Author: Holly Barclay

I prefer print to electronic screens in most respects. I do not own a tablet or an eReader- a laptop and an archaic smartphone (it should probably be leaking chemicals in a landfill somewhere) with no data plan are the digital devices in my possession. Let’s get this out of the way now: I am not a luddite. A large part of my job involves teaching people how to competently operate digital devices. I understand the merit, worth, and appeal of digital reading platforms. I just prefer to read print. I despise being confined to my laptop screen when reading, I prefer the mobility which a book or a hardcopy of an article allows me. But wait, why don’t I get myself an eReader or an iPad? These devices would allow me a similar freedom of movement.

To unpack my preference for print, lets consider this quotation from one of this week’s readings: “A platform in its purest form is an abstraction, a particular standard or specification before any particular implementation of it. To be used by people and to take part in our culture directly, a platform must take material form” (Montford & Bogost, 2009, quoted in Rowberry). It is the examination of the platform as an abstraction, at the expense of its materiality, that troubles me. One consequence of interrogating the platform as a physical object (which so far has not been mentioned in this class) is the environmental impact of shifting cultural practices of reading.

I do not read eBooks, in part, because I do not wish to purchase their platforms. They have  relatively short life-spans and require replacement after a handful of years, either because they stop working or are no longer compatible with current apps. What happens to the device once it is no longer needed? This question, along with others (what minerals were used to make the device and where were they mined? What was the cumulative hydro-pull of this device throughout its lifespan?) are important to ask. So perhaps what I choose to read on the screen has less to do with personal preferences than it does with this nagging question: What are the ecological consequences of changes in cultural reading practices in the age of ubiquitous computing and accelerating climate change?

Of course books and the paper industry have an ecological footprint too. As someone who grew up in a pulp mill town in northern B.C., I’ve got the increased risk of lung cancer to prove it. My point is not to idealize the paper industry but to point out the absence of the land in our discussions of the future of the book.

Bibliography:
Simon Rowberry, “Ebookness,” Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, (2015): 1-18

This week I decided to take a closer look at a page that (for better or worse) I view frequently: The Facebook Page. I chose this site because I believe it is a good jumping off point to begin a discussion of Andrew Piper’s work. Perhaps because I spend a good deal of time answering questions about “reading” websites for library patrons- of particular interest to me are his ideas concerning the shifting nature of literacy in the presence of digital pages.

You’ll notice in the top right corner of the Facebook screenshot a series of icons. Due to the somewhat unsettling fact that I have been using this social networking site for eight years, and because I frequently use computers and other ICTs, I know that the pictures of an arrow, lock, globe, and speech bubbles are symbols. For example, the globe is a label for my notifications button. As other long-time users of Facebook can attest to, this has not always been the case. At one time that button said ‘notifications.’ This use of symbols is not isolated to Facebook: when exactly did three horizontal lines stacked on top of one another come to mean “Menu”? This language of symbols is not self-evident to people who seldom use computers, or who are learning to use them for the first time. Yesterday, as I helped a patron access information for tax purposes, they asked “Was it hard for you to learn computers?” I had no satisfactory answer for this question, as I cannot recall the first time I used a computer, although I must have been around eight years old, old enough to remember such things.

Piper writes: “Sentences have become pixilated, divorced from their normal grammar in the same way that the digital page is no longer connected to the spine of a book” (56). Here, the imagery of pixilation captures the iconography of the internet which is gradually doing away with written words in its adoption of a language of symbols that consists of images without context. It isn’t until you try to explain to an adult much older than yourself why the three horizontal lines means menu that the taken-for-granted connection between signifier and signified is disrupted.

***

Piper, Andrew. “Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming).” In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Marlena and I are collaborating on the encoding challenge. We are both interested in Canadian ecological poetry, which led us to consider the work of Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky as options for our encoding challenge.

In what follows I reflect on Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy, the revised second edition, published in 2011 by Gaspereau Press.

