Book was There: Reading in Electronic Times

Piper, Andrew. Book was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012. 

Piper is a Professor in the department of languages and literature at McGill University. At the same time, he directs a digital humanities laboratory and is editor of a new web-based, open access journal, the “Journal of Cultural Analytics.” This book’s subject is about the future of reading through studying the history of a multiplicity of human interaction with books. This interest stems from his work in applying both the tools and techniques of data science to uncover answers to questions concerning literature and culture. He particularly focuses on the place of the printed text in the digital age. He celebrates the lasting power of print, but in the end, what he declares matters, is that people keep reading – not which ‘vehicle’ enables reading to occur.

Piper sees the art of reading as informing “who we are and how we think.”  He is concerned to understand “how technologies, both new and old, shape how we read.”   What the author is attempting to lay out is an understanding of the relationship “between books and screens, to identify some of their fundamental differences and to chart out the continuities that might run between them.” …Because ‘Books got there first’, Piper comments “we cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past.”  At the same time, he readily admits that reading is changing – particularly for young people today.

As we read more and more using electronic means, the role of touch and scent change radically. As Piper puts it:

To think about the future of reading means, first and foremost, to think about the relationship between reading and hands, the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read….Books are objects that conjoin openness and closure together, like the hands to which they belong. 

Piper goes on to describe a whole period of ‘numerous experiments with the tactility of reading, and how people see books as meant to be circulated while others see them as possessions not to be shared. Piper writes: “To hold on to books is to hold on to time….Books are how we speak with the distant and the dead. That the past lives on in books is a commonplace. The important point is that we can close books – and thus our relationship to the past.”  This statement begs the question: “How can we hold, and hold on to, our digital texts today?” 

It is true that digital texts can be grasped and touched, and pages ‘need to be turned.’ As Piper notes, even though electronic readers have been created to look like books, they are very different in “how readers manually interact with them and those changes matter for how we read.”  Piper comments on the ‘fragility’ of digital texts – not in terms of whether they are more or less ‘endangered’ than books, but in terms of understanding the way “these two categories, the lost and found, mutual inform one another as conditions of knowledge”  and affect historical thinking about what must be preserved and what can be let go.

In discussing the digital page, Piper talks about it being a fake, a simulation called up from distributed data’ – unlike book content which is built up on the ‘knowledge of adjacency.’ Because we can ‘roam’ and ‘zoom’ in digital texts, reading digitally accommodates “dreams of fluidity.”   Yet despite these profound changes, Piper concludes that a basic aspect of “seriality”  is maintained from the printed book.

Note taking and handwriting come under Piper’s gaze. He asks the provocative question: “Does Handwriting matter?” He goes onto discuss the democratizing effect of new media where it is ‘fairer and also faster.’ Interestingly Piper defends handwriting as a valuable human skill because “it is where our representation of the world is at its most multi-dimensional.” 

Finally Piper focus on Sharing – he see reading as never purely an act of isolation. He notes that how different technologies in the future help or inhibit sharing, will have a significant effect on reading itself. In talking about textual initiatives, he notes that almost all of these initiatives is structured:

Around three overlapping notions of sharing: commonality, transferability, and sociability. We want other people to read the same thing we are reading (commonality); we want to be able to send other people what we are reading (transferability); and we want to be able to talk to other people about what we are reading (sociability). “Social reading” is shaping up to be the core identity, or ideology if you will, of digital media.” 

What matters in all of this, Piper says, is ‘whether we share well.’ IN a final comment about what makes books meaningful, Piper says that they convey a sense of time…. From opening to closing…

Piper closes his work with a discussion of the importance of redundancy – both in the world of the book and in the digital world. He says that redundancy is a compelling argument for new forms of electronic reading – just as it continues to be important for books. He sees the book as part of an eco-system: one in which humans continuously communicate in new and complex ways – through words. The last thing he wants to see is the computer becoming the new book!

Much of the seminal readings relating to victims’ experiences during the Holocaust and for survivors after the Holocaust, remain unfindable or unusable in the digital world. Piper’s embracing of the digital world and digital reading in all forms, (including computational reading), opens implications for digital discovery involving all kinds of artifacts – as they become digitally available in new digital formats – for ‘reading’ outside of the ‘book’. 

Artifacts, Artworks and Agency

Dipert, Randall R. Artifacts, Artworks and Agency. Temple University Press, 1993

• Dipert, Randall R. “Some Issues in the Theory of Artifacts: Defining 'Artifact' and Related Notions.” The Monist, Vol. 78, No. 2, Prosthetic Epistemology (APRIL 1995), pp. 119-135. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27903425.
• Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage Publications, 2004, p. xix. Accessed 13 December 2017, https://usu.instructure.com/courses/454859/files/65116431/download?verifier.

Dipert wrote this work because it is his contention that the notion of an artifact and the theory of artefactual agency have never been properly defined or investigated. In a beginning definition of the word ‘artifact’, Dipert states that:

An artifact is an intentionally modified tool whose modified properties were intended by the agent to be recognized by an agent at a later time as having been intentionally altered for that, or some other, use…Hence artifacts, are unlike tools, distinctively “social”- and this in a precise sense. They require us as agents to think of other cognitive and acting agents, their attitudes and thought and emotional mechanisms, and the contents of their thoughts and attitudes. 

In exploring the meaning of artifacts, Dipert explores the term in the context of ‘action-theory’. He highlights what he perceives as the confusion in other literary writings about artifacts, over instrumentality of objects and “a conception of their historical and other-agent originating nature on the other”.  

