4oh4 - words not found

Transcendental Black Metal

2011-10-25T00:39:00.000+01:00

- [fuck] the demand for reality - that is for unity, simplicity, communicability, etc. - lyotard(ish) - "what is postmodernism?" -

First: An apology, to all who've been reading for the last couple of years, an apology for disappearing for a bit. Blogs ebb and flow of course, but this one has ebbed more than I would have liked while I finished writing up. For now, we're back in business.

But what is this business? Still ebooks, ereaders, and all (sometimes tenuously) related material, at least for the most part. My PhD viva is at the end of next month on this very subject, and, if all works out, a book to follow on the same or similar. So this blog will continue to discuss such things (which means I guess I should have said something about the Kindle Fire, but then again the news was kind of boring. Mark Sample tweeted a while back that he thought the same, that LCDs weren't the future of ereading. I'm inclined to agree: a reliable and affordable hybrid screen would have been news; a cheap touchscreen that will grace landfills everywhere in 18 months as new tech emerges is somewhat less impressive. No doubt it will perform well this Christmas, but I'm not here to cheerlead Amazon's share prices).

But I'd like to broaden what gets discussed here on 4oh4 too. I've just started a teaching fellowship post specialising in Digital Humanities and Critical Theory, and my MA students in particular are reminding me of all the theory I loved before getting lost in ereading. Over the course of writing the thesis I also became more interested in politics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental literature, and I hope ideas relating to all of these will get an airing over future postings (which, whilst on no fixed schedule, will be more frequent and with shorter discursive postings alongside the essay length entries).

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An aside: One of my students has an awesome project brewing on transcendental black metal, nationality, maybe some ecology, maybe some poetry. He turned me back on to Liturgy who've made one of my favourite albums of the year so far. He also gave me a copy of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's manifesto for a Trascendental Black Metal (caps required) which is utterly bonkers, occasionally flat out wrong (or maybe just not fully realised), and also courageous (an admirable and admirably defended aspect of the genre(?) it's held up to define).

The ever fascinating Timothy Morton's been getting excited about Wolves in the Throne Room recently (sample quote: "Wolves in the Throne room provide a kind of musical antihistamine that enables humans not to have an allergic reaction to working at the depth necessary for reforging our broken coexistence with all beings"), and I think Hunt-Hendrix's manifesto (for a similar if not at all the same music) taps into a similar vein (sample quote).

So, a heads up: transcendental black metal and ecology. Just sayin'.

Evolving Everything

2011-07-16T18:59:00.001+01:00

- knowledge…lives in the muscles, not in consciousness - John Dewey - Human Nature and Conduct - 177 -

I've been thinking about technology and bodies a lot recently. Frequent readers of this blog have probably heard that topic come up here more and more often over the last year, and to be honest I think it's what I'm going to be spending most of my time on over the next few years: what are the specifics of the embodied reader meeting an equally embodied reading technology (be it Kindle, iPad or codex)?

Maybe it's because I've been reading about Evolutionary Epistemology again. I've written about Henry Plotkin's work on EE a few times, and again I'm finding myself drawn back to it as, to me, it's the most coherent and persuasive branch of the subject. I thought I'd post something which might find its way into my thesis, but mostly just scratches my current EE itch (and is a bit off topic from e-reading). The idea of applying EE beyond biological evolution just appeals somehow.

I'd like to discuss the vision of EE that Henry Plotkin outlines in Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge as the simplicity of his theory clearly matches the bare-bones mechanism of evolution - the three forces of the variation, selection, and reproduction/heredity of individual members of a species within an environment - that enables ideas like Universal Darwinism to function. I would like to argue that Plotkin's approach allows us, through it's stripping out of the specificities of biological organisms' reproduction and genetic encoding of information, to talk about EE as it might apply to technologies in their alternative environment (alternative to climates and predation and suchlike) of human culture. With non-artefact, i.e. biological entities their environment is easily defined: everything in the milieu in which they exist which can have an impact upon their development or surviving long enough to reproduce. But for technologies that milieu is more specifically defined, though the same principles apply. I would like to argue that we are the defining selective forces for our artefacts, human users are the environment for our technologies. As I hope to show alongside this discussion of EE, we provide selective pressures in a manner very similar to traditional evolution.

Plotkin's central idea is that as organisms adapt to their environments, via evolutionary selective pressures, what they pass on to their offspring in each generation is not just genetic instructions for building new bodies, but knowledge about the world that came before them (hence EE). His most striking example is that of the stick insect: a stick insect looks like a stick not because it tries to, but because generations of stick-insect parents survived better the more that they looked like sticks and avoided becoming prey long enough to reproduce and pass on genes which stipulated increasingly stick-like bodies. Plotkin argues that the stick insect's body has a knowledge of an aspect of the world far greater than its own mind is capable of.

This immediately raises the question “why use the word 'knowledge' to describe an adaptation?”, and Plotkin asks the question himself: “why take the further step of equating adaptations with knowledge?...How can the wing markings of a moth [for example] be knowledge?” (Darwin Machines, 117). Plotkin defends the word choice on the grounds of looking at what knowledge, in 'everyday life' means, saying that “knowledge, in its most common meaning, denotes a mental state that bears a specific relationship to some features of the world” (4). When we say that we “know” something we're stating that there is parity between two things “a brain state, which is a part of organismic organization, and the world itself...which is the feature of environmental order relative to which that brain state stands” (117). Knowing someone's name, or where our house is, or what a book looks like, we incorporate that thing we know into ourselves in some way; we have modified ourselves to reflect an aspect of external reality.

For Plotkin there must be a brain state which represents the thing in the world, or the aspects of the thing in the world we have access to:

knowledge is always something that comes in two parts. There is the 'knower's end' of knowledge, comprising feelings, brain states and, of course, the means of expressing the knowledge; and there is the 'world's end' of knowledge, which is that aspect of the world that is known. All knowledge is a relationship between the knower and the known (pp10-11).

Now this is not to say that there's a miniature version of the world playing out within our brains, simply that for an act of knowing to occur there must be a state of cognition and memory which has a physical instantiation and which maps to our experience of, recall, or interaction with an object in the world, and in that sense might be said to incorporate and represent it.

By envisioning knowledge in this stripped down sense we are able to use the word to describe adapted biological organisms' relation to the world. Evolutionary adaptations, like everyday human knowledge, also always have a

relational quality. Every adaptation comprises organization of an organism relative to some feature of environmental order…The wing markings of a moth stand in relation to the nervous system of a predator, specifically the way in which that nervous system is wired such that the ‘eye’ [of the moth's markings] startles the predator and perhaps causes it to flee…All human knowledge has the same two-component relationship that adaptations have (pp116-117).

This matching of body or brain states to world states is the underpinning assertion for Plotkin's vision of EE. Adaptations conform the bodies of the evolved organism to the worlds that housed its lineage; stick insects' bodies are the sum total of the knowledge acquired from the environments of its ancestors. In this way stick insects incorporate an aspect of the environment into their being: simply, they are material instantiations of the knowledge that the environments which preceded them favoured insects which looked like sticks.

My question now becomes “Are technologies manifestations of knowledge of the environments which shaped their lineage?”

For our stick insect, her ancestors were a mix of more or less stick-like insects; the fact that she exists today shows that her ancestors were the most stick-like. The gene pool of early insects generated billions of more or less ‘sticky’ bugs over time, through various mutations, and those that most resembled sticks, who were better camouflaged, avoided being eaten, and survived to reproduce and pass on their stick-like natures to their offspring resulted in our current stick insect - an instantiation of the sum total of the biological knowledge of the aspects of the environments incorporated into the bodies of her ancestors living in them through natural selection and passed on to their offspring. If we want to say that equipment can be a similar instantiation of knowledge then, as with the bare-bones evolutionary theory used above, we must find, in some way, parity between an artefact and the stick insect.

To begin with, evolution must be in place, which, as before, requires individuals, an environment for them to exist in, and the three stages. Let's use a simple artefact for our example.

The modern machete is a ubiquitous tool in many tropical countries where it's used to cut away vegetation when travelling through dense jungle, to harvest tough crops such as sugar cane, and in the home for butchering practices where a cleaver is a common alternative in other parts of the world. It's essentially a long knife, typically set into a wooden or plastic two part haft that is bolted together through a full tang. The machete, for our discussion of EE, is the individual, and, unlike the stick insect's experience, its community of potential human users are its environment.

Variation in knife manufacture and design is clear; from the first stone blades used by early hominids, through to multi-component contemporary cutting tools, the sheer variety of blade lengths and shapes, handle styles, materials, number of components, etc. is staggering. This is to be expected of a tool which has been put to so many different uses around the world and for so long. Each new development comes from a mutation which alters the range in which a feature is expressed. In a culture where knife blades are usually between two and five inches, a 15 inch blade is a mutation which, if used successfully, permanently alters the potential range of blade lengths for future generations of knives.

The contemporary, relatively standardised machete comes from a process of selection dictated by its environment. The stick insect's ancestors ran the risk of being eaten if they were not significantly stick-like. For every mutation which made them more vulnerable, predators, as part of the environment, frequently stopped them living long enough to reproduce. But for every mutation which made their genes more likely to provide a range of colouring akin to their surroundings, a range of appearances more accurately fitting the vectors of a twig, then the environment rewarded that trait by allowing it to be passed on. The insects' bodies matched a world state which remained consistent over generations; their biological knowledge of that aspect of the world grew; they had incorporated an appearance to be found in their environment into themselves.

Machetes don't look like any aspect of their human environment, but, I would argue, the same process of selection occurs. Fitness to the environment for equipment is the same as for insects in as much as it's about matching a state so that the environment doesn't obliterate the traits your particular instantiation is expressing. In a tropical climate the machete shape is the best fit for its environment. This is not to say that the machete matches the jungle, or incorporates an aspect of the jungle, it doesn't. The machete has no evolved knowledge of jungle environments. But it does have a knowledge of how part of its environment intersects with the jungle, how human users experience the jungle. A short stone knife is no use for clearing jungle plant life, so when metal came along, which allowed for thin, strong blades which could be carried easily, it was adopted. Metal also introduced a new variable: blade length. A longer blade allowed for large slashing motions to be made - inefficient for precision work, but perfectly suited to human passage through tropical terrain. This is what the machete matches, this is what the machete incorporates, the repeated moment where knife users meet the jungle, the aspect of their environment related to blade length, just as the individual stick insect is the product of past insects' repeated intersections with predators unable to distinguish between sticks and insects. Blades would have become longer and longer as users discarded shorter blades and created, or requested the creation of increasingly machete-like knives, and, similarly, blades that were too long or unwieldy would have quickly been rejected.

This is the moment of reproduction/heredity. Stick insects, having successfully evaded the selective pressures of their environment, would mate and return their particular combination of genes to the gene-pool, causing new phenotypes to express them in new ways, more or less successfully. The machete doesn't have genes, and it can't facilitate the creation of the next generation of long bladed knives, but the third evolutionary criteria of reproduction/heredity I believe still stands. When the stick insect mates this is also an adapted behaviour, and therefore, in EE, also an instance of knowledge. The ability to mate relies on knowing, in Plotkin's conception of the term, that there will be other stick insects in the environment with which mating can occur, i.e. other stick insects are part of the environment of the individual stick insect, and they have internalised that aspect in the same way as any other adapted trait. When offspring are produced an aspect of the environment (another stick insect in this case) has caused our individual stick insect's genetic material to be reproduced. Machetes have a knowledge of the consumer forces of its environment of users; its traits also get reproduced when an aspect of the environment causes them to be, i.e. when a long bladed knife is used successfully an individual user is more likely to recommend it to other potential users, and to produce or request this trait themselves when they next need the tool. Thus a machete's blade is a knowledge, not only of how humans encounter jungle plants when moving through them, but also of the consumer forces which can allow such a blade to come into being and be repeated. Blades that are too short are rejected, blades that are too long are rejected, blades which have a trait that marks a fitness to their environment have that trait reproduced in the next generation; blade length is a heritable trait in knives.

In a discussion of EE Tommi Vehkavaara (.pdf) argues that

The ability to act successfully presupposes the knowledge how to act successfully. Discoursive [sic] linguistically expressed justification is not always necessary - if the ability to act is (successfully) demonstrated, no argument can overcome this ultimate proof of knowledge. This kind of demonstrable knowledge connects us to other forms of life - every living creature needs at least some knowledge how to act successfully (in its environment). Of course, knowledge does not determine the action it enables, it is just the precondition for the action. Although an action can be seen as a presentation of knowledge, the actual action is not necessary for the existence of knowledge - knowledge is potential action, the power to do (210, emphasis in original).

A stick insect is put into action in the act of being a stick insect; a genotype is knowledge in potential, a living phenotype is knowledge in action. Every second that the stick insect is alive it demonstrates that it has a knowledge of the consistent aspects of the environments which led to its being, that there will likely be oxygen to breathe, food to eat, light to see by, predators to evade, and other stick insects to mate with. The machete differs in that it doesn't act second by second, it only acts during use; the stick insect also only puts knowledge into action when it is in concert with its environment, it just happens to never be outside of that environment. A stick insect born into a vacuum doesn't act, it has nothing to know and simply ceases, it might be argued, in some way to even be a stick insect. A machete outside of use also doesn't act, it cannot demonstrate, and therefore cannot prove its knowledge until that concert with its environment begins. But the moment that it is picked up it comes into action, and the success of its use is a measure of its knowledge. This fact actually allows us to use the notion of an Evolutionary Epistemology of Artefacts (EEoA) to define the term artefact: anything that manifests a fit with an environment, but that cannot act without the impetus of another individual is an artefact. Artefacts exist as potential knowledge until they are in use, they have, in Vehkavaara's terms, “the power to do.”

Maybe the Dumbest Generation Came Before Us

2011-06-05T22:13:00.010+01:00

- many people have a tree growing in their heads but the brain itself is much more grass than tree - deleuze and guattari - a thousand plateaus - 17 -

UPDATE: Mark Bauerlein replied over at Teleread.com and I'm waiting for my comment to pass moderation. I've added the exchange to the bottom of this post, and I'll update if there are any more replies.

Recently I've been trying to make my way through Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation (2008), but now...I've given up. I just couldn't face it. As part of my research I've been collecting people's accounts of resistance to reading on screen from blog posts, newspaper articles, conversations etc., and I thought that Bauerlein's work would provide me with some interesting anecdotes for my research, on the assumption that the plural of “anecdote” is sometimes, if you're lucky, “data.”

From the first few pages, The Dumbest Generation smacks of the worst kind of get-off-my-lawn resistance to change, and Bauerlein often bashes “pro-technology” commentators, as if the printed book reading that he exalts somehow wasn't a technology itself. But I was kind of expecting this, it's the rhetoric which sells these kinds of books (see also Keen's The Cult of the Amateur). I was fairly shocked, however, by the large number of studies that Bauerlein cites, about literacy, language skills, and cultural engagement in America, which seem to report huge drops in quality (of various measures) whilst completely neglecting to take into account the effects of increasing numbers of non-native English speakers joining the country over the course of the sometimes decades long data collection. He mourns, for instance, that only “one in 10 [18-24 year olds] attended a jazz performance [in the last year], and one in 12 attended a classical music performance. Only 2.6 percent of them saw a ballet, 11.4 percent a play...One in 40 played a classical musical instrument...” (p24). But, it seems like these are (with the exception of jazz) (a) cultural activities associated (rightly or wrongly) with the heritage of the white middle classes and (b) (often including jazz) expensive pursuits. Maybe less young people in America (in the absence of data from other countries) do see less ballet or classical music now, but what of the rise of Salsa or Mariachi; of ethnic, artisanal, and slow food movements; of live (increasingly esoteric) popular music; or a few hundred other more diversely cultured pursuits? And what about the growing division between the disposable wealth of an ever expanding poor and the middle classes, couldn't this also impact on these particular forms of cultural participation?

Again, maybe I should have expected such data analysis. The broad brushstrokes of these kinds of interpretation aren't designed for sustained attention or interrogation, they're for telling people who already hold certain opinions about the state of a nation, or a generation, or a cultural product that their views are well founded. Selling people's prejudices back to them can be brutally efficient.

But I digress. I mostly hated Bauerlein's book because I couldn't finish the damn thing (I went through anger, which kept me reading, to boredom, which couldn't). Rather, I hated that, for a second, it seemed like I was bearing out his thesis: that, as a member of the digital generation, I was unable to concentrate on sustained linear arguments due to the hypnotic and anaesthetising effects of “the screen” (Bauerlein talks a lot about “the screen”).

All of this got me thinking about the kind of data such writers cite when disparaging the abilities of anyone under 30 (subtitle of The Dumbest Generation: “or, don't trust anyone under 30,” no joke). Take the “f-shape” reading that I'm apparently meant to employ when I read online: when faced with a screen rather than a book I won't read in neat lines, I'll read the first line or two, just the start of the next few, then maybe have a dig through half of the next few lines, and then go back to just looking at the first words until I hit the bottom of the page (the eye-tracking software that captures this kind of reading reports this data back as the f-shape).

So, is this how I read? Yes! All the time. I skim maybe two or three hundred articles a day if my RSS is clogged, maybe 50 emails, and 500 or more tweets (and I paired down who I was following to get to that). Most of this content doesn't even get an f-shape, more an equals sign, a title and a blitz of the first couple of lines. But this doesn't mean that I'm a drooling, clicking, screen-sapped victim of technology, it means that I go to all of those things to dig out information, and that they're an imperfect source of it, at least as far as my interests lie. I've learnt to filter an RSS feed of 300 items in half an hour, cutting out the irrelevant (from my perspective) and bookmarking the potentially enlightening. That, for me, is a new skill and it keeps me up-to-date with roughly what's going on in the major stories of the world, and in the worlds of the things that particularly interest me, and it also provides access to a relative diversity of opinion on each subject. It's not perfect (I know because it's getting slightly better all the time), but it's the best system I've found.

