
I suspect that more nuance needs to be added to this model to better account for the different types of “texts/interactions” that can occur within the same interaction spaces.-
I agree with the need for more nuance. Part of the issue is that the dichotomy between author and reader has always been problematic: writing and reading are in many ways inextricably linked — you can’t have one without the other. Also, many “single author” books involve the work of many people. New technologies complicate the relation between reading and writing partly because the readers’ marginal comments and conversations become a permanent part of the manuscript. At what point do commentators become co-writers, or a networked community of writers/readers?
-
-
This is a particularly smart point… I was struck by this when it was mentioned at BiB and I continue to think its a smart realization.
-
Yes. Excellent point. Noah and Kathleen’s experience could just as easily be categorized as experiments in social writing.
Interestingly, during a discussion with Kathleen, I realized that one of the problems for scholars was that time constraints make it unlikely that everyone can comment in detail on every paper written by their colleagues in the field. Which led me to the observation that perhaps this whole social reading (of scholarly texts) isn’t going to really take off until we begin to see collaborative writing — i.e. where instead of six scholars writing their own papers and expecting each of the other five to comment on them, perhaps we’ll start to see six scholars writing together, where the functions of writing and reading are truly merged.
-
To my mind, the rise in collaborative writing is the most exciting aspect of the shift from printed page to networked screen. My most rewarding writing experiences have been collaborative — though I’ve mostly worked with one other writer on popular books and articles, rather than scholarly texts. I’m intrigued to see how social reading/writing technologies impact academic work and scholarly publishing.
-
In the humanities, this is certainly not the norm yet, but most science (and econ, math, etc.) papers already have multiple authors. What exactly this means is a little murky at times, though, when authorship is granted merely for working in the same lab. Still, maybe this model can be modified fruitfully to more of what you suggest.
-
-
Along those lines, it might be interesting (and meta) to test a social writing system on a CHI/ACM paper on “building a social writing mechanism.” CHI papers a bit unique in being, from the start, typically conceived multi-authored.
An alternate model is to think about episodic fiction — in particular sci-fi — as a location for this type of collaborative authorship. This would require a bit more initial concept work to build the editing into the narrative itself. -
I did this myself on the last page. Even starting with the intention of reading the text before the commentary, it’s surprisingly hard to resist the curiosity about what is happening in the margins. For a novel, it would definitely help to have the option to hide the comment numbers. OK, back to reading.
-
Beside the page has proven a great tool for me. In a way, public reading acquires the intimacy of reading someone else’s comments on the margins of his/her book, but at the same time being a participant in the act.
-
This practice of commenting on a text (sometimes at the end, sometimes within the text) was common in the very-long medieval era: a manuscript would make the rounds among interested scholars and the scholars would either append their own comments to blank pages at the end of the manuscript or would simply recopy it, with their own remarks or emendations incorporated. Manuscripts not infrequently returned to the same readers over and over. Naturally this required a good deal of patience if one wanted to hold a conversation about the work.
-
Now I begin to see how the context protects the content-owner’s IP rights. And as a content provider I feel less hostile toward the notion of a work that is open, as it were, to having material attached to it from any and all parties who may or may not have paid for it.
There is still a container of some kind, however–the community in which the content is being discussed. Such communities are generally closed in some way, even if only via membership (“log on to Facebook”). -
Alongside the benefits Chris and Sol mention, the beside-the-page approach encourages careful reading and responsible commenting. As I write a comment, I can easily refer back to an exact phrase (without endless scrolling). I also feel a greater sense of responsibility to avoid blithe misinterpretations, since I know my comment will appear alongside the paragraph so future readers can compare the two.
The beside-the-page approach reminds me of the Comment and Markup functions in OpenOffice, MS Word and others, which allow multiple (offline) readers/authors/editors to comment in the margins on specific words as well as paragraphs and to delete or rewrite text. I realize that these word processing programs are quite different — they’re offline and don’t permit an ever-updating flow of conversation — but I wonder if it would be useful to give readers the option of commenting on smaller segments of text.-
the problem with making it so that readers to choose segments shorter than paragraphs is that it gets very confusing when Reader A selects words 8-34 and Reader B selects words 19-27. we just don’t have good enough tools yet to enable that level of complexity. i trust this situation will change as we have more experience and tools evolve.
-
-
A thought regarding Chris’s concern about fracturing readers’ attention –
As one who is endlessly distracted, I like the option of making the sidebar comment pane disappear.
