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reading responsibly: nancy kaplan on the NEA's data distortion   11.30.2007, 5:21 PM

The following critique, which expands upon a comment left late yesterday, is from Nancy Kaplan, Executive Director of the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore.

Analyzing long term trends in Americans' reading habits, To Read or Not to Read argues that three important trends produce a worrying prognosis for the future of reading, and indeed the future of civic life:

1. a historical decline in voluntary reading rates among teenagers and young adults;
2. a gradual worsening of reading skills among older teens;
3. and declining proficiency in adult readers.

These three trends provide the foundations for the central argument of the report, which can be summarized fairly succinctly:

Reading books in one's leisure time strongly correlates with reading proficiency so that when rates of voluntary book-reading decline and we also see a decline in reading proficiency, it is reasonable to suppose that people become less proficient readers because they are spending less time reading books for pleasure.

The entire argument, in short, depends on the ability to demonstrate both that reading proficiency is declining and that the number of people who choose to read books in their leisure time is also declining. From those two trends, the NEA draws some inferences about what declines in reading books and declines in reading proficiency mean for the nation as a whole.

Much of the data used to support the core claims derives from statistics gathered and analyzed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). In particular, data on reading proficiency at three ages -? 9, 13, and 17 -? come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on long term trends, a "nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Assessments are conducted periodically [since 1971] in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history" (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/). In addition to assessing reading proficiency across three contexts for reading ("reading for literary experience, reading for information, and reading to perform a task"), the assessment also "asked students to report contextual variables such as time spent on homework, the number of pages read for school and homework, and the amount of time spent reading for fun" (TRONTR, p. 27). Data demonstrating the decline in reading proficiency among adult readers come from a separate NCES study, the National Assessments of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which has been conducted periodically since 1992.

Despite the numerous charts, graphs and tables in To Read or Not ot Read, a careful and responsible reading of the complete data provided by the NAEP and the NAAL undermine the conclusions the NEA draws. Two examples of problematic uses of primary data sets will illustrate the issues.

The graph below shows the original data as it is displayed on the NCES web site (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/images/ltt/ss01.gif) with the NEA's truncated and reformatted version superimposed above the original:

Although the data represented in the NEA version are strictly speaking accurate, they nevertheless seriously distort the data set from which they were derived in two key ways: by truncating the data set and by representing irregular time intervals with regularized spatial intervals. The first distortion creates a trend where none exists. The second distortion magnifies the effect of the decline in scores by making the slope of the line between the scores in 1999 and the scores in 2004 steeper than it should be. The steeper slope, then, suggests a more rapid and deeper decline than the underlying data support.

Note that the NEA graph begins with the year 1984 while the data set from NCES begins in 1971. Note too that the average scale score for 17 year olds in 2004 -? 285 -? is exactly the same as the average scale score for that age group in 1971. In other words, over the whole period for which data are available, there has been no change in reading proficiency among 17 year olds, although there was evidently a brief period of significant improvement between 1984 and 1992 (the asterisks mark statistically significant differences with the 2004 score). In short, there is no downward trend in reading proficiency over the whole period for which we have data. The downturn that did occur after scores peaked from 1988 through 1992 is statistically significant but it is on the whole not very steep nor particularly precipitous. In fact the magnitude and duration of the decline mirror the statistically significant uptick in scores over the four year period from 1980 to 1984.

A second graph produced by the NEA and used both in the executive summary and in Chapter 5 of the report highlights and magnifies both kinds of distortions. The graph uses a truncated set of the NCES data for two age groups -? 17 year old students and 9 year old students -? to exaggerate the difference in trends between the two groups. The underlying data are represented on the NCES graph at the top of the illustration. The green dots and line represent the relative changes in scores for 17 year olds from 1988 to 2004 and the blue line represents the relative changes for 9 year olds. The horizontal red line is the base 1988 score for each group. The 9 year old groups' score is 7 points higher in 2004 than it was in 1988 while the 17 year old groups' score is 5 points lower. In the NEA graph for these same data, the scale has been altered to create the impression that score differences are much greater than they actually are. The dramatic improvement in the scores of 9 year old readers is statistically significant, as is the 5 point decline in scores for 17 year olds over the period shown in the graphs. Yet in the NEA revision of the NCES graph, the data points for each test year are spaced evenly across the x-axis even though the tests occurred at uneven intervals. As a result, the changes in scores for both groups are made to seem much more dramatic and sudden than they really are.

Misleading graphs based on manipulated data are not the only fudge factor the NEA employs. In addition to relying on two sources of NAEP data, To Read or Not to Read also uses data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy whose latest report, Literacy in Everyday Life, provides a nuanced and detailed analysis of adult literacy in America over 11 years (1992-2003). Despite the complexity of its subject and the detailed data it provides, the NAAL report begins with a clear and simple assertion: "between 1992 and 2003, there were no statistically significant changes in average prose ... literacy for the total population ages 16 and older..." (p. iv). Even though the overall picture did not change, the NAAL did report some data that, when removed from the larger picture, appear to suggest declines in adult proficiency. As the NEA notes, proficiency among adults with bachelor's degrees and post-graduate degrees declined in statistically significant measures. But the NAAL report explains the apparent contradiction by noting that underlying demographic changes account for the fact that overall proficiency did not decline while levels of proficiency among the more highly educated appear to have decreased:

The fact that average prose literacy decreased or remained the same for all levels of highest educational attainment raises an interesting questiion. How could prose literacy scores decrease at every level of education beyond high school without a decrease in the overall score? This pattern is called Simpson's Paradox. The answer is that the relative size of the groups changed. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with postsecondary education increased and the percentage of adults who did not complete high school decreased. The increase in the percentage of adults with postsecondary education, who, on average, had higher prose scores than adults who did not complete high school, offsets the fact that average prose literacy scores declined at every level of educational attainment beyond high school. (p. 37).

Among other things, the NAAL report finds that various demographic factors, especially an adult's first language and the age at which that person learned English, have significant effects on proficiency with literacy in English. A quick look at changes in population over the same period provides a reasonable hypothesis to explain the NAAL data. Over the period measured in the latest report, the US has experienced large increases in immigrant populations. For example, in 1990, 7.9% of the total US population were foreign born; in 2000, the 11.1% of the population were immigrants. The overwhelming majority of foreign born residents of the US (97% of naturlized citizens and 84% of all other foreign born residents) are adults. Such changes in the make-up of the population might have important effects on the data.

Data may be one kind of thing but polemic is another. The heart of the NEA's case appears not in the report proper but in preface provided by the Endowment's Chairman, Dana Gioia. There he explicitly asserts that reading books, preferrably every day, produces more prosperous and more virtuous citizens:

Strictly understood, the data in this report do not necessarily show cause and effect. The statistics merely indicate correlations. The habit of daily reading, for instance, overwhelmingly correlates with better reading skills and higher academic achievement. On the other hand, poor reading skills correlate with lower levels of financial and job success. At the risk of being criticized by social scientists, I suggest that since all the data demonstrate consistent and mostly linear relationships between reading and these positive results - ?and between poor reading and negative results -? reading has played a decisive factor. Whether or not people read, and indeed how much and how often they read, affects their lives in crucial ways.

All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals - ?whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual's academic and economic success - ?facts that are not especially surprising - ?but it also seems to awaken a person's social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports - ?no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact - ? books change lives for the better.

There is little doubt that modern information economies require many more proficient readers than older industrial economies did. Because of changes in the nature and conditions of work, declining proficiency in reading among American adults might cause some concern if not alarm. It is surely also the case that educational institutions at every level can and should do a better job. Yet there is little evidence of an actual decline in literacy rates or proficiency. As a result, the NEA's core argument breaks down. Even if we assume that high school seniors in 1971 spent more of their leisure time reading books than today's high school seniors do (although there is no data going back far enough to support the case one way or the other), there simply is no evidence that today's youngsters don't read as well as Mr. Gioia's peers did at a comparable age. From the information available, we simply cannot construct any relationship, let alone a causal one, between voluntary reading of books and reading proficiency.

