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a serious shot at screen reading   03.24.2008, 8:11 AM

Another new online magazine: Triple Canopy (noted by Ed Park). Unlike Issue and Rosa B. this isn't a design magazine – although the content is very interesting – but like them, it's a serious attempt to construct a new kind of magazine for the screen-reading environment. While Rosa B.'s design uses the affordances of dynamic layering, Issue concentrates on reader annotation, Triple Canopy simply does away with the scroll bar.

Removing the scroll bar is an obvious idea for improving screen reading that's only rarely implemented: when you read text with a scroll bar (like this blog), the reader is forced to remove their concentration from the text to scroll down and then to find where the reading left off. It's something we're all quite used to, but that doesn't mean it's an advantageous reading behavior; we put up with because we rarely have a choice. Triple Canopy reverts from the scroll bar to the paged model of the codex book: if you click on the "+" sign to the right of the page, a new page slides in. It's obvious where to resume reading. The text itself is well-cared for: it's presented in columns of legible width, another lesson of print design that's too often ignored in the online world. Worth noting as well is the way that images are integrated into some of the texts; again, there's a clear and understood model for how reading works. Video can be slotted into some of the pieces without causing a disturbance or overwhelming: it appears on a page by itself, meant to be the primary focus of attention.

It's not entirely perfect: while the "+" sign always advances a page, "–" sometimes goes back a page and sometimes goes to the previous article (if clicked on the first page of the article). I wish clicking the "triplecanopy" at the bottom took you back to the issue's table of contents and not the magazine's front page. Because the site's made in HTML, the design breaks if you increase or decrease the font size in your browser. And the Powerpoint-style wipe when the pages change quickly grows tiresome. But these are minor quibbles with a design that's overwhelmingly successful. I'll be curious to see if this is sustainable over more issues.

Posted by dan visel at 08:11 AM | Comments (3)
tags: b. , canopy , design , issue , magazine , reading , rosa , screen , triple

expressive processing: post-game analysis begins   03.20.2008, 3:27 AM

So Noah's just wrapped up the blog peer review of his manuscript in progress, and is currently debating whether to post the final, unfinished chapter. He's also just received the blind peer reviews from MIT Press and is in the process of comparing them with the online discussion. That'll all be written up soon, we're still discussing format.

Meanwhile, Ian Bogost (the noted game designer, critic and professor) started an interesting thread a couple of weeks back on the troubles of reading Expressive Processing, and by extension, any long-form text or argument, on the Web:

The peer review part of the project seems to be going splendidly. But here's a problem, at least for me: I'm having considerable trouble reading the book online. A book, unlike a blog, is a lengthy, sustained argument with examples and supporting materials. A book is textual, of course, and it can thus be serialized easily into a set of blog posts. But that doesn't make the blog posts legible as a book...

...in their drive to move textual matter online, creators of online books and journals have not thought enough about the materiality of specific print media forms. This includes both the physicality of the artifacts themselves (I violently dogear and mark up my print matter) and the contexts in which people read them (I need to concentrate and avoid distraction when reading scholarship). These factors extend beyond scholarship too: the same could be said of newspapers and magazines, which arguably read much more casually and serendipitously in print form than they do in online form.

I've often considered Bolter and Grusin's term "remediation" to be a derogatory one. Borrowing and refashioning the conventions of one medium in another opens the risk ignoring what unremediated features are lost. The web has still not done much more than move text (or images, or video) into a new distribution channel. Digitizing and uploading analog material is easy and has immediate, significant impact: web, iPod, YouTube. We've prized simple solutions because they are cheap and easy, but they are also insufficient. In the case of books and journal articles, to offer a PDF or print version of the online matter is to equivocate. And the fashionable alternative, a metaverse-like 3D web of the sort to which Second Life points, strikes me as a dismal sidestepping of the question.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:27 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Blogosphere , Games , design , expressiveprocessing , peer_review , publishing , reading , screenreading , the_networked_book

step inside the books: new york event this friday (3/21)   03.17.2008, 5:31 PM

If you're in the New York area, don't miss this. Friday, March 21, 2008, 7-9pm—New York, NY—125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor.

