Author: Stephanie Duncan

If I could go back in time and tell the people of an era one really important thing about the future of books and reading, it would simply be that books are not going to die. With this message, I could travel back to a variety of different time periods, because there have been many instances of moral panics over “the death of the book” (i.e. Théophile Gautier in 1835 France; Marshall McLuhan circa 1966).

The intent behind this message would primarily be to allay these poor book lovers’ fears regarding the death of the book. Think of the time and energy that could have been saved and redirected into more creative writing endeavours if people hadn’t fixated on arguing over this issue (not to say that what people wrote about the matter in all of these different periods is not interesting in and of itself!). I wish I could tell them that books will change, and while some will embrace this change, books as they were known in times past will continue to flourish, and people will continue to read them. If they had known this, perhaps more people would have been encouraged to write books, to write more books, or to write different books.

As we have learned in this course, print books are not going to die, and e-books are not going to take over. Even if they did, works would still get read, even if the format might change slightly (or drastically). In any case, other technologies such as newspaper, radio, or TV will not replace books and reading: the need for books is strong and the love for them is ever-present.

An example which comes to mind for this week’s discussion question took place a few years ago in my Book History seminar with Scott Schofield. We were studying digital texts, and I wanted to compare a couple print editions of Kerouac’s On the Road (namely the first edition and the 50th anniversary “Original Scroll” edition) to the digital “Amplified Edition” (http://www.penguin.com/static/pages/features/amplified_editions/on_the_road.php). This e-edition was only available for iPads, and since I didn’t have one at the time, I borrowed one from the Inforum. I purchased it on the device from the App Store, and used it as needed for my paper. The issue came about when I had to return the iPad and realized that I would likely be saying goodbye to my purchase. There may have been some way (or maybe there still is?) to access it through iTunes, since I believe it was connected with my Apple ID, but I never figured it out. I sometimes wonder if the app is still on that Inforum iPad, and if anyone ever opens it up and gets some use out of it (I hope so!).

This fleeting period of ownership got me thinking about how much we ever really own things. A recent foray into minimalism has shifted the way I think about how humans relate to material objects, and whether or not this relationship is always entirely healthy. Do we own things, or do they own us? In many cases we use things to define our identities, which I would argue can be dangerous: what happens when our identities or interests change? An example which was discussed in class some weeks ago is the phenomenon of humans being the only species to collect books we don’t read (ha ha). This is very true though– we place books on our shelves to create a certain identity for ourselves, but how authentic is that identity if we have never (and may never) read them? For this reason, and a million others, I love libraries. We can read a book without feeling tied to it for life.

Tool libraries and “libraries of things” are a great way to extend this model to material items other than books. Similarly, I know of some minimalists who use Craigslist as a storage locker (check out these guys: http://www.theminimalists.com/). That is, they sell an item which they rarely use (say, a table saw), and if they find themselves needing one again, they just buy another from Craigslist, and sell it right back for the same price when they are done. I think this notion of borrowing things rather than owning them is useful when contemplating how we should be interacting with objects.

On a more bookish note (or e-bookish note), it makes me think of how we borrow e-books from libraries. So many non-library folks simply don’t understand why there are limits on how many people can borrow an e-book at once, and why they can only borrow it for as long as a regular library book. They think that since it is a digital version, there should be an endless supply of copies and loan periods. While we know there is a simple answer related to copyright laws, I think their impatience with the system exposes some of the unhealthy habits we are developing in the digital world, namely that we want things now and we want them without limits. I wonder where we will find ourselves if we continue to indulge these “more more more” ideologies of consumption.

For the final assignment, Professor Galey is allowing Aneta and I to continue our encoding assignment. The XML challenge was my first foray into coding, and I discovered that I really love it! Something about the nit-picky nature of coding really jived with me; I enjoy work in which very careful attention to detail is needed. I have always liked editing, and have an eye for small mistakes, which seem to jump off the page at me. Ever since the assignment, I have been trying to figure out how I can do more coding projects that will produce something meaningful and substantive. (If anyone is interested in joining, I’m hoping to attend a Ladies Learning Code session or two in the near future: http://ladieslearningcode.com/)

A friend of mine who took this course a couple of years ago told me that for the final assignment, he and his partner took their XML document and created an interface for it. This seemed like a perfect fit for Aneta and I, because while we were coding, we had a lot of questions about what the decisions we were making would really look like in a finished product. We felt like we left a lot of loose ends on this front, and we were curious to see how they would play out. We also wanted to know how to proceed with turning the XML into something more tangible, and we actually started playing around with the TEI header and thinking about things like cascading style sheets. The goals for this assignment, therefore, are twofold: to get some closure on our unanswered questions, and to learn how to turn raw XML into a finished product by way of CSS/HTML. We are eager to get started, and excited about the anticipated results.

My examples for this week’s discussion of blurring the line between content and container are less textual, or book-based, and more audiovisual, but still relate to the digital context. The first is from a documentary entitled “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg,” directed by Jerry Aronson. I studied this film for my Managing Audiovisual Materials course last summer, and while watching it I noted that the clips of video interview footage with Ginsberg himself are of very poor quality. At times, tracking lines or static lines (as us VHS kids are familiar with) would show up in the picture. I am unsure whether this was due to mismanagement in preservation or simply old age or a low-quality format, but in any case it was quite distracting for the viewer. I think this is a good example of the container superimposing itself onto the content, as it calls attention to the medium in a very obvious way.

Another example which is somewhat similar, but takes place in another medium, is the phenomenon of pages which lose quality after being photocopied, and then photocopied again, etc. I was reminded of this annoying phenomenon recently in my drawing class, when my teacher provided us with a copy of a photo which had clearly been used before, and recopied from a copy, as someone had drawn gridlines on it. While this issue can easily be avoided by keeping a clean master to copy from, it happens often. Both of these examples demonstrate the container showing up in the content in a negative way, and drawing attention to the processes behind the object’s creation. In fact, I would argue that it tells a sort of story about the life of the object, in terms of where it has been and how it has arrived at its current location.