Reading well, doing well, and doing good may exhibit strong correlations but the underlying dynamics producing each of the three effects may have little to do with what Americans choose to do in their leisure time. Read responsibly, the data underlying the NEA's latest report simply do not support Mr. Gioia's assertions.

Like many other federal agencies under our current political regime, the National Endowment for the Arts seems to have fixed the data to fit its desired conclusions.

Posted by ben vershbow at 5:21 PM | Comments (13)

sparkles from the wheel   11.30.2007, 5:19 PM

Walt Whitman's poem "Sparkles from the Wheel" beautifully captures the pleasure and exhilaration of watching work in progress:

1

WHERE the city's ceaseless crowd moves on, the live-long day,
Withdrawn, I join a group of children watching - ?I pause aside with them.

By the curb, toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel, sharpening a great knife;
Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone - ?by foot and knee,
With measur'd tread, he turns rapidly - ?As he presses with light but firm hand,
Forth issue, then, in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel.

2

The scene, and all its belongings - ?how they seize and affect me!
The sad, sharp-chinn'd old man, with worn clothes, and broad shoulder-band of leather;
Myself, effusing and fluid - ?a phantom curiously floating - ?now here absorb'd and arrested;

The group, (an unminded point, set in a vast surrounding;)
The attentive, quiet children - ?the loud, proud, restive base of the streets;
The low, hoarse purr of the whirling stone - ?the light-press'd blade,
Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
Sparkles from the wheel.

I was reminded of this the other day while reading a brief report in Library Journal on Siva's recent cross-blog argument with Michigan University Librarian Paul Courant about Google book digitization contracts. These sorts of exchanges are not new in themselves, but blogs have made it possible for them to occur much more spontaneously and, in Siva's case, to put them visibly in the context of a larger intellectual project. It's a nice snapshot of the sort of moment that can happen along the way when the writing process is made more transparent -? seeing an argument crystallize or a position get clarified. And there's a special kind of pleasure and exhilaration that comes from reading this way, seeing Siva sharpening his knife -? or argument -? and the rhetorical sparks that fly off the screen. Here's that Library Journal bit:

Discussion of Google Scan Plan Heats Up on Blogs:

Now this is why we love the Blogosphere. In launching his blog, University of Michigan's (UM) dean of libraries Paul Courant recently offered a spirited defense of UM's somewhat controversial scan plan with Google. That post drew quite a few comments, and a direct response from Siva Vaidhyanathan the author, blogger, and University of Virginia professor currently writing the Googlization of Everything online at the Institute for the Future of the Book; that of course drew a response from Courant. The result? A lively and illuminating dialog on Google's book scanning efforts.

Posted by ben vershbow at 5:19 PM | Comments (1)

ephemera   11.30.2007, 1:07 AM

I had dinner last night with an elderly and eminent print collector and art historian. He specialises in the eighteenth century - the period when the quantity of text being produced last exploded by an order of magnitude - and embodies many of the assumptions of that period. The printed word is always meaningful; all printed matter is precious; even the minutiae of history are worth preserving.

So when not writing authoritative texts on engravings of Stubbs, he collects ephemera. To the uninitiated, that's postcards, leaflets, adverts - basically anything printed, however trivial it might seem - and delivers great sacks of the stuff to the Bodleian Library at intervals to be sifted and, if deemed important, archived.

I tried to imagine what it would be like attempting to keep up with modern-day ephemera. I asked him: in an era of mass desktop self-publishing, is it even conceivable or possible to try and keep up? How can one collect and archive such stuff? He said they usually only take stuff from periods up to around the '50s or '60s as a rule. But somewhat to my surprise, he insisted that ephemera was more important today than ever, precisely because of computers: "Sooner or later anything on a computer gets erased. If we don't collect some print how will anyone know what happened?".

I'm not sure that delivering sacks of home-printed yoga adverts and party invitations to the Bodleian Library is the answer. But it did make me pause. While pamphlets, books and other ephemera give us some clue as to what life was like three centuries ago, what provisions are we making for our own mass memory? Will this neophiliac digital culture be stored on the future equivalent of floppy drives, only to end up becoming just as swiftly obsolete and unreadable? Answers on a postcard.

Posted by sebastian mary at 1:07 AM | Comments (2)

reeding riting and ranting   11.29.2007, 11:49 AM

It's the season for literacy statistics. The reading performance of children in England has fallen from third to 19th in the world according to a major assessment. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), undertaken every five years, involved children aged about 10 in 40 countries. Attitudes to reading in England appear poor compared to those of children in many other countries, and have declined slightly since 2001. Children in England read for pleasure less frequently than their peers in many other countries.

But what does that mean? The ensuing debate about declining standards has failed to consider how use of screen and page mingle for young consumers (and creators) of culture. Time spent playing on computers is assumed to be wasted, but how much reading and writing is done on screen? My friends' thirteen year old daughter spent lots of time on line - but was found to be writing fan fiction short stories and uploading them for peer group response, all with no parental or educational support whatsoever. The key to creating more young readers is to keep books of all kinds in the mix with the other information and entertainment sources children make use of. That's what's so important about schemes like Bookstart and Booktime which put exciting books into children's hands and homes at key moments in their early lives.

As long as children can read proficiently - and the PERLS study shows a decline in interest amongst confident readers rather than plummeting literacy levels - then what really matters is not how many books they use as opposed to websites or tv programmes consumed, but how much information and imagination they glean from their entire cultural diet.

At a meeting last week of FLO, the consortium of 'Friendly Literature Organisations' in the UK, we presented the case that agencies like the Poetry Society, Spread the Word and the whole network of literature development agencies in the UK need have no fear at all of the digital. Their work is all about literature not books, about access, interaction and excellence; their skills as curators of their artform are exactly those most prized in the age of attention.

It's important we keep banging the drum for the living word and look ahead to where stories and poetry go next. That's the way to ensure that young people grow into creative readers and writers of the world they inhabit.

Posted by chris meade at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

the NEA's misreading of reading   11.29.2007, 12:50 AM

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum writes an elegant and concise critique of the National Endowment for the Arts' ominously titled new study of American reading trends, "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence", which is a sequel to their 2004 opus "Reading at Risk." The basic argument is that reading, or what they rather awkwardly refer to as "voluntary reading" (that is, reading done purely for pleasure or self-improvement) is in a precipitious state of decline, especially among the young -? a situation which poses a grave threat to our culture, democracy and civic fabric.

Though clearly offered with the best of intentions, the report demonstrates an astonishingly simplistic view of what reading is and where it is and isn't occurring. Overflowing with bar graphs and and charts measuring hours and minutes spent reading within various age brackets, the study tries to let statistics do the persuading, but fails at almost every turn to put these numbers in their proper social or historical context, or to measure them adequately against other widespread forms of reading taking place on computers and the net.

The study speaks, as Kirschenbaum puts it, "as though there is but a single, idealized model of reading from which we have strayed" -? a liesurely, literary sort of reading embodied by that classic image of the solitary reader hunched over a book in deep concentration. Kirschenbaum rightly argues that this way of reading is simply one of a complicated and varied set of behaviors that have historically operated around texts. More to the point, many of these alternative forms -? skimming, browsing, lateral reading, non-linear reading, reading which involves writing (glossing, annotation etc.) to name some -? today happen increasingly in digital contexts, constituting what Kirschenbaum refers to broadly as a grand "remaking of reading." The NEA document takes little of this into account. Kirschenbaum:

...while the authors of the report repeatedly emphasize that they include online reading in their data, the report sounds most clumsy and out of touch when referring to new media. The authors of the report tend to homogenize "the computer" without acknowledging the diversity of activity -? and the diversity of reading -? that takes place on its screen. Our screens are spaces where new forms like blogs and e-mail and chats commingle with remediations of older forms, like newspapers and magazines -? or even poems, stories, and novels. Reading your friend's blog is not likely a replacement for reading Proust, but some blogs have been a venue for extraordinary writing, and we are not going to talk responsibly or well about what it means to read online until we stop conflating genre with value.