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY: Step inside three books, drink free beer and wine, and experience the future of the book:

Mark Batty Publisher, Hotel St. George Press, the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Writers Residency program offer a night of multi-media readings that invite attendees to step inside books, celebrating how new media and traditional publishing fuse to create innovative projects that are more than “just books.” On this night, authors Garth Risk Hallberg, Alex Rose, and Alex Itin demonstrate how their stories rely on more than just words.

Hallberg’s illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, documents two fictional families through 63 entries accompanied by evocative photographs contributed by some of today’s freshest photographic talents, as culled from the book’s ongoing companion website, afieldguide.com. Read from start to finish or in a “choose your own adventure” style, Hallberg’s attention to narrative detail makes clear why he was included in the 2008 Harcourt Best New American Voices anthology, and why Print called A Field Guide to the North American Family “a modern illuminated manuscript.” Hallberg will project photographs from the book.

The interwoven, post-modern folktales that comprise The Musical Illusionist by Alex Rose muse upon historical arcana, tethered together by music and topography. Drawing on his experience as a director whose films, videos, and animations have appeared on HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, and the BBC, Rose conjures, in the words of the Village Voice, “the playful parables of Jorge Luis Borges . . . exotic maps and exquisite prints further suggest a volume passed down from an epoch much more enthralled with mystery than our own.” Rose will read from the title story of his collection, accompanied by a surround-sound score composed by David Little and recorded by the Formalist Quartet.

As an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Institute for the Future of the Book, Alex Itin uses text, original illustrations and animations, and music to encourage readers to reconsider the definition of a book. Take for example Itin’s Orson Whales: Melville’s Moby Dick meets Orson Welles, and Led Zeppelin. Itin’s multi-media books will be screened.

The LMCC is the leading voice for arts and culture in downtown New York City, producing cultural events and promoting the arts through grants, services, advocacy, and cultural development programs.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)
tags: alexitin , art , bookarts , books , events , newyork , publishing , reading

student designer envisions a more credible kindle   02.27.2008, 6:02 PM

Engagdet points to an award winning Australian student design for an e-book reader that combines the gesture-based "multi-touch" interface of the iPhone with the e-ink display of the Kindle.

LIVRE design concept — Nedzad Mujcinovic, Monash University

"Interaction happens via a thin capacitive touch screen mounted on top of an electronic paper screen ('eINK'). Browsing pages happens by striking the screen from right bottom corner towards the centre of page to go forward or from the left hand corner to go backwards. Doing that using one finger will browse one page, two will browse ten pages and three will browse fifty pages at a time."

If simple reenactment of basic black-and-white, illustration-light print reading is your goal, I'd say that this is a far more viable proposition than Amazon's clunky gadget. (Thanks, Peter Brantley, for the link!)

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:02 PM | Comments (1)
tags: design , ebooks , hardware , kindle , reading , screenreading

penguin of forking paths   02.26.2008, 4:55 PM

Following on last year's wiki novel, Penguin will soon launch another digital fiction experiment, this time focused on nonlinear storytelling. From Jeremy Ettinghausen on the Penguin blog:

...in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling (yes, another one, I hear you sigh). We've teamed up with some interesting folk and challenged some of our top authors to write brand new stories that take full advantage of the functionalities that the internet has to offer - this will be great writing, but writing in a form that would not have been possible 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. If you want to be alerted when this project launches sign up here - all will be revealed in March.

The "interesting folk" link goes to Unfiction, the main forum for the alternative reality gaming community. Intriguing...

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)
tags: ARG , fiction , hypertext , nonlinearity , penguin , publishing , reading , storytelling , writing

"naked in the 'nonopticon'"   02.19.2008, 3:52 PM

If you haven't already, check out Siva Vaidhyanathan's excellent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece on privacy and surveillance: a review of several new books treating various aspects of the topic, but a great all-around thought piece. A taste:

Certainly the Stasi in East Germany exploited the controlling power generated from public knowledge of constant surveillance and the potential for brutal punishment for thought crimes. But that is not our environment in the United States. Basically, the Panopticon must be visible and ubiquitous, or it cannot influence behavior as Bentham and Foucault assumed it would.