-
Categories 1, 2 and 3 (15 comments)
-
“the awkwardness of complex online conversations means that offline discussions are currently much less specific or deep”
This doesn’t make sense. I think maybe offline in the quote should really be online. -
I’m in the midst of writing about Infinite Summer right now, and am thinking precisely about the ways that the book came to serve as the focus of a really rich set of communications through a series of interconnected blogs, often bleeding over into face-to-face meetings as well. There was something extremely powerful about this experience — part of it had to do with DFW’s recent death, of course, but it was also the degree to which this highly wired group of readers found a text that engaged them directly in thinking about the issues that they were facing. There are other forms that this kind of intensive if asynchronous reading group has taken — group readings organized on listservs like pynchon-l among them — but this distributed experience demonstrated something about the potential for collective engagement online with a text that lived offline.
-
Good catch Juliet, should read correctly now. Thanks, b.
-
Bob,
The first issue I have is that these are describing modes of phenomenological interaction, but not necessarily the genres of communication that take place within these interactions. I suspect that a genre/model needs to accompany this — otherwise I suspect that this model may risk becoming a bit determinalistic.
Case and point with Cat #1 – the context that frames a discussion will greatly influence the content of the interaction. Cat 1/Case 2 – Blind Date – which I’d sort into “book small talk.” That produces/structures a type of conversation that could grow into another category (exegesis – i.e. what myself an collegues do when we often discuss books) but doesn’t necessarily have to. -
Glad to see you are noting Infinite Summer. An equally interesting, if less successful, experiment was the “One book one tweet” (1b1t) which generated a lot of attention for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods but less detailed content. In part, that appears a restriction/outgrowth of medium (the primary discourse taking place on twitter vs. blogs). I also suspect part of it is due to the fact that much of Infinite Summer took place within an largely established social network of bloggers.
-
To follow up on the previous comment, here’s an attempt to better sketch out this concept of interaction types (with corresponding taxonomic categories)…
category 1 with what we might call “Book Small Talk”
category 3 and 4 with “Exegesis” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis).
One that I see missing is “Book as Metaphor” – where the book(s) is invoked as a shorthand for a specific point of view, or proof of a certain fact. The book may be used throughout this sort of conversation without it necessarily ever being specifically about the book.
Another one to consider is “Participatory (Meta) Feedback” in which, as Kathleen Parker and others have noted, the conversation is directed as gathering feedback to aid in the development for the author.
“Instrumental Commentary” is probably another category, especially important for business (and tech) books, which deal with identifying the most important/useful aspects of the text and then thinking about how they apply (or fail to work) in a specific situation.
Reviews are of course another type of social reading mode.
And, using Youtube comments as another source, “I read this and Loved/Hated it (and you should also read…)” is another type of global conversation. -
There was also an online, synchronous attempt to read David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infiite Jest” in 2009 (the summer after his death) called “Infinite Summer.” A website with a multi-author blog as well as a message board was set up specifically for the project at http://www.infinitesummer.org. There were also informal weekly offline book groups in different cities organized online (using the IS site, Twitter, and Facebook). Some people also blogged (and even started their own group blogs) their experience reading the book. As far as I know (as a participant) it was project set up solely by fans for no profit. If social reading tools (like margin comments) had been available at the time I imagine it would have made what was for me a pretty amazing reading experience even more transcendent.
-
Yep, should’ve read ’til the end of the page before commenting.
-
i’m uncomfortable with “should’ve” here. there will likely always be a gap between the natural linear structure of reading and the impulse to comment. if i read a section all the way through before commenting i avoid premature conclusions, but i also may lose the thought entirely. a decent system for social reading on the page will have to account for different reading/commenting styles.
-
-
n.b. “fandom wank,” a spontaneously generated, meticulously scholarly group record of a specific event whose original site has been lost or, more often, deliberately erased.
-
While it’s important to keep the taxonomy simple, you might consider fleshing out Category 1. It strikes me that reading and talking about books in person plays an enormous role in transmitting reading skills and reading enthusiasm. Many parents teach their kids to read with children’s books.
-
Does “lit-blog” refer to the multiple ways blog posts discuss reading, or just to blogs whose primary topic is books?
-
i think the latter.
-
-
-
Introduction (11 comments)
-
Of course, books and reading have also been social sites in past times. Technologies like the ifbook experiments with give the sociability of text a new texture, but it’s interesting as well to explore how this grain of the networked book compares to textual sociability throughout history.
-
A seminal account/theorization of social reading can be found in Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” which explicitly links communal reading activities with the development of the modern nation state.
-
A note here. You are quite correct to point to YouTube and WoW in terms of commenting. Facebook would be another site to look at for “event/announcement” based commenting.
That said, it’s important to not flatten all of this into the same mode/genre of social writing. The comments that follow videos are significantly different than the annotation to video (and even within annotation, we can see different forms/intents of the annotation). Likewise, WoW represents a very specific form of synchronous communication within bounded groups of players — something very different than the global comments on videos on YouTube.