The report also fails to acknowledge the extent to which reading and writing have become commingled in electronic venues. The staccato rhythms of a real-time chat session are emblematic in this regard: Reading and writing all but collapse into a single unified activity. But there is a spectrum of writing online, just as there is a spectrum of reading, and more and more applications blur the line between the two.

(He goes on to mention CommentPress and a number of other networked reading applications...)

There's certainly cause for concern about what might be lost as deep extended reading of deep extensive books declines, and in their crude way the NEA's stats and figures do tell a worrying tale of shifting cultural priorities. Indeed, the most appealing aspect of "To Read or Not to Read" is its passionate commitment to a set of humanistic values: sustained thinking, personal and moral growth, a critical outlook, the cultivation of knowledge. Few would disagree that these are things that ought to be held onto in the face of relentless technological change and a rapacious commercial culture, but to insist that the book and one particular romanticized notion of reading must be the sole vessels for transporting these values into the future seems both naive and needlessly limiting.

You could say that our group's mission is to advocate for these same values -? values that we certainly associate with books, hence our name -? but in the diverse landscape of new media. To the question "to read or not to read" we answer emphatically "to read!" But to understand what reading actually is demands a more nuanced investigation.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:50 AM | Comments (9)

how to keep google's books open   11.27.2007, 5:27 PM

Whip-smart law blogger Frank Pasquale works through his evolving views on digital library projects and search engines, proposing a compelling strategy for wringing some public good from the tangle of lawsuits surrounding Google Book Search. It hinges on a more expansive (though absolutely legally precedented) interpretation of fair use that takes the public interest and not just market factors into account. Recommended reading. (Thanks, Siva!)

Posted by ben vershbow at 5:27 PM | Comments (1)

amazon raises paperback prices   11.27.2007, 1:01 AM

An interesting twist in the Kindle story reported at Dear Author:

Amazon's pricing for mass market books has suddenly gone full retail, no discount since the release of the Kindle. When questioned in Newsweek about the low pricing, Bezos said "low-margin and high-volume sale - ?you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." It looks like Bezos is hoping to make more money off the high volume of sales from those mass market purchasers.

...I guess this is one way of forcing readers to purchase the Kindle. If Kindle success rises or falls on the backs of the mass market purchasers, this is going to be ugly because I see a whole bunch of Amazon purchasers being pretty upset about this turn of events.

Thanks to Peter Brantley for the link.

Posted by ben vershbow at 1:01 AM | Comments (0)

the novelodeon   11.26.2007, 12:40 PM

This past April, as the final season of The Sopranos hit the airwaves, with seemingly the whole country bracing for impact, I'd still never seen a single episode. Gradually, my indifference turned to concern. It felt like every talk show, news culture section and conversation on the street was about the fate of Tony Soprano -? a latter-day American anti-hero, a titanic figure with the air of myth about him. I began worry that I'd missed out on something big. A cultural touchstone of rare proportions.

So, as the end drew near, I took a deep breath and decided to start from the beginning.

Six months, 86 episodes, and over 70 combined viewing hours later I'm finally done, and while I may have missed out on The Sopranos as a broadcast event -? seven seasons of weekly appointments with Tony, Carmela, Meadow, AJ and the whole crumbling world of New Jersey gangsterdom -? I got to experience something perhaps more satisfying: a hyper-concentrated, solitary viewing experience, curled up nightly in bed with my laptop. Episodes flowing into each other almost seamlessly like chapters of a book. The pause button like a dog-eared page or bookmark inserted as my eyelids began to droop. An experience not unlike reading a big novel.

Book lovers frequently insist they could never get in bed with a computer, but it seems that this is happening all the time. Any of you who have indulged in a multi-season TV binge can probably attest to this -? hours spent prone, the laptop huffing away, plowing through disc after disc (Bob made a similar observation a while back). Substantively too there's something that recalls leisure reading. It has oft been remarked that The Sopranos heralded a major shift in television into terrain once solely occupied by the novel: serial dramas that transcend their episodic structure and become a new kind of literature. Big cross-seasonal plot arcs. A broad social canvas. Intricately interwoven narrative. A large cast of deeply drawn characters. Not to mention a purchase on the country's imagination that recalls the popularity of the great serial fictions of Dickens a century and a half ago. With the spate of high-caliber TV serials originated by HBO and then proliferated by channels across the television spectrum, film has moved onto the novel's turf, matching not only its narrative scope but its expansive dimensions. Stories as big and sprawling as novels can now be told in moving pictures, and thanks to a host of new individualized distribution channels, experienced as intimately, on a laptop or iPod.

Of course I'm not suggesting that film and prose fiction aren't very different things, just that their roles seem to be converging. From its early days, film has been in conversation with the novel, frequently operating on canvases as vast as Anna Karenina or Great Expectations, but it necessarily has had to compress, select and distill the worlds it shows into something in the vicinity of two hours. When a film edges toward the three-hour mark it is considered epic. Simply in terms of duration of story and investment of time by the viewer/reader, movies and novels have always been very different kinds of fiction requiring very different sets of commitments from their audiences.

The shift arguably began with the multi-episode adaptations of classic books pioneered by the BBC in the 70s -? shows like I, Claudius, on through the 1995 hit rendition of Pride and Prejudice, right up to last year's Bleak House. Here, television began to stretch out novelistically. And indeed, novels were the source material. Still, the solitary "reading" element was absent here. These were broadcast events, viewed in living rooms at an appointed time set by the channel, with little or no control by the spectator. Soon enough, however, VCRs entered the home and television audiences became time shifters, capturing and bending the broadcasters' schedules to fit their own. From there the die was pretty much cast. A parade of new "narrowcast" technologies -? DVDs, TiVo, personal computers, iTunes, bit torrent -? imbued these shows with book-like qualities: reader-driven, personal, portable... an intimate cinema of one.

Immediately upon finishing The Sopranos, with the pangs of withdrawal already setting in, I found solace in Wikipedia, which has extensive articles on each episode and character from the show. With the help of the external links, I soon found myself on a strange digital dérive through various arcana: press clippings, blogs, and an forums debating the show's ambiguous ending, personal web pages of supporting cast members such as Joseph R. Gannascoli, who played the gay mobster Vito Spatafore, and from whose site one can purchase such fine collectibles as t-shirts emblazoned with "I Love You Johnny Cakes." Through the drifts of trivia, I eventually dug up several interesting quotes from contemporary authors ruminating on the novel's place in American life and the increasing overlap with television. The first bits were from John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, who published a piece in The Guardian during those fevered months surrounding the Sopranos finale entitled "Has the novel been murdered by the mob?"

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

....America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood (and the White House press room), so the ascendancy of The Sopranos to the level of quasi-literary art should have been expected. Indeed, this wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did.

Freeman cites two authors, Gary Shteyngart and the late Norman Mailer, both of whom have discussed The Sopranos as a story of novelistic proportions. First, here's Shteyngart, in a Slate dialogue last year with Walter Kirn:

Our time...is more mutable. Change occurs not from year to year but from day to day - ?the fiction writer's job of remaining relevant has never been harder. And I don't think this will be true only of the present age. I think we are entering a period of unprecedented acceleration, of previously unimaginable technological gain that may be derailed only by the kind of apocalypse found in Cormac McCarthy's latest novel.

The Internet, I both fear and hope, is only the beginning.

But the emotional need to connect with a story remains. One of the folks behind the popular HBO series The Wire recently said that he sees each season as a novel, with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The Sopranos, which may one day be acknowledged as the definitive fiction of the early 21st century, puts an emphasis on detail, setting, and psychology in a way that could resonate with a reader of, say, A Sentimental Education.