...what we have at work in America today is the opposite of a Panopticon: what has been called a "Nonopticon" (for lack of a better word). The Nonopticon describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. The most pervasive surveillance does not reveal itself or remains completely clandestine (barring leaks to The New York Times). We don't know all the ways we are being recorded or profiled. We are not supposed to understand that we are the product of marketers as much as we are the market. And we are not supposed to consider the extent to which the state tracks our behavior and considers us all suspects in crimes yet to be imagined, let alone committed.

In fact, companies like ChoicePoint, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.com want us to relax and be ourselves. They have an interest in exploiting niches that our consumer choices generate. They are devoted to tracking our eccentricities because they understand that the ways we set ourselves apart from the mass are the things about which we are most passionate. Our passions, predilections, fancies, and fetishes are what we are likely to spend our surplus cash on.

And so these concerns extend to the realm of online reading. With networked texts, a book (or whatever other document form) may be reading you while you're reading it. This creates a major ethical quandary for libraries of course, who, to take advantage of social networking, collaborative filtering and other powerful affordances of digital technologies must radically revise their traditional stance on privacy: i.e. retain as little user data as possible.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:52 PM | Comments (1)
tags: library , privacy , reading , surveillance

"books are social vectors"   02.01.2008, 4:48 PM

Some choice quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin's terrific new Harper's essay, "Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading" (unfortunately behind pay wall):

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

...I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature — art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage.

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:48 PM | Comments (3)
tags: books , reading , social_software

expressive processing meta   01.29.2008, 2:20 PM

To mark the posting of the final chunk of chapter 1 of the Expressive Processing manuscript on Grand Text Auto, Noah has kicked off what will hopefully be a revealing meta-discussion to run alongside the blog-based peer review experiment. The first meta post includes a roundup of comments from the first week and invites readers to comment on the process as a whole. As you'll see, there's already been some incisive feedback and Noah is mulling over revisions. Chapter 2 starts tomorrow.

In case you missed it, here's an intro to the project.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:20 PM | Comments (1)
tags: academic , books , expressiveprocessing , peer_review , publishing , reading , the_networked_book , writing

amazon reviewer no. 7 and the ambiguities of web 2.0   01.29.2008, 3:21 AM

Slate takes a look at Grady Harp, Amazon's no. 7-ranked book reviewer, and finds the amateur-driven literary culture there to be a much grayer area than expected:

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users' motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely.... As in any numbers game (tax returns, elections) opacity abets manipulation.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:21 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Web2.0 , amazon , books , collaborativefiltering , criticism , reading

expressive processing: an experiment in blog-based peer review   01.22.2008, 5:30 AM

An exciting new experiment begins today, one which ties together many of the threads begun in our earlier "networked book" projects, from Without Gods to Gamer Theory to CommentPress. It involves a community, a manuscript, and an open peer review process — and, very significantly, the blessing of a leading academic press. (The Chronicle of Higher Education also reports.)

The community in question is Grand Text Auto, a popular multi-author blog about all things relating to digital narrative, games and new media, which for many readers here, probably needs no further introduction. The author, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a professor of communication at UC San Diego, a writer/maker of digital fictions, and, of course, a blogger at GTxA. His book, which starting today will be posted in small chunks, open to reader feedback, every weekday over a ten-week period, is called Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. It probes the fundamental nature of digital media, looking specifically at the technical aspects of creation — the machines and software we use, the systems and processes we must learn end employ in order to make media — and how this changes how and what we create. It's an appropriate guinea pig, when you think about it, for an open review experiment that implicitly asks, how does this new technology (and the new social arrangements it makes possible) change how a book is made?

The press that has given the green light to all of this is none other than MIT, with whom Noah has published several important, vibrantly inter-disciplinary anthologies of new media writing. Expressive Processing his first solo-authored work with the press, will come out some time next year but now is the time when the manuscript gets sent out for review by a small group of handpicked academic peers. Doug Sery, the editor at MIT, asked Noah who would be the ideal readers for this book. To Noah, the answer was obvious: the Grand Text Auto community, which encompasses not only many of Noah's leading peers in the new media field, but also a slew of non-academic experts — writers, digital media makers, artists, gamers, game designers etc. — who provide crucial alternative perspectives and valuable hands-on knowledge that can't be gotten through more formal channels. Noah:

Blogging has already changed how I work as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences -- and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences. But, of course, that's just the beginning. We founded Grand Text Auto, in 2003, for an even more important reason: blogs can create community. And the communities around blogs can be much more open and welcoming than those at conferences and festivals, drawing in people from industry, universities, the arts, and the general public. Interdisciplinary conversations happen on blogs that are more diverse and sustained than any I've seen in person.

Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work. In fact, while writing the manuscript for Expressive Processing I found myself regularly citing blog posts and comments, both from Grand Text Auto and elsewhere....I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto.

Sery was enthusiastic about the idea (although he insisted that the traditional blind review process proceed alongside it) and so Noah contacted me about working together to adapt CommentPress to the task at hand.

The challenge technically was to integrate CommentPress into an existing blog template, applying its functionality selectively — in other words, to make it work for a specific group of posts rather than for all content in the site. We could have made a standalone web site dedicated to the book, but the idea was to literally weave sections of the manuscript into the daily traffic of the blog. From the beginning, Noah was very clear that this was the way it needed to work, insisting that the social and technical integration of the review process were inseparable. I've since come to appreciate how crucial this choice was for making a larger point about the value of blog-based communities in scholarly production, and moreover how elegantly it chimes with the central notions of Noah's book: that form and content, process and output, can never truly be separated.

Up to this point, CommentPress has been an all or nothing deal. You can either have a whole site working with paragraph-level commenting, or not at all. In the technical terms of WordPress, its platform, CommentPress is a theme: a template for restructuring an entire blog to work with the CommentPress interface. What we've done — with the help of a talented WordPress developer named Mark Edwards, and invaluable guidance and insight from Jeremy Douglass of the Software Studies project at UC San Diego (and the Writer Response Theory blog) — is made CommentPress into a plugin: a program that enables a specific function on demand within a larger program or site. This is an important step for CommentPress, giving it a new flexibility that it has sorely lacked and acknowledging that it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Just to be clear, these changes are not yet packaged into the general CommentPress codebase, although they will be before too long. A good test run is still needed to refine the new model, and important decisions have to be made about the overall direction of CommentPress: whether from here it definitively becomes a plugin, or perhaps forks into two paths (theme and plugin), or somehow combines both options within a single package. If you have opinions on this matter, we're all ears...

But the potential impact of this project goes well beyond the technical.

It represents a bold step by a scholarly press — one of the most distinguished and most innovative in the world — toward developing new procedures for vetting material and assuring excellence, and more specifically, toward meaningful collaboration with existing online scholarly communities to develop and promote new scholarship.

It seems to me that the presses that will survive the present upheaval will be those that learn to productively interact with grassroots publishing communities in the wild of the Web and to adopt the forms and methods they generate. I don't think this will be a simple story of the blogosphere and other emerging media ecologies overthrowing the old order. Some of the older order will die off to be sure, but other parts of it will adapt and combine with the new in interesting ways. What's particularly compelling about this present experiment is that it has the potential to be (perhaps now or perhaps only in retrospect, further down the line) one of these important hybrid moments — a genuine, if slightly tentative, interface between two publishing cultures.

Whether the MIT folks realize it or not (their attitude at the outset seems to be respectful but skeptical), this small experiment may contain the seeds of larger shifts that will redefine their trade. The most obvious changes leveled on publishing by the Internet, and the ones that get by far the most attention, are in the area of distribution and economic models. The net flattens distribution, making everyone a publisher, and radically undercuts the heretofore profitable construct of copyright and the whole system of information commodities. The effects are less clear, however, in those hardest to pin down yet most essential areas of publishing — the territory of editorial instinct, reputation, identity, trust, taste, community... These are things that the best print publishers still do quite well, even as their accounting departments and managing directors descend into panic about the great digital undoing. And these are things that bloggers and bookmarkers and other web curators, archivists and filterers are also learning to do well — to sift through the information deluge, to chart a path of quality and relevance through the incredible, unprecedented din.

This is the part of publishing that is most important, that transcends technological upheaval — you might say the human part. And there is great potential for productive alliances between print publishers and editors and the digital upstarts. By delegating half of the review process to an existing blog-based peer community, effectively plugging a node of his press into the Web-based communications circuit, Doug Sery is trying out a new kind of editorial relationship and exercising a new kind of editorial choice. Over time, we may see MIT evolve to take on some of the functions that blog communities currently serve, to start providing technical and social infrastructure for authors and scholarly collectives, and to play the valuable (and time-consuming) roles of facilitator, moderator and curator within these vast overlapping conversations. Fostering, organizing, designing those conversations may well become the main work of publishing and of editors.