This text fascinates me for many reasons, one of which being the complexity of its form, and the relationship in the text between form and function. Non-linear in nature, Zwicky takes a polyphonic approach to her reflections on time and resonant meaning. On each recto page is a passage by Zwicky, while on each verso are the thoughts of another thinker. While not directly commenting on the other thinker’s work, Zwicky’s placement of the passages allow them to exist alongside, and speak to, one another. In the introduction, she writes: “The relation of the two texts to one another is somewhere between counterpoint and harmony, somewhere between a double helix and the allemande of the earth and moon.” It gestures towards what David Gelernter describes as deep beauty: “An idealized integration of form and function” (Kirschenbaum, 2004). The text is shaped by the physicality and spatiality of pages and signatures. The negative space on each page also adds to the meaning of the text by both inviting the reader’s hands into the margins and suggesting where to pause.

The form of the book challenges understandings of interface. Kirschenbaum (2004) writes: “… the interface is also where representation and its attendant ideologies are most conspicuous to our critical eyes. Ostensibly wedded to the ideal of user-friendliness, the interface is also where we deploy our most creative features and imaginative functions.” The structure of Zwicky’s work is complex: the relationship between form and meaning is not an obvious one, and is certainly not designed to be user-friendly. The form invites the reader to work to make meaning, and much effort is required on the reader’s part to decode the text. The structure of Lyric Philosophy challenges the notion of user-friendliness. It is this challenge which makes Zwicky’s work an intriguing candidate for translation into XML. In the end, we chose a poem by Robert Bringhurst to encode. Lyric Philosophy will have to wait for another time…

Bodach, V. & Logan, L. (2015). Ten Easter eggs. Scholastic: New York.

I left last Monday’s class thinking about the relationship between bibliographic form and meaning. What print books would be impossible to translate in a digital form without losing meaning integral to the text? An answer to this question was literally handed to me the next evening by a young girl during my shift at the Cobourg Public Library. She presented me with one of the library’s board books, Ten Easter Eggs, concerned it had been broken. For those unfamiliar with children’s library collections, a board book refers to a book designed for infants and toddlers with stiff, cardboard pages. In our readings this week Kirschenbaum and Werner write (2014) “… most digitizations focus on the value of the object as a text to be read” (p.419), board books are objects with value extending beyond their printed text. As a result, digitization of board books is difficult to achieve without losing meaning essential to the object.

Board books are designed not only to be read. Manufactured with durable materials, they allow for use specific to the developmental stage of infants: the reader may put the book in their mouth, or grab it by one page and wave it around. Ten Easter Eggs is an interesting board books as its pedagogical function extends beyond the lessons of the text (such as counting to ten, and simple addition and subtraction) to sensorial learning.

The book contains ten three-dimensional eggs. For example, page one contains one 3D egg and nine egg shaped cut-out holes, which reveal the other nine eggs contained in the book. As the page is flipped, a fuzzy chick made with felt is revealed below the egg. Page three now contains nine eggs and one felt chick. The verso pages contain egg-shaped holes. This process continues until ten felt chicks are revealed. This design allows the reader to explore the book with their hands, feeling the holes, the felt chicks and the smooth 3D eggs. This sensory experience could not be replicated in a digitized version of the text. Furthermore, eBook platforms such as eReaders or tablets are not designed for children to put them in their mouths or throw them around. As a result, the child’s relationship to the object would be shaped by greater caution in a digital format (enforced, most likely, by adults) and as a result, would look quite different.

I mentioned earlier this book was handed to me by a young library patron. She was concerned because several of the 3D eggs had been “punched-in” by previous readers, rendering their shape less than egg-like. Rather than understanding the book as damaged, this can be read as a productive interaction between the reader and the text-object. Through using the book in a way it was not designed to be used (applying great pressure to the eggs) the child reader has the ability to change the shape of the egg, creating a very different sensory experience for future readers. In this way the text effects meaning unintended by its designers.