And here's Mailer, in a 2004 interview on Poynter Online:

The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed. You couldn't just stick someone in Tampa without knowing about Tampa. You couldn't get away with it. People didn't get upset if you were a little scanty on the details in the past. Now all the details get in the way of an expanse of a novel.

You can take a much broader canvas with nonfiction ... and Americans want large canvases because America is getting so confusing. People want more information than you can get from most novels. You can read a novel about a small subject like the breakup of a marriage, but that's not a wide enough approach for some. It takes something like "The Sopranos," which can loop into a good many aspects of American culture. As I said, I don't think the Great American Novel can be written anymore. There will be great novels ... forever, I hope ... But the notion of a wide canvas may be moving to television with its possibilities of endless hours.

I think it's this element of time that lies at the heart of this over-drawn analogy. The storytellers of television are driving a golden age of magisterial fictions roomy enough to capture the full flow of time. TV serials used to be a way to kill time: repeatable formulas, the same story told again and again, a tradition that's alive and well in shows like Law & Order. You can check in, check out, it doesn't really matter. TV has always been sort of timeless in this way. Whereas prose fiction has long had a special relationship with time. Time, in its fullness, takes time for the author to convey, and the time it takes to read book-length fictions is I think equally part of the reward -? it's an endurance sport, long-distance running. I always assumed that only a book could show me the landscape of time in this almost bodily way, but my recent odyssey with the Soprano family appears to have blurred the usual distinctions.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:40 PM | Comments (8)

siva on kindle   11.23.2007, 1:23 PM

Thoughtful comments from Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Kindle:

As far as the dream of textual connectivity and annotations -- making books more "Webby" -- we don't need new devices to do that. Nor do we need different social processes. But we do need better copyright laws to facilitate such remixes and critical engagement.

So consider this $400 device from Amazon. Once you drop that cash, you still can't get books for the $9 cost of writing, editing, and formating. You still pay close to the $30 physical cost that includes all the transportation, warehousing, taxes, returns, and shoplifting built into the price. You can only use Amazon to get texts, thus locking you into a service that might not be best or cheapest. You can only use Sprint to download texts or get Web information. You can't transfer all you linking and annotating to another machine or network your work. If the DRM fails, you are out of luck. If the device fails, you might not be able to put your library on a new device.

All the highfallutin' talk about a new way of reading leading to a new way of writing ignores some basic hard problems: the companies involved in this effort do not share goals. And they do not respect readers or writers.

I say we route around them and use these here devices -- personal computers -- to forge better reading and writing processes.

Posted by ben vershbow at 1:23 PM | Comments (5)

not drowning but waving   11.20.2007, 12:28 PM

On the Suffolk coast where we stayed last weekend they had been warned of floods comparable to the deluge of 1953 which submerged whole villages and killed hundreds. In the event the high tide wasn't as high as predicted, although a breach up the estuary submerged the fields beside the river. Local residents were relishing stories of alarmed visitors; they've seen it all before round here.

We walk along the river bank and my novelist friend is keen to discuss the future of the book. Her publisher has been circulating their authors with letters about the impact of digitisation; she's convinced big changes are coming in how novels are distributed, but doesn't believe there will be much interest in using new media in literary storytelling.

We visit a fish shop by the river that was flooded out. They'd only just opened an extension built at a height recommended by a local fisherman who had told them, "That's as high as the tide went nine years ago - you'll be all right." They weren't.

Bloggers mix text with still images with moving pictures embedded from YouTube etc. - young people take that media mix for granted, and as consumers we all do, watching tv adaptations of favourite books, using the web to research more about the author to discuss at our reading group. A new generation of more consciously transliterate reader will take it as read that the text is surrounded by researches, images, networks of reader response to the point where these become an entirely integral part of the work of art, the author's creative voice distinct but no longer so alone.

The flooded fields are rather beautiful and it's already hard to recall what the landscape looked like before. Nature can adapt instantly to change; it takes longer to redraw the maps. At this week's if:book:group at DEMOS in London we're discussing authorship and user generated content. Let's push off into uncharted waters and see not if but where we float.

Posted by chris meade at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

of razors and blades   11.19.2007, 4:06 PM

A flurry of reactions to the Amazon Kindle release, much of it tipping negative (though interestingly largely by folks who haven't yet handled the thing).

David Rothman exhaustively covers the DRM/e-book standards angle and is generally displeased:

I think publishers should lay down the law and threaten Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with slow dismemberment if he fails to promise immediately that the Kindle will do .epub [the International Digital Publishing Forum's new standard format] in the next six months or so. Epub, epub, epub, Jeff. Publishers still remember how you forced them to abandon PDF in favor of your proprietary Mobi format, at least in Amazon-related deals. You owe 'em one.

Dear Author also laments the DRM situation as well as the jacked-up price:

Here's the one way I think the Kindle will succeed with consumers (non business consumers). It chooses to employ a subscription program whereby you agree to buy x amount of books at Amazon in exchange for getting the Kindle at some reduced price. Another way to drive ereading traffic to Amazon would be to sell books without DRM. Jeff Bezos was convinced that DRM free music was imperative. Why not DRM free ebooks?

There are also, as of this writing, 128 customer reviews on the actual Amazon site. One of the top-rated ones makes a clever, if obvious, remark on Amazon's misguided pricing:

The product is interesting but extremely overpriced, especially considering that I still have to pay for books. Amazon needs to discover what Gillette figured out decades ago: Give away the razor, charge for the razor blades. In this model, every Joe gets a razor because he has nothing to lose. Then he discovers that he LOVES the razor, and to continue loving it he needs to buy razors for it. The rest is history.

This e-book device should be almost free, like $30. If that were the case I'd have one tomorrow. Then I'd buy a book for it and see how I like it. If I fall in love with it, then I'll continue buying books, to Amazon's benefit.

There is no way I'm taking a chance on a $400 dedicated e-book reader. That puts WAY too much risk on my side of the equation.

Posted by ben vershbow at 4:06 PM | Comments (1)

newsweek covers the future of reading   11.19.2007, 9:21 AM

Steven Levy's Newsweek cover story, "The Future of Reading," is pegged to the much anticipated release of the Kindle, Amazon's new e-book reader. While covering a lot of ground, from publishing industry anxieties, to mass digitization, Google, and speculations on longer-term changes to the nature of reading and writing (including a few remarks from us), the bulk of the article is spent pondering the implications of this latest entrant to the charred battlefield of ill-conceived gadgetry which has tried and failed for more than a decade to beat the paper book at its own game. The Kindle has a few very significant new things going for it, mainly an Internet connection and integration with the world's largest online bookseller, and Jeff Bezos is betting that it might finally strike the balance required to attract larger numbers of readers: doing a respectable job of recreating the print experience while opening up a wide range of digital affordances.

Speaking of that elusive balance, the bit of the article that most stood out for me was this decidely ambivalent passage on losing the "boundedness" of books:

Though the Kindle is at heart a reading machine made by a bookseller - ?and works most impressively when you are buying a book or reading it - ?it is also something more: a perpetually connected Internet device. A few twitches of the fingers and that zoned-in connection between your mind and an author's machinations can be interrupted - ?or enhanced - ?by an avalanche of data. Therein lies the disruptive nature of the Amazon Kindle. It's the first "always-on" book.

Posted by ben vershbow at 9:21 AM | Comments (4)

reenactment   11.18.2007, 8:05 PM

From time to time, the Institute returns to thorny and intractable thought experiments. One that's been kicking around for a long time is what we've called the "Communist Manifesto problem": the problem of representing a book and the conversations it engenders over time, conversations which may grow to include other books. (The Communist Manifesto would be a particularly knotty text to render because it's had so many cultural repercussions. See here and here for past references on this blog.) It's a good thought experiment because it's too big to be easily solved, but aspects of it come up fairly frequent basis. This past week, I found myself thinking about a particular facet of the Communist Manifesto problem: how we think about re-enactment in the age of the archive.