The “real” (read: “traditional”) reading, however, is interspersed with the hunting, or comes later, when I read books (on screen and off), and I read those book-marked RSS finds (with relative degrees of intensity), and sometimes I can't help but read something as soon as I find it, and what mostly manifests is linear progression. Why? Because what I've found, to me, is interesting. For no other reason does my eye track each line onward, one at a time. I've just finished reading a collection of writing on Husserl, a paper on the neuropsychology of gripping objects, an article about a comic book series, and an unpublished short story, all on screen, and I read every word because they were fascinating. But someone else, someone who couldn't care less about Husserl or my taste in fiction, would have f-shaped them into oblivion in the absence of something which truly gripped them.

Leaving aside whether we would have preferred them to scan material we might consider more elucidating, I wonder how many teenagers, the dumbest generation after all, just flipped through Twilight (or Harry Potter, or any book that catches their attention) rather than reading every page? If they read it on a Kindle or an iPad did they pay less attention, or did they remain rapt, learning every scene well enough to complain at what the film scripts left out? In short: does any screen have the power to make something which grips you lose that grip?

The mistake that Bauerlein, and a thousand other commentators make is that a big lump of printed prose is not an inherently good thing in of itself. If people are reading things poorly, or reading poor things, then we have bigger problems than the existence of screens, and it's to these wider issues that we should (we must) turn. If readers are just skimming the surface of words they choose to turn to, and only skimming (because skimming isn't the end of the world in an information rich environment, it's a necessity on the path to finding quality content), then there needs to be both in-school education of how to read in multiple ways in such a space, and compelling content needs to be produced.

Something that never seems to come up in the denigration of the new generation's reading habits is what it says about where they came from, that when faced with the largest repository of human knowledge and creations ever conceived of they choose to select materials out of the morass that the past generation, its progenitors, feel is beneath them. In a world where the internet archive exists and yet people watch grainy re-runs of tired shows on youtube maybe we need to ask questions of the society, what it has valued, and what values it passes on, rather than saying screens are corrupting our children (or our adults). This isn't to say that we shouldn't enjoy our time online in whichever fashion we choose, that the latest memes are worthless or to be avoided, that you shouldn't enjoy the media which gives you pleasure, guilty or not. But everyone asks, at least once in a while, whether what they consume is sufficient, whether they could be improving themselves with other content, and is it really the sheer numbness of the screen which makes us ask such questions? Or is their still some flicker from our education, from our culture more broadly that makes us wonder what we could be missing out on? Surely the more interesting challenge is how to amplify that flicker, rather than how we can get people away from a screen which, after all, as with radio or television, or even books, can present the best or worst of what our species has to offer, more or less at our request.

If people are going to keep being asked to publish books on the problems with our cultural productions then I'd like to see more of these missing arguments, arguing why people might turn to certain things, arguing for the provision of quality materials, arguing for why they're quality, and arguing convincingly, continually. We need that flicker in our midst to send us down the new paths that the screen has enabled us to follow. If readers are skimming everything they come across then maybe what they're being guided to isn't doing a good enough job, maybe it's not holding their attention, not because it's too hard, too complex, too challenging, but because it's saying nothing new, nothing compelling, nothing challenging at all.

Maybe that's why some things get skimmed, maybe that's why some books just don't get finished.

UPDATE:
From Teleread:

Mark Bauerlein says:

June 6, 2011 at 4:44 pm

A weak analysis of the data in the book. All you cite are the numbers from the SPPA on arts participation (and your assertion that opera, classical, and jazz listening have been “middle class” pursuits in US history is flat wrong–and the survey asked about listening, too, not just attending, so the “too expensive argument” doesn’t wash). What about NAEP reading scores, college remediation rates, employer surveys, SAT writing scores, etc., which are in the book? What about leisure reading rates in SPPA, NSSE, HSSSE, American Freshman Survey, etc.? Sorry, but the rates of immigration don’t come close to accounting for the declines. And to cite yourself and your own habits as contradiction isn’t even anecdotal. It’s ego. Finally, didn’t you get the joke of the sub-subtitle?

Mark Bauerlein

My reply (with a couple of typos fixed!):

@MarkBauerlein,

I apologise if you took my piece to be an analysis of the data in the book, that wasn't my intention, I was just trying to explain my frustration with a certain kind of data analysis that seems to be repeated in the discourse associated with popular books on the decline of "preferred" cultural participation; I only held your work up as the example I had most recently engaged with. There seemed to me, to be a neglect in the book of wider cultural issues (perhaps by necessity of a particular assignment?) which would just as significantly impact on the reception of particular cultural forms as any technology, and this frustrated me enough to write asking why such things never appear to be considered.

To address your other points: I realise that jazz, and to some extent opera and classical music more generally have not always been deemed middle class pursuits, in the case of jazz very obviously not. But to say that they are not frequently seen that way now would naive. I do not think they should be middle class pursuits (and I certainly don't think that no one outside of the middle classes enjoys them), so why has this become the perception? I don't think that "the numbing effects of the screen" is a good enough answer.

More importantly where is the defence for these being more valuable cultural activities than any others? There's a reason that these are picked out as examples of "quality" activity, it's a complex of race and class based prejudice. This can be seen in the breadth of the claim which renders it banal, for instance: will any jazz do? Would we rather our children listened to, or worse attended gigs of smooth jazz rather than listening to some of the challenging, complex, innovative work in hip-hop, dub-step, folk, etc., etc.? Are we talking about Miles Davis or Kenny G here (hardly the worst of his peers, but you get the point)? In short, I was wondering why your book, and others like it, choose to be complicit with this kind of received wisdom of quality?

As for the issue of expense, granted home listening is clearly less expensive (but, as my quotation showed, there's no doubt that you and the original study chose to pick out declines in the more expensive aspects of the pursuit of these forms). But why was there no mention of the fact that educating yourself in listening to classical or jazz is not cheap from the perspective of a great many families? Far too many people are unable, even if inclined, to shell out for CDs, CD players, or internet connections for their children. This isn't uncommon, and this does affect participation rates. The increasingly niche status of classical music in particular also pushes up CD prices making it an even less attractive avenue for those who do have a disposable income for music.

I didn't go into the other ratings that you outline in the book because a) I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem with what we seem to value culturally (only that the screen isn't to blame, and the mere availability of content we might agree on as facile or, at best, irrelevant cannot be held up alone as what guides people toward it) and b) because, again, it wasn't the intention of my piece to do a blow by blow analysis of the book, simply to share the thoughts that it promoted.

Finally, citing myself as evidence. It was an article based on my report of reading on screen, so there's that - "I hated that, for a second, it seemed like I was bearing out his thesis: that, as a member of the digital generation, I was unable to concentrate on sustained linear arguments due to the hypnotic and anaesthetising effects of 'the screen'." I did worry about this, it was the thought that prompted the piece, so I thought it worth spending two paragraphs out of 12 on. Also, in the absence of data on new reading modes we *have* to rely on personal report. I offer up my reports, other writers offer up theirs, and then we look at the official data which says "you're doing reading all wrong now" and some of us are able to say "no, we're just reading in different ways sometimes."

It would surely be odd to use a new technology in the exact same way as an older technology, but as we haven't settled on the new form's received wisdoms yet I think it's best to be as vocal as possible so that we can compare notes (incidentally, most reading used to occur out loud, standing up, and with a finger following the text? How stupid they must have looked with their different reading mode! Or maybe to those early scholars we'd have looked like we weren't paying enough attention when we settled down on the couch?).

To be honest, I think we'd probably agree about a lot if we were ever to meet in person. We both seem to worry that people could be engaging with more significant content in the age of the internet, and we both worry, of course, whenever we see that children are struggling in school, and later as adults, in whatever way. But I think that laying the blame at the foot of technology lets too many systems off the hook: lets off education at all levels; lets off a media which has lost its way and serves only a clearly failing status quo; lets off increasingly fractured communities; and lets off an economic system which causes the disparities which create and/or further all of these problems and more.

Having the platform to have your voice heard by so many, and in so valued a medium as a printed book, seems an enviable opportunity to address some of the problems in the field you chose to tackle. But there have been too many books recently which (rightly) question the new technology, but leave everything else alone, and become complicit with data collection and interpretation which promulgates old prejudices at the expense of nuance or elucidation. I felt that this was worth writing about, even if I couldn't do justice to all of the material you presented.

_Matt

Reports on the Changing Bodies of Books

2011-03-23T01:44:00.005Z

- but ho! if only they would make some sound, / or wear a face where faces should be found! - h.p. lovecraft -

It seems strange that I don't hear this more often, but I think it's important to remember that with a codex, a material printed and bound text, the work and the medium are as physical as one another, they are the same thing, bound in an unchanging dialogue within that one item. Not to say that the work and the pages it's printed on are the same thing, rather that when we talk about War and Peace being a book what we used to mean is that there is a codex which contains War and Peace that we can point at and say “that book is War and Peace.” We've grown, over centuries, to understand that this is the reading experience: to acquire a specific and unique (though replicable) thing and to work out what it means (plot, argument, etc.). The e-reader/e-book relationship is entirely different; what do we point to when we say “that book is War and Peace?”

As Katherine Hayles puts it “[a]n electronic text literally does not exist if it is not generated by the appropriate hardware running the appropriate software. Rigorously speaking, an electronic text is a process rather than an object, although objects (like hardware and software) are required to produce it” (Katherine Hayles, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep” 79).

E-readers are as physical as any codex (though they obviously have their own specificities which establish different gestures and actions during use), but the e-books that can be read on them are ephemeral, ghostly, brought to the surface to establish a bond with the tangible object, but then returning to somewhere else, leaving the physical form of the equipment to mean by itself and in other contexts, with other works. We have corollaries for this experience of course, in television, computing, cinema, and varieties of music players; these all deploy stable physical objects which can call up diverse content, and as such we should hardly be surprised by the new equipment for reading. But perhaps the surprise is to be expected: reading had always, until the advent of the moving image, meant interacting with an object which is the book (or the scroll, or the parchment). Cinema, television, and, predominantly, computing changed that arrangement and eventually brought it into our homes and to our engagement with long form texts (rather than just subtitles) like books. E-reading threatens to make this shift irrevocable, and there is, I suppose, something to be lost here. Though it might well become trivial, at least in terms of its importance to future generations of readers, it can, and maybe should seem significant to the current generation: with screen reading the book and the object are taken apart.

I'm very interested in the effects that this has on readers, and I'm fascinated with the language people use to talk about their experiences of reading on screen as it seems like a constant outpouring of valuable data. In the same way that folk psychology has become a recognised discourse, we can see the various reports of reading on screen's “unnaturalness,” and ergonomic inadequacies as a kind of folk phenomenology - a description, stemming from first person analysis, of experience which the creator often feels can be exported, with limited modification, to other experiencers of the same or similar phenomena. Thomas Metzinger, in one of the few available classifications of the term, describes folk phenomenology as “a naïve, prescientific way of speaking about the contents of our own minds - folk-phenomenology is a way of referring specifically to the contents of conscious experience, as experienced from the first-person perspective...and is characterized by an almost all-pervading naïve realism.” But as folk psychology can often demonstrate useful examples, methods, and states to its more academic counterpart, I would like to argue that the folk phenomenology of intuitive report, at least when it comes to e-reading, has a lot to offer us in terms of prompting us toward the issues that are central to negotiating what is qualitatively different about reading on a screen with its capacity to present an infinite array of texts.

For example, Lynne Truss, in her punctuation pedant's handbook Eats Shoots and Leaves, offers an illustrative folk phenomenological experience which seems to support this attitude: “Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past” (181). Now, I don't agree with Truss' claim here, that the eyes don't move during reading where the material is scrolled rather than paginated, indeed all physiological data about eye movement during reading runs counter to it (see, for example, Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain), but there is certainly value to the report - fluid scrolling, to Truss, doesn't feel like reading at all, in fact seems its 'opposite,' where the eyes do no work and the experience seems passive in comparison to the warp and woof of the machinery.

Christine Shaw Roome, a professional fundraiser for an academic library in Canada, writing this year about her first experience of reading from an iPad for the blog Life as a Human, reports a similar position to Truss: she wonders if she's now reading a book at all, the feel of the activity has completely altered.

I noticed many things about my e-reading experience. First and foremost, my eyes grew tired faster. This was particularly true of the days that I spent in front of the computer screen only to take a “break” from my work in order to look at yet another screen. This did not feel like reading a book...[her husband interrupts her] “I’m reading a book!” But, was I? I was missing the tactile features of the book, which often comfort me. The smell and feel of the book and the way you can see how far you’ve read by measuring the thickness of the pages. When I buy a book, I always take time to look at its design - the type face, the page weight and colour, the way the ends appear to be torn or are cut precisely. The texture of the cover and the photography or illustration that accompanies the title all draw me in and are part of the experience of enjoying a book. Sometimes, I buy a book just because I like how it feels in my hands.

Roome offers us a good survey, here, of the most familiar elements of the folk phenomenological debate surrounding reading on screen: eye strain; too much time spent reading on screen; it no longer seeming to be a book; it not feeling like a book; it not smelling like a book; the wedge of remaining pages being a consistent indicator; and the object as aesthetic artefact.

The scent of physical books, old and new, has become such a shorthand for the deprivations of reading on screen compared to codex reading that a spoof range of aerosols (SmellofBooks.com) did the rounds in various discussions of the subject. The appeal to smell might seem an odd reason to cling to a medium, but, if nothing else, it shows how deeply passions run in this regard, or just how far appeals will go to demonstrate the sanctity of the old form - everything about it is 'comforting.'

What really comes through in this report from Roome, however, is the importance of haptic experience: the feel of the book in the hands is an essential part of grounding the experience as what it is. When this aspect is missing the effect is so profound, the cognitive dissonance so great, that seemingly unintuitive questions arise: “is this even a book?” “Is this reading?”

When, in Print is Dead, Jeff Gomez suggests that “there is one area of knowledge that is sacrosanct, seen to be both untouchable in terms of its utility and unimpeachable by its very nature. I’m talking about the words found in books” (12), and when when Lucien X Polastron suggests that “the sole difference a paper book carries - in addition to the clearly superior epidermal pleasure it provides over that produced by touching plastic…is that the total weight of the text is constantly felt by the reader. This sensation perhaps gives the reader an impression...of possessing the whole of its meaning, an illusion whose loss could panic fragile souls” (The Great Digitization, footnote 35), then we start to close in on some of the detail motivating the folk phenomenological reports of resistance to reading on screen rooted in tactile experience of the technology of reading. A paper book represents knowledge, rather than just containing it, and its fixed and physical coherence, completed and separated from the world by its covers, assumes the projection of a definitive truth. The acquisition of knowledge and the “perfect” form of the bound and printed book are intimately associated.

An expression of this might be found in Sven Birkerts' work on the subject, work which also seems to have a folk phenomenology of codex reading underpinning its assertions:

Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer - a skeptic if not a downright resister?...I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it - the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly (“Resisting the Kindle”).

This quotation shows a distinct attitude towards the embodiment of the text: to touch a book is to experience a unique history of evolutionary dynamics. For Birkerts there is a history of haptic engagement which comes into play with every turn of the page, a kinesthetics (and, as we also saw with Roome, a kinaesthetics) which acts as a physical reminder of the forces and efforts which go, and have gone into understanding. From the reports of the skeptics it is clear that when we turn pages we engage with the systematic pursuit of knowledge, but it's not enough just to look, we have to become, for Birkerts, for Roome, and for Truss, involved, to physically engage. And can we find that involvement in a Kindle? Or a touchscreen reader? I know that if I want to understand and persuasively support reading on screen then this is what the folk reports suggest I must find.

Interdisciplinarity: Whatever it Takes to Understand

2011-03-03T17:17:00.001Z

I'm in Dundee for the Poetry Beyond Text conference. Before I go out and investigate the city for food and a dram of something or other I wanted to post the talk I'm giving tomorrow on interdisciplinarity. It's more of a reflective piece intended to provoke discussion rather than a presentation of research, but hopefully anyone interested in combining disciplines, particularly with English Studies, will get something out of it. Apologies in advance for weird italics, line breaks, punctuation etc. just my tics of writing things to be read out.

_m

Expanding on Discipline: Whatever it Takes to Understand

I'd like to discuss three things: I'd like to offer some thoughts about a specific definition of interdisciplinarity; discuss why my thesis draws on a few different disciplines; and then look briefly at a research paper that I'm intending to explore in my own work, and use it as an example of some of the possibilities and challenges that come from looking a bit further from home.

1. Interdisciplinarity.

I've come to understand “interdisciplinarity” as the production of work which truly adopts, not multiple discourses, or even multiple practices, but instead a synthesis of a newly integrated methodology and accompanying language. Regenia Gagnier, in her opening remarks to the 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, described interdisciplinarity as “a way to combine the objects and methods of different disciplines in order to solve a particular problem or tell a particular story.” There are some problems that are too complex for a single way of looking at the world, and that require new models which can only be produced by imbedding yourself in a discipline which differs from that in which you have previously trained, written, or worked, or by collaborating with a practitioner from another discipline and allowing your voices to merge. And I'd like to make it clear that, at this stage of my research career, I'm only very rarely able to attempt either.