I realize that you’re not specifically flattening all of them into the same category here… just wanted to note the boundaries from the beginning. -
I think you mean “rendering.” This is dense, interesting stuff, but it helps if you get simple English & punctuation issues right.
-
corrected. thank you.
-
-
I would suggest that the text-based conversation is the most robust of all. We’re all seeking a single lingua franca, one common playground. Note that English-language fiction is the most-often pirated around the globe. While games and images can explode in the mind with tremendous enlightening force, they still need to be processed by endless verbal analysis.
-
Solo reading has not been the sole mode of text consumption in the past. The 2 other common modes have been: a) Instruction. This is where a single text is held in common by a group who normally are trying to learn it together; b) Debate springboard. This is where people agree to read a text (either alone or, more often, together) in order to discuss issues arising from the text. Perhaps we can learn from the histories of these experiences what we might expect from the new networked opportunities of the 21st century?
It seems to me that where Instruction is the mode, the networked formulation acts as a magnifier of those tendencies already implicit in the old mode. The most notorious example of this is where extremist literature is propagated through the Internet. Where debate springboard is the mode, we have the burgeoning market of academic discourse. However, previously the debate springboard has also been the communication infrastructure within which new social movements have been born (eg the 19th and 20th century European labour movement).
As the social aspect of reading moves to the foreground, will we see an equivalent social movement growing from within it? Or will it be taken over by those with an Instructive agenda? -
All of these examples are based on handheld devices, or services anchored on handhelds (Kindle). I wonder if this intro would function differently if it referenced the category 2 online networks (Goodreads, Amazon reviews). That might foreground the Web, rather than apps and non-Web services.
-
excellent point Bryan; right in line with the general comment i made last week about the relationship of a social close reading with the broader discussion taking place on the web.
-
-
-
Matrix — a Taxonomy of Social Reading (5 comments)
-
I think that these four initial categories (location, timing, formality, persistence) are good starts.
One thing I don’t see accounted for here is different “circles of readers/permissions to participate.” If the “reader circle” isn’t formally theorized in the taxonomy, I’m concerned that we risk losing it in the overall model and ending up with a concept of “reader” that’s not unlike Facebook’s “friend” (i.e. an undifferentiated, binary state).
Bob’s entire system revolves around groups of readers in relations (a pair on a date, co-workers at lunch, teacher and students in the classrooom, online “reading club/event”). In each of these groups there are people who are “allowed/invited/recruited” to participate, there are those who are “allowed/invited/recruited” to read/listen, and there are those who are explicitly or implicitly *NOT* included. Any platform for reading is going to have to deal with how to accommodate differentiated circles of readers so we don’t end up with “I am” or “I am not” a reader. -
If readers are using a platform like CommentPress, then there is effectively still a container around the conversation. Readers in that social reading experience are all engaged in the same conversation with each other about that text, and publishing their comments where the text lives.
But consider turning that inside out. Social behaviour linked with books is happening all the time, online and offline, asynchronously, through a distributed network. All categories of reader are participating in varying numbers. So, instead, imagine a platform that hoovers up all of that social behvaiour that’s already going on, all the conversations, all the shallow “I loves it” and “RPatz is, like, so hot as Edward”, along with the deeper analysis and contributions to the author/text, and anchors it all together alongside the book. I’m not a programmer so I have no idea how this might be achieved, but I imagine it’s a function of something like tags and/or metadata.
Suddenly a reader coming new to the text is automatically joining a social reading community, and one that is as deep and broad (with all the complexities that throws up) as Facebook.
Which is a complicated way of saying that I don’t think this is a matter of whether readers will try something new like annotating and commenting on books. They are already doing it. They do it voraciously. It’s just those annotations and comments aren’t being published alongside the text of the book to create a social feedback loop for the book’s readers.
-
Kate, while, i’m completely in favor, for a variety of reasons, of hoovering up all the annotations on a particular text, i’m resistant to calling this the effort of a “social reading community.” I realize it’s arbitrary, but for the present, i think that it’s best to reserve the word “community” for groups where members know something about each other.” Context is important and we don’t yet have good ways of assigning context to the annotations of strangers. [note: i'm not disagreeing with your main point, just making a plea for semantic clarity in terms of how we use "community" when applied to groups of readers].
