Category 4
Category 4 — Engaging in a discussion IN the margins
(online, formal, synchronous or asynchronous, persistent)
Permalink for this paragraph 6 Putting a dynamic margin on the page of a book enables people to carry on a deep extended conversation. CommentPress, DigressIt, and BookGlutton are three early examples of what happens when readers are able to leave comments attached to specific paragraphs, pages, and chapters or to user–defined subjects and themes that cross an entire work. As opposed to blogs, where comments appear beneath the author’s text, CommentPress and similar platforms place reader’s comments in the right–hand margin. This design makes the conversation an integral part of the text, in effect extending the notion of “content” to include the discussion it engenders.
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Teachers who have used these platforms report that discussions which previously ended at the classroom door, now flow seamlessly throughout the day, as students, doing their homework, continue the conversation in the margin. Examples: a high school Spanish class;
an English class at the University of North Carolina (20 students entered over 500 comments during a week–long discussion.
Permalink for this paragraph 10 The ability to carry out a conversation in the margin turns out to be particularly useful for scholars who are using it to conduct new forms of open peer review. Notable examples are MIT Press’ experiment with Noah Wardrip–Fruin’s book Expressive Processing and MediaCommons’ publication–for–comment of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence.
Permalink for this paragraph 0 The face–to–face advantages of book groups that meet in someone’s living room are often out–weighed by the fact that busy schedules or the fact that the people you most want to read with are spread over many timezones, making it impossible to meet in person. When the conversation moves to the margins of an online book, online book groups become viable. For example, seven women read Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook together over a six week period, leaving as many as 20 comments on a single page.
Permalink for this paragraph 2 One very interesting factor in Category 4 social reading is that it may reduce the need to apply draconian and universally hated digital rights management (DRM) that ties files to specific hardware devices. If the teacher expects you to do your homework in the margin of the book or document being studied, you have to buy “your own copy” so that you can show up in the margin as yourself. It won’t do to get a pirated copy or a password from another student. It’s the same with book groups, where readers must pay in order to appear on the pages as themselves. From a broader perspective, social reading at this level enables a redefinition of content to include the conversation engendered by the text.
Permalink for this paragraph 0 Category 4 has a decidedly back–to–the–future aspect. Centuries before print, people would gather around books at universities and monasteries and make group notes in the margin as they read and studied together.
Margaret Ikeda
Edward Visel
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!
Libertary does something similar, although it is not beside the page.
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.
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.