Collaboration will, I hope, come about soon, and indeed plans are underway for a study into digital screen reading undertaken alongside a Neuropsychology researcher from the University of Nottingham. But until this comes about, if I want to be interdisciplinary under the definition that I've just given, then I've got to synthesise, or write as part of a newly synthesised discourse that doesn't yet exist in my home discipline of English Studies or the field that I draw on.

It's worth briefly clarifying how I'm thinking of some of the distinct ways of combining disciplines, besides interdisciplinarity, that come up most frequently.

Cross- and multidisciplinarities are the most common forms of linking fields, and also seem to be the methods most often confused with interdisciplinarity. They revolve around study where the item that your research focuses on would often be considered the province of disciplines different to your own. For example: a geographer writing about Quantum Mechanics would be crossdisciplinary; writing about Quantum Mechanics, English Studies, Biology, and History they would be multidisciplinary.

It should not be considered an interdisciplinary project, however, if the geographer doesn't adapt her methodology to combine the fields. In the same talk mentioned above Gagnier describes disciplines as being at least partially “defined by what they count as evidence.” If an English Studies researcher draws on work from Mathematics, but eventually relies on a form of textual interpretation rather than the production of coherent proofs, then they haven't produced interdisciplinary work, as they are relying on the same conditions of evidence that they always have. If they were instead to draw on Physics and produce empirical evidence via proof or practice, then again the work is not interdisciplinary, they are just doing Physics. The researcher has certainly moved across disciplinary lines, but no blending has occurred, and most importantly, no problems resistant to solution by either discipline can be solved by her movement.

This is not to denigrate cross- or multidisciplinarity; sometimes work from one discipline can readily solve a problem in another, and the two simply require a medium to force them to communicate. But, in line with Gagnier, some problems are just too big, or rather too complex, for this approach to function.

Lastly, though a discussion of the contested nuances of transdisciplinarity is beyond the scope of this paper, it's well worth noting that it can loosely be thought of as the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in order to produce an attempt at a unified and holistic knowledge of a subject. Interdisciplinarity doesn't call for us to dispense with disciplinarity in this way, only the perceived inviolability of its boundaries.

2. My own research.

With these definitions in mind I'd like to turn to the experience of my own research.

I've always found disciplinarity challenging. During my Creative Writing undergraduate, where I quickly realised that I wasn't the novelist I imagined, and ended up trying to write about atomic structures and the chemistry of paint molecules in ekphrastic poetry, I developed an interest in Critical Theory, and it was during my Critical Theory MA that I really got into Copyright Law. So during the first year of my PhD I sat in on some classes for a Copyright MA, and it must have been sifting through legal history for another two years that got me interested in Cognitive and Neuropsychology.

Now I find myself in an English department finishing up a PhD on the new technology of reading from portable screens where the first half of the thesis looks at Neuropsychology and STS studies in order to attempt to better understand the class of objects we refer to as technologies, and the second half focuses on the tactile experience of reading on a screen and eventually depends on a mix of Evolutionary Biology and Phenomenology to make its claims about how we experience and adjust to objects over time.

Whilst it's become clear that I might well have commitment issues, I'm unfortunately not polymathic and don't pretend to be. But the idea of going to whatever is required, whatever you think might help, whatever it takes in order to better understand something that escapes you, that fascinates me.

Often when I meet someone at an English Studies conference who asks me what my thesis is on, and I say that I look at the new technologies of reading, and try and see why so many people dislike and mistrust reading on screen, then I get a warm smile, and an approving nod. “Yeah, they're horrible aren't they?” they say, “nothing like reading a book.”

“I agree,” I say, “I'm learning that it's really nothing like reading a book, despite the fact it's still just words passing in front of our eyes. That's what got me started on the project really, wondering why I prefer reading from paper so much.”

And then there's a couple of stock responses: “Well, it's obvious really, isn't it, they just don't feel right, do they?” or, more weirdly, “they don't smell right,” and “you can't read them in the bath.” Or, the best one, “well, we weren't meant to read from a screen, were we? And that makes it so bad for people's brains of course.” Variants of this last one are coming up a lot more lately.

But I've held all of these views myself, every last one: Paper feels better; it's more robust; it's more interesting to touch; and technology is this unnatural thing which might get in the way, and might even do us harm. But my two favourite questions are “how?” and “why?” and it turns out that when you attack these stock responses, these stock attitudes, with how and why then you get some very unsatisfactory results.

“Screens stop people paying attention” - how? “Because it's nothing like reading a book” - why? The words are the same. “Well, because it doesn't feel right” - why? “Because paper feels better than plastic and glass,” and then we descend into this childish game, why why why why why? And it really doesn't feel like there's a bottom to those “whys” because often people, myself certainly included, don't even contemplate why they might hold the beliefs about certain kinds of objects that they do.

The physical world, of which physical books are a very pleasant part, is just something most of us accept as meeting our hands and eyes unmediated. The idea that what we feel, I mean rawly, viscerally, gravity goes down, stone is hard, feathers are light, feel, that our emotional response to such fundamental sensations could be even subtly different from person to person, based on occasionally borderline hegemonic cultural preconceptions, this is something that we rarely consider.

As to the “fact” of a screen being worse for a brain to read from then a physical book: whether that's true or not I want to know the how and the why of it before I'll advocate imposing the mythology of codex reading onto the next generation of readers, a group who might, conceivably, be far better off without the fetishisation of linear print on paper, and the types of intelligence it fosters.

Sometimes, if departmental wine has been involved, I might even attempt a version of this diatribe, at which point my hypothetical interlocutor is good enough to ask: “well, how can you find evidence for this either way?” and the missing words and intonation are clear “how can you find the evidence: you're an English student.”

It's certainly a fair question; English Studies, traditionally, only has a few successful ways of thinking about such things.

Research investigating the materiality of texts has been around for a very long time in Humanities circles, and Book History and Textual Scholarship are well established fields. We've gotten pretty good at understanding what makes a codex do what it does from a textual standpoint, and there's a whole language readily available for explaining how an author or an editor might alter page space, binding, editions, and myriad other material decisions, to produce particular effects.

Phenomenology has become increasingly available to English Studies researchers interested in objects' and bodies. But Phenomenology, at least at its inception with Husserl, and then to varying degrees with later adopters, is marked out as a philosophy which initially strips out both the transcendent and the scientific in its quest to see things “as they are,” to remove any prior apprehensions we might be working under, and to get to things, phenomena, as they are manifested.

Although its true blending with English Studies should definitely be considered as interdisciplinary, because Phenomenology is not primarily seen as being empirically evidence-based, researchers in English can feel that Philosophy is so much of a sister discipline that they are able, for better or worse, to simply glom the findings and language of Phenomenology onto their usual work with relative ease.

The digitisation of texts, the rise of the Digital Humanities, and the so called “computational turn” in general, have also produced numerous approaches to discussing materiality whilst working with written materials, and represent, as with Textual Scholarship, a genuine demonstration of not only the power of interdisciplinarity, but also the potential for Humanities scholars to move well outside of the previously fixed boundaries of their disciplines and add immense value both to their own scholarly background, and to the new fields that they encounter. The new databases, languages, artworks, games, tools, and entire disciplines that are emerging out of this work are often the products of synthesis, not just of juxtaposition, and as such they can be better equipped to tackle novel complex problems and narratives.

So English Studies has, to my mind, three compelling discourses fairly readily available to it to discuss the material effects of reading: Textual Scholarship and Book History; some aspects of Phenomenology; and work still emerging out of the Digital Humanities.

But when it comes to understanding the impacts of digitisation on reading; on research; on thought; on pedagogy at all ages; on development at all ages; then researchers in English need to realise that this is an inherently material affair. This is all about bodies, objects, and changes in their embodiment, and if English Studies wants to be truly engaged, and truly useful in this conversation then we need to face up to its size and complexity, and this might mean asking if our current strategies are enough.

3. A research paper

I would like to finish by suggesting that Cognitive Neuroscience, particularly as a naturalised form of Phenomenology, is a great site for interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research, from the Sciences and the Humanities, into the impact of digitisation on reading.

In December of 2009 Christopher Davoli, Feng Du, Juan Montana, Susan Garverick, and Richard Abrams published a research paper entitled: “When meaning matters, look but don’t touch: The effects of posture on reading.” The paper is interested not so much with posture as with hands, and asks: if our hands are physically near written material, does this affect our textual interpretation skills?

If you happen to be a Psychologist then that this paper exists is probably not too surprising, but to me it was a revelation. I've just gotten to the stage of my second chapter where I need to support the notion that hands and bodies affect cognition, and that this might be part of the reason that people worry about changes to reading activities which involve new uses, or even the absence of use of the hands, at least at some subconscious level. And here's a paper which addresses that exact issue. Does holding a text for reading have a different effect than when the hands are removed from the visual field, for example when words are up on a computer screen?

The short answer appears to be yes, but not in the way, I suspect, unless you're familiar with the paper, that you might be thinking. In fact holding a text in the hands appears to be worse for comprehension.

The paper begins by citing numerous studies which demonstrate the brain's acute interest in visual and spatial information directly surrounding the hands. This makes intuitive sense when we think about tool use: we need incredibly precise information about our hands' position in space when we dextrously and accurately manipulate objects.

But this incredible precision - and it really is remarkable, particularly when you compare even the infants of our species to our closest primate relatives -, this precision comes at a cost, and Davoli et al identify that cost as manifesting in decreased semantic understanding: when our hands are near something the drain of producing a heightened spatial awareness interferes with the comprehension of information required by another realm.

This conclusion comes from Davoli's team carrying out Stroop tests, a standard test in experimental Psychology for determining the speed of semantic processing, where the congruence or incongruence of the example was indicated by the test subject either pressing a button to the left or right side of the screen, i.e. their hands were near the text, or pressing a button on their left or right leg, i.e. their hands were away from the text.

The team found a statistically significant, and in some cases dramatic drop in response times when the answer was indicated with the hands by the sides of the screen over being indicated with button pushes on the legs. Their conclusion, iterated in the title of their paper, is that when it comes to semantic comprehension: look, but don't touch.

Naturally I want to incorporate this research into my thesis because it provides a compelling counter-narrative to those who say that screen reading impedes comprehension. Things might not be so simple: Adjustment to a new reading practice may well cause a drop in comprehension, but reading from a desktop screen seems fundamentally no more, and could potentially be less cognitively demanding than reading a text held in the hands.

So how do I use this work? And why might it be hard to?

When it comes to use I have three choices.

I do some Cognitive or Neuropsychology, I get involved in the production of data, and this is what I'm actually hoping to do with the researcher from Nottingham that I mentioned earlier: we're trying to devise a useful follow up experiment and publish the results in different forms in both a Psychology journal and an interdisciplinary Humanities journal, sharing the task of writing in different proportion for each write up. This work could either be cross- or interdisciplinary depending on how we affect one another's practices, and whether we enter into a discourse which doesn't already exist in disciplinary Psychology or English Studies.
Secondly I could quote the paper as evidence for an assertion. This is the solo crossdisciplinary approach, where I'd simply draw on work which would normally be considered outside of my field and bring it into my existing study.
Lastly I could work alone to use the paper as part of worrying out a new interdisciplinary approach.

My second chapter attempts a blend of Evolutionary Epistemology and Phenomenology in order to discuss tactility and digital reading, and I hope that the language that emerges out of that combination is new, and productive, and, yes, interdisciplinary.

But rather than producing a new language, my work could also enter into the existing interdisciplinary “middle” language that Shaun Gallagher describes in his work How the Body Shapes the Mind, a discourse which Gallagher believes must sit between Phenomenology and Cognitive Neuroscience in order to best allow them to talk to one another.

Regardless of the specifics, there are obvious potential upsides to drawing on such work, most notably finding a way to provide evidence and understanding of something that would otherwise be unavailable to me via the conventional discourses of my discipline.

But it's also clearly not easy, not just in the intellectual activity, but also in some of the basic problems of drawing on another field. For instance: I'm not so familiar with Neuropsychological research that I can accurately or intuitively contextualise this particular paper. I've studied various flavours of English at university level for nearly eight years, but I've looked at even the tiny aspect of Psychology that I'm immediately interested in for only about 20 months. And this disparity isn't going to fix itself in even another 10 years of work.

I will always know the history and discourse of English Studies better than I know Neuropsychology, unless I give up English and start my Neuropsych undergrad tomorrow. This may seem an obvious point, but everyone seems to know a researcher doing inter- or crossdisciplinary work who believes that it is a problem surmountable in the short term. To put it bluntly I think that they are hugely mistaken, and that it is disingenuous to presume even a roughly comparable sufficiency to disciplinary practitioners in the new discipline, even just in the niche that they're investigating, until they've been occupying that new field for a period of several years. Disciplines are just too dense.

A related problem is that I have no idea what this means.

Really, none. I have no training in statistics, and therefore I rely on others, either in their discussion sections, in reviews, in forums, in emails, or in face-to-face conversations to aid me in interpreting results. This keeps you very humble, but these harsh displays of disciplinary inadequacy can also be a great reminder of the need for balance.

On the one hand, to intentionally blind ourselves to aspects of an object under discussion isn't a workable strategy if we wish to progress in our understanding. On the other, however, for most of us the requirement of polymathism simply isn’t an option. But I don't think that a lack of extensive contextual knowledge or specific skills are reasons to abandon attempts at interdisciplinary work, or any work which questions the rigidity of disciplinary boundaries. Instead I firmly believe that, as Merlin Donald describes the incomplete data available to evolutionary psychologists, “some knowledge is better than none,” provided we fully realise and acknowledge our limitations.

Recourse to a few lines of abstract ‘science’ is not enough to expand, let alone explode a discourse; there must be an attempt to engage with the new discipline on its own terms, at the same time as acknowledging when to refer readers to the relevant disciplinary materials if they want to pursue the roots that lie beneath the synthesised, adapted, or appropriated idea, metaphor, or concept you've explored.

Dialogue, generosity, and a deference to established expertise can only strengthen a position which doesn't offer the pretence of comprehending every aspect of a problem, but which instead demonstrates the complexity of the issue of understanding, and calls for a blended methodology suitable to the task.

The Boundaries of the Digital Humanities

2011-02-25T01:46:00.005Z

it is strange though; for once, as a young man, he sat on damp ground and drank rum with soldiers - virginia woolf - the waves p144

I've said before on this blog that I don't really consider the work that I do to be Digital Humanities. Sometimes, though, at conferences, when people don't know where to position my work (and I certainly don't) it's the tag they append to it. After the twitter frenzy following this year's MLA I started to ask the question more and more: "What is DH?" I'm not overwhelmingly qualified to answer, a very early-career academic at the fringes of the subject at best, but it's been a pleasure to try and work through the idea, and I thought I'd share the essay that came out of those musings.

I've posted the opening section below, which contains the essay's potentially provocative thesis, but if you'd like the full .pdf head here (google docs downloadable file).

_m

The Boundaries of DH:
Finding A Place For Neuropsychology (and Other Things) in the Digital Humanities

In this essay I want to address a question that will bother, in one way or another, an ever increasing number of academics, and which already haunts calls for articles, conference outlines, website biographies, and university course plans: What does it mean to be a Digital Humanist? (I wonder why it so holds the attention? Maybe because it sounds like a debate of philosophical conviction with an electronic mind - 'so what does a digital Humanist believe?' - which also emphasises, nice and early, the oxymoronic irony of the term DH where a set of disciplines built, in recent times, on subverting an over-reliance on the 'truth' of dyads now finds itself twinned with a field which can only find expression, at its heart, in binary code. 'Yes, the trace of 'OFF' may be in 'ON,' but trust me, the computer knows the difference'. The technician closes her eyes). I suspect that there are as many answers as there are people who are asked this question, and I cannot hope to somehow answer it definitively here. But I would like to consider the Humanities+computers=DH definition, which, despite the extent of the debate,1 remains the gloss of the matter to most initiates/skeptics/saboteurs, and this will form the essay's first section. I'd then like to offer two hopefully illustrative supplementary essays (of sorts) which draw on my own research, and that I believe could sit in an augmented idea of what might be appropriately considered the field of the Digital Humanities. I offer these examples not as an attempt to position my research, or to draw conditions or conclusions, but only as another instance of pushing at some of the boundary lines, as my part of the project so many of us are attempting as we attack, defend, and otherwise refine what might turn out to be one of the most vital contemporary disciplines.

DH can seem, primarily, to be about creation, about using new digital technologies (i.e. computers and surrounding hardware and software) to build new things that Humanities scholars enjoy, whether that be scanning documents, democratising access to materials, maintaining databases, or exploring new literary forms which push at the boundaries of linearity, of textuality (and, on occasion, of cogency). But the interpretive work, whether it be looking at the ontology of the new technologies themselves, the impacts of those technologies, as well as the possibility of bringing those technologies to bear on existing disciplines, is already immensely rich, as evidenced in totemic work in the field such as Matthew Kirschenbaum's forensic studies in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), and Katherine Hayles' theoretical and close readings of 'born digital' and digitally inspired literature evidenced in Writing Machines (2002) and Electronic Literature (2008).

Such works bring the peculiarities of academic, artistic, corporate, governmental, and home computing under the gaze of Humanities scholarship, making digital content and content producing equipment the thing to be interpreted, or as the way-in to interpretation; they are, to most arguers, clearly DH projects. But I've been wondering if these are the right lines, or rather the only lines to draw around the Digital Humanities; is the computer, whether used for creation or interpretation, the correct primary signal to look out for in the process of defining our own and others' work? Or should we also include projects which might only have computing as a secondary or tangential concern? It must be involved, of course, to satisfy the digital of 'DH,' but up until a few decades ago literary scholars needed paper and ink to be involved for their discourse to exist, and no matter how important these things are they certainly didn't seem to be the primary drivers or indicators of the field, more the underlying condition.