On Wednesday night, I went to see the Wooster Group's production of Hamlet. I'm not especially qualified as a theater critic (I'm sure others here can say more intelligent things than I), but the central thrust of this production is simple enough: the actors performing Hamlet perform it in front of video of the 1964 filmed version of the play starring Richard Burton. The Burton version is a filmed play, a form intended to bring theater to the theaterless masses that never quite caught on; the Wooster Group's actors expertly mime the 1964 actors, and sets are moved balletically to match changes in camera angles in the film. Often the original actors are digitally edited out of the film in whole or in part. It's a clever idea. Hamlet is as familiar to us as any play can be. Even if you've never seen another dramatic or filmic production of the play, the language can't be escaped: in some stretches, every line has been borrowed as a title for something else. It's lousy with resonances. We can't watch Hamlet as a self-contained work of art any more than we can look at the Mona Lisa. The Wooster Group's production makes this explicit: when we watch Hamlet, we're watching it against the army of other Hamlets we've seen.

This has always been an issue with certain well-known works: Hamlet's been omnipresent for a long time. The availability of a digital archive, however, has foregrounded this. Before film, theatergoers would be measuring productions against memories of previous productions they'd seen. Now we don't need to rely on memory: a dozen filmed versions of Hamlet can be queued on Netflix without any trouble, to say nothing of the 4,700 videos that are the results of a YouTube search.

Another cover version: on Thursday night, I went over to Anthology Film Archives to see Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. From 1982 to 1989, a group of teens in Mississippi filmed their own scene-for-scene version of Spielberg's Indiana Jones movie, corralling their friends to play Egyptians, family dogs to play monkeys, and laboriously recreating all but one of the original stunts: they decided there was no way to film a Nazi decapitated by an airplane's propellor without it looking cheesy, so they left that out. The film & sound quality is muddy, to say the least but one can't help but be impressed by what they managed to do. It's clear that an astonishing amount of work went into the film, still more when you realize that they didn't have a copy of the original on video to work from. And spending seven years on the project: my youth appears pale and lazy by comparison. Strangely, the makers of the film only bothered to show it once before its rediscoveryfour years ago.

Once you start thinking about the idea of re-enactment, you start seeing it everywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that we're in a cultural moment devoted to re-enactment. Much of what we write off as novelty can be put into this category. The Internet recently was excited about old people re-enacting iconic photos of the twentieth century; see also choirs of old people performing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia". Or choirs of small children doing much the same. But less ironic presentations abound: off the top of my head, Japancakes just released a note-for-note country-inflected cover of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's seminal drone-rock record. Going further, German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has played and recorded Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Tom McCarthy's excellent recent novel Remainder concerns a wealthy man who maniacally reenacts scenes; McCarthy springs from the art world, which has been interested in re-enactment for a while. Examples spiral on ad infinitum. But there seems to be something in us that wants to see or hear what we've seen or heard before again.

These are quickly composed thoughts, and I'm ignoring a great deal; parsing the difference between re-enactment and adaptation could be fiendishly complicated, as might be the role of copyright in all of this, etc. I'll simply tie this back to the Communist Manifesto problem. I think it's become apparent that we're no longer reading texts in isolation: now when we read Hamlet, digital media has made it possible to read any number of possible versions at the same time. The archive presents us with an embarrassment of riches, though I suspect that we still lack the tools to let us make sense of the pile: both to make sense of the growing number of versions of texts and to usefully compare versions. The Wooster Group's Hamlet can be seen as a close reading of the 1964 Hamlet. But such a one-to-one reading might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Posted by dan visel at 8:05 PM | Comments (3)

build your own texbook   11.16.2007, 4:21 PM

Peter Brantley pointed me to an interesting experiment from Pearson Custom Publishing, who is working with faculty at Rio Solado community college in Arizona to print custom textbooks assembled from multiple sources. Inside Higher Ed has details:

The result, in what could be the first institution-wide initiative of its kind, will be a savings to students of up to 50 percent, the college estimates, as well as a savings of time to faculty, who often find themselves revising course materials to keep pace with continuously updated editions.

...Professors can pick from among the books in Pearson's library as well as outside sources in preparing their custom textbooks. For works not published by Pearson, there's a limit of 10 percent of the contents, but the company will then handle copyright clearance.

I recently read in the Times about a similar service from Condé Nast for individualized cookbooks culled, à la carte as it were, from the Epicurious.com recipe library.

Posted by ben vershbow at 4:21 PM | Comments (1)

amazon kindle due out monday   11.16.2007, 3:54 PM

In CNET news: "Amazon to debut Kindle e-book reader Monday."

While it's got more going for it than any of its predecessors or present competitors -? wi-fi connection, seamless integration with the biggest online store in the world, access to dozens of periodicals, keyword search for crying out loud, which the Sony Reader still bafflingly lacks -? I'm skeptical about the Kindle. If the device ($399) and individual electronic titles (barely marked down from print) weren't so absurdly overpriced, it might make more sense to readers. Over at Teleread, David Rothman wonders about the solidity of Jeff Bezos' long-term commitment to books.

Posted by ben vershbow at 3:54 PM | Comments (2)

library of congress to archive electronic literature (suggest a link)   11.16.2007, 12:55 AM

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks your assistance in selecting "works of imaginative writing that take advantage of the capabilities of the standalone or networked computer" for preservation by the LOC and Internet Archive:

The Library of Congress has asked the Electronic Literature Organization to collect a sample of 300 web sites related to the field and to contribute that sample to the Internet Archive's Archive-It project. The sites selected will be crawled and archived to the extent that the Archive-It technology allows. The result will be full-text searchable collections of the spidered HTML files in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The ELO will enter metadata including a short description and keywords for each URL entered into the database. The ELO Board of Directors, Literary Advisory Board, membership, and community are encouraged to suggest sites here for three sets of links.

-? Electronic Literature: Collections of Works: Sites that aggregate works of electronic literature by multiple authors, such as online journals and anthologies.

-? Electronic Literature: Individual Works: Individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.

-? Electronic Literature: Context: Sites related to the critical, theoretical, and institutional contexts of electronic literature.

More info on how to suggest links at the ELO wiki.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:55 AM | Comments (7)

would you date someone with no books on their shelves?   11.15.2007, 1:43 AM

I'm not completely sure about the netiquette of blogging about a conversation heard around the digital watercooler, ie on a close-knit community messageboard; but I came across one such recently that made me pause.

Paraphrased, the thread started out asking about the ethics of going through other people's stuff. But it moved on to the subject of snooping on others' bookshelves. The question then became: if you were left alone in someone else's house the morning after a date, would you make a judgement about their suitability for future dates from their book collection? The answer was an overwhelming yes.

There were a few dissenting voices who muttered about intellectual snobbery, performance anxiety about their bookshelves, or even setting traps for book-snobs by displaying their Stephen King collection somewhere prominent. But the common element was a sense that someone's book collection is an intimate portrait of their interests and/or aspirations, and can have a profound effect on others' perceptions - to the point of being a romantic deal-breaker.

Books as extensions of personality is a familiar theme. But the context of the conversation, an internet messageboard, got me thinking. The theme of the messageboard in question is sexuality, and hence the community self-selects for reasons that have nothing to do with things intellectual/literary. I reckon it's fair to say it was a small but reasonably random sample of moderately digitally-literate UK women.

Now, a familiar narrative in the publishing industry says that print is dying: see, for example, Jeff Gomez, Penguin USA's director of online sales and marketing, on BBC Radio 4's Open Book last week to promote his new (print!) book Print Is Dead. This narrative pits books against the internet, as though the latter either follows the former in some ineluctable evolution, or else the latter is a predatory force out to destroy culture as we know it. But this digital watercooler conversation, conducted amongst 'normal' internet-using people, suggests that these apocalyptic visions have more to do with industry angst than any widespread cultural shift among everyday users of print and digital media.

Despite a relatively high common standard of net literacy, no-one said 'I wouldn't care about lack of books - I'd be more worried about being stuck in a house with no wifi'. There was an overwhelming consensus that books are revealing, important and an insight into a stranger's interests. The sense was not that digital media might replace books, but that they play different roles, and are perceived as different in kind - not just at the level of how they deliver 'content'.

Such despatches from the middle ground might seem unglamorous in comparison with the giddy high-altitude futurism of Kelly et al, or pronouncements of the death of hard copy. But they're worth noting. The cultural currency of books should not be conflated with the economics of producing them, such that a challenge to the latter is narrated as a collapse of the former. Though this might seem obvious, it's one of the most common elisions in the discourse of print vs. online; it does little but muddy the debate, and has even less to do with lived reality for most people.

Posted by sebastian mary at 1:43 AM | Comments (9)

why are screens square?   11.14.2007, 12:21 AM

More from the archive, I'm afraid; but I've quoted this so often in the last year that it merits repeating.

A video of Jo Walsh, a simultaneously near-invisible and near-legendary hacker I met through the University of Openess in London, talking about FOAF, Web3.0, geospatial data, the 'One Ring To Rule Them All' tendency of so-called 'social media' and the philosophies of making tech tools.

"Why are screens square?", she asks. What follows is less a set of theories as a meditation on what happens when you start trying to think back through the layers of toolmaking that go into a piece of paper, a pen, a screen, a keyboard - the media we use to represent ourselves, and that we agree to pretend are transparent. This then becomes the starting-point for another meditation on who owns, or might own, our digital future.

(High-quality video so takes a little while to load)

Posted by sebastian mary at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)

reading as collective enterprise   11.12.2007, 8:12 PM

In this excerpt from an interview with Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW's Bookworm, Junot Díaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao articulates an aspect of the communal nature of books that isn't often brought up: he argues that we learn to read communally, and that this isn't necessarily a mode of reading that we should move away from. Here's the audio – there's a fervor to Díaz's argument that doesn't come off in a straight transcription:

(This is an excerpt; the full version can be downloaded from the Bookworm web site.) For those who can't listen, a quick synopsis: Silverblatt, looking at the way Díaz uses science fiction and diaspora culture in his novel, sees a similarity to how James Joyce uses Dublin in Ulysses, as a lens through which to scry the world; in Oscar Wao bits of sci-fi and pop culture become a "vast encyclopedia of the world"; the universe reveals itself in particular. Díaz then takes that idea and runs with it: as a reader, he sees his own book as a single part of an "enormous conversation of books":

Nobody learns to read outside of a collective. We forget – because we read and we read alone – we forget that we learn to read collectively. We learn with our peers, and a teacher teaches us. . . . When you read a book – and especially like this book, where there's gonna be Spanish, there's gonna be historical references, there's gonna be nerdish, as they say, forget the elvish, the nerdish, there's gonna be fanboy stuff, there's gonna be talk about Morgoth, about dark side, about John Brunner's science fiction books, about Asimov, about Bova, about Andre Norton, about E. E. Doc Smith's Lensman, you know all this weird esoteric stuff, amongst all these Dominican references, Caribbean references, urban black American references, all this nerd talk, all this kind of hip "we went to college" speak – the reason that's all there in one place is the same reason that reading is a collective enterprise. When we did not know a word when we were young and learning, we would ask someone. We forgot – I think many of us forget – that praxis, that fundamental praxis. What I want is for people to read and remember that reading, while we may practice it alone, in solitude, it arose out of a collective learning and out of a collective exchange . . . .

Posted by dan visel at 8:12 PM | Comments (0)

publishing after publishers   11.12.2007, 2:15 AM

Circulating briskly last week around the blogosphere was an interesting trio of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) by the thriller writer Barry Eisler pondering how various roles in the present-day publishing ecosystem might evolve - ?or go extinct - ?in the coming decades. He envisions a world (an America at least) where mega-chains and big box retailers have taken over most of the distribution functions of publishers. Each store powers a squadron of on-demand printers (like the Espresso Book Machine), churning out paperbacks from a limitless digital backlist - ?think of a Kinkos and a Starbucks fused together with a small browsing area in between. Direct dealings with authors, including editing, copyediting and packaging, have largely become the work of agents, who broker distribution with various on and offline retailers. Authors themselves have become the brands. In some cases retailers ink deals to run exclusive authorial product lines - ?like Tom Clancy's "Op Center" or James Patterson's various co-authored spinoffs - ?in their stores. Lesser known writers can make a living writing for these franchises, riding the coattails of tomorrow's Dan Browns and Sue Graftons.

In a flat distribution world, retailers will need publishers less, perhaps, eventually, not at all (or rather, retailers will become publishers themselves). But they'll still need someone to help them cut through the clutter. And someone will still need to represent authors to buyers. I expect agents will start selling directly to retailers, and that their business won't be nearly as affected by flattening distribution as will publishers'.

Eisler is really talking primarily about blockbusters here, and within that limited scope his predictions seem sound (though I think he seriously underestimates the extent to which reading will go entirely digital). Authors in the "short head" of the curve are already essentially brands and it's only a matter of time before they realize that their publishers' services are no longer required and that they can keep a much bigger cut of the proceeds by going it alone. Eisler points to the situation in the music biz and Madonna and Radiohead - ?superstars who bucked their record labels in favor of independent distribution and have been wildly successful. But what does this prove? Blockbuster acts with legacy brands and massive fanbases can easily establish their own media empires - ?Stephen King toyed with the idea with his 2000 serial e-novel The Plant, which he sold directly to readers with modest success.

The point is that these examples shed little light on the future except for those few who are already at the top of the heap - ?that tiny heap which has become so disproportionately favored by an over-consolidated, bottom line-driven industry. Rather than heralding a new age of self-determination by artists, the Madonnas and Stephen Kings are the exceptions that prove the rule that, while distribution may have been radically flattened by the net, attention and audience are as hard (if not harder) to come by as ever. How the vast majority of writers will make a living, and how they might have to adapt their craft to do so, is far less clear (the R.U. Sirius piece I linked to earlier this month, which interviews ten serious midlist writers who have done a fairly good job of setting up online, "branded," presences, is a good barometer of current anxieties).

Eisler's right, though, that publishers need to start thinking hard about what they have to offer beyond distribution or else go the way of the dodo. But it won't just be the agents that replace them but a melange of evolved Web impresarios: bloggers, curators, list-server editors, social bookmarkers and other online tastemakers. But writers too will have to change to survive. The digital medium will provide more maneuverability and more potential reach, but less shelter and less of the hand-holding, buffering and insulation from their public that publishers traditionally provided when once upon a time they managed the production and distribution chain. In many cases, writers will have to work harder at being impresarios, developing public personae and maintaining a more direct communication with readers. They'll have to learn how to write all over again.

Posted by ben vershbow at 2:15 AM | Comments (9)

using commentpress with adolescents, first assessment (sol gaitan)   11.09.2007, 9:20 AM

The bulk of this post is from Sol Gaitan, a teacher of Spanish language and literature at the Dalton School in New York and an occasional writer on this blog. Over the past couple of months Sol has been using CommentPress in an assignment for one of her classes and recently took the time to reflect on how the experiment has gone. The result is a fascinating report from the front lines on the complexities and ambiguities of employing digital technologies in the classroom. From this one trial it becomes obvious that the digital divide can run through almost any place - ?even a hyper-privileged school like Dalton in the Upper East Side of Manhattan - ?and that maintaining a communal Web environment as an annex to the classroom presents tremendous benefits as well as tremendous burdens.

I am using CommentPress in my Hispanic Literature class to study Gabriel García Márquez. Instead of putting his work in to CommentPress, I decided to put in my introduction and the goals for this part of the course, what at Dalton we call "the Assignment" -? one of our pedagogical pillars. I instructed my students to comment on the assignment based on what they learned after reading his collection of short stories, Los funerales de la Mamá Grande. I also added a section of guiding questions, a section with excerpts from one of the short stories, and a few other texts. My expectation was that the students would comment on my text, but they went to the specific questions and commented there. I believe they felt more comfortable with a familiar format. We still need to read his novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba so I have asked the class to enter comments to my introductory text as the culmination of this assignment. My rationale behind all of this is that students fully grasp what I tell them when I present an author only after they have read his/her works and not the other way around. Furthermore, CommentPress allows me to evaluate their work within the context of their whole experience as they gain knowledge and understanding along the way, something that a final paper doesn't necessarily do. I also value enormously the fact that the classroom extends beyond its physical confines.

