Future of the Book

When thinking about where I have encountered issues with representation, I thought of my experience using the database Early English Books Online (EEBO). It’s not quite as specific of an example as the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper’s, but my experience of this database was probably my first encounter with issues of representing print online, and how different projects privilege different types of representation. You can find the site here, and should be able to sign in through U of T.

In my third year of my undergraduate I was taking a Shakespeare course, and my professor had us do an assignment that asked us to engage with a variety of scholarly resources for a single project. Using EEBO was one of the tasks, while going to see a 1511 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis were among the other tasks we were given in our scholarly scavenger hunt (The assignment was focusing on Shakespeare’s education and the texts he would have read). This was the first time I had ever seen a rare book, and the first time I had consulted a database that replicated early printed text. Going to see the rare was obviously one of the most incredible experiences of my life and everything sensory about it stayed with me – the colour and feel of the paper, the binding, the woodcuts, the printed Latin I couldn’t read – but when I searched around various texts on EEBO, I naturally felt fairly underwhelmed comparatively. While the content and layout remained, that characteristic aged colour of the paper was gone, and there was only the pure white of a scanned image (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

This makes sense considering EEBO is database of digital facsimiles rather than a digital preservation project with high-resolution photos of actual rares. However the juxtaposition was especially jarring after having been looking at the real thing. I suddenly became aware that while the representation served a purpose, it was missing a great deal of the aspects of reading an early printed book. It also brought an awareness that the medium of a text could inform a reader’s experience in pretty exceptional ways. What was missing from the digital facsimile helped me appreciate the tactile and visual aspects of early print and the importance of conserving it.

It also gave way to further thoughts around representation and choice. It’s important to think of digitization as representation because there is a motive behind the act of taking a text and altering it so that it exists in a new state. Digitization both reveals and obscures in the sense that it has an awareness and an opinion about what the end product should say and do, which intentionally guides the reader in subtle (and less subtle) ways that are important to consider when engaging with any text.

This week’s question concerning representation brought to mind The Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt: A Hypertext Edition, edited by Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock. This text also ties in with Monday’s class discussion on popular perceptions of the Digital Humanities.

To explore this project for yourself, follow this link: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/selected/

While I find the design of this project unappealing, including the small window for text and the font choice of Courier New, I appreciate the way the text makes editorial choices visible.

The use of hyperlinks highlights particular sections of the poem. Words and lines associated with a link are highlighted in blue and underlined. This emphasizes the words in ways in which a footnote citation does not. Footnotes, while by no means invisible to the reader, are less obtrusive. In the print version of the text, the font is also all one colour (black). As a result, the editors direct readers’ attention quite obtrusively to specific parts of the poem. This asserts an editorial presence.

Is all of this necessary, though? The intended reader for this text is a scholar. I draw this conclusion because one can only find this text on the Trent website if they already know of its existence, either through searching the site or following a series of hypertext links through the rabbit hole which is the university’s website. When reading Pratt’s “The Titanic,” does a scholar really need to click on a link which brings them to a grainy picture of the vessel’s deck? A Google image search would provide the same result, and more.

I am curious to hear what my Future of the Book colleagues think about a digitization project such as this one.

I feel the need to begin this post with a disclaimer. I love ebooks. I don’t mind not having the tactile feeling of a physical book as I read. The tactile feeling of my ereader is enough for me. I have noticed differences in how I read and what I retain when reading ebooks versus physical books, and I have some preferences as to what genres I read in either. Still, I’m generally happy either way.

That being said, I’ve had a very bizarre experience reading manga in print and online. Not all manga, but one specific series. Manga, though I’m sure everyone knows this, are Japanese comics. So for me to even read them at all they must go through a pretty significant change. Not only must they be translated into another language, but Japanese characters (ex. for sound effects) are often integrated into the art, which forces the translators to choose between leaving them in, often unexplained, or replacing them with Roman letters. I’ve experienced both.

The series I had such a strange time with is Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (hereby called TRC) by the manga artist group Clamp, which was published from 2003-2009. As I was reading it, I quickly became impatient with the speed at which the volumes were released. Chapters of the manga were being published serially in Japan and I had to wait months for them to be collected, translated, and delivered into my greedy hands. So, I started reading them in scanlation. Scanlations are fan-made translations, written on top of scans of the Japanese originals and posted on the internet as they are released. They are often dark and smudgy, retaining the physical look of the paper as well as distortion caused by the scanning process. The translations themselves can be awkward.

Despite this, I read buckets of scanlated manga. TRC itself I read and reread multiple times, eventually obtaining image files of the scans and cobbling together my own PDF ebooks.

Eventually, I decided I should read the legitimate, legal, licenced translations. But, when I got the books from the library the experience was disorienting. The pages were too small compared to what I had on my computer – the images weren’t distinct enough, the print was too small. The need to hold the book open wide so that the gutter wouldn’t distort the illustrations annoyed me. The paper itself was too powdery, but it smelled very nice, more gentle than other books, and gave a creamy cast to the illustrations. I’d read other manga in physical form without noticing anything. Somehow, my brain couldn’t handle switching formats with this particular series.

Recently, I started buying TRC in ebook form. That reading experience too is very different. The lines are cleaner and the whites are brighter, which is lovely. And, they come with the licenced translations. Still, one disorienting difference is that the ebooks show the page spreads, both recto and verso. Having read the manga so many times page by page, image file by image file, it’s a strange experience. I am essentially retraining my brain to read this format.