In shedding light on potentially new methodological pathways of content analysis (coming out of my reading of Krippendorff’s work on Content Analysis – and his particular comment that data’s significance “stems from the meanings that others bring to their readings”…(Like Dipert, Krippendorff also emphasizes the importance of communications and “the awareness of the relational space between senders and receivers, of the processes through which interpersonal relations are negotiated, social structures are constituted, and members of large populations come to know about each other.” 

Applying a much expanded (in breadth and depth) definition of artifact by Dipert, the door is open for a deeper examination of Holocaust artifact intentionality –as applied to exploring the intentionality of Holocaust literary authors on ‘future agents’ of the different genres of literary artifacts: diaries, memoirs, poetry, novels and short stories.  At the same time, understanding ‘agency’ more broadly catalyzes new conversations for future generations to consider in the context of Holocaust remembrance.

A Pedagogy for Original Synners

Anderson, Steve, and Anne Balsamo. “A Pedagogy for Original Synners.” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. Edited by Tara McPherson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. The MIT Press, 2008. 241–259. DOI: 10.1162/dmal.9780262633598.241. Accessed 5 November 2017. 

This work was written as part of the MacArthur Foundation's book series on Digital Media and Learning. The authors explain that the term “original synners” is borrowed from a title by 

Science fiction author Pat Cadigan’s cosmology, “which identifies them as “original synthesizers” whose most important literacy will be the ability to create knowledge by harvesting information from diverse sources. 

Asking themselves how to prepare both their students and themselves as teachers to be ‘the stewards of culture for the future’, Anderson and Balsamo use the science-fictional device of time-traveling to gain perspective on the contemporary scene of digital learning (in 2007). They imagine it is now 2020.

The questions they set out as important to focus on are questions like: 

How do students of this generation assess information that comes to them in different media forms (in print, text, images, animation, simulation, personal experience, augmented experience, virtual experience, displaced experience)? How do they learn to form new ideas and new insights, both on their own, and as part of collaborative groups? What is the tenor of their informal social learning networks? How do they interact with formal institutions that reify the values of the parent culture? How should these institutions change to address this generational disposition? 

Out of all these kinds of questions comes the hint of thinking about ‘unintended consequences’ of the “deployment of digital technologies for the purposes of education and learning.” 

In their assessment of what it means to be ‘born digital’ and raised in a ‘digital networked age’, the authors focus on young people’s beliefs and assumptions about how learning occurs and on the fact that their beliefs are shaped 

By their early encounters with pervasive digital worlds and network technologies, and the ubiquity of “smart” and responsive environments. They present themselves as just-in-time learners, confident that when they need to know something, they'll know where to find it. By the time they are ready to enter the university, these students have amassed significant experience in mining their networks (both digital and social) for their information needs. 

So what does ‘thinking’ translate into for digital natives? The authors say:

The process of “thinking” now routinely (and in some cases, exclusively) relies on social network navigation. Data = information = knowledge is their taken-for-granted epistemology. And for many of them, every world is a game, and all the people merely players. Their imaginations are structured and shaped through encounters in different kinds of mediated worlds: RL and online games, institutional and familial, peer-based and anonymous. They move easily through different kinds of networks: social, technological, material, and virtual. Consequently, their identities are a hybrid of multiple personae performed and shaped through their participation in dispersed (mixed reality) social networks as well as within simulated virtual (gaming) worlds. In this they are the quintessential decentered postmodern subjects marked by differing intensity flows and shifting affinities. 

The authors themselves think it is important to refine what is meant by ‘critical thinking’ “ to focus more on the skills of creative and critical synthesis.”  From my own research in to the subject of thinking – and particularly research into the teaching of thinking skills by Dr. Edward de Bono, I believe that this insight is particularly important.

The authors clearly describe educational institutions ‘in transition’ in an ‘emergent knowledge economy.’ All educators need to evaluate their roles:

The role of universities in the knowledge production industry, the waning cultural authority of the professoriate, the notion of education versus credentialing, and the professionalization of junior faculty and graduate students. For just as the development of new digital technologies and networking applications serve as the stage for reconfiguring learning practices of students, so too do these technological innovations provide an opportunity to reengineer common practices within institutions of higher education. 

They examine different models such as:

• Open CourseWare at MIT, (p. 247-250):
• CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion (p. 250-251)
• Media Rich: The Institute of Multimedia Literacy (p. 251-254)

They conclude with a “Manifesto for Original Synners”. (p. 254-257)

Fundamentally they see the challenge for educators as finding ways to teach students to think creatively, constructively, creatively and computationally so as to “critically synthesize knowledge from the information that that comes to them from multiple sources, in multimediated forms, and through multiple social networks is to teach them a value proposition: how will they create culture differently? This shifts the discussion about the purposes of education into a different register: one that focuses not on the act of critical consumption but rather on the act of creative production. 

In conclusion, the authors state:

In short, Original Synners require new literacies: cultural, technological, social, and epistemological. As professional educators, we have the responsibility to design learning environments and institutional practices that foster the acquisition of foundational skills that students will need for a lifetime of network navigation, information synthesis, social participation, and creative knowledge production. 

In summation, this work is most helpful for my research because it asks the question: how to prepare both students and teachers to be ‘the stewards of culture for the future.’ How digital artifacts will shape the memory of the Holocaust in future generations is profoundly affected by the answer and outcomes to that very question.