After about one month of using CommentPress, I decided to have my students assess their experience with this medium for communication outside the classroom. All students appreciated the advantages of sharing their literary thoughts in a forum that provides the immediacy of classroom discussions, but also allows them the time to elaborate their thoughts before expressing them. This is especially important in a class conducted entirely in a foreign language.

At an institution like Dalton where computers are an integral part of daily communications, it took me by surprise to realize that there is still a digital divide. One half of my class is comprised of affluent Manhattan kids and the other half of less privileged ones. Interestingly, the latter expressed some level of discomfort in dealing with technology. The rest, who also happen to be younger, were absolutely excited about it. For the less privileged ones, lack of fast Internet connections at home or older, slower computers are major obstacles to the use of a networked assignment. Also some complained that they cannot read/work on this assignment on the subway. This has to do with the fact that these students have long commutes while the more well to do students often live "around the corner" from the school. One student claimed that he doesn't have four computers at home as some of his classmates do. This presents a logistical problem since some students may use this as an excuse for not posting as often as they should. Regardless, inequality is definitely an issue.

I realized that the need to post comments regularly helps students to know where they stand regarding grades because I use their posts in lieu of in-class essays and papers. This opens up the evaluation process as students are in intimate contact not only with their individual progress and production, but also with that of the whole class.

Group discussion is central to Dalton's philosophy thanks to our small classes. Thus, students do not necessarily value conversation beyond the classroom as much as students in schools with larger classes might do. One student argued that she had already shared her thoughts in class and preferred working after school on papers in the privacy of her home. Others argued the opposite, that it's a very useful thing to be reading at home and right then and there have the chance to share their ideas with their classmates and with me.

A frequent complaint from students who expressed uneasiness with networked assignments was that we are using their favorite tool for communication, the computer, for a school assignment. All agreed that e-mail, social networking and text messaging are their preferred ways to connect. Why is it then that they object to having this applied to their learning experience? They say they feel an academic blog demands a more "serious" approach and a certain degree of formality, and also seem annoyed at the fact that they MUST comment. We agreed that they could feel free to be less formal in their postings (though when I read them, I notice that they cannot avoid showing their intelligence and articulacy) and that they should enter a minimum of two comments per week. Also, because they are writing in Spanish, they must also enter grammatical corrections.

CommentPress has added work to my daily life because I must check student work more often, I must send them grammatical tidbits, and I must add my own comments when things need clarification. However, I can feel the pulse of the class more closely and accurately, and I don't have a ton of papers or exams to grade all at once.

Posted by ben vershbow at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)

cooking the books   11.08.2007, 11:44 AM

I've been digging through old episodes of Black Books, a relatively little-known comedy series from the UK's Channel 4. The show is set in a second-hand bookshop, run by Bernard Black, a chainsmoking, alcoholic Irishman (Dylan Moran) who shuts the shop at strange hours, swears at customers and becomes enraged when people actually want to buy his books.

It started me thinking about something Nick Currie said at the second Really Modern Library meeting. We were talking about mass digitization and the apparently growing appeal of 'the original', the 'real thing'. The feel of a printed page; the smell of a first edition and so on. He mentioned a previous riff of his about 'the post-bit atom' - the one last piece of any analog cultural object that can't be digitized - and which, in an age of mass digitisation, becomes fetishized to precisely the degree that the digitized object becomes a commodity.

So Black Books struck me as (besides being horribly funny) strangely poignant. While acerbic, in many ways it's full of nostalgia for a kind of independent bookshop that's rapidly disappearing. Bernard Black would be considerably less endearing if he was my only chance of getting the book I wanted; but that in the age of Amazon and Waterstone's, he represents a post-bit atom of bibliophilia, and as such is ripe for fetishization.

Posted by sebastian mary at 11:44 AM | Comments (6)

books phones screens freedoms   11.07.2007, 7:44 PM

The UK is one of the most watched over societies on earth with CCTV cameras in abundance, and the whole world is waking up to how much retrievable evidence the likes of Google have on us all thanks to our laptops and cellphones. (This spooky walking iphone was seen at the New York Halloween parade last week).

But is the invasion of privacy making our culture more secretive or less? Networks like FaceBook appear to be turning the once wild web into a cosy global village where all know each other's business and keep an eye out for our digital neighbours and group members.

Privacy and the implications of social networking and user generation on our culture were key topics in a discussion about new technology on the UK internet TV company Doughty Street TV this November 5th, hosted by the Institute of Ideas.

Reading has always been a solitary activity where the individual's imagination roams at will. There's been a strange reversal now that book groups and recommendations from chat show hosts - Richard & Judy in the UK, Oprah in the USA - create a tiny pool of recommended bestsellers in the vast and frightening ocean of the unread. Who are the free thinkers now, websurfers or bookbrowsers?

Posted by chris meade at 7:44 PM | Comments (5)

the really modern reader   11.07.2007, 12:33 PM

Readers of this blog will probably find much of interest in Sucking on Words, a new documentary on conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith, as I've noted before, is the wizard behind the curtain at ubu.com; this documentary, by Simon Morris, focuses on his work as a conceptual poet. Like much conceptual art, Goldsmith's work tends to make many sputteringly angry; as he himself readily admits in the film, the idea of reading it can be superior to the act of reading it, and the exploration of his work in this documentary might be the best introduction to it that's available.

A typical Goldsmith piece is to take all the text of a day's edition of The New York Times – all of it, from the first ad to the last – and to put it into a standard book format: viewed this way, the daily paper has the heft of a typical novel. It becomes apparent from this that when we talk about "reading" a day's New York Times, we really only mean reading a tiny subsection of the actual text in the paper. Our act of reading the paper is as much an act of ignoring. (Nor is this limited to print media; taking a typical page on the online Times, one notes that of the 963 words on the page, only 589 are the article proper: our reading of an article online entails ignoring 2/5 of the words. This quick count pays no attention to words in images, which would send the ignored quotient higher.)

Goldsmith starts from the proposition that there's enough language in the world already. Like many in the digital age, he's trying to find ways to make sense of it all; in a sense, he's creating visualizations.

Posted by dan visel at 12:33 PM | Comments (2)

a thought experiment: reading in parallel   11.07.2007, 10:45 AM

I recently picked up Amiri Baraka's The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, as I'd been curious about the trajectory of the life of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, a man who pops up in interesting places. His autobiography is a curious work: for reasons that are unclear to me as a casual reader, names in certain sections of his life have been changed. His first wife, née Hettie Cohen, becomes Nellie Kohn. Yugen, the magazine they started together, becomes Zazen; the Partisan Review becomes The Sectarian Review. As a casual reader, the reasons for these discrepancies are unclear, but they were interesting enough to me that I picked up How I Became Hettie Jones, his first wife's version of her life. She presents many of the same scenes Baraka narrates, with her own spin on events, a difference that might not be unexpected in the narration of a divorced couple.

The changes in names are an extreme example, but the basic situation is not one that uncommon in how we read: two books share the same subject matter but differ in particulars. As noted, I read the two books in series as a casual reader, but I found myself wishing there were some way to visualize the linkages or correspondences between the books. One could write in the margins of Baraka's description of a party "cf. Jones pp. 56–57" to point out Hettie Jones's version of events, but it strikes me that electronic representations of a book could do this better. What I'd like to see, though, isn't something as simple as a hyperlink; these links should point both ways automatically. Different kinds of links – showing, for example, similarities and differences – might help. Presenting the texts side by side seems obvious; lines could be drawn between the texts. The problem could be expanded: consider comparing and contrasting a Harry Potter book with its film version.