Let's take the example of Lawrence Lessig to consider this further: his work on copyright law in a digital age3 seems to me as if it should be classed as a form of DH. Law is arguably a Humanities subject, at least as an academic discipline, and Lessig explores the impact of digitisation on legal theory, creative use of others' work as material for new creations, and the content industries (whose output forms the basis for a lot of more easily defined Humanities scholarship) which seek to hide behind increasingly draconian copyright legislation. Why isn't this, or why is this so infrequently considered to be a Digital Humanities project? I can only assume because the legal,observational, and persuasive aspects take precedence over the hazily defined computational component of his discussions. Would it make the term too baggy or ill defined to include such projects, which investigate the impact of digital technologies, but don't have computers as their primary focus? Would this opening of the floodgates to any Humanities work which draws upon the effects of digital media - of digital means of production, and attempts to understand them with a sensitivity to the discourses of New Media in general, and Computer Science in particular - but which doesn't give precedence to the source of that media's expression, would this open up the field too widely, too permissively?

Already I've had to make an assumption: that New Media studies and Cyberculture studies could fall, at least in part, under the auspices of the Digital Humanities. This assertion is certainly not self-evident, and there is a strong argument for keeping the object oriented studies of New Media, and the online sociology of Cyberculture separate from the 'Humanities Computing' of DH. But the boundaries between all three disciplines are so frequently blurred that to some degree I'm inclined to argue for bringing them all together (for our purposes here under that term 'Digital Humanities') so that we might unite their voices and their research; to a large extent that will be the position from which I'll argue for the augmentation of DH in this essay. I certainly think that there will be space to mark such granularities further down the line, but for the moment it may be counter-productive to balkanise groups which have so many common aims. In the same way, to define DH as solely about bringing Computer Science into Humanities scholarship seems to leave a number of energetic and instructive voices out in the cold. How many scholars interpreting digital technologies and their artefacts and practices don't feel like they're 'just' doing English, or Philosophy, or History, but are also not learning to programme, archive, or otherwise bring computers to bear on their home field's traditional practices? A banner term, be it Digital Humanities or not, seems like a requirement to galvanise like-minded scholarship, rather than yet another too-fluid taxonomy.

If I were to offer my own somewhat instinctual definition, to answer that question 'what does it mean to be a Digital Humanist?', I would opt to see DH projects as those which aim to bring the impacts, artefacts, and discourses of digitisation to the Humanities ahead of time so that Humanities skills can be tested and refined rather than left behind, and/or that allow those refined skills to help shape the future of those concerns. In this case Lessig would be in as we're only just starting to feel the extent of the copyright issues digitisation will introduce into the Humanities; Lessig's work opens the door early and asks us to consider problems which might not manifest their full extent for a decade or more, even though some are unpleasantly already on our doorstep.4 Hayles' and Kirschenbaum's work, which spearheaded new forms of textual engagement and contributed to opening up the Digital Humanities to a new generation of scholars, would also certainly be included due to their near prescience (seemingly the effect of being curious enough to explore, explore well, and explore early) of what would become the new or most productive concerns. But as such studies (digital copyright, close reading electronic literature, forensic investigation) become, if not commonplace then rarified and increasingly specialised, then we might see them as retreating out of the Digital Humanities over time and becoming repositioned into more traditional and less fluid disciplinary camps which allow for minute study and canonisation, thus making way in DH for new broad themes and ideas to again be tested early.5 DH, in this guise, can, and should to my mind, remain ever on the front lines of interpreting and supporting the evolution of digital technologies as they apply to the Humanities.

But this is obviously a much broader definition, and one which allows many more projects to be included under the umbrella of DH. I would argue, however, that specialisation is the privilege (and sometimes burden) of long-established disciplines with long-established corpora for consideration, and that DH studies remains, despite by some estimates around four decades of activity in one way or another, a youthful enough field to continue its attempts to map and shape a potentially vast shift in scholarship and society relatively unimpeded by the minutiae of taxonomic worries. This continued vitality/adaptability is surely part of the excitement, so what not make it part of the definition?

It is probably worth saying why I sympathise with such an expanded boundary: Whilst it would be surprising indeed for traditional Humanities skills to, by themselves, be up to the task of interpretation and creation in a newly digitised world, surely it would be equally incredible to find that all of the answers lay in a combination of CompSci and close reading? 'Digital' certainly means computers, but the impacts and understanding of born digital content, and the digitisation of previously corporeal materials, will also occur well beyond the screen.

In my own research I look at the problems inherent in defining what exactly a 'technology' is. This has become my way-in to considering people's reactions to electronic texts, to reading on screen, on Kindles and iPads, and to people's reactions to other people reading on such screens. I'm trying to get at the impetus behind three assertions which seem to make up the brunt of the resistance to such practices: i) electronic texts are 'unnatural' ii) electronic texts don't 'feel right' (otherwise known as the 'but you can't read it in the bath' or 'ebooks don't smell good like a proper book does' arguments) and iii) web-connected or online electronic texts 'make us stupider'.6 These three broad assertions stand for much of the popular debate surrounding the evolution of reading technologies, but I believe that they also hold the key to a more nuanced understanding of the potential effects of digitisation facing readers and reading.

Babette Gladney speaks with her husband Jack halfway through Don DeLillo's White Noise:

'I feel they’re working on the superstitious part of my nature. Every [technological] advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared'.
'Scared of what?' 'The sky, the earth, I don’t know'.

'The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear'. 'Why is that?' she said (1985: 161)

Resistances to reading on screen somehow tap into some fairly primal fears, of the unnatural, the other, loss of control, and loss of our primary means of communicating with the world: touch. Books have become positioned as 'natural,' as somehow a-technological, and the intrusion of buttons and touch-screens and connectedness is seen as somehow getting in the way of a more 'pure' reading experience. By using the word 'resistance' I fully intend to invoke a political, moral, or ethical claim to avoiding or repudiating the move toward a new electronic written environment, to allowing a generation to grow up reading digitally. Sven Birkerts is amongst the most eloquent detractors of the new forms, and he picks up on this language of the ‘unnatural’ throughout his work on the subject. His playing up of a dichotomy between the reader’s ‘natural’ interaction with a bound book and the ‘unnatural’ processes of reading on a multimedia screen recurs frequently throughout The Gutenberg Elegies, and his argument reaches its apotheosis in the following: 'What [book] reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it' (1996: 85). This quotation gets to the absolute heart of the resistance to ‘unnatural’ screen reading: for detractors of electronic reading technology, book reading, and all of its related practices, has become a spiritual experience, tapping into something at the centre of who we are. Alan Kaufman, in a ferocious article entitled 'The Electronic Book Burning,' discusses this near-religious love of the codex form, and the related hatred of digitisation:

My books have been hard won. What made it all seem worthwhile was the book, the physical item, a kind of sacred and appropriate temple for the text contained within. Had I been told from youth that my literary destination would be some 7 inch plastic gizmo containing my texts shuffling alongside thousands of other 'texts' I would have spit in the face of such a profession and become instead a hit man or a rabbi...To me, the book is one of life's most sacred objects, a torah, a testament, something not only worth living for but as shown in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, something that is even worth dying for. And yet, though I have been willing to sacrifice everything for the books I have written, compiled or just read, though I have given the days of my life, my years, my youth and adulthood to the book, as both sacred object and text, I am now witness to the culture turning away en masse from the book. The world is moving to embrace the electronic media as its principle mode of expression. The human has opted for the machine, and its ghosts, over the haptic companionship and didactic embodiment of the physical book (2010).

Not all commentators would go this far, of course, and I suspect that many who resist screen reading in favour of their own idiosyncratic relationship with the printed word would deride Birkerts and Kaufman's polemic. But it does feel as if they all somehow stem from a common pool, that all such resistances seem bound to a notion of an 'advance' too far, a sudden tapping of a nerve that no one realised was exposed. With the Kindle's launch in 2007 books became very suddenly under fire as the default way to receive written information; suddenly books, rather than simply reading, seemed like something which had to be defended.

The pertinent question is whether getting to grips with these ideas is a Digital Humanities project. When I've spoken at conferences it often gets positioned as such, and I think that it's probably as useful a distinction as any to frame the work. But in order to support my ideas I find myself increasingly drawing on research and metaphors from outside of English, my 'home' discipline, looking instead at neuropsychology, philosophy, archaeology, biology, and anthropology. Computer Science is perhaps most notable by its absence in this list, not that I don't think that there's plenty of opportunity to draw on the discipline in order to address these questions, but instead that that task is already under way. I believe that these less considered fields, in terms of the Humanities attitude towards new reading technologies, have the potential to add much needed nuance to our understanding of the impacts of digitisation on individuals, and on societies at large, and that they are often left largely untapped for elucidating metaphors and raw evidence by Humanities scholars. If brought into use as soon as possible then such discourses could help researchers, en masse, refine their cumulative skill set for interpreting and manipulating the development of the digital, and, as I've already said, that could well be a useful measure of what we define as a DH project.

For the remainder of this essay I'd like to outline two examples from my own research which relate to the question of resistance to digitisation. The first considers what is so special about a particular book which couldn't be reproduced on screen, and the second looks at the application of computing to philosophy (and yet doesn't feel like DH). I offer them as examples which might enact the more troubled boundaries of the field, and at best I hope that they can demonstrate some of the use in an augmented idea of DH study.

If you'd like to read the rest of the essay please see here.

Digital English: How Technology is Changing What We Study

2011-02-22T16:03:00.010Z

I posted an early draft of a module proposal last month, and I wanted to offer this update which is hopefully a lot cleaner and simpler to scan and get a sense of. Below the module itself is my reasoning for why I think this is a great time for such a module to appear in the UK.

I'm currently writing up my PhD and at the moment this is a course without a home; if you know of any institution which you think might be interested in such a module then please let me know. Also if you have any questions or recommendations for changes then I'd love to hear from you.

_m

MODULE TITLE	Digital English: How Technology is Changing What We Study
PRE-REQUISITES	None (no computer skills needed)
AIMS
This module aims to allow students to identify and interrogate the possibilities, and potential threats, digital technology offers to the study of English, and more generally to the practice of reading in the 21^st century. In an age increasingly dominated by computers and the internet this course will allow students to engage with the arguments that are going on all around them. How might technology change the way we read texts? What new texts might be created? Is technology really a threat to reading? What makes reading from a screen different to reading a book? How does literary theory need to change in order to consider electronic texts, and can these digital objects make theory easier to approach? These are the conversations going on around the world as written texts become ever more diverse, and ever more accessible. As English scholars we have a unique education in the impact of writing on readers, and this module aims to be part of putting us to work on the texts of our time. The module begins with a consideration of the 'threat' of technology, particularly the popular discourses of screen reading and easily accessible material attenuating focus and attention. From there we will go on to situate the current technologies historically, consider the unique details of their forms and their potential impacts on readers, and then move on to how we might respond, how we can theorise, and how we can productively use these new tools. As it encourages an advanced understanding of the increasing impact of digital technologies in the world, the course should prove particularly valuable to students who wish to pursue a career that might involve electronic modes of communication, digital content production, or further study of these issues. We will look at a diverse range of experimental and canonical texts, from novels to poems to theoretical, philosophical, and even neuropsychological work in order to understand what might be different about digital. This diversity has two functions: i) to demonstrate the range of aspects of English study that digitisation affects (and what new aspects it necessarily calls into play) and ii) to allow students to focus on what interests them most about English as a subject, whether that be close reading, high theory, or trying to understand the changing pleasures of the written word in all its forms.
INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES (ILOs)
*Module Specific Skills - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:* a. demonstrate an advanced understanding of the current and potential implications of various digital technologies on English Studies. b. demonstrate an advanced ability to discuss what might make reading on screen different to reading from a printed page and the implications for readers. c. demonstrate an advanced understanding of how written electronic texts are situated in a history of technologies of textual reproduction.
INDICATIVE SYLLABUS PLAN
1. The dangers of digital - What does technology do to reading? 2. Scrolls to screens - how do electronic texts fit into the history of reading technologies? 3. What does electronic literature look like (and how do we read it)? (offscreen) 4. What does electronic literature look like (and how do we read it)? (onscreen) 5. “It doesn't feel right” - Neuropsychology and understanding what it means to hold a book. 6. E-reader anatomy - features of digital reading devices and their impacts on reading and research. 7. Digital subjectivities and electronic communities. 8. Amateur vs. expert - authority online. 9. Theory for electronic texts. 10. What comes next? 11. Summary, conclusions, and essay workshop.
INDICATIVE READING LIST
This reading list is intended to indicate the sort of work with which the module is concerned; it is by no means comprehensive. Ideally a reading pack would be produced with a mixture of complete essays and extracts from longer works. Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997 Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber, 2006 Jay David Bolter. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999 The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2002 Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves. London: Anchor, 2000 Robert Darnton. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: Public Affairs, 2009 Stanislas Dehaene. Reading in the Brain. London: Viking, 2009 Jonathan Safran Foer. Tree of Codes. London: Visual Editions, 2010 Jeff Gomez. Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. Macmillan, 2008 N. Katherine Hayles. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002 N. Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 Frederick G. Kilgour. The Evolution of the Book. Oxford: OUP, 1998 Matthew Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press, 2008 George Landow. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003 Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001 Jerome McGann. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2001 Jerome McGann. The Textual Condition. Princeton UP, 1991 The New Media Reader. eds. Nick Monfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. MIT Press, 2003 Maryanne Wolf. Proust and the Squid. Cambridge: Icon, 2008 *Web based resources:* A Companion to Digital Humanities. eds. Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth. Blackwell, 2007. (Available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/) Electronic Literature Organization (http://www.eliterature.org/) Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/)
LAST REVISION	22/02/11

The following list shows Universities ranked by the Guardian for teaching in English (Do they have a department with clear ties to the Humanities focussing on the study of digital materials or the impact of computer technology? (is there an undergrad option?) / Do they have undergrad English modules which include the impact of digitisation?):

Oxford (Yes - Oxford e-Research Centre (no undergrad) & Oxford Internet Institute (limited undergrad lecture series) / No)

UCL (Yes - Centre for the Digital Humanities (no undergrad) / No)

Cambridge (Yes - CRASSH Digital Humanities (no undergrad) / No)

St Andrews (No / No)

Warwick (No / No)

Buckingham (No / No)

Durham (No / No)

Exeter (No (CMIT Digital Arts & Humanities discontinued as of this year) / No)

Edinburgh (No / No)

King's College London (Yes - Centre for Computing in the Humanities (with undergrad course) / No)

York (No / No)

Aberdeen (Yes - Recoded at the Centre for Modern Thought (no undergrad) / No)

Queen Mary (No / No)

Leeds (No / No)

Liverpool (No / No)

Glasgow (Yes - Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (with undergrad course) / No)

Essex (No / No)

UEA (No / No)

Bristol (No / No)

Brunel (No / No)

The vast majority of undergraduate English students who make it into a top 20 university (for their subject) will have no immediate access to academic discussion of how computers, the internet, digital reading devices, and the issues provoked by their use apply to their chosen field. In a time which is fast becoming defined by on- and off-line digital activities this seems to represent a failure to keep up with current developments in issues which will become increasingly relevant to society and scholarship, and also marks a space where universities outside of this ranking can very easily become competitive by demonstrating their sensitivity to the times, and to the needs and desires of their students.

It is, perhaps, too easy to assume that English students, by choosing their courses over, say, Computer Science, have made their decision to exclude themselves from such debates. The rise of postgraduate courses in the Digital Humanities at UCL and Kings, and the HATII undergrad course at Glasgow, not to mention the currently promoted AHRC theme of 'Digital Transformations' and the rise of the Digital Humanities as a significant international academic discourse, demonstrates that there are an increasing number of voices from the Humanities which wish to make themselves heard in this area.

Those few courses that are available, however, have a strong programming / production / Computer Science element, where radically unfamiliar skills must be acquired in order to take part, and a commitment to specialisation must be made early on. There is clearly a space for students who are interested in the impact of digitisation on Humanities study, but don't yet want to specialise, and also for those who want to interpret digital content without having to go about learning to code and produce such materials for themselves. The present situation is comparable to having Creative Writing as the sole approach to studying literature; practice, however significant and informative, is not the only way to encounter a subject.

This is certainly not to talk down the importance of Humanities researchers learning to code and markup text, indeed these skills are increasingly vital, but they involve a certain kind of specialised tuition and requirement of resources which is perhaps not yet available, or in many cases desirable, at

undergrad level. I would like to propose a course that could be taught as a 2^nd or 3^rd year optional module which would seek to fill the gap between an English course unable to talk about digital technology, and one which is so specialised as to be off-putting or impractical.

By focussing on the interpretation of digital materials and the impact of digitisation on English Studies I believe that it could be made non-threatening, and indeed actively appealing to undergraduate students seeking to expand their skills as they turn an eye to the job market beyond HE study. A graduate who is easily able to demonstrate how their degree might be a good fit for certain jobs, in sectors which might not otherwise have realised the value in their input, has to be more competitive as they enter the fray. With the contemporary literature and theory elements I would like to include it would also be a particularly appealing module for those students interested in contemporary experimental literature and the evolution of English Studies as a whole.

A (Very) Modest Proposal

2011-01-13T15:50:00.004Z

- from great expectations -

I've been caught up in marking for the last few weeks, taking on some extra so I can save up some money to concentrate on the last push to complete my thesis. As such I haven't really existed online (hence no blogging, apologies). I have found time, however, to try and think (and panic) about what comes next, what to do after September? After looking at the various university courses around the country I've decided that not enough institutions in the UK (though there are some, and they are great) are teaching Digital Humanities, Internet Studies, Cyberculture, Electronic Literature, etc., alongside conventional English Studies. And I think that this is a real shame, I think that there can be a natural fit for them with one another, and indeed that fit is being acted out all around us, a tragedy if it goes unnoticed.

After MLA 2011 a lot of tweets and blogs and articles were going back and forth about whether the Digital Humanities were too exclusive, with their 'gods' and their cliques (this article seems to have, maybe ironically, become the industry standard to cite on this). Johanna Drucker's recent comment that "if you can't build something, you aren't a digital humanist" is also fanning similar flames. In any field factions emerge, and I'm not yet certain of the clarity of the boundary lines where DH stops and New Media starts (for instance). But I can, unfortunately, often surmise a number of department's very clear distinction between English Studies and DH, Cyberculture, New Media, etc.: taught and not taught to undergrad English students.

From what I can tell DH doesn't seem exclusive, it seems proactive, and that can be intimidating to look at, this edifice of tweeting, blogging, serious, funny, prolific, experienced and precocious minds. But intimidating is not the same as cliquey, and every DH-er that I've had contact with, online or off, has been welcoming, chatty, and unbelievably helpful. Some of them aren't entirely sure if they're 'doing' DH, whilst some are very very certain. The boundaries are contested even within the 'clique,' and this is healthy, this is good.

There are DH courses that teach things which Drucker would regard as not being DH, and there are courses which don't identify with DH when many people would wonder why they shy away from the term. But this isn't the problem, or even a problem. What seems in any way controversial is that these are rarely undergrad courses, and it seems so strange to me to keep anyone under 23/24 out of these debates unless they do so on their own time.

I'm probably not a Digital Humanist, though some of my research heads into that territory, and I don't know the solution, or if there is a solution, or if we even want a solution to what DH "is." But to my mind the best way to settle debates of this kind is to throw undergrads at it and see what sticks. Let the groups rise and fall early, let the factions bicker when some of their number are young, state funded, and have a bit more free time. Most importantly, don't let people get bogged down in disciplinarity before they're aware of all the disciplines...

Anyway, I thought I might have a crack at writing a module that could start to bring some of these issues to English Studies undergrads. Whatever your discipline I'd love to know what you think.

I'm aware that this kind of module might remain something of a hard sell in the current climate, so I've gone very canonical with my slim preliminary secondary reading list (the module website list would be annotated and more diverse), and quite restrained with the aims of the course. That said, please tell me what's missing, if the module was picked up and proved to be a success then I'd love to push out a little more into the weirder and sometimes more wonderful.

It's not DH though...

Best

MODULE CODE	EAS	MODULE LEVEL	3
MODULE TITLE	Digital English
LECTURER(S)	Matt Hayler (convenor)
CREDIT VALUE	30	ECTS VALUE	15
PRE-REQUISITES	None (no computer skills needed)
CO-REQUISITES	None
DURATION OF MODULE	11 weeks
TOTAL STUDENT STUDY TIME	300 hours (including 1x2-hr seminar and 1x1hr workshop per week)
AIMS
This module aims to introduce students to the possibilities and potential threats digital technology offers to the study of English. In an age increasingly dominated by computers and the internet this course will allow students to engage with the arguments that are going on all around them. How might technology change how we read texts? What new texts might be created? Is technology a threat to reading? Is reading a screen different to reading a book? What does literary theory need to do in order to consider electronic texts, and can these digital objects make theory easier to approach? These are the conversations going on all around the world as written texts become ever more diverse, and ever more accessible. As English scholars we have a unique education in the impact of writing on readers, and this module aims to be part of the early days of putting us to work on the texts of our time. Because it encourages an advanced understanding of the increasing impact of digital technologies in the contemporary world, the course should prove particularly valuable to students who wish to pursue any career that might involve electronic modes of communication. We will look at a diverse range of experimental and canonical texts, from novels to poems to theoretical, philosophical, and even neuropsychological work in order to understand what might be different about digital. This diversity has two functions: i) to demonstrate the range of aspects of English study that digitisation affects (and what new aspects it necessarily calls into play) and ii) to allow students to focus on what interests them most about English as a subject, whether that be close reading, high theory, or trying to understand the changing pleasures of the written word in all its forms.
INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES (ILOs)
On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Module Specific Skills: a. demonstrate an advanced understanding of the current and potential implications of various digital technologies on English Studies. b. demonstrate an advanced ability to discuss what might make reading on screen different to reading from a printed page and the implications for readers. c. demonstrate an advanced understanding of how written electronic texts are situated in a history of technologies of textual reproduction. 2. Discipline Specific Skills: a. demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse experimental literature emerging in the twenty-first century and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context. b. demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history. c. demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts. 3. Personal and Key Skills: a. through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups. b. through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose. c. through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis. d. through research and writing, demonstrate an advanced capacity to make critical use of secondary material, to question assumptions, and to reflect on their own learning process.
LEARNING/TEACHING METHODS
Details of Learning and Teaching Methods: Teaching is by one two-hour seminar per week. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion, and will be encouraged to hold independent small group meetings in preparation for the seminars. Seminar attendance is compulsory, and students are expected to participate in seminar discussions.
ASSIGNMENTS & ASSESSMENTS
Formative or % Contribution:	Form of Assessment:	Size of the assessment e.g. duration/length	ILO’s assessed by this assessment:	Feedback method:
Formative	Seminar presentation and discussion and of study group findings	Continuous	3 a, c	Oral feedback from tutor. Opportunity for office hours follow-up.
Formative	Reflection on current online activity	1000 words	1 b, c 2 b, c 3 b, c, d	Feedback sheet with opportunity for office hours follow- up.
30%	What comes next? Speculative essay	2000 words	1 a, b 2 a, b, c 3 b, c, d	Feedback sheet with opportunity for office hours follow- up.
60%	Essay	4000 words	1 a, b, c 2 a, b, c 3 b, c, d	Feedback sheet with opportunity for office hours follow- up.
10%	Seminar Participation	Continuous	3 a, c	Oral feedback from tutor. Opportunity for office hours follow-up.
SYLLABUS PLAN
1. The dangers of digital. What does technology do to English? 2. Scrolls to screens - how do electronic texts fit into the history of reading technologies? 3. What does electronic literature look like (and how do we read it)? (offscreen) 4. Hyperlinks and hypertext. 5. What does electronic literature look like (and how do we read it)? (onscreen) 6. Digital subjectivities and electronic communities. 7. “It doesn't feel right” - Neuropsychology 101 and understanding what it means to hold a book. 8. Theory for electronic texts. 9. Amateur vs. expert - authority online. 10. What comes next? 11. Summary, conclusions, and essay workshop.
INDICATIVE LEARNING RESOURCES
Indicative basic reading list: Module Reading Pack (online or purchase). Week 1 reading available on module ELE site. *Selected secondary texts* A Companion to Digital Humanities. eds. Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth. Blackwell, 2007. Available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997 Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber, 2006 Jay David Bolter. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999 The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2002 Jeff Gomez. Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. Macmillan, 2008 N. Katherine Hayles. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002 N. Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 Matthew Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press, 2008 George Landow. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003 Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001 Jerome McGann. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2001 Jerome McGann. The Textual Condition. Princeton UP, 1991 The New Media Reader. eds. Nick Monfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. MIT Press, 2003 Indicative web based resources: The Digital Reader (http://www.the-digital-reader.com/) Electronic Literature Organization (http://www.eliterature.org/) Exeter Learning Environment (ELE) Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/) Teleread (http://www.teleread.com/) Other resources: Reading for week 1 - Sven Birkerts and Alan Kaufman extracts on ELE site.
DATE OF LAST REVISION	12/01/11

End of Year

2010-12-22T15:53:00.002Z

- 1 says 0. 1 knows 0. - grant morrison - from we3 -

This blog's represented some of my thoughts on the field into which I'm entering, and reflected on the recent events in Higher Education policy which threaten to upend the sector I want to be a part of. But I don't want to do an end of year round up, I'll leave that for other blogs, too many wars, leaks, oil spills, and iPad launches for me to do justice to (it's not only holiday season, but marking season too...).

At the end of term when I was at school we used to play games in class, maybe watch a video. The teachers always tried to keep it on topic, English staff attempting to talk us into awful Shakespeare adaptations for instance, until they'd eventually give in and let us watch Star Wars (in hindsight a missed opportunity to teach us the heroes journey...). With that in mind this post is this blog's end of term alternate class (supply your own party rings).

I've done my best to keep up with music a bit more this year (I've been a bit neglectful since undergrad). This isn't a 'best of' list, just the stuff that's been on my headphones most this year, things I got a kick out of, and things I wish I'd listened to more (the joy of any retrospective trawl). Mostly punky guitar bands and glitchy electronic bits and pieces, but hopefully there'll be something of interest somewhere down the list. I've posted youtube video examples, but most of it can be tracked down on Spotify, or, better yet, buy some albums you missed!

Have a good Christmas and I'll see you in the new year.

Favourite Albums 2010

1) Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

2) Cloud Nothings - Turning On

3) James Blake - Klavierwerke (EP)

4) How to Dress Well - Love Remains

5) Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

6) Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

7) Four Tet - There is Love in You

8) Screaming Females - Castle Talk

9) Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner

10) Love is All - Two Thousand and Ten Injuries

Great Single Tracks (not on those albums)

1) Japandroids - Younger Us

2) The Knife - Colouring of Pigeons

3) The National - Terrible Love

4) No Age - Glitter

5) Shabazz Palaces - Blastit at the homie rayzer’s charm lake plateau bbq july at outpalace pk.

6) Salem - King Night

7) James Blake - CMYK

8) Moonface - Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit Drums

9) Broken Social Scene - World Sick

10) Sun Airway - Put the Days Away

11) Glasser - Home

12) Sharon van Etten - Love More

13) Fang Island - Daisy

14) Sam Amidon - How Come That Blood

15) Delorean - Stay Close

16) Robyn - Indestructible

17) Florence and the Machine - Hurricane Drunk (Horrors Remix)

18) The Tallest Man on Earth - King of Spain

19) No Joy - Hawaii

20) Lissie - Pursuit of Happiness (Kid Cudi Cover)

Solidarity From Exeter

2010-12-08T19:55:00.002Z

So...the University of Exeter is in occupation. Here's an image from the moments after we took the largest lecture hall on campus:

Before I nipped off to take this picture I announced that we'd be quiet (somehow I ended up with a megaphone), and after a couple of minutes chanting we settled in for the end of a math's lecture:

(This is the closest I've been to a lecturer in the midst of lecturing. She never missed a beat, and we tried to learn about infinity).

For banners my house brought Thoreau (never make English geeks take to the streets):

And some more maths:

And then we marched:

And now we're here:

In the already established traditions of this year's activities it's been nothing but peaceful and no damage has occurred (in fact we've sorted recycling bins, have a no alcohol policy because we've got under 18s from the college (who've been amazing as ever), and arranged to hoover up when we're done...).

A Request

2010-12-06T17:58:00.004Z

On Thursday the 9^thof December 2010 the UK government will be voting on whether they ruin higher education in this country. This is a painful simple truth. The swathe of cuts that are proposed to university teaching budgets, to research budgets, and also to the support of 6^th forms and further education colleges, is a terrifyingly direct attack on social mobility, on the belief in a well educated citizenry, and on the importance of thought beyond profit motives. The language of markets is not the language of education, and to confuse the two is to attempt to screw people before they even have a chance to learn how to resist (though, no matter how obfuscating the attempt, people will always learn, always question and react, inside or outside of formal education - the activism of the last few weeks demonstrates the danger of taking any generation's apathy for granted).

This has all been ably documented over the last few weeks:

Attacks on 6^th forms and colleges.

HE cuts general information.

Attacks on the Humanities in particular (and here)

The inefficiency of the proposals (the clearest indicator of ideological motives).

Even if you sympathise with the cuts in general, it is surely easy to agree that the current proposals have been poorly considered, rushed through debate, and now rushed into voting. The strength of opposition that we've seen in the protest marches, not just in London, but all around the country (here's my gallery from Exeter), as well as the inspirational UCL sit-in, and dozens of other actions (this link is far from comprehensive, but gives a good selection), all indicate that something is very wrong. Hundreds of thousands of people have been compelled to make their protest heard, and many are starting to realise the importance of these discussions beyond the media's continual reduction of events to discontent in the face of the (admittedly ludicrous) fees hike “which won't even affect those protesting” (the idea that attacks on the institutions which shape our teachers, politicians, journalists, doctors, artists, philosophers, scientists, etc., etc., somehow 'won't affect' everyone is beyond me...).

The best way to fight these cuts, this week, is to support whatever protests go on in your area (Exeter University will be rallying and marching on December 8^th from 11am), and, perhaps most importantly, contact your MP and ask for a NO vote. Not an abstention, not the decision not to make a decision, but a loud NO, that these cuts are not right, and that they should not go ahead.

I know that people are busy, and I know that sometimes finding the time to even write an email can be something continually put off until it's too late. In the past form letters have been the thing which finally got me to take this basic action, so I've linked to the NUS letter below which quickly and easily allows you to contact your MP. I'd encourage you to please, please do one of the following (the further down the list the better):

Put your name and your MP's name into the email and send a copy to your MP.
Put your name and your MP's name into the email, add your own paragraph or otherwise edit it, and send it to your MP.
Write your own email expressing your particular views and send it to your MP.
Do any of the above and ask others to do the same (please pass the NUS page or this page around, or retweet them, or email them to anyone you think might be encouraged by them).

*** NUS FORM LETTER LINK ***

Oh yes, and cross your fingers, the vote this Thursday is important and its outcome will set the tone for how this government believes it is allowed to treat its citizens. There are a great many MPs wavering on this issue, and everyone's voice really can make a difference.

If you can take the time to do this, thank you.

Eating Trees / Reading Leaves

2010-11-06T23:38:00.002Z

- dawn...vagina...scotchtape - jonathan safran foer - from nyulocal -

You might have already seen some shots of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Tree of Codes. Here's one if you haven't yet:

Apparently Visual Editions came to Foer with an offer - “we can’t pay you, but on the other hand we’ll make any sort of book you can imagine” (from here) - and this was what he came up with, a near impossible to mass produce cut-up of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Every page is uniquely die-cut to make a new (and, we're assured, cogent) work out of Schulz's original.

There are more pictures over at the Visual Editions site, and there's even a reaction video which surely makes the art-books-as-weird-porn-for-bibliophiles link as explicit as it's ever going to be...

The book comes out on the 15th of November, so there's been no chance to read it, but I wanted to write something about its striking form before the content was made available (such separations are impossible, of course, but this is the closest we can get to such a vacuum). A great post over at The Experts Agree talks about how Tree of Codes' form physically mimics the erasures of Tom Phillips' A Humument (itself a doctored copy of W.H. Mallock's A Human Document), and about Oulipo-like restrictions on creation and Burroughs-like cut-ups which lets us start to go a little further into what the physicality of a book we haven't read might mean, in itself and to the 'death of books' argument in which it will inevitably sit.

Reporting on an interview with Foer, The Experts Agree post also alluded to the seamy contemporary weight of cutting into documents - redaction. A Humument never felt like a redaction to me, just a creative use, an ever adding, not removing of value. Maybe it's the way the paint and the ink and the paper and the glue exists on Phillips' pages, sometimes only partially obscuring the text that's no longer 'meant' to be there, allowing the palimpsest to emerge, for the two texts to mingle. In Foer's work, of course, this can never happen, Schulz's text is obliterated, and that pang of regret (that I have no doubt will be experienced as an eerie “is this...ok?” by some readers), that a book has been somehow destroyed to make this one, becomes significant, now, in a way it might not have in a time less sensitive to leaked dossiers, expenses scandals, or whistle-blowing sites' attempts at selective (and protective) censorship. Plain white pages with sections missing, things lost through effort, black ink replaced with space, with depth, undoubtedly feels politically resonant today. How such an interpretation will sit alongside the story remains to be seen, but such a meaning can never be entirely emptied from Foer's book, the treatment of documents (in both senses) is too embedded in the media landscape. The sanctity of intact books is surely tied to a belief in their wholeness as a form of truth; that pang of regret at a desecration becomes tied, in Tree of Codes' form, to our belief that redacted documents aren't an 'interpretation' or a 'version' or an 'artwork,' they're a species of lie.

(A note in relation to content: Foer's spoken about the infamous break up (the cut-up) of a Schulz painting, a mural painted for the Gestapo officer who protected him, for a time, during World War II (story here). A displaced and defaced legacy has become a part of Schulz's memory, and any book which seeks to exclude and re-appropriate his voice to its own ends (however noble) must be tied to such events. It's impossible to comment on Foer's treatment of such without exploring Tree of Codes, of course, but it seems too indelible a part of the politics of the form not to mention).

How else might we start to think about the shape of the book? A palimpsest forms there too, but not between Foer and Schulz; it becomes an oscillating, iterating palimpsest of itself. From the first page you can see elements of the text to come between the bars/barricades/supports of the cut out page that you're on, and every page-turn will change that view. You might read a word or two from ten pages on, and then see it in five different contexts as you move through the story. You might not be 'meant' to read them yet, but they will inflect, and be inflected by their surroundings over and over until suddenly you'll be upon words you've been reading in various ways for ten minutes, revealed now in their 'true' context. Whether this saturates or empties them of meaning in the context of the story itself will surely come down to luck, and the willingness of the reader, but I suspect that the sheer performativity of the text, the making of a material metaphor for the way that words are just letters (which are just proxies for fragments of sounds), which depend and alter and turn on context, will be an effective device, allowing all sorts of readers to produce more meanings than they might expect from such a device (/hunch).