I have read three different representations of this series, and each time it has been like reading a different thing. The scanlations focused on the textual, linguistic content. That was the reason for their existence, after all. The physical and ebook forms showcase the art more. Yet, the gutters of the physical books obscure some of the image content and page transitions, whereas the flatness of the ebooks makes it almost too easy to move from page to page.

In the end, I suppose I will continue to switch between formats. Each one has its benefits and drawbacks, and each supplies a unique and valuable experience.

Board games are a popular pastime and lend to socialization among friends and family members. There has been a resurgence in Toronto at places like Snakes and Lattes and their sister location Snakes and Lagers. When we think of digitization of these types of games, we think of computer or mobile games that transfer all the properties into the digital realm. However, I thought about when board games are only partially digitized and how assets add or take away from the experience.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a new game of Monopoly with the electronic banking system. Monopoly originated in the United States in 1903 as an educational tool to explain taxation (Wikipedia, 2016). It has evolved into a pastime enjoyed by families with many versions available, such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. In this new version, you are given a card with preloaded money and all transactions flow through it. I found it difficult to keep track of my money because I was use to seeing it in front of me and had little tips on how I would spend it. My strategy was to place my $100 and $500 bills under the board out of sight, so that when I was in a pinch I had that extra money to spend. Now, with everything on the card, I could no longer do so. In addition, you could no longer cheat! My brother tried to scam some money as the banker, but was unable to do so because everyone could see the transaction via the machine. I found that this change from a material cash system to an electronic one diminished the experience of the game. The feel of the money, visually keeping count of how much you had, and, yes, even skimming some off the top.

The change from a cash system to an electronic one was a reflection of how our society had changed. Rarely, do I see people walk around with cash; they rely on their debit and credit cards for everyday transactions. It is harder to keep track of your purchases this way and can easily lead to increased debt. It used to be that Monopoly would teach you money skills in the sense that you are given so much and once it’s gone (physically) you know you are bankrupt and need to sell assets to survive. With this cash system change it seems like those lessons are gone and replaced with the consumerism tied to digital money: you receive money electronically, you spend it using a credit card, and all you can see are numbers going up and down, from black to red. You no longer have the physical medium of money to learn the lesson of rational spending; the system becomes hidden with only a digital counter to belie its existence.

Citations

Hasbro Games, Monopoly Electronic Banking Game. 2016. http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/product/monopoly-electronic-banking-game:AD4A14AC-5056-900B-10AB-AE9AC7F1AC92

Wikipedia contributors, “Monopoly (game),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monopoly_(game)&oldid=701893421 (accessed January 27, 2016).

 

Board games are really popular right now (especially in Toronto). At first glance, this tactile, in-person social phenomenon seems to be a rebuke of all things digital, or at least a respite from them. Cardboard over circuit boards. Dice over devices.

But alongside board games are digital apps that recreate these games, ostensibly not changing anything about the game. The rules are the same. The artwork is often exactly the same.  It’s just on your iPad – well, kind of…

One of these games to make such a transition is designer Philippe Keyaerts’ Small World (Days of Wonder, 2009). And it’s a game I’ve played in its digital form. This is a game for 2-4 players . It plays like a streamlined Risk, players competing directly for territories. Here are some of the big differences between the physical and digital versions:

• There is music in the digital version. This music, by my ears, seems to reinforce the lightheartedness of the game with a lulling, cheery soundtrack.
• The game has quite a bit of math in it. But the digital version, as you’d expect, handles this digitally. On the one hand this ensures that the points keeping is more accurate. On the other hand, if this is being used as an educational activity for children, then the digital version’s automatic calculations would be a disadvantage compared to the physical version’s need for human brainpower.
• But the most significant change between the two versions is that the digital version allows AI opponents that a single player can compete against. Unlike the physical version, which requires in-person social interaction between players, the digital version does not. It’s easy to see why that may change the experience of the game. If board games are synonymous with in-person social activities, is any digital port of a board game really a board game?

 

Museum of Natural History, Berlin. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/science/putting-museums-samples-of-life-on-the-internet.html).

Okay, bear with me on this one. There’s a bunch of wormhole-y tangents that I hope will come together to make some sort of sense. I started this off thinking about attempts to digitize completely physical objects, things that exist undoubtedly in natural form. So, how about nature itself? It turns out that the Berlin Museum of Natural History is ambitiously undertaking a project that uses digital technology to create 3D images of the museum’s entire collection of insects. Erik Olsen describes how these are not simply scanned images of specimen drawers – rather, specimens are placed on “a rotating drum in a lightbox and photographed at many angles with a macro lens,” then, using computer software, the team stitches the photographs together which can be downloaded and seen from up to 100 angles (as many as 500 images can be taken of a single angle, and 3,000-5,000 images of a single specimen) (Olsen, 2015). Olsen notes that the team uses compression and an algorithm to load small portions of the resulting massive image at a time. See the result, called ‘ZooSphere’ here: http://www.zoosphere.net/. You can also see a video describing the project here: http://nyti.ms/1kkig5z.

This raised a lot of questions for me. There are numerous degrees of separation/representation going on here – there was the insect living in the wild, then the dead insect physically pinned/preserved in a drawer in the museum, then the digital 3D rendering of the image, posted publicly online – searchable, downloadable, viewable as a panorama. While not a ‘text’ per se, although perhaps in McKenzie’s broad definition – these insects still speak to Sