Morris Pelzel's List: Reading, Books, eBooks

• you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.
• marginalia
• a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.
• intra- and extratextual references
• pure logorrheic force of my excitement
• future of marginal notes
• the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.
• Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states. It might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction: a point of contact that could improve both without hurting either. Digital technology, rather than destroying the tradition of marginalia, could actually help us return it to its gloriously social 18th-century roots.
• meta-conversation running in the margins
• gathering “metadata” about our reading — broken spines, dog-eared chapters, marginalia. This metadata is crucial. It is, as Bridle puts it, “where our experience of the book lives.”
• It would be like the option of watching a film with the directors’ commentary — a nice bonus but also easy to ignore.
• Marginalia — with its social thrill of shared immersion — is what the culture is moving toward, not away from. We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.

11 more annotations...

• For some years, the amount of reading we assign university students has been shrinking
• Are students even reading Milton or Thucydides or Wittgenstein these days? More fundamentally, are they studying the humanities, which are based on long-form reading?
• I contend that the shift from reading in print to reading on digital devices is further reducing students’ pursuit of work in the humanities. Students (and the rest of us) have been reading on computers for many years. Besides searching for web pages, we’ve grown accustomed to reading journal articles online and mining documents in digital archives. However, with the coming of e-readers, tablets, and smartphones, reading styles underwent a sea change.
• e-books are causing a pedagogical reboot
• Not all reading works well on digital screens.
• The bottom line is that while digital devices may be fine for reading that we don’t intend to muse over or reread, text that requires what’s been called "deep reading" is nearly always better done in print.
• Common responses for what students liked most about reading in print included "I can write on the pages and remember the material easier" and "it’s easier to focus." When asked what they liked least about reading on-screen, a number of Japanese students reported that it wasn’t "real reading," while respondents from all three countries complained that they "get distracted" or "don’t absorb as much."
• My all-time favorite reply to the question "What is the one thing you like least about reading in print?" came from an American: "It takes me longer because I read more carefully." Isn’t careful reading what academe was designed to promote?
• Readings in the humanities tend to be lengthy, intellectually weighty, or both. The challenge of digital reading for the humanities is that screens—particularly those on devices with Internet connections—undermine our encounters with meaty texts. These devices weren’t designed for focused concentration, reading slowly, pausing to argue virtually with the author, or rereading. Rather, they are information and communication machines, best used for searching and skimming—not scrutinizing.
• Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World

8 more annotations...

• Dozens of publishing start-ups tried harnessing social reading apps or multimedia, but few caught on.
• “A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”
• Bob Stein, a pioneering digital innovator, wrote recently that “people often ask me to expound on the ‘future of the book.’ ” Since Mr. Stein is founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, one might think he would expect and even welcome this. He does not. “Frankly,” he wrote, “I can’t stand the question.”

1 more annotation...

• The owner of a Kindle and an iPad, Mr. Jacobs feels he reads more now because of technology, not in spite of it
• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
• My big problem is really digital-rights management

1 more annotation...

• The definition of OER currently most often used is ‘digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research’”
• • Reuse—The most basic level of openness. People are allowed to use all or part of the work for their own purposes (e.g., download an educational video to watch at a later time).
   
  • Redistribute—People can share the work with others (e.g., email a digital article to a colleague).
   
  • Revise—People can adapt, modify, translate, or change the work (e.g., take a book written in English and turn it into a Spanish audio book).
   
  • Remix—People can take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g., take audio lectures from one course and combine them with slides from another course to create a new derivative work).

• amplified marginalia.
• Mr. Duncombe published the results online using CommentPress, open-source software by the Institute for the Future of the Book. Online discussion and commenting is made possible by Social Book, a social-reading platform created by the institute. Bob Stein, its founder, has been a vocal proponent of social reading for texts of all lengths. Open Utopia is one of several pilot projects now in progress. Social Book appealed to Mr. Duncombe because it aims to "create communities of people talking to each other."
• Open Utopia made its debut too late for Ms. Gellene to assign, but she thinks that the social-reading approach could help solve a recurring challenge. "Keeping the discussion around the text is always a problem, especially with something like Utopia, where people want to have political debates," she told me. With a shared reading platform, "the discussion becomes part of the text," which helps students stay focused.
• Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author."