Tree of Codes will also undoubtedly be expected to join the bibliophiles' rank of works, such as A Humument, House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, Tristram Shandy, The Unfortunates, and thousands of small run artists' books, as another example of the misrepresentation of the death of the book, of something which could never be done, could never mean as much, on a screen. It must. (In fact, with A Humument receiving an iPad edition, it's surely got more work to do than ever...) When most people mourn the death of the book they rarely seem to be saying that these forms will go away (mostly, I suspect, because it would be a stupid argument, and easily countered - they'll be the last to go as artists two hundred years hence will still be searching for the last of the commercial printers, or building their own presses to make something “like they used to” in order to see what that might mean). Instead they speak out for books in general, for the average paperback not finding its way into the hands of some hypothetical reader. It seems far better, however, to admire what the shape of Foer's book might say about the act of reading, about reading as producing, about reading as skimming and skipping, about writing as using the work of others, about writing as occluding the work of others, about censorship as creation, about censorship as the opposite of silencing (as it drives people to the original, the unexpurgated, in their droves), than to mourn a million Dan Browns ending up pulped and re-pulped to make a Kindle box. I'm genuinely excited for Tree of Codes because it demonstrates the futility of saying that books are dead or dying. Books are just what someone chooses to do between two covers, and Foer looks like he's chosen to do something (at least materially) wonderful. We don't need books which just give us words we could happily absorb from anywhere, we need books which have to be books. Books which couldn't be anything else remind us what we love about the form, and they help us make choices based on our own peccadilloes - if you love reading and Tree of Codes doesn't seem interesting then maybe it's the case that words interest you more than books (and it would be a strange demographic indeed if every voracious reader was a bibliophile). We need works which push at the boundaries of their form to help us with these sorts of questions, to remind us what we're fighting for, and to stop us fighting if there isn't a good reason. At first glance the complexity of Tree of Codes looks like something people thought was well worth fighting for.

On Being Divided While Books Are Sliced

2010-10-24T19:20:00.000+01:00

- my only interest in making money would be to make it. fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. it is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats spring electricity coney island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and niagara falls) that my ‘poems’ are competing - e.e. cumming's - from the foreword to is 5 -

I like to think I'm pretty modern about this whole books-as-near-religious-object thing. I may be an English student, but I'm all for ebooks and the digitisation of resources. I'm almost at the stage where I'd buy an e-ink screened device (I still can't quite get used to that glitchy-looking refresh rate), and for certain resources I can even see why libraries might want to develop all-digital collections (text-books, mass-market paperbacks, technical data, legal documents, etc.), though never at the expense of preserving existing physical materials. The artefacts, after all, can speak as loudly as the words they contain, and not to hear them once in a while is to miss out on a certain richness of history.

In all though I'd like to think that I'm on board with the whole project, and so I've found myself joining in with the scathing glances, the tuts and shakes of the head aimed in the Luddites' direction, at those people so stuck in the past that they cling to their objects, still enjoying the smell and the weight of the pages, and trying to inflict their mythologies of books as the superior reading device on a new generation who would otherwise quite happily never purchase an item of physical media in their lives. They're not wrong in saying books are a fantastic resource, but surely they're going a bit over the top? After all books are just things.

I'm still surrounded by tons of paper books I love, of course, and no, bar .pdfs and newspapers I haven't made a complete switch to reading electronically yet, but I will, when the technology's right. It doesn't mean I'm not there, I mean, like, right there with it all.

I don't think I'm alone in having this tortured conversation with myself, in fact maybe its the condition of most people born in maybe the late 70s, early 80s who take an interest in these things. We know we should be fine with the death of the p-book (bring on the e-!) but something's not quite…right. Right?

Jennifer Howard provided me with a wonderful example of the sort of thing which brings all of this suppressed conversation flooding back in a blog post from last week. In it she discusses the actions of one Alexander Halavais, a communications professor who digitises his own books (yes! One of us!), and has processed about a thousand of them so far by slicing off their spines (oh…) and passing them through a scanner (ah…really?). Yup.

We're assured, by the way, that he "spares the special ones," but anything else is up for grabs.

And suddenly, when Halavais says that "he feels a little bad about what he's doing. 'I’m over a thousand books in, and even now I get that — especially with hardcovers, for some reason —that gut feeling of "Will I be judged by the book gods for doing this?"…Destroying books is very difficult'," when he says that I still wince. And that's why I loved to read Howard's account of his efforts: because it reminded me that when it comes to physical books I'm still faking any acceptance I might have of their demise, because it gave me a glimpse of what a Robert Darnton or a Sven Birkerts must feel all the time.

Oh sure, in theory I'll go paperless, but that's because I haven't done it yet, I haven't had the chance, I haven't had to line up the 'but…'s.

But what about annotations?

But what about the pleasures of browsing second hand?

But what about lending things out to more stone-age friends and relatives?

BUT WHAT ABOUT IT STILL FEELING VERY WRONG TO SLICE THE SPINE OFF A BOOK?

Even when I'm reading everything from a flexible colour e-ink screen with instant access to every bit of written material we've managed to rend into a stream of bytes I probably won't think that that's ok. Like the hypocrisy, I would guess, of most people and steak, I admire the theory, but I'm not sure that I could hold the knife. Is it really better to know that in the case of books my squeamishness is irrational?

Harder, it seems, than giving up paper might be giving up caring about paper.

Only A Flesh Wound

2010-10-19T02:04:00.000+01:00

- when we academics feel ashamed of our intellectual culture, we naturally hesitate to explain it - who, after all, cares? - gerald graff - clueless in academe p35 -

I'm very scared. I love my current jobs tutoring at two universities, I love teaching. I love going to conferences and speaking, and debating from the audience, and, when I get the chance, I love having papers published in the hope that I can contribute to arguments moving from a small select group and into the hands of whoever might be interested, whoever might be able to make them more useful. I would like to carry on doing all of these things that I love after I finish my PhD next September, and I would like to get better at them in the hopes that eventually, after much practice, I will have something significant to offer students, conference attendees, and anyone who reads my work. I'm confident that accruing and trying to share the best knowledge and ideas that I can muster over a lifetime is a worthwhile goal as I have the utmost respect for, and can see the good done by people who have sought and gone on to find the same.

I'm scared because these things, these attempts, take time, work, and luck. I can't control the latter, but I'd just started to learn that I had to always try and make it the smallest contributor to any success that I had. But now I'm beginning to realise that as of this Wednesday, October 20th, I may have far less control over the first two, and be forced to lay my hopes on this last capricious element.

As someone who would like to be an academic I need to be in an academic environment if I am to progress. Such an environment would require dedicating my time and work to teaching and publishing research, the exact things that I would like to progress in, which is, I admit, very convenient. As a PhD student with some funding and some jobs I have a fairly decent amount of time, and a fairly decent amount of energy to dedicate to getting into such an environment, and I have long been informed that the usual triad of time, work, and luck is what it will take. And if I do my best to minimise the luck then I don't mind failing on those terms. Too lazy to put in the work or time? Well I missed my chance. Fine. Not nice, but fine, get back to work, have another crack, learn from my mistakes.

A few weeks back I saw the following in a call to protest by Sally Hunt, the General Secretary of the University and College Union:

"university teaching and research budgets are to be slashed [by the UK's coalition government] even more than previously anticipated…800,000 learners and 20,000 teaching jobs will be lost in FE if the government pushes ahead with funding cuts of 40 per cent in the forthcoming spending review. In higher education the media are reporting plans to slash university teaching budgets by up to three-quarters and even of letting some universities go to the wall. Yet as our competitors understand, now is not the time to be cutting back on education spending. Others are investing to expand while we cut courses, jobs and undermine our future prosperity" (full open letter here)

Hunt said this on the 1st of October, nearly 3 weeks before the official announcement of the depth of the cuts, and many wrote it off as idle speculation based on hazy media reports.

The BBC reported on a leaked email yesterday, two days before the official figures will be announced, which appears to confirm much of this month's early speculation - it looks like the HE teaching budget may be cut by 79%, or £3.2bn, with a further £1bn taken away from research. As the BBC states "[a] £4.2bn cut in funding would be almost four times that which universities had been expected to make by the previous government."

We find out on Wednesday if this all proves to be idle speculation. Maybe the cuts aren't so deep, maybe they're sensitive to balancing arguable economic necessity with the importance of a well educated population capable of the innovation which might help to support itself in the future (not that all education and innovation occurs in and around universities, just that some does, and that it is of a type which is hard to cultivate elsewhere).

But I'm scared. Scared because I think I can feel which way this is going to go, scared that my worst fears about this government's attitude towards education, towards thought, towards fairness and support, will be amply born out. I'm selfishly scared that stepping out into such a climate I might not (probably will not) get to do what I really want to, what I'll have put eight years of work, time, luck, and money into, scared that I'll fail on terms I couldn't have predicted or accounted for - the absence of jobs to even apply to. But I'm also scared of what comes next, for everyone here, because these aren't the only cuts coming, and students and teachers are certainly not the only ones who will feel them. What is economically and culturally sustainable? What is the bare minimum on which we can sustain the best that we have cultivated? And how did we let it get to here, to where we have to ask these questions?

Whatever universities are left will run courses on this.

Reading Askeu, or What Are We Asking of Our Screens?

2010-10-10T21:43:00.001+01:00

- not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). his own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them - jorge luis borges - from 'funes the memorious' -

I've just started the year's teaching at a couple of universities, and on both courses I'm tutoring 1st year modules which function as introductions to English Studies at a graduate level. Something I learned while teaching last year is that, particularly for these kind of seminars, terminology can be tremendously empowering. I'm sure I can annoy the hell of out new students by constantly pinning down the use of various terms, or using what must seem overlong or complex words in 'simple' discussions, but once it clicks, and the student, grasping for the right word to explain what they mean in an argument, turns automatically to some collection of syllables which they would have balked at the week before, then some of the value becomes apparent. The right word doesn't just give us a way to talk about things, it gives us a way to think about things. English students, for instance, can't help but learn the loaded differences between the academic use of 'book' or 'text,' and both of these terms become incredibly rich over years of study, fundamentally affecting the way such students think about objects which are read. But dense language is certainly not just for undergrads - 'e-book,' 'e-reader,' 'electronic text,' 'teleread,' etc. etc. etc., the public sphere has been adding a diffuse and steadily growing (as in expanding and deepening) vocabulary and repository of metaphors to the digital book debate for nearly 30 years now.

I wrote about the QWERTY keyboard a few weeks back, and talked about the reasons for its creation (mostly the need to prevent groups of letters frequently used in series - like i-n-g - being located too close together on typewriters as they jammed up the machine if struck in quick succession) and its continued use despite superior alternatives (e.g. the Dvorak keyboard). The difficulty of changing from one system to another (teaching the new mode of typing, switching millions of keyboards, etc.) represents a greater effort of will and resources than the proportional perceived benefits of the switch (which, with the Dvorak layout, means maybe a 10% increase in speed in competent typists). The continued dominance of the QWERTY keyboard in numerous territories is a case of 'path dependence' (def. - past decisions affecting the range of present day options, even if the strictures on those past decisions are no longer relevant), and one which I saw as useful, if only by metaphor, to bring to the discussion of ebooks and electronic texts.

Another useful term we might want to keep in mind for such discussions, one which also happens to be a variation on path dependence, can be found in Timothy Taylor's The Artifical Ape, where he outlines another manifestation of past decision making which continues to be felt in objects in the present, a word the richness of which I think should be put to more extensive use: skeuomorph. The word refers to

special features of objects, and special types of objects, where the function is more to suggest than to deliver…Simply put they are carryovers from an older technology or way of doing things that had value, and are retained as a semblance, and expectation…The technological reason for the feature has gone, but you expect it - it completes the object. Open a wine bottle and pour out the wine. Notice that the bottom is dented-in, in a shape known in France as le voleur ('the thief'), because without it there would be more wine. When wine bottle were blown, there was no alternative: the molten glass bubbled out like a long balloon with a rounded end; this base was then flipped inside out as the bottle was set down to cool, producing the level circumferential basal ring that would allow the bottle to stand upright…[;] the dent in the base has become a skeuomorph. Le voleur remains because we expect it to be there (Taylor, The Artificial Ape, pp152-153)

Skeuomorphs differ from path dependence because the features that remain in the contemporary object are true vestiges, serving little or no function, despite unrestricted options (for more examples of skeuomorphs see here and here). Taylor demonstrates the usefulness of such vestigial design quirks for archaeological study in his outline of a 5000 year old village ceramics industry in Germany which produced ceramic cups with omphalos bases and 'riveted' handles. An omphalos base, in gold work, resembles le voleur - gold is beaten into a hemispherical shape and then the base is pushed in to form the basal ring on which the bowl sits. To Taylor, that the ceramics of the German village would feature such bases, as well as ornamental 'riveted' handles, demonstrates, even without the presence of metal in that village's archaeological record, that gold versions would have once been present in the village for the potter to imitate (Taylor's colleague disagrees, suggesting that the skeuomorphic features result from aspirational imitation of a richer culture nearby, see discussion on p154 of The Artifical Ape. Regardless, the object's detailing suggests a knowledge of metal work in the village which, lacking other evidence, could only be inferred from this feature).

I'm certainly not the first to suggest that page-turn effects, typographical quirks, and even the continued existence of pagination in ebooks are skeuomorphic (see, for instance, this comment at if:book, or the discussion of Apple's obsession with skeuomorphic tics in its software here and here). But I do think that the term is more neglected than it should be in discussions of digital reading; it's not only useful, but a rather wonderful word to say after all.

Why do we feel that we should read in particular ways, or rather why is there such a widespread resistance to new forms of reading? Are pages, for instance, a vital part of the process, or are they skeuomorphs? No longer needed on a screen (why not just keep scrolling down?), do we keep them because certain kinds of reading are bereft without them, or because we're a generation who think that the object, physical or virtual, just isn't complete unless divided by the (usually) arbitrary strictures of a particular edition?

(I'm aware that this argument doesn't really apply to e-ink screens, such as those found in the Kindle, which can only display a certain amount of information before they need to be refreshed. But note that the only reason such an object was ever created was because people wanted something book-like; in terms of practicality a steadily scrolling screen is no more or less pressing, in terms of the technological evolution of reading devices, than something with pagination comparable to a physical book. The demand comes from expectations of a certain kind of reading experience, a demand which needed to be met before the idea of e-reading would even have a chance of wide-spread adoption. All of which tells us something else about skeuomorphs (and ourselves) of course: things feel right (read: 'safe') when they're familiar, hence their frequent persistence).

If we recognise that our reading prejudices are attached to skittish skeuomorphic impulses (rather than a genuine benevolent concern) then they (should) become a lot harder to inflict on generations which haven't grown up expecting such features to be in place (and wouldn't consider the objects to be incomplete or defective if they were not present). Will anyone born in the last five years really miss a hokey page-turn animation when they first come to read Pride and Prejudice for their English class? And are they more likely to see value in referencing pages (different in each edition) over some undoubtedly-soon-to-be-created standard for locating specific words and phrases in electronic texts? I guess our answer depends on existing questions such as how much we really think we're missing without reading Dickens divided up into serialised editions, or how much we think is lost by our not reading The Odyssey on a series of scrolls (or, rather, not experiencing it performed over several days to a rapt audience). In fact when we consider how much we lose from the original manuscript recordings of The Odyssey - now we have a skeuomorphic expectation for there to be punctuation, spaces between words, and a notable absence of boustrophedon line order - haven't we been kidding ourselves for a while that physical book reading is the 'true' way to read? Isn't The Odyssey that we receive now just the form that has been most suited to our particular reading culture? And what's to say that those norms won't change again? My Vintage edition, lovely as it was to read, wasn't particularly authentic as an object, though it suited my expectations admirably. Its design vestiges might be as good a way-in as any to thinking about what people are really campaigning to hold on to in their reading practices, as the slavish adherence to skeuomorphic quirks simply favours safety and familiarity over function.

Reflecting on Extensions

2010-10-03T16:24:00.000+01:00

- we can never escape the bio-technological nexus and get 'back to nature,' because we have never lived in nature - timothy taylor - from the artificial ape p199 -

I've been thesis writing this week, trying to get a chapter sorted before I start a new term of teaching at a couple of universities on Monday. I'm trying to define the word 'technology' with greater specificity than we currently use it, to say that technology is more than just an object which helps us get things done. But, of course, that is still a very important part of any definition of technology. Objects which we encounter in use, objects which we use as a means to an end, 'equipment' in Heideggerian terms, are very often technological things. In the thesis I've described the augmentative capacities of certain objects as 'Extension,' as in such-and-such extends our abilities. I haven't posted anything from my thesis here in a while so what follows is a small selection of ideas on technological extension from a couple of other writers which I've found helpful in shaping an early section of the chapter I've been working on.

