I am signing off for the holidays, and I thought I could do worse than citing Oliver Sacks on why we need as much diversity as possible when it comes to reading: “No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear, for we are all individuals, with highly individualized …
The announcement of the new German Digital Library, or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, made me realize just how limited our thinking is about electronic reading today. It is part of the broader Europeana initiative and as such has an impressive collection of both books and images. As I played with the …
For the first time, I have to admit that my conviction of a commingled print-digital future has seriously begun to wane. Over the course of the past 10 years, I have tried to argue against the either/or nature of the debate, both for practical reasons (I think this would be …
I’ve just returned from a fantastic conference in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Women’s Writing Instruments in the Eighteenth Century. We learned about the types of things that a woman would have at her desk when she sat down to write, including seals, wax, ink, quills, knives, …
One of the bigger challenges facing the humanities today with the changing nature of our reading interfaces is the problem of technical opacity, what goes by the colloquial name of the black box. Do we need to know how computers or computation work to understand an electronic text? Or can …
This past week 22 researchers from 3 different countries gathered together in Montreal to continue collaboratively writing a book on the history of print. The “multigraph,” as we’re calling it, is an experiment in seeing what happens to our ideas when we change the way we write and work together. …
A very important new study on students’ differential reading of screens versus books is out in the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing. A summary of some of the article’s findings: Connection with characters on screen does not seem as deep because concentration is not achieved in the same way. …
Faux-linen is out. Modern industrial is in. Imaginary bookshelves are out, too. The big news at Apple this past week was the ouster of Scott Forstall, one of the chief designers for their mobile technologies. The even bigger news (for readers) is what this will mean for interface design. Forstall’s …
It seems like this is going to be one of those debates that will be rehearsed over and over again, but here’s a quick response to the scuffle caused by the recent LA Review of Books piece on “literature is not data.” The general resistance to electronic reading (aka digital humanities) …
I was taking notes in my notebook this weekend when I realized it had a pocket in the back. It reminded me of the centuries-old tradition of books as containers. Unlike e-books that keep things out, books are things that hold things (notes, eye-glasses, dried plants, records, even flies for …