• Mr. Goldsmith told the class he expected everyone to comment. They did. The approach "generated enormous discussion," he told me. "Everybody was making comments as they were reading, which was kind of fascinating."

   

  The experiment was almost too big a hit. "We couldn't get through everything," he said. But too much discussion is not a bad problem to have, and Mr. Goldsmith said he plans to use Social Book again.
• Copyright creates a barrier to social reading's catching on in a big way. Mr. Duncombe had a public-domain text to build on, but many readers want recent material. So far publishers haven't rushed to provide copyrighted works to gather around online.
• A conventional book invites readers to shut out the world while they read. Social reading asks them to connect with others as they encounter the text. Whether that sounds like a more perfect world depends on the reader.

5 more annotations...

• The research team concluded that the instructional design process for building digital curricula for mobile devices must consider not only the paper-to-digital transformation but also the form factor of devices and how students use devices of different sizes.
• digital "books" with print-copy content are clearly not the destination, just one step along the way

• Qualitative interviews confirm that proficient readers use the Web and computers for overview in a manner characterised by browsing and skimming; that is: discontinuous and fragmented reading. Typically, concentrated reading is done on paper, especially reading of long–form text
• This study suggests that academics seldom read a scholarly article or book from beginning to end, but rather in parts and certainly out of order, using hands and fingers flicking back and forth, underlining and annotating, often relating the reading to their own writing.
• this study seeks to explain the main differences between digital and paper–based reading
• psychologists have long argued that human intellectual faculties, rather than being the result of brain evolution alone, are reciprocally related to anatomical and behavioural adaptations to environmental and social changes
• By including bodily and material perspectives in reading research, it becomes increasingly clear that reading, in addition to decoding and comprehension, is also physical handling of reading appliances and that the way we read is dependent on technologies, implement design and text composition
• Engelsing’s account created a binary conceptual opposition that has lasted to this day: between deep reading and shallow reading or between active engagement with text and passive consumption of text.

4 more annotations...

• Complaints about "too many books" echo across the centuries, from when books were papyrus rolls, parchment manuscripts, or hand printed.
• Writing was very likely the first culprit, making possible the accumulation of texts beyond what a single mind could master, even a mind trained to memorize Homer or biblical texts.
• Reactions to overload have often been emotional, whether hostile or enthusiastic. Early negative responses include Ecclesiastes 12:12 ("Of making books there is no end," probably from the fourth or third century BC) and Seneca's "distringit librorum multitudo" ("the abundance of books is distraction," first century AD). But we also find enthusiasm for accumulation—of papyri at the Library of Alexandria (founded in the early third century BC) or of the 20,000 "facts" that Pliny the Elder accumulated in Historia naturalis (completed in AD 77).
• Humanists taught the art of note-taking under topical headings called "commonplaces," generating reams of excerpts selected for rhetorical, historical, or moral interest.
• florilegium
• Starting in the 13th century, the scholastics devised powerful new tools, notably the alphabetical index (including biblical concordances and subject indexes) and the structuring and layout of a text into numbered sections and subsections, so that it could be consulted rather than read through.
• Above all printing created the conditions under which a broad reading public was able to use tools that had previously been limited to a small, specialized elite.
• bibliographies
• compilations
• The periodical and the book review were also advertised as remedies to overabundance when they appeared, in the late 17th century. And during the 18th century, contemporaries commented on the explosion of dictionaries and encyclopedias.
• Although annotations survive in the margins of medieval manuscripts, significant collections of working papers and free-standing reading notes come down to us only from the start of the Renaissance, when paper became widely available
• Early reference works were not only valued but also decried as shortcuts that threatened to lure students and scholars away from learning. Thus the anxieties surrounding Wikipedia and other shortcuts available today have historical antecedents.
• My study of information management in the era of humanist note-taking and early printed reference books has left me wondering about what we risk losing in academic scholarship as we move more of our work to electronic media:
• By the late 19th century, the professionalization of library cataloging and indexing had brought some relief in the form of a controlled vocabulary, a set of agreed-upon subject headings. Although subject and index headings perforce change over time, as do the categories by which we remember and manage our own notes, they remain a uniquely powerful tool.
• making and using shortcuts skillfully and responsibly requires judgment, too

13 more annotations...