Extension, of one kind or another, is deeply rooted in any definition of technology, and also in Heidegger’s notion of ‘equipment.’ When we approach an object with a ‘concern’ or purpose, it is because we are able to achieve something through our dealings with it that we could not achieve by ourselves, or the interaction saves us time or effort (again this is about achievement, of a faster speed, or a less tiring process) - “[t]ools and weapons have been called the 'extra-somatic means of adaptation in the human organism,' enhancing innate somatic (or body) strength beyond what would seem naturally possible” (Taylor, The Artificial Ape, 19). We shouldn’t, however, think of technologies as merely implements which exist outside of ourselves to which we must turn in order to perform a task, but instead as equipment which alters the set of default practices we consider ourselves able to achieve in their absence, i.e. if something changes the practices available to us then it moves toward being considered as a technology; we could not travel at speed without cars and planes, we could not type and print without computers, we could not have hunted effectively without spears nor butchered the catch without knives, and we would not think to do so without these items -

it is not too much philosophy to say that the emergence of technology was and is intimately connected with the extension of the range of human intentionality. Without a car...I could not have intended to go fishing..., given the distance involved; without a stone tool technology, our prehistoric ancestors could not have had the intention to kill big game, or make baby slings…[T]he existence of objects, such as saucepans, not just allows actions but suggests them (Taylor, Artificial, 152)

Marshall McLuhan suggested that media technologies are augmentations (extensions) of our basic discursive apparatuses; the phone, for instance, augments the mouth and ear, the television the eye (The Medium is the Massage). All technologies must extend some aspect of ourselves in this way, whether relatively trivially such as a shoe extending the range of abilities achievable by the foot (covering rough terrain, sports use, etc.), or profoundly, such as the spear’s extension of the hunter’s arm, allowing for an immense change in our prehistoric culture and comestibles, and every change that has been entailed by such a shift. This capacity for extension, or at least our panoply of extensive interactions, is a uniquely human trait: “We alone on the planet seem capable of creating and exploiting such a wide variety of action amplifiers, ranging from hammers and screwdrivers, to archery bows and bagpipes, to planes, trains, and automobiles” (Clark, Supersizing the Mind, 157).

Andrew Feenberg discusses technology's extensive abilities in light of its mediation of our embodiment:

God creates the world without suffering any recoil, side effects, or blowback. This is the ultimate practical hierarchy establishing a one-to-one relation between actor and object. But we are not gods. Human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical significance of embodiment...Technical action represents a partial escape from the human condition. We call an action 'technical' when the actor's impact on the object is out of all proportion to the return feedback affecting the actor (come back to this sentence in the 'extension' section). We hurtle two tons of metal down the freeway while sitting in comfort listening to Mozart or the Beatles...In the larger scheme of things, the driver on the freeway may be at peace in his car but the city he inhabits with millions of other drivers is his life environment and it is shaped by the automobile into a type of place that has major impacts on him. So the technical subject does not escape from the logic of finitude after all. But the reciprocity of finite actions is dissipated or deferred in such a way as to create the space if a necessary illusion of transcendence (“Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview.” Tailoring Biotechnologies. Vol.1, Issue 1, Winter 2005, 48)

Technology comes between us and the world so that we can temporarily exert a dominion usually beyond us, diminishing our effort, and coming closer to the work of a God immune to Newton's third law.

Timothy Taylor notes that technology tipped the balance of natural selection for humans:

Although the power of technology today is unprecedented, the tipping point occurred over 2.5 million years ago. The dawn of the technological era is signalled archaeologically by the first stone artifact - a tool or weapon plausibly used for killing big game. After that point, for animals confronted by humans, the characteristics that would ordinarily convey fitness could increasingly become a liability. The process of natural selection and survival of the fittest was undermined. Intelligent humans with weapons could kill whichever animals they liked, fit or unfit, young or old, large or small, and the animals, trapped by the biology of inheritance, had no effective response...[H]umans, at a very early stage, turned the survival - and therefore evolution - of the creatures around them upside down. The fit became targets, the weak survived to be valued as 'fit' in terms of which we are the sole arbiters (Taylor, Artificial, 20)

Technology turned 'survival of the fittest' on its head, with the fittest animals now becoming the targets of smart and well-equipped human hunters; the largest animals, the strongest, the ones with the biggest horns and tusks, the biggest feet, the biggest teeth, were suddenly no more likely to escape than the smallest, and in fact may have actively been sought out as better meals and better trophies. Technology meant that the animal kingdom surrounding successful human hunters was made up of significantly weaker breeding pairs, and the reduction in elephant tusk size, for instance, or of cattle size, is a measurable form of human- and technology-driven selection.

But technology alters our bodies too:

Even in the last 10,000 years (the blink of an eye in evolutionary time), our bodies have weakened dramatically. Over this timescale it can be shown that our stature has decreased by 7 percent: Christopher Ruff estimates that we have lost fully 10 percent of our overall bony ruggedness - our so-called skeletal robusticity - in that time. Over the past 100,000 years, we see a 30 percent overall decrease - not as great as in some of the cattle we have domesticated, but remarkable nonetheless...A more gracile body will need less upkeep, and what it can no longer manage by brute force can be managed with specifically designed artifacts that amplify and concentrate strength: slingshots and spears, levers and bows. These technologies allowed our self-domestication just as they aided our domestication of wild animals (Taylor, Artificial, 28)

Technology, then, extends our capabilities both physically, and in terms of what we perceive ourselves to be capable of. But that extension has weakened our physical bodies over time, and is almost certainly still doing so. Is there a danger of over-extension, of putting too much faith in our technological augmentations so that we end up as over-fragile, bereft without our external props? Or is there really no human life without them? Is the move of power from body to object just the logical continuation of an evolutionary drift begun long ago, one which has made us amongst the most successful species, at least in terms of dominating the food chain, on earth? I think that these questions may be part of why people are often so hesitant to adopt new technologies, the fear that this one may be the step-too-far, that this one is 'playing god,' despite the fact that we've been doing that work ever since we've sharpened stone.

The Rats Are Alright

2010-09-26T14:34:00.007+01:00

- to envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. that, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward - we've been inside what we wanted all along. das ist komisch - david foster wallace - from 'some remarks on kafka's funniness' -

There's a post over at The Digital Reader where Mike Cane invokes an old Seth Godin post to say that bookstores are now catering to the 'rats.' Rats are, in Cane's interpretation of Godin's analogy, what's left when everyone else has jumped the sinking ship (the analogy is pushed too far and breaks down in both cases, i.e. the rats are red herrings). In this case the rats are those customers for whom books are a once in a while casual purchase, maybe one or two a year, consumers with little overall investment in literary matters as a whole. Rats, to Cane and Godin, are the people who don't matter to bookstores because they don't generate stable retail income, and, as soon as book stores begin to die, they are the people who will find new amusement without a second thought for what came before, as evidenced by said lack of purchasing power: if you're committed you will buy. In short, rats don't put up a fight for any industry, they cannot be turned to in order to abate an inevitable decline.

iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched. Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.

(from Godin, cited by Cane)

When the 'best' book buyers have headed off to Amazon and the Kindle, or now to Apple and the iPad, or to Barnes and Noble and the Nook, etc., then it's only the dregs-ish book buyers that remain, right? The ones that have no effect, the ones that are no use?

Well, apparently Amazon only have a 6% equivalent of the print market in Kindle ebooks (we're talking about 2009, let's ignore the other industry players for the moment, I don't think things have changed too drastically this year, or at least we've yet to see). I think, to judge by the amount of people who jumped the music industry ship, that they as an industry had a lot more heavy users who were a lot more motivated to jump. But maybe that 6% equivalent that Amazon have acquired represents the cream (retail figures-wise) of the print book buyers, and those people each rack up 500 book sales a year, and the remaining rats only buy one book, and the entire book selling industry is screwed… Well, not according to the 2009 sales figures (American figures, just to keep in line with Godin) which stayed essentially the same, bar a few low-to-mid single digit percentage drops here, and some similar raises there, compared with 2008. These figures come after two years of Kindle sales poaching the 'best' readers. These figures come in the midst of a recession felt world-wide (where uncommitted rats might tighten their book buying belts). These figures come in a year with no Harry Potter or Twilight (surely the rattiest of novels?). In fact ebooks in general only accounted for 1-3% of total book sales in 2009, suggesting that the defection, if it is of the elite reader/buyers, might not be such a crushing blow to the industry.

Imagine if it was true, imagine if all the hardcore book buyers had jumped ship…it didn't matter at all. The industry stayed just about the same. It would have turned out that the rats, en masse, are its bread and butter (because I think the whole rat metaphor's condescending as hell I will mix it all day long).

I think it's strange to suggest that hardcore book buyers (read 'book lovers,' read 'bibliophiles') would leave behind the bookstore for the Kindle. That, to me, sounds like a kind of ratty thing to do. If I just bought one or two books a year, but I was (for the sake of argument) a lover of shiny novelty, then maybe I'd check out one of these ereader things everyone's talking about and buy a few more (e)books on it once I had it too (i.e. I would contribute to overall ebook sales, at least in years one or two, far more than I used to contribute to the print book industry which has lost my sales). If I was (I wish) able and willing to buy 500 books a year I would imagine that nothing could drag me away from doing such a thing. You don't buy hundreds of books a year because you like words, or stories, you do it because you like books. The music industry analogy doesn't really hold because it's relatively easy to get over the mediocrity of CD packaging (bar some high level examples of the form). But when you have to hold an object in your hands every time you interact with it then it can lead to some…intense emotions.

But all of this is broad brushstrokes (of course). We have no figures to tell us how readers (and what kind of readers) move this way and that. We have no way of knowing whether people that buy 100, or 300, or 500 books a year are reading good things, or bad things, new things, or old things, whether they're bibliophiles or merely prolific readers. We have no way of knowing when and if they're going or have gone. And as for the rats, we have no way of knowing when they'll jump ship, or if they'll be pushed, and if they go then where they'll land.

Whatever though, these people on one book a year aren't rats. Their one-or-two-books-, one-or-two-albums-, one-or-two-DVDs-a-year is what keeps everything afloat because they're legion…which does make them sound a bit like rats I guess, with their power laying in their numbers. And in fact, if you look at my bookstore buying then I'm a rat, I buy one emergency present there around Christmas, but otherwise it's all libraries and The Book Depository. And I love music, but yeah, I'm probably a rat to HMV, because I try and buy straight from the artist where I can. I jumped from the high street ship years ago.

Sometimes the people who appear to be rats by some skewed indicator of retail capitalism (which Cane and Godin both seem to play into: "if you don't buy enough, you're a rat, you're not important to the industry we care about" (even though, as I've argued, you probably continue to drive it with your couple of sales)), sometimes these are the people who care the most, but they're simply driven outside of the systems which were meant to provide for them, but instead did anything but.

*Update*

Mike reposted and commented on this post -

Why did the music stores disappear? Why did the video stores disappear? Why did Blockbuster just file for bankruptcy? Why are Barnes & Noble and Borders both closing stores?

I think he takes exception to the term “rat,” really. Blame Godin for choosing the metaphor. The fact remains, changing the terminology, that when your best customers leave, you can’t support a business with casual customers.

I offered the following in a comment:

I can’t lie, I found the ‘rats’ term to be loaded, and the more I thought about it, it seemed to be reflected in the sentiment, that those left behind are the unsavvy ones, that if you don’t buy enough then you’re not ‘good’ for the industry everyone else is escaping anyway.

I agree, a business built on casual customers struggles to get going, but I’m not so sure that it can’t be sustained on them. Casual customers support supermarkets for instance (there’s not so much loyalty to a particular brand that people will travel for them, people tend to transition quite well), and I think this is a useful analogy to what music and book stores became long before digitisation.

Barnes and Borders and Blockbusters and Tower, I believe, are all in trouble because they never catered to a hardcore clientele, they catered to the supermarket crowd, those who wanted cheap and easy, not to the real ‘best’ customers who would stick with them when times got tough, but those who, when the money ran out, went for cheap, free, and easy elsewhere.

If Tower had cared for people who really loved music they’d have made long term sustainable profits on a small scale, rather than the short and explosive gains that late stage capitalism prides. Tower is boom and bust, Borders is boom and bust. Local bookstore and music stores are sustainable and dependable, bar the threats imposed on them by the wider market. Local indies suffer when they’re driven out of business by the big names, which then themselves die on the features they were built on (cheap, easy) when digitisation takes over. Then the indies can’t come back because now ‘free’ (or even just ‘non-physical’) is normalised.

I wonder how many bibliophiles with a great local bookstore have switched to the Kindle?

The conversation is continuing in the comments over at Mike's blog if you're interested in taking a look.

*Update 2*

I'm waiting for Mike to moderate another comment I left over there, and I thought I'd repost it here in the meantime as the sentiment is perhaps a little clearer:

I’m just not so sure that the reason it’s got to that stage [where big bookstores are closing] is that the dedicated hardcore buyers defected to new media leaving the book stores to perish. Dedicated buyers would, I assume, love to stay with the bookstores they know and trust, but those stores got shut and replaced with massive book superstores. These hardcore buyers had no commitment to the big book stores (which were never really for them, but instead for the rest of the population who were far more casual in their buying, who wanted ease not terrifying variety, a good book not a long search, who prided good prices and efficiency over shop character and staff knowledge, and who can blame them, books aren’t their obsession, they merely quite like, or even like them a lot, and their few dollars, multiplied over and over and over sure added up…), so when there was another option which, while not as good as the dead indie stores, gave back the variety they’d missed, the big buyers, the hardcore, went online, and maybe switched to ereading too. And as ereading gets more popular, the casual crowd are seeing that it’s perhaps even easier and more efficient than the big stores, even though they were aimed at them, ever were. So now they go online too, and some of them find out that you can even download stuff for free, which is even better than cheap and efficient. So the big stores die (and in their death throes deploy a certain kind of competition which kills off the last of the indies). When the dust settles, the big stores long gone, with few indies able to return, everyone who gives a damn about reading will be online and ereading. This is a fate, and maybe not a bad one. I have no doubt that there are others too.

E as in 'Electronic' vs. P as in 'Physical'

2010-09-19T01:23:00.000+01:00

- glory be to god for dappled things – / for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; / landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; / and áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim - gerard manley hopkins - from 'pied beauty' -

When I fell in love with music it was because I was promised three chords and the truth, and because it seemed perfectly logical, when faced with the problems of sexism, racism, classism, elitism, religion, or 'the man,' to just say "fuck" over and over again until someone listened. I tried for six months to like dance music like everyone else at my school, so I wouldn't get my head kicked in, or so I thought, but I was 13 and she was 16, and she had a Nirvana t-shirt, black lipstick, and purple Doc Martins, smoked rapidly disintegrating roll ups, and talked with fire about what music made you feel, from your body to your soul. In my head music still kind of looks and sounds like her.

***

When I fell in love with books it was because I thought no one else had yet. I must have been 9 or maybe 10 the first time I bunked, not a class, but a lunch break to go and hide down a tunnel of blackberry brambles behind the school kitchens, to eat my packed lunch and read in cool isolation. With the screams of a game of kiss chase, where I knew I had no hope of being pursued, blissfully muted into white noise, with the sun directly overhead, with fruit just about to burst from green to black all around me, that's where I first learnt the meaning of 'dappled,' a word with a look and a sound that I still love. The triumph of a new word that fit perfectly, the uneasy moment where your immediate surrounds seem a pale simulacra of a fiction you've just ceased reading into being.

***

When I got given my first mix tape I had no idea what it was. She ran up, put it in my hand, and walked away without a word, like she knew that what she was doing needed gravity, mystery, like it just had to start with unanswered questions and a cold rectangle of plastic and a yellow glittery star glued in the top righthand corner. I knew I wouldn't be able to talk to her again unless I'd listened to what was on that tape and worked out what it meant. Half an album on each side, by bands I'd never heard of. I still remember: drums, volume, sex, guitars. The next time I saw her we went for a walk, and she asked me what I thought, and I kissed her. I bought a walkman and wore that tape out on the bus, still sitting at the front, but not talking to the driver like a geek anymore. I swapped songs with the guy I'd start a band with on a bus like that, which means that if anything's managed to go ok so far it's probably because of that tape.

***

I fold down pages, underline quotes, and write in the margins of books because they're mine. And I've got books with messages written in them from people who cared enough to lean over and scribble something to me in class. And I've got books where I tore out a blank page so someone could write a hasty letter to save themselves from much more shame, or try, just once, to get him to go that party, because, who knows, he might say yes, and that would be something, wouldn't it, that would mean something, that he wanted to go, when he could be anywhere else after all. And I've got books that brought home photos used as bookmarks after I'd leant them out. And I've got books that still smell like perfume after I leant them out. And I've even got a book which now says, in gold pen, "I wish I'd invited you instead," which is, for long gone reasons, the most painful book I own.

So, god knows, I get it. I get that you worry about the damage, and that you look at kids with mp3 players the same way that people who grew up with vinyl looked at your tapes and CDs and understood the appeal, but still sadly shook their heads at what had passed. I get that you think it would be the end of the world if books went the same way too.

And I get it when you say "it's not the same." And I get it when you say "ebooks will never be the only way that people read." And I get it when you say "they don't smell right," even if you do insist on saying it over and over again, the same way you tell me that "you can't read them on the beach."

I get it.

But the other day I found a mobile phone with its SIM still safe, and I swapped it out, and read old messages on a new screen, and was quietly stunned that something like that, a bit of mobile, which is meant to be so cold, could make me feel those things all over again.

Given enough time, enough energy, and enough hormones we can attach meaning to almost anything. Anyone who loves them knows that books are much more than words on a bundle of pages. But they're not of course, the bundle is exactly what they are, we just bring something else, something better, and do our best to attach it, and, with practice, do.

