In which case, is there a risk that a large part of their authority is going to pass to administrators, managers, or technicians?
Will scholars themselves increasingly come to resemble such figures: experts who do not necessarily need to possess the knowledge contained in the systems they administer and have access to?
Instead, their authority will rest on their ability to search, find, access, and even buy knowledge and information using online journal archives, full text search capabilities, electronic table of contents alerting, and citation tracking, and to organize the results into patterns, flows, and assemblages?
Or will such developments lead to the emergence of a different form of scholarship, whereby learned individuals no longer acquire the bulk of their information in concentrated immersive doses, as they might have in the past, from sitting down in a library or study and carefully reading a book?
Rather they experience more fragmented and distributed flows of information – at home, in the street, while travelling by car, or waiting to catch a train – that nevertheless enable a certain body of knowledge to be built up over a period of time.
Might this be described as ambient scholarship?
Gary Hall is author of Digitize this Book! and Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University .
22. Set the Text Free: Balancing Textual Agency Between Humans and Machines – John Haltiwanger
The computer has eaten typography, just as it has eaten everything else. The ramifications of the coded extensions we wrap our text in are both practical and ideological.
In a rare ideal, digital text moves fluidly from format to format, expanding to enjoy the material specificities found in, for instance, HTML and PDF. The more locked down a format is, the harder this necessary multiple existence becomes. Microsoft Word is a remediated typewriter with a capitalist agenda, and its outputs are as brittle as ink and pulp in terms of format fluidity.
Modern typography bases itself on a notion of message encoding, meaning that the typeface in which a message is set becomes part of the message itself. This message was initially set in a libre font called Lato. It was generated entirely using libre software, with a method that allows for transduction into not only HTML and PDF but also into any other format for which specifications are available, a material quality not available in the proprietary mechanism of its final typesetting. Generative typesetting demands a retreat from human-biased textualities presented by WYSIWYG tools, replacing it with a more equitable balance between human and machine. A foundation in libre ideology defies the on-going colonization of capital, rejecting the proprietary in favour of liberated textuality.
John Haltiwanger engages new media in theory and practice. He is a member of the Open Source Publishing collective.
23. Educate Well, Read Better – N. Katherine Hayles
Literacy is not without neurological consequences. Recent research in fMRI studies indicates that reading changes how the brain functions. My students increasingly read on the Web rather than in print. What difference does this make? The question is not only what they read, but how they read. Reading on the Web seems to encourage skimming. While useful as a technique to identify quickly items of interest, it can become a disadvantage when working with complex digital literary forms. For example, when I assigned my students Shelley Jackson’s classic hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl, they were unprepared for the work’s density, extent, and complexity. By contrast, when they read Mary Shelley’s print novel Frankenstein, they fully expected to spend several hours (or days) with it. Does this mean that reading on the Web is making us distracted, as Nicholas Carr has argued, or in the more extreme view espoused by Mark Bauerlein, that it is making us stupid? Such arguments overlook the fact that strategic reading practices have always included skimming and scanning, as any scholar can testify. The trick is to have a repertoire of varied reading techniques and the experience to shift to one or another depending on the situation. Where we are failing as parents, teachers, and educators is teaching our digitally native students a full range of reading strategies and educating them on how to use them in disciplined and creative ways.
N. Katherine Hayles is a professor in the Literature programme at Duke University , Durham , NC .
24. Reading the Picture – Toon Horsten
When Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was interviewed in the seventies, he wasn’t certain of things. The comic strip, and Tintin in particular, had had its day. The medium was out of date and the strip story could not compete with the new forms of amusement (including games and animation films).
In the following four decades, it seemed as if Hergé was right. With the digital revolution, it seemed that there wasn’t for the moment any place for the combination of picture and text as they appeared in the comic strip. Reading comic strips on a computer screen was trying. But now that the iPad and other tablets seem to have taken over the market for digital reading, the picture suddenly looks completely different. Comic strips appear to be extremely suitable as reading matter on an iPad. Although the possibilities have to be further investigated.
The iPad version of the Suske and Wiske album De stuivende stad [ed. The Bustling City ], issued to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the series, leads the way. The comic strip, supported with a full soundtrack and some slight animation, shows which possibilities the new applications can offer for reading comic strips.
They will have to ensure, however, that with all the new possibilities, they don’t simply end up reinventing the animation film.
Toon Horsten is writer of Het Geluk van de Lezer [ed. Happiness of the Reader] and artistic leader of Strip Turnhout.
25. Apples and Cabbages – Minke Kampman
‘We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.’ A sentimental line by Norma Desmond in the movie Sunset Boulevard, explaining why silent movies were so wonderful and so much better than talking movies. Being immersed in the topic of reading as I was when watching the film, I could not help connecting this line to reading as I did with almost anything I saw or read or heard about. With so-called ‘talkies’, we did not only add spoken dialogue to film, we added foley sounds as well. Fake sounds that are a better representation of the sound than the actual sound itself. We make the story come more vividly to life by adding the sound of chopped cabbage when a head is chopped off or by clapping together two coconut shells for a horse galloping away. Even though the cabbage in itself has no relation to the storyline, this additional layer of sound enriches our viewing experience.
With regard to our reading experience, we’re about to leave the stage of sentiment we are in now. A stage in which most of the commercial software and hardware still try to replicate the ‘real’ reading experience by imitating a book and having us turn the page, make bookmarks, and read chronologically. No wonder that we are still comparing the two, as Norma did with silent movies and talkies. Imagine what she would have said about YouTube. A platform in which the metadata has taken over and completely changed our viewing experience, and yet we still go out to watch movies in the cinema.
Alessandro Ludovico states in his text: ‘Digital and print, while being two different worlds, are not mutually exclusive.’ Both will remain in existence and evolve, but should not be compared with each other, just as you shouldn’t compare Cinema with YouTube either. Both chronological and non-linear reading is possible in digital and print. The argument that digital would make reading a more mobile activity is ridiculous; you can take your book anywhere and it will never shut down on you. Subdividing reading into digital and analogue seems a bit redundant, but is perhaps necessary to define two different starting-points from which we can proceed further.