• When you look across all of the evidence, there's very strong suggestions that the way we take in information online or through digital media impedes understanding, comprehension, and learning. Mainly because all of those things combine to create a very distracted, very interrupted environment.
• Studies pretty clearly show that when our attention is divided, it becomes much more difficult to transfer information from our short-term memory, which is just the very temporary store, to our long-term memory, which is the seat of understanding.
• The Laptop and the Lecture
• one of the most debilitating things you can do to students is distract them.
• I use the Net for research all the time. It's an extremely valuable way to uncover information. I think that there are at least two possible downsides. We know that as human beings we love new information. That's pretty well proven by psychological research. If given the opportunity to find something new, we'll usually go in that direction, whether that information is trivial or important.
• Because there's so much information at our fingertips, we can get stuck just constantly uncovering new relevant information and never stopping and actually reading and thinking deeply about any one piece of information.
• His hypothesis there is that we become so dependent on search, and the results from searches are determined by popularity of one sort or another. And the risk of using search for online research is that everybody gets led in the same directions to a smaller number of citations which, as they become ever more popular, become the destination for more and more searches. And ... he suggested that simply the act of flipping through paper copies of journals actually may expose researchers to a wider array of evidence.

5 more annotations...

• In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
• The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
• you should be skeptical of my skepticism.
• complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
• As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

3 more annotations...

• cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.
• mutual constitution of humans and technology
• what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
• information explosions and the utopian and apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern.
• we access, use, and engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and delimit
• Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”8; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.”9
• Complaints about too many books gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the book market exploded, especially in England, France, and Germany. Whereas today we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data, late eighteenth-century German readers, for example, imagined themselves to have been infested by a plague of books [Bücherseuche]
• The emergence of a print book market lowered the bar of entry for authors and gradually began to render traditional filters and constraints on the production of books increasingly inadequate. The perception of an excess of books was motivated by a more basic assumption about who should and should not write them.
• Immanuel Kant complained that such an overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially.”13 Extensive reading not only fostered bad reading habits, but also caused a more general pathological condition, Belesenheit [the quality of being well-read], because it exposed readers to the great “waste” [Verderb] of books. It cultivated uncritical thought.
• To insist that there are too many books was to insist that there were too many books to be read or dealt with in a particular way and thus to assume the normative value of one form of reading over another.
• dictionaries, bibliographies, reviews, note-taking, encyclopedias, marginalia, commonplace books, footnotes
• helping readers to select, summarize, and organize an ever-increasing store of information
• compilations, which date from at least the early modern period, employed cut and paste technologies, rather than summarization, to select, collect, and distribute the best passages from an array of books.15 A related search technology, the biblical concordance—the first dates back to 1247—indexed every word of the Bible and facilitated its broader use for sermons and, after its translations into the vernacular, even broader audiences. Similarly, indexes became increasingly popular and big selling points of printed texts by the sixteenth century
• All of these technologies facilitated a consultative reading that allowed a text to be accessed in parts instead of reading a text straight through from beginning to end.1
• They were technologies for managing two perennially precious resources: money (books and manuscripts were expensive) and time (it takes a lot of time to read every word)
• “polymath
• dilettante
• Carr assumes that technologies simply “determine our situation,” independent of human persons
• print facilitated a range of reading habits and styles
• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
• Extensive or consultative forms of reading—those that Carr might describe as distracted or unfocused—existed alongside more intensive forms of reading—those that he might describe as deep, careful, prolonged engagements with particular texts in the Enlightenment
• focus on one particular historical technology—the footnote—and its afterlife in our contemporary digital world.
• common tools for organizing knowledge are algorithms and data structures
• these digital hyperlinks have a revealing historical and conceptual antecedent in the Enlightenment footnote.
• The modern hyperlink and the Enlightenment footnote share a logic that is grounded in assumptions about the text-based nature of knowledge. Both assume that documents, the printed texts of the eighteenth century or the digitized ones of the twenty-first century, are the basis of knowledge
• The Enlightenment’s citational logic is fundamentally self-referential and recursive—that is, the criteria for judgment are always given by the system of texts themselves and not something external, like divine or ecclesial authority. The value and authority of one text is established by the fact that other texts point to it. The more footnotes that point to a particular text, the more authoritative that text becomes by dent of the fact that other texts point to it.
• One of the central mediums of the Enlightenment, journals, operated according to a citational logic. The authority, relevance, and value of a text was undergirded—both conceptually and visually—by an array of footnotes that pointed to other texts. Like our contemporary hyperlinks, these citations interrupted the flow of reading—marked as they often were by a big asterisk or a “see page 516.” Perhaps most importantly, however, all of these footnotes and citations pointed not to a single divinely inspired or authoritative text, but to a much broader network of texts.
• a term for all of this pointing: the language of books [Büchersprache]. Books were imagined to speak to one another because they constantly pointed to and cited one another. The possibility of knowledge and interaction with the broader world in the Enlightenment rested not only on the pensive, autonomous philosopher, but also within the links from book to book, essay to essay.
• The insight that made Google Google was the recognition that all links and all pages are not equal
• Brin and Page recognized that the real power of this citational logic rested not just in counting links from all pages equally, but in “normalizing by the number of links on a page.”
• If, as I have done above, the relevance of technology has to be argued for in the Enlightenment, then the inverse is the case for our digital age—the relevance of the embodied human agent has to be argued for today.
• • The most euphoric among them speak of a coming “singularity” when computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence.
     