-
-
-
General Comments (3 comments)
-
I had the pleasure of being an earlier reader of this essay, which outlines what I imagine we will all come to call “the Stein Taxonomy.” I find Bob’s analysis to be persuasive. The one point I would like to make, though, is that taxonomies can be structured along different axes. The Stein Taxonomy explores this along the social access, but we could have a taxonomy of social reading that, for instance, identified different means of monetizing a service or by the different technologies for various activities. There is potentially a taxonomy for any point of view, though some are likely to prove more useful than others. The Stein Taxonomy is very much a SOCIAL taxonomy of social reading.–Joe Esposito
-
Reposted from Read 2.0:
It’s really important in this debate to properly define what we mean
by social reading, and I think we would do well to expand on Bob’s
taxonomy with some categories for more passive social reading
categories.Social reading is not just about people leaving notes on texts. That’s
just one small aspect of it. And it is not something we’re all
anticipating — it’s the mode of reading we engage in everyday on the
Web. It’s what we’re doing on this list.Any time we have a reaction to a digital text, and that reaction is
somehow recorded, quantified, aggregated, shared or transmitted
digitally, we’re engaging in social reading. It’s not a genre or a
trend, it’s something we’re actually quite used to that’s being
amplified and transformed by the Web. And the possibilities for it go
way beyond simple annotations. Any measured responses or behaviors
with a text — whether it’s measured by looking at a server log, a
database, at sums of 1-click user contributions (such as ratings), or
quantification of more complex responses such as annotations — are
part of social reading.Nielsen’s observations come from wide samplings taken across very
unsophisticated reading system. Until very recently, browsers and
websites lacked low-threshold response mechanisms, and now these have
become rather commonplace (think Tweet, Like, Rate, Flag, Share
widgets, etc).What we’re really interested in is “digital reading,” and the social
aspects of that happen to be far more important than they’ve been for
print-bound reading. In that sense, “social reading” is a limiting
phrase that doesn’t properly express the possibilities. -
here’s a brief summary of what i’ve learned from the discussion so far.
Process
People are very resistant to leaving comments in a public space. There was a much more extensive discussion of this draft on the private Read 2.0 listserve than what you see here. i begged people on the listserve to post their comments here, but with few exceptions no one was willing. The really sad thing from my pov is that by refusing to join the discussion in CommentPress, people deprived themselves of the opportunity to experience category 4 social reading first hand. I am very respectful of many of the people on the read 2.0 list and would have loved to have had their first-hand reactions to the experience of engaging in the close-reading of an online document with people whose views they value.The resistance to public commenting isn’t surprising; it’s just not yet part of our culture. Intellectuals are understandably resistant to exposing half-baked thoughts and many of them earn their living by writing in one form or another, which makes the idea of public commenting a threat to their livelihood. [I've long proposed the inverse law of commenting on the open web — the more you'd like to read someone's comments on a text, the less likely they are to participate in an open forum.]
Changing cultural norms and practices is a long haul.
Content
The comments I did get, both here and privately, helped me realize that, the first draft needs lots of work.Several people pointed out that the focus on “reading” obscured the fact that the flip side of “social reading” is “social writing.” Think of it this way. When i put the draft up in CommentPress i thought i was offering people a chance to experience “social reading.” It’s obvious to me now that the public comments people left are not only a permanent part of this draft — a part of the work itself — but also extremely helpful to me in terms of making version 2.0 stronger. this is indeed not just not just “social reading.” it is also collaborative thinking and writing.
This has interesting rights implications. In my speech at the recent Books-in-Browsers meeting i suggested that readers “own” their annotations and have to have the right to export and transport those annotations to other environments. I now realize that’s simplistic. if a reader has made comments in the margin AND specified that those comments should be public, the “ownership” of those comments has to be shared with the author or publisher. Since those comments become part of the public record, the author or publisher should have the right to include them forever as part of the work. However, the reader who made the comments must have the right, in perpetuity, to take those comments with them to other reading environments and places of conversation. if a reader specifies that comments are not to be made public, then it seems that the author/publisher has no right to do anything with them.
The second serious problem with version 1.0 is that its structure strongly implies that category 4 social reading, conversations that occur IN the margin, are the “highest form” of social reading. That’s just plain wrong. People read and write in order to play a role in their culture and time. Mysteries or romance novels have a cultural point of view that forms the background for the plot and communicates a world view. From this perspective, even reading “for pleasure” is in part a way of looking at an aspect of society through someone else’s eyes. If a central purpose of reading is to engage with the issues of the day, then a platform for close reading is best seen as a valuable tool, useful in helping readers join a broader discussion. put another way; if the comments and ideas someone writes in the margin never make it out, then it’s like a tree falling in the forest that no one hears. [note: yes i understand that the private thoughts someone has while reading, may show up later in public forums. i'm trying to make a point about how much more valuable the comments written in the margin become when they escape the private tributary and join the river of public discourse.]
A big thank you to everyone who has chimed in. it’s been a wonderful example of how social reading and writing work help elucidate complex problems.
-
Comments on the Blog
One of the things that made the open peer review of Planned Obsolescence so powerful for me was not just inviting readers to give me feedback, but the degree to which they were able to discuss (and to disagree) with one another on points of assessment within the text. It provided an important complication of the peer review process, while giving me the social context within which to understand the feedback I received.