This isn't an especially complex reading behavior at all: we compare texts (of different sorts) all the time. We look at, for example, how Rudolph Giuliani reads the statistics on survival of prostate cancer and how the New York Times reads the same statistics. Why aren't there online reading tools that acknowledge this as a problem?

Posted by dan visel at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)

au courant   11.06.2007, 8:33 AM

Paul Courant is the University Librarian at the University of Michigan as well as a professor of economics. And he now has a blog. He leads off with a response to critics (including Brewster Kahle and Siva Vaidhyanathan) of Michigan's book digitization partnership with Google. Siva responds back on Googlization of Everything. Great to see a university librarian entering the public debate in this way.

Posted by ben vershbow at 8:33 AM | Comments (2)

"digitization and its discontents"   11.06.2007, 8:14 AM

Anthony Grafton's New Yorker piece "Future Reading" paints a forbidding picture of the global digital library currently in formation on public and private fronts around the world (Google et al.). The following quote sums it up well - ?a refreshing counterpoint to the millenarian hype we so often hear w/r/t mass digitization:

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we'll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.

Grafton begins and ends in a nostalgic tone, with a paean to the New York Public Library and the critic Alfred Kazin: the poor son of immigrants, City College-educated, who researched his seminal study of American literature On Native Grounds almost entirely with materials freely available at the NYPL. Clearly, Grafton is a believer in the civic ideal of the public library - ?a reservoir of knowledge, free to all - ?and this animates his critique of the balkanized digital landscape of search engines and commercial databases. Given where he appears to stand, I wish he could have taken a stab at what a digital public library might look like, and what sorts of technical, social, political and economic reorganization might be required to build it. Obviously, these are questions that would have required their own article, but it would have been valuable for Grafton, whose piece is one of those occasional journalistic events that moves the issue of digitization and the future of libraries out of the specialist realm into the general consciousness, to have connected the threads. Instead Grafton ends what is overall a valuable and intelligent article with a retreat into print fetishism - ?"crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables....millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books" - ?which, while evocative, obscures more than it illuminates.

Incidentally, those questions are precisely what was discussed at our Really Modern Library meetings last month. We're still compiling our notes but expect a report soon.

Posted by ben vershbow at 8:14 AM | Comments (4)

anmoku no ryokai   11.02.2007, 2:24 PM

A nice piece in this month's Wired about "the manga industrial complex" in Japan, and the complex structure of tacitly-permitted copyright violation that powers the participatory fan culture around commercially-produced manga. Though the countless fan publications that take existing, copyrighted characters and repurpose them in new, surreal or pornographic environments are in explicit violation of copyright, the industry maintains an anmoku no ryokai ('unspoken, implicit agreement') to allow this culture to flourish - as it benefits everyone:

Taking care of customers. Finding new talent. Getting free market research. That's a pretty potent trio of advantages for any business. Trouble is, to derive these advantages the manga industry must ignore the law. And this is where it gets weird. Unlike, say, an industrial company that might increase profits if it skirts environmental regulations imposed to safeguard the public interest, the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.

This odd situation exposes the conflict between what Stanford law professor (and Wired contributor) Lawrence Lessig calls the "read only" culture and the "read/write" culture. Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture. They prohibit me from running an issue of Captain America through a Xerox DocuColor machine and selling copies on the street. The moral and business logic of this sort of restriction is unassailable. By merely photocopying someone else's work, I'm not creating anything new. And my cheap reproductions would be unfairly harming the commercial interests of Marvel Comics.

But as Lessig and others have argued, and as the dojinshi markets amply confirm, that same copyright regime can be inadequate, and even detrimental, in a read/write culture. Amateur manga remixers aren't merely replicating someone else's work. They're creating something original. And in doing so, they may well be helping, not hindering, the commercial interests of the copyright holders.

It's interesting to speculate on whether J K Rowling's publishers have the same attitude to the legions of fan writers busy generating Harry Potter slashfic; whether fanfic and slashfic is considered a meaningful contribution to the industries it riffs off, the way fan publications are recognised as such in the manga industry; and whether the idea of an anmoku no ryokai might be a useful addition to existing practice around copyright in a 'read/write' culture.

Posted by sebastian mary at 2:24 PM | Comments (1)

what's the word's worth on the world wide web?   11.02.2007, 12:08 PM

In early October R.U. Sirius published a nice piece on 10 Zen Monkeys in which he asked ten writers who have done reasonably well at straddling the print and online realms, "is the net good for writers?". The result is an interesting little snapshot of a craft in transition, with a better signal to noise ratio than most other authors-mulling-over-the-future sorts of features. Some respondents veer inevitably into grumbling, but it's a more considered and witty sort of grumbling (and with flashier prose) than one finds in the reactive screeds that John Updike and others have periodically spewed. Common laments are the shrinking of attention spans, information overload and the tyranny of the short blurb over the long, polished prose piece. Familiar tropes, but expressively tackled. And it's refreshingly light on copyright matters.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the more constructive remarks. First from Mark Amerika who among all those queried has the most evocative take on how the persona and skill set of the "professional" writer may have to adapt in the new environment. I recently picked up his book META/DATA: A Digital Poetics and this makes me even more eager to dig in:

It helps to know how to write across all media platforms. Not only that, but to become various role-playing personas whose writerly performance plays out in various multi-media languages across these same platforms. The most successful writer-personas now and into the future -? at least those interested in "making a living" as you put it -? will be those who can take on varying flux personas via the act of writing.

And Edward Champion (a fellow Brooklynite) who, while noting the hazards for writers in the new net culture, is on balance optimistic:

The Internet is good for writers for several reasons: What was once a rather clunky process of querying by fax, phone, and snail-mail has been replaced by the mad, near-instantaneous medium of e-mail, where the indolent are more easily sequestered from the industrious. The process is, as it always was, one of long hours, haphazard diets, and rather bizarre forms of self-promotion. But clips are easily linkable. Work can be more readily distributed. And if a writer maintains a blog, there is now a more regular indicator of a writer's thought process.

This emphasis on process is important. We need to be thinking about writing and the book more in terms of process and less of product - ?although various saleable products (print, speaking engagements or whatever else) may arise out of this visible process. He continues:

The stakes have risen. Everyone who wishes to survive in this game must operate at some peak and preternatural efficiency. Since the internet is a ragtag, lightning-fast glockenspiel where thoughts, both divine and clumsy, are banged out swifter with mad mallets more than any medium that has preceded it, an editor can get a very good sense of what a writer is good for and how he makes mistakes. While it is true that this great speed has come at the expense of long-form pieces and even months-long reporting, I believe the very limitations of this current system are capable of creating ambition rather than stifling it.

And on the subject of short blips and blurbs, one commenter takes similar encouragement:

Is it just me that thinks this may presage a resurgence in the popularity of the short story? Beautiful writing in bite-size chunks seems tailor-made for the current generation.

Sonnets and haiku place huge restrictions on poets. It can take more talent to create in a confined space than in the wide-open page.

Whatever happens, it'll be interesting.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

harry potter and the litigants of doom   11.01.2007, 3:29 PM

J.K. Rowling has maintained an admirably strong grip on the creative lives of her fictional creations and their merchandising over the years, for instance insisting on complete control over the writing and casting of the movies and ensuring that Coca Cola put money into literacy projects around the world in exchange for putting HP on their bottles. But the news today that she is suing a publisher for planning to bring out an encyclopedic companion to her books is alarming. Does she really fear that her book will bomb if somebody else 'steals' the idea first? Why shouldn't fans - or even critics - write freely about her work?
The growth of fan fiction, blogging and the exchange of views on favourite books and characters has been a wonderful development of creative reading on the web - and done wonders for the rampant cult of Hogwarts, so it's a big shame J.K.R hasn't taken a bold stand for reader interaction with her (copyright) world.

Posted by chris meade at 3:29 PM | Comments (2)