I could go on, but better to hold off on further speculation and to just watch how it unfolds. The Expressive Processing peer review experiment begins today (the first actual manuscript section is here) and will run for approximately ten weeks and 100 thousand words on Grand Text Auto, with a new post every weekday during that period. At the end, comments will be sorted, selected and incorporated and the whole thing bundled together into some sort of package for MIT. We're still figuring out how that part will work. Please go over and take a look and if a thought is provoked, join the discussion.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:30 AM | Comments (4)
tags: Blogosphere , MIT , academic , books , commentpress , expressiveprocessing , peer_review , publishing , reading , the_networked_book , writing

read this   01.16.2008, 1:27 PM

An interesting experiment on Vimeo. See what's going on?

Via IT IN place.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:27 PM | Comments (1)
tags: animation , reading , video

reading between the lines?   01.09.2008, 12:13 PM

The NEA claims it wishes to “initiate a serious discussion” over the findings of its latest report, but the public statements from representatives of the Endowment have had a terse or caustic tone, such as in Sunil Iyengar’s reply to Nancy Kaplan. Another example is Mark Bauerlein’s letter to the editor in response to my December 7, 2007 Chronicle Review piece, “How Reading is Being Reimagined,” a letter in which Bauerlein seems unable or unwilling to elevate the discourse beyond branding me a “votary” of screen reading and suggesting that I “do some homework before passing opinions on matters out of [my] depth.”

One suspects that, stung by critical responses to the earlier Reading at Risk report (2004), the decision this time around was that the best defense is a good offense. Bauerlein chastises me for not matching data with data, that is for failing to provide any quantitative documentation in support of various observations about screen reading and new media (not able to resist the opportunity for insult, he also suggests such indolence is only to be expected of a digital partisan). Yet data wrangling was not the focus of my piece, and I said as much in print: rather, I wanted to raise questions about the NEA’s report in the context of the history of reading, questions which have also been asked by Harvard scholar Leah Price in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review.

If my work is lacking in statistical heavy mettle, the NEA’s description of reading proceeds as though the last three decades of scholarship by figures like Elizabeth Eisenstein, Harvey Graff, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardin, Bill Sherman, Adrian Johns, Roger Chartier, Peter Stallybrass, Patricia Crain, Lisa Gitelman, and many others simply does not exist. But this body of work has demolished the idea that reading is a stable or historically homogeneous activity, thereby ripping the support out from under the quaint notion that the codex book is the simple, self-consistent artifact it is presented as in the reports, while also documenting the numerous varieties of cultural anxiety that have attended the act of reading and questions over whether we’re reading not enough or too much.

It’s worth underscoring that the academic response to the NEA’s two reports has been largely skeptical. Why is this? After all, in the ivied circles I move in, everyone loves books, cherishes reading, and wants people to read more, in whatever venue or medium. I also know that’s true of the people at if:book (and thanks to Ben Vershbow, by the way, for giving me the opportunity to respond here). And yet we bristle at the data as presented by the NEA. Is it because, as academics, eggheads, and other varieties of bookwormish nerds and geeks we’re all hopelessly ensorcelled by the pleasures of problematizing and complicating rather than accepting hard evidence at face value? Herein lies the curious anti-intellectualism to which I think at least some of us are reacting, an anti-intellectualism that manifests superficially in the rancorous and dismissive tone that Bauerlein and Iyengar have brought to the very conversation they claim they sought to initiate, but anti-intellectualism which, at its root, is—just possibly—about a frustration that the professors won’t stop indulging their fancy theories and footnotes and ditzy digital rhetoric. (Too much book larnin’ going on up at the college? Is that what I’m reading between the lines?)

Or maybe I’m wrong about that last bit. I hope so. Because as I said in my Chronicle Review piece, there’s no doubt it’s time for a serious conversation about reading. Perhaps we can have a portion of it here on if:book.

Matthew Kirschenbaum
University of Maryland

Related: "the NEA's misreading of reading"

Posted by matthew kirschenbaum at 12:13 PM | Comments (11)
tags: NEA , academic , reading