futureofthebook.com
preservation and persistence of the changing book

Introduction

Commentary

Reports

Workshops

Store

Links

Craft, Critique, Culture...Conference

The second annual CCC conference at the University of Iowa, April 11-14, was a great success. The theme, interdisciplinary writing in the academy, is wide and there were 26 sessions of papers provided to cover the various perspectives.

I went to two of the sessions and enjoyed them completely. Session E2; “Delivering the Digital Dimension: Old texts Take New Shapes in the Digital Community” and session F2; “Technological Literacy and Literary Technologies: How We Read and Write with Changing Media”, each featured provocative and carefully presented papers. Actually, I was amazed at the provocative, even counter “digital revolution”, aspects of each of them.

In the E2 session Danielle Wiese profiled the features of content presented in a site designed to counter authorization of oil drilling in a refuge. Here the strange aspect was the invitation to an inert activism that enticed readers to consider themselves informed and positioned without real participation in the cause. Was this outcome an inadvertency of the reading mode or an inadvertency of participatory democracy on-line or both?

Kevin Schut reported on his “ethnographic” work among computer and video game developers. He did a wonderful job of using interviews to extract keywords and concepts of the practitioners, much like an ethnography of primitive paper making in Siam. The important question raised was the pre emptive importance of “game play”, the enticing quality of certain games, regardless of their technological support, to induce reader or player engagement.

The session was completed with Rebekah Farrugia’s discussion of the persistence of an enclave of DJ’s using vinyl (rubies)...counterpointing the trend to digital access to music. Here the use of real records to perform a real mediation between the DJ and the dancers, perfectly mirrored the persistence of the paper book in a digital context. There were very useful descriptions of the methods of DJ performance, regardless of an inability of the speaker to port CD examples of “scratching”. Turns out this was a perfect illustration of “on the fly” performance.

The F2 session presented four wonderful papers. Kristin Baum offered a very thoughtful paper correlating the corporality of the book and body and suggesting that important mutual dependencies, not inadvertencies, are at work. The talk was rich with literary sources and a demonstration of real book exemplars made the talk more persuasive. The paper also set the stage for interesting implications; if the book is our consciousness migrated into and out of our bodies, what has become of this orphan itself and how has it made its way in the world? Is it, for example, more than inadvertent that the book has come to thrive in an artifactual ecology of libraries? One small treat for me was the presentation of the book spread illustration from McLuhan. Two thumbs restrain the opening. Kristin used it to introduce the importance of the hands in narrating the haptic qualities of the print book. What struck me was the McLuhan tangent as read from this illustration. The McLuhan illustration showed the thumbs restraining the book opening for the photographer, not the dexterity of the fingers and whole hands at work in actual reading!

Sarah Townsend presented on the mechanisms of presentation of poetic works in the composite, screen based reading mode. Her admirable illustrations questioned the advisability playing back to us the very act of reading as a digital artifact rather than an experience of poetry. She also illustrated the merge and churn of parent reading modes, involving all the perceptions, as represented in the shaky jello of the composite, screen based mode.

Michelle Simmons took a courageous, logical stand that screen based, interlinked reading does the opposite of liberating the reader. In the author/reader/writer morphing scenarios of on-line reading the multiple paths actually impose an authorial method of thinking and a truly arbitrary context for the readers’ constructed meaning. FotB would go much further, to suggest that the arbitrary linage dissolves the meaningful text into word fragments that are themselves saboteurs, prompting the reader to a whole text land of these pirate words. This is a very different link of the parent text from that associated with hand written marginalia found in a paper book. These live links color the linked word and prompt the cursor while distracting the reading.

Deborah Walkoczy also took a contrary stance as she described a crumbling of the layer on layer technological support of graphic design. A higher price is paid for not thinking in the rush to digitally mediated design. Rather than a NewAge, Deborah raised the specter of a digital dark age. FotB thinks that dark age is here, but welcomes it as an enlightenment that will allocate the reading functionalities more appropriate to their various modes. A historical preeminence of print can be aligned with a functionality of scientific repeatability, and print will certainly persist in symbiosis with that method. Meanwhile, the composite, screen based mode will better support the equally important, non repeating meanings produced by on-line reading.

EndNote

Finally, I hate it when...in any of these contexts of discussion about reading modes... someone asks about relevance of “gender” and everyone else suddenly agrees that it is a crucial issue. When will all these silly students of interdisciplinary texts realize that reading is truly disengendered...regardless of inconsequential frills and fringes. FotB readers know that reading is the tertiary sex.