If you have any doubt that people will find a way to humanise their digital things then you must really think that those things stop humans being humans, because making things not things anymore, but objects, our objects, is what we do. Every stickered laptop, every swapped memory stick, every annotated electronic text, every emoticoned IM, every abbreviated SMS, every nail-varnished mobile, every cheap home movie, every bedroom recording, every tagged photo, every lovingly tended Myspace, Deviant Art, and Live Journal profile is testament to the fact that we spend our days making things ours, as in mine, and ours, as in you and me together.

How long do you really think it will be until ebooks are more than words on a bundle of screens? How long are you willing to bet against people using things into beauty?

Are Bound-Books Qwerty?

2010-09-12T01:42:00.002+01:00

- knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles, not in consciousness - john dewey -

My copy of Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain is, shamefully, still residing on my shelf. I've been distracted by Heidegger, Hubert Dreyfus (to help me understand Heidegger), Graham Harman and Bernard Stiegler (to confuse me about Heidegger again), and I've basically neglected my reading on the neuropsychology of reading to pursue the phenomenology of technology. I got linked to Dehaene's interview with Scientific American, however, and my interest has been sparked all over again. In the interview the following exchange takes place:

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: [I]f the brain of a dyslexic is organized differently, does that suggest that it might have other abilities - or is dyslexia purely an impairment?

DEHAENE: This isn't fully known, but I was intrigued by recent research which indicates that dyslexic children and adults can be better on tasks of symmetry detection – they have a greater ability to notice the presence of symmetrical patterns, and the evidence even suggests that this was helpful in a group of astrophysicists to detect the symmetrical spectrum of black holes!

My theory is that mirror recognition is one of the functions that we have to partially 'un-learn' when we learn to read – it is a universal feature of the primate brain that is, unfortunately, inappropriate in our alphabet where letters p, q, d and b abound. By somehow managing to maintain this ability, dyslexics might be at some advantage in visual, spatial or even mathematical tasks.

More generally, we are touching here on the very interesting issue of whether cultural recycling makes us lose some abilities that were once useful in our evolution. The brain is a finite system, so although there are overwhelming benefits of education, there might also be some losses.

I've always found this idea striking, that the notion we 'push out' old knowledge by gaining new knowledge might actually be sort of true. There's evidence, for example, that some people who become blind experience a withering of the visual areas of their brains, and a concomitant enlargement of the auditory or somatosensory apparatus, the 'super senses' of the visually impaired riffed on in Daredevil. This can be seen as a gain (of greater auditory/tactile sensitivity) at the expense of a loss (of, unused but still functional, visual cortex). There are hundreds of other examples in the literature, from learning braille expanding the size of the region controlling fingertip sensation at the expense of the surrounding areas, to juggling expanding grey matter in visual and motor regions (also see Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself).

But it wasn't really brains that came to mind when I read the Dehaene interview, it was typewriters, or rather keyboards. The standard qwerty keyboard was designed by Charles Latham Sholes in the 1870s. The agreed upon design prior to this was

“a rectangular arrangement of keys…in alphabetical order. The levers manipulated by the keys were large and ungainly, and the size, spacing, and arrangement of the keys were dictated by these mechanical considerations, not by the characteristics of the human hand…Why did the alphabetical ordering change? To overcome a mechanical problem. When the typist went too quickly the typebars would collide, jamming the mechanism. The solution was to change the locations of the keys: letters such as i and e that were often typed in succession were placed on opposite sides of the machine so that their bars would not collide…In the end, the keyboard was designed through an evolutionary process, but the main driving forces were mechanical. Modern keyboards do not have the same problems; jamming isn't a possibility with electronic keyboards and computers…In the end, the qwerty keyboard was adopted throughout the world with but minor variations. We are committed to it, even though it was designed to satisfy constraints that no longer apply…and [it] is difficult to learn…There is a better way - the Dvorak keyboard…It is easier to learn and allows for about 10 percent faster typing, but that is simply not enough of an improvement to merit a revolution in the keyboard. Millions of people would have to learn a new style of typing. Millions of typewriters would have to be changed. The severe constraints of existing practice prevent change, even where the change would be an improvement” (Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, pp146,147,&148)

This story resonated, somehow, as I read Dehaene talk about the dyslexic brain as, not deficient, but processing differently, perhaps still performing in some ways as an illiterate brain where, similar to the evolution of keyboards, 'the severe constraints of existing practice prevent change.' The brain of the non-reader, of course, is not somehow inferior, and on Dehaene's account may actually outperform literate individuals at certain tasks (see also Maryanne Wolf's discussion of the artistic abilities of her dyslexic son (who draws very proficiently upside down!), and other examples of dyslexics who excel at visual and other tasks). In order to learn to read you've got to unlearn something that the brain comes hardwired with, 'mirror recognition,' so that skill's pathway can be put to use in the task of reading. The same can be said of keyboards: to switch to a possibly preferred mode (Dvorak) would be to give up the ease of the (culturally) 'hard-wired' qwerty keyboard. Sticking with qwerty is a dys-function, a different proficiency than one which might be currently culturally preferred.

This is the worry I have with the sometimes desperate tone of those committed to bound-book reading, or those expounding the virtues of the digital: are bound-books qwerty, the hardwired function we'd actually, in the current environment, be better rid of, but can't yet shed? Or are they the more efficient Dvorak that the next generation might lose, unable to deploy them because the ebookish dys-function is becoming culturally hardwired? A strange metaphor perhaps, but one which has been buzzing round my head. The keyboards, and the evolution of the brain, show that use breeds use until it sticks and becomes normalised, becomes 'common sense,' becomes 'how it is,' and then it's really hard to see what might actually be best for the time you're living in.

I really don't know if this is the time for books or ebooks en masse. I've made my own decision (books until tablets get cheaper, and easier on the eye, probably 18 months away), I'd just hate for anything as culturally important as reading to be dictated by what the herd has followed (this is more important than Betamax vs VHS…). That's why maintaining the debates, the questions, about the future of reading is so vital, and why sticking to our guns in the face of any evidence contrary to our opinions might spell disaster.

Surplus to Requirement

2010-09-07T03:50:00.000+01:00

- he snorted and hit me in the solar plexus...i bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. when i had it nicely spinning i gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor - raymond chandler - from pearls are a nuisance -

Commenting on Clay Shirky's new book on 'Cognitive Surplus,' John Miedema informs us that:

"As Shirky observes, Wikipedia was built out of one percent of the hours spent watching television in a year. However, before the web, we also spent more time reading long-form books, shaping the capacity for complex cognition, something that’s changing with the switch to scanning snippets on the web. As MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte observed: 'my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared.' This deficit also has enormous consequences. The capacity for complex thought is required to meet the complex social, political and environmental problems of our day. Bottom line, does the surplus exceed the deficit?"

That Wikipedia stat makes me incredibly happy. I genuinely think that the time I've spent away from television (three years and counting, barring the occasional box set of The Wire, Generation Kill, etc.), time spent with the internet, has improved my thinking immeasurably when combined with better reading and being surrounded by some very smart and very erudite people at university who make me feel bad enough that I try a bit harder. And I'm new to creating regular written content, but surely the cognitive surplus devoted to writing here is better for me than anything I ever watched week to week on that other screen. I also relax with the internet in the same way I used to with television, flaking out for an hour (or two, or three), but Boing Boing, The Guardian, Wired, Pitchfork, and every other digital thing I browse just for fun always seems to get my head working against the grain of whatever homogenising influence British television had. The net's good like that; diversity breeds complexity which breeds challenge which breeds thought, and it comes relatively effortlessly provided you 'click through,' provided you search around, provided you engage.

So, I agree that the Shirky point is one worth making: the internet has the capacity to drag people's leisure time into more productive use than television does. And I also agree that reading "shapes the capacity for complex cognition" (check out Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid or Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain for more on this). But the idea that "scanning snippets on the web" is reducing the "capacity for complex thought" honestly seems a touch…ludicrous. The full quote from Negroponte is: "I love the iPad…but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through." This seems to be a different quote than the one which is cited as evidence in Miedema's post, where it is appropriated into suggesting that the net in general has robbed Negroponte of his capacity to consume extended written work. Regardless, as more people use tablet computers, and generally read on screen, might we see a death of long-form reading, a move to reading snippets, and the end of activities which develop 'complex cognition?' My guess is no, certainly not, or at least not on this evidence.

Negroponte, I assume, is a busy man. He probably gets a TON of email which needs regular checking. But otherwise the behaviour he describes doesn't seem so new. I still look up words I don't know from books, I just tend to Google them now rather than go to a dictionary. But as far as I'm concerned that's not breaking up reading, that is reading, that's what you do to read properly. It's the same with 'clicking through' - that's just pursuing leads. If where you were held all the answers, or formed the meat of what you were interested in, then you'd stay there. Clicking away to new content, to the detriment of where you were before, just suggests that where you were simply wasn't where you wanted to be, not that you were incapable of reading it (I've discussed this before).

The other thing about being busy, besides the email, is you don't get to practice the things in your life that you see as being in any way peripheral. Last year I read around 120 books, a lot of them poetry and novels. This year I've only read 40 so far, (cover to cover at least), very little of which was poetry, barely any novels, it's mostly been a lot of technical and theoretically dense works. I'm a different reader than I was last year; not better or worse, just different. Actually, maybe a bit worse. My point is that reading is a skill that waxes and wanes with use like any other. If you don't practice playing guitar for a time then you will get worse, even if you remember the gist. If you stop reading poetry, unfortunately, your critical head isn't going to be as good as when you were knee-deep in it. And if you don't get a chance to read long-form works then suddenly a 300 page tome will seem gargantuan. I suspect that Negroponte is able to get the things he perceives as crucial to his work and leisure from short-form writing and other media forms, otherwise he'd be practicing long-form reading by necessity. If you're whittling to essentials then long-form reading might well fall by the wayside, even if you feel bad that that's the case.

And this is ok. I fail to believe that Negroponte's work with OLPC, and everything else he gets involved in, doesn't flex the muscles of his complex cognition, even if how he spends his leisure time is less taxing than it used to be. If he was reading Confessions of a Shopaholic would he really be working his mind harder? Reading, as an action in isolation, isn't a substitute for thinking, we've known this since Plato:

"Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom [they] will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society" (Phaedrus p96)

Reading is not an unalloyed good, critical thinking is. Some written work has the capacity to prompt such thought, much doesn't. The same applies for the internet, for cinema, for music, for visual art, and, yes, for television, though at varying ratios (Sturgeon's law, however, has always seemed about right to me). If reading is important to you then you need to practice, and you will. If the presence of a new device in your life gets in the way of this, as an adult, then maybe your priorities just lay elsewhere, maybe what you were looking for, information, distraction, whatever, is better provided by another medium. When it comes to teaching children then yes, we absolutely need to indoctrinate every last one of them into the specific skill of absorbing large swathes of written information, not because it's essential or somehow noble, but because any one of them might go on to lead a life where they will need it. Early pedagogy is about providing the fullest range of likely options for valuable later use that we can muster. But as adults: readers read. They just do. Anyone who stops reading just because youtube has funny videos they can suddenly access, well, maybe reading wasn't really for them, maybe it was getting in the way of putting their cognitive surplus to use in the same way youtube now does. Or maybe youtube scratches a necessary itch in a way reading couldn't.

It is no service at all to suggest that the internet causes people to read less, as if that was a bad thing in and of itself, as if some panacea for the ills of the world was being squandered while a puerile vice mushroomed irrefusibly. The truer argument lies with suggesting that people's cognitive surplus, their downtime from their activities needed strictly to survive and thrive, might be better spent in more meaningful or enabling activities. The medium is not the point, we shouldn't try to yoke people to media that they would willingly abandon at the first sign of something easier - this only masks the more profound problems of our society: the devaluing of inquiry, the rising infantilism of mass culture, the privileging of the easily gratifying. But these are not new problems, parts of the internet only continue them, and books are far from immune to their ravages.

A Very Human Technology

2010-08-29T02:41:00.001+01:00

- if you said to me, you can either have your toes cut off or your whole library destroyed, with no chance of ever accessing those works again, i'd say 'take my toes' - because i can more easily compensate for that loss. of course, you could get into a grisly argument over how much of my biology i'd give up before i'd say, 'ok, take the goethe' - timothy taylor -

Whitney Trettien recently tweeted an article which applied Andy Clark's notion of humans as 'Natural-Born Cyborgs' to Medieval research. I've been thinking and writing about technology a lot recently, particularly as to how it applies to our common mode of being, and the article's full of great insights into how Medieval 'technologies of the self' (Foucault) were utilised, and might be considered under the rubric of Clark's work. It's great to see more philosophically and scientifically informed work emerging throughout the humanities, even if the 'neurological turn' doesn't seem, to me, to be a particularly useful concept. Neurology is too narrow a specificity for the humanities in general to focus on, and we shouldn't settle for only drawing on work in that field, there's too much good stuff elsewhere, in the sciences and just about everywhere else. It does seem, however, that the time for a pure disciplinarity is justly passing. It's not that there is no value in specialising - there is, and it is vital to bringing something of real worth to any debate -, but that horribly pat phrase "it's outside my discipline" should surely cease to be a justifiable defence of an unwillingness to engage with a wider intellectual community. Not knowing about, or even having heard of something is, of course, fine, but a blind belief that then means it's not valuable really isn't. /rant.

Anyway… One quote from the article particularly stuck out:

The late fifteenth-century European humanist Jacobus Publicius's Art of Memory (the first edition of which was printed in Venice in 1482) speaks of memory (by which he means trained memory and its associated memory-practices) as capable of transforming us from "mute beings, incapable of speech…into skilled and eloquent speakers" (quoted in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, 232). The theory of locational memory is the means, he assures us, "by which the advantages of nature are strengthened and the endowments of natural ability are augmented" (quoted 236). And Publicius trusts in science to deliver this enhancement: "It has already been established by experiment that the combining of letters and material objects [images] brings us a great, immeasurable, and almost divine advantage" (quoted 249).

The compatability with Clark's work is obvious, and this chimed with the direction my own thought had taken: that technologies of all kinds, including spoken language and writing alongside tool and weapon use, contribute to a nature which we might consider to be definitively human. Jacobus Publicus might privilege the written word and the image in granting 'divine advantage' over beings which did not possess them, but Plato before him had denigrated such (in the Phaedrus) in favour of the dialectic, the 'true work' of the philosopher, and this pair's combination of language, writing, and a particular mode of thinking is to say nothing of societies which have deployed and deploy signifying tools such as dance to express things which words cannot, nor any of the myriad of more physical, complex and mundane, technologies that are utilised around the globe, and at all times, to extend the abilities of the human body and mind. Technology on such a broad definition, I thought, is an absolute of our species unlike any other. I wasn't trying to suggest any inbuilt homogeneity, a preordaining genetics, instead only that our tremendous diversity stems from our ability (which is both genetically viable and culturally provoked) to look around ourselves, at our environment and culture, and divine what might aid us in our goals, and when nothing fits that bill to create something which will. As Clark says in a later work: “We exist, as the thinking things we are, only thanks to a baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural and technological scaffolding” (Clark, Natural-Born, 11). This explains "why we humans are so deeply different from other animals, while being, quite demonstrably, not so very different in our neural and bodily resources" (4).

And I was relatively happy with such a notion. But a book coming out next month, The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor, seems like it might contribute to my having to reconsider technology as a mark of 'the human,' and instead lead me to say that technology isn't just something we do, nor something which defines us, but something which made (and makes) us.

My only experience of Taylor's ideas come from a couple of interviews, so I'll use quotations from these to give a sense of his ideas as I know them (there'll a follow up post after the book I suspect):

So you are saying that technology came before humans?

The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That's the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That's a gap of more than 300,000 years - more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools.

Is it possible that we just don't have a genus Homo fossil, but they really were around?

Some researchers are holding out for an earlier specimen of genus Homo. I'm trying to free us to think that we had stone tools first and that those tools created a significant part of our intelligence. The tools caused the genus Homo to emerge.

"These tools were not ends in themselves, they were for doing things, like butchering animals, and, perhaps, for making things, such as slings. The loop of hide that makes the simple sling can not only scare away a predator with a stone, it can be used to carry. And the most critical load for a little, savannah-dwelling biped to carry would have been its own infant progeny."

"Once you have slings to carry babies, you have broken a glass ceiling - it doesn't matter whether the infant is helpless for a day, a month or a year. You can have ever more helpless young and that, as far as I can see, is how encephalisation took place in the genus Homo. We used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos. Our children are born more and more underdeveloped because they can continue to develop outside the womb - they become an extra-uterine fetus in the sling."

"Many previous theorists have imagined that hominin young mothers, rendered helpless by their offspring, must have been desperate for base-camp provisioning and protection. Both could have been provided by an incipient hubby/ape-man, whose innovative skills allowed the emergence of language (communication during the hunt) and technology (tools of the hunt). Roll on 1950…[B]ut if we can imagine for a moment that females are inventive too, then the fix, [baby-carrying slings] might be considered more technological than social."

"By solving a carrying problem for a bipedal ape, this invention – made, I believe, by an australopithecine female with little more brain power than a modern chimp – opened the way to our becoming human."

Getting tied into neurology and, to an extent, phenomenology is what led me to think of technology as a 'human' thing, as items which we devise, the aptitude for which defines our species. But Taylor's work, I hope, has triggered a more nuanced conclusion: that technology is not what marks us out, but what makes us us. We are not human because we use technology, but human because we couldn't be without it; there is no human without technology, and there never was. No human created the first technology because 'technology' doesn't describe objects we create, or even ways of thinking we establish; from our first breath, the way we encounter the world is through and because of technology, and it seems this may well always have been the case.