reading - Michel Roland on Diigo

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Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns

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Readings from library-provided electronic journals has increased substantially, while readings of older articles have recently increased somewhat. Ironically, reading patterns have broadened with electronic journals at the same time citing patterns have narrowed.
While the average number of article readings per scientist is increasing, the average time spent per reading is declining. In the 2005 surveys, scientists reported spending an average of 31 minutes per reading, down from 48 minutes in 1977. Multiplying the average time spent per reading by the number of article readings shows that the total commitment to reading by U.S. science faculty increases from approximately 120 hours annually in 1977 to 144 hours annually in 2005. It appears that the amount of time available for reading scientific articles may be reaching a maximum capacity.
The number of readings increased by an estimated 130 readings per scientist from 1977 to 2005. The "other sources" increased by about 20 readings (from 23 to 43), which might be attributable to open access initiatives since the current 43 readings are 11 from preprints; 19 copies provided by authors, colleagues, etc.; 4 from an author website and 2 from other websites (plus 7 from an unspecified source). Reading from personal subscriptions decreased about 27 readings per faculty scientist. Some of the decrease represents a drop in personal subscriptions, but most is attributable to less reading per subscription (i.e., about 21 readings per subscription in 1977 to 15 in 2005). Most remarkable is that readings from library-provided articles increased by 137 readings, which is comparable to the net increase in readings overall (130 readings). Much of this increase is due to electronic journal or aggregation collections in libraries.
Over half of readings in 2005 are from electronic sources (59.5% vs. 40.5% from print sources). However, as shown in Figure 3, personal subscription readings frequently continue to be from print issues. On the other hand, most library-provided articles and other sources are read from electronic versions.
The most frequent principal purpose of reading is research (48.5% of readings), followed by teaching (22.5%), writing (articles, reports, proposals, etc. – 10.8%), and current awareness/keeping up (8.0%).
Articles published in 2005 (prior to October/November when the surveys were done) were largely identified through browsing (52.6%), but as the articles became older, readers more frequently became aware of them by other means. Articles published prior to 1996 were mostly identified through citations (46.9%) and searching (32.8%).

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker

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Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

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Is Google Making Us Smarter? -- Brain Function -- InformationWeek

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Read my lips: Using multiple senses in speech perception

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The End of Solitude / By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ - ChronicleReview.com

Tags: privacy, solitude, pratiques_informationnelles, digital_natives, reading on 2009-01-27 and saved by 6 people -All Annotations (42) -About

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if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity.
Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm.
solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism.
Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to reading's essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of television and the Internet in our own.
Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical.
"sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others.
With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship.
Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing.
The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate?
Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century.
But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.
The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.
the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
But we no longer believe in the solitary mind.
cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal."
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite.
Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal.

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Courber le temps - Hors champ

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Ce matin-là, donc, une fille planquée dans le fond de la classe m'a balancé une question en forme de grenade: "Ça sert à quoi de lire des livres?"
De nos jours (me suis-je mis à réfléchir tout haut, en tétant mon café tiède), la plupart des objets culturels sont intégrés dans une approche multitâche. Autrement dit, on peut écouter de la musique en lavant la vaisselle, visionner un film en bavardant avec son voisin ou lire huit sites Web en simultanée.
Le livre, en revanche, demeure l'un des seuls objets culturels qui exigent de tout arrêter. Pour exister, il nécessite une attention exclusive. Impossible de lire un bouquin en pensant à autre chose.
Dans un monde multitâche, consacrer tout son temps à une seule activité revient à perdre son temps - ce qui explique sans doute en partie pourquoi on lit moins de livres qu'auparavant. L'intérêt du livre se trouve pourtant là: il exige certes plus d'effort, mais il dilate les heures.
Le livre est, en somme, une machine à courber le temps.
Voilà qui expliquerait d'ailleurs pourquoi le roman historique jouit en ce moment d'une telle popularité. Il s'agit au fond d'une métaphore de ce que le livre parvient à créer: une parenthèse temporelle avec sa propre logique, sa propre vitesse
Ils comprenaient pourquoi ils n'avaient pas envie de lire des livres, mais aussi pourquoi ils auraient pu en avoir envie.

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Your Brain on Google - ChronicleReview.com

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Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

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Without leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press
The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
s early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts.
Six hundred years later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
With electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius would have found natural.
Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were filmed, and which remained in obscurity.
It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,”
The cataloguing data that identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million
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.
Specialist engines like Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks.
these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

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Steve Jobs Was Only Half-Right: People Do Read - Even Kids - They Just Do It Online - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: Steve_Jobs, reading, reading_2.0 on 2008-04-02 and saved by 7 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
young news readers are less likely to read printed newspapers
The problem is not in readership decline, it seems, but in teen readership decline.
the younger generation like to consume media for free and they have come to expect free content through online extensions.
So is a diet of only digital media bad?
I wonder if reading novels is really better for you than reading online source about current events in terms of stretching your mind.
And because of blogs, forums, and email, I probably write several dozen pages worth of text each week, which is probably more than many members of previous generations can claim!
Add Sticky Note
- It is perhaps not accurate to consider all kinds of writing, as well as all kinds of reading, as equivalent. This lack of distinction between different types or levels of reading/writing looks like a major flaw in most of teh discussion about reading decline, etc..
  posted by bibliothecaire on 2008-04-02
What is txt'ing if it's not reading?
It's extremely helpful to use hyperlinks to flow between information, especially if you need to find specific interest points, but it hinders as you haven't had the full picture as the author intended.
Add Sticky Note
- Digital reading (but the story began much much earlier) tends to reduce information to facts, which is a good thing when you are looking for facts. But the thinking part, the "knowledge" part is now up to you, with little help. See Wikipedia, which is unchallenged (more and more) to give facts but totaly lacking of style in the writing of the articles.
  posted by bibliothecaire on 2008-04-02
An article now should be constructed with an executive summary (less than 100 words, preferably less than 255 charcaters), and links to directly related information. If the entire article if covering a range of different topics, then it should be split into different posts. The entire Article length should not be more than two pages of A4. Otherwise it's rambling and should be split across more than one article.
Reading fiction is being replaced by multimedia story-telling (on the web, TV, movies, elsewhere).
I asked Steve Jobs about your post, and he said that people don't read posts that long any more.
Yes, I read the Newspaper and news online, but I have become a big Science and non-fiction reader now.. I find myself buying books and looking for used book stores or the local library....So, on the weekends. I am reading more then ever beofore...

The secrete about the internet is that you need to know how to read to use it...
Give people a mobile reading capable phone (e.g. iPhone) and great reading tool (e.g. www.textonphone.com for iPhone book reading) and people will quickly replace their other mobile snacking activities with the book reading.
I am sure I am not alone in being able to say that I have never read as much during my life as in recent years
I did watch way too much TV

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Response, Sunil Iyengar and Mark Bauerlein: There is good reason to be worried about declining rates of reading | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian

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if people are reading less, why haven't scores dropped more dramatically? The answer gets to the most significant sleight of hand of the NEA study: its studies are heavily biased towards words on a printed page
A recent study by the British Library of onscreen research activities found that "new forms of 'reading' are emerging as users 'power browse' ... "
"Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading."
The only reason the intellectual benefits are not measurable is that they haven't been measured yet. There have been almost no studies that have looked at the potential positive impact of electronic media.
I challenge the NEA to track the economic status of obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer programmers over the next 10 years. Which group will have more professional success in this climate?
internet users generally are better educated and more interested politically. And among young people under 30, use of the internet to learn about the campaign has a greater impact on knowledge than does level of education.

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National Endowment for the Arts Announces New Reading Study

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

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The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought - Publishing 2.0

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I was thinking last night about books and why I don’t read them anyone
there’s something about the print vs. online dialectic that always seemed superficial to me.
Books are linear and foster concentration and focus, while the web, with all its hyperlinks, is kinetic, scattered, all over the place.
If I’m such a digital guy, then why do I have no interest in ebooks?
What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?
We still retain an 18th Century bias towards linear thought.
Add Sticky Note
- Why 18th Century? Non-linear reading and in consequence praise for linear reading vs non-linear is way older. See Illich about monastic vs scholastic reading.
  posted by bibliothecaire on 2008-04-02
When I read online, I constantly follow links from one item to the next, often forgetting where I started. Sometimes I backtrack to one content “node” and jump off in different directions. There are nodes that I come back to repeatedly, like TechMeme and Google, only to start down new branches of the network.
Is there such a thing as networked human thought? Certain there is among a group of people enabled by a network — but what about for an individual, processing information via the web’s network?
online reading has a very important negative result:

lack of concentration.
Before reading, people networked to obtain and validate information.
The real question is how we manage the change from linear cognition to non-linear cognition.
Are we going to recognize that this is an evolution in human consciousness and start valuing the types of effects that non-linear thought processes elicit? OR will we treat this as a plague to be eradicated and spend untold sums of money and energy trying to kill off the next great leap in human development?
I don’t feel a lack of concentration while reading/absorbing info in this way - if anything I feel it’s easier to concentrate for me. Isn’t that weird? Maybe it’s because I’m following my own train of thought (in the sense that I’m determining the narrative by deciding where to go next) rather than someone else’s?
When I do read fiction I find that I can’t put it down until I have read the whole story.
No fiction at all.