30 more annotations...

• Digital rights management technologies prevent some e–books from being downloaded or used on multiple computers,
• some studies suggest students read printed pages faster than text on a screen; this may lead some students to prefer reading printed text instead of reading from the screen
• some studies suggest students read printed pages faster than text on a screen; this may lead some students to prefer reading printed text instead of reading from the screen
• “freemium” pricing strategy, in which some goods are given away for free, while premium services are available for a price

2 more annotations...

• In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel reminds us that the silent reading we take for granted didn’t become the norm in the West until the tenth century. Far from the quiet contemplation we imagine, monasteries were actually “communities of mumblers,” as critic Ivan Illich once described, where devotional reading was constant and aloud.
• In 2005, Northwestern University sociologists Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright identified the emergence of a new “reading class,” one “restricted in size but disproportionate in influence.”

• The Internet is a text–saturated world
• literate people across societies throughout the world are reading digital screens on a regular basis. And all readers, including expert readers —such as university students and scholars — tend to read online digital text differently than the printed word.
• The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf (2008) has suggested that we are experiencing a shift from the reading brain, which has been a hallmark of the human species for millennia, to the digital brain.
• Reading with a capital “R” — any kind of sustained reading for pleasure or information in one’s leisure time. But my definition of reading also includes the reflective and critical expert reading for study and work that is associated with individuals such as university students and academics (Hillesund, 2010).
• Both types of reading are similar in that they are sustained and in–depth, whether they involve intensely following a narrative or closely analyzing a text.
• it is a contemplative cognitive activity somewhat at odds with the Internet’s zeitgeist of immediacy
• in–depth reading can also take place with printed or digital text, but as this review essay will demonstrate
• Orality and literacy, Walter Ong (2008) pointed out that the earliest basic script dates from only about 6,000 years ago. Furthermore, the first full alphabet did not have its beginning until the Greeks developed their alphabet about 750 B.C.
• Scrolls would eventually evolve into folded pages, which in turn eventually became gathered pages — or the codex — the book as it is recognized today.
• these early scribes first did their work by reading out loud to themselves. Not until the ninth century did monastic regulations begin requiring silent reading [12]. By the thirteenth century the practice of men reading silently and alone became commonplace. This shift to silent reading was a profound change, one that Darnton suggested “involved a greater mental adjustment than the shift to printed text” [13].
• It did not simply supply more information. It provided a mode of understanding, a basic metaphor of making sense of life.
• switch from reading “intensively” to “extensively
• readers in most societies have usually been a minority:
• The more typical situation is the one that is increasingly the case today: readers are an elite group that holds disproportionate political, economic, and cultural power.
• The NEA suggested that young Americans aged 18–24 have “undergone a particularly inspiring transformation from a 20 percent decline in 2002 to a 21 percent increase in 2008 — a startling level of change”
• Unfortunately the NEA studies do not include in–depth reading for work or school. If this were included, the overall rates and breakdowns by sex might look very different.
• Griswold instead thinks that a highly educated and affluent elite segment of society is emerging, which actually reads more than the average readers of the past
• the social benefits of the Internet are an ongoing matter of dispute.
• The research of health scientists continues to show a negative relationship between the Internet and social capital, while social scientists have suggested a positive relationship between the two
• people who are online also tend to be readers
• The Internet is not going to displace reading but it is going to give readers yet one more advantage
• similar tendency to search “horizontally” instead of “vertically,” skimming information and bouncing quickly from place to place
• It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
• When online, people switch between two poor kinds of reading — “tunnel vision” reading in which one reads a single bit of text without a sense of the context, and “marginal distraction”, which happens, for example, when a person reads textual feeds on the sidebar of a Web site such as a blog
• Experts seldom read a scholarly article or book from beginning to end, but rather in parts, and certainly out of order
• This shift to digital “holdings” has brought tremendous benefits to university researchers, students, and the general public. However, the reason for this shift has also been economic, having to do with escalating prices for journal subscriptions and limited library budgets
• the e–journal article, with its relatively short length and focus on newly emerging research, quickly proved to be ideally suited to the digital format
• All of this has made both end–user printing and on–screen viewing practical and convenient
• Nicholas Carr (2010) has summed up Apple’s involvement in the tablet phenomenon this way: “Jobs is no dummy. As a text delivery system, the iPad is perfectly suited to readers who don’t read anymore”.
• the highest–selling e–reading device is not a dedicated e–book reader
• students entering university may soon be as comfortable with the notion of e–books as they are with print books
• In fact, for their university studies, students prefer to read on paper, although they also want the convenience of online digital text
• While reading has historical, technological, social, and behavioural contexts, it is obviously also a cognitive and neurological activity.
• Despite the fact that skimming and jumping around from place to place within text is not limited to online reading, this type of reading appears to be the most common type of reading online.
• cognitive differences between the two types of reading
• Linear reading and hypertextual reading are cognitively very different from each other.
• Robert Darnton describes how the literary critics’ notion of the “paratext” — the framework of a text — affects the meaning that a reader derives from that text. Just as a book’s cover, dedication, and acknowledgements make a “frame” that shapes a reader’s interpretation of a book’s main text, the paratextual elements of online text are important.
• “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” he analogizes, but “now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
• This online multitasking and lack of cognitive focus is not an effective way to learn. Evidence suggests that multitaskers find cognitive focus difficult, that it takes longer to do two tasks simultaneously than it does to complete the same tasks one after the other, and that knowledge gained in dual–task situations can be applied less flexibly in new situations (Ophir, et al., 2009; Rubinstein, et al., 2001; Foerde, et al., 2006).
• It is just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly
• more recent years the comprehension gap between reading on a screen versus on paper has been decreasing
• Maryanne Wolf has wondered if there is an emerging “society of decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts from a deeper development of … intellectual potential”
• the mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain’s greatest achievement”:
• By its ability to become virtually automatic, literacy allowed the individual reader to give less time to initial decoding processes and to allocate more cognitive time and ultimately more cortical space to the deeper analysis of recorded thought
• I am worried about kids who are immersed in digital culture.
• Over the millennia, reading has changed alongside us, and it has also changed us. Reading is a cultural activity that has changed over time, but that has also physiologically changed the brain
• accessing information and the acquisition of knowledge are two different phenomena.
• ongoing research is needed on many aspects of the evolving reading habits of students over the coming years, as we continue to experience the revolutionary technological, behavioural, societal, and neurological aspects of online reading.
• illusion that illumination is based upon speed
• we may need to remind ourselves of the importance of teaching transferable critical reading skills, and the value of motivating our students to remain lifelong learners who practice the skill of in–depth reading throughout their lives, no matter where our information technologies may take them in the future.
• appropriate spaces — such as library reading rooms and study halls — suitable to the time–dependent and cognitively intensive activity of deep reading, wh
• their need for the availability of
• ether it is done on paper or on a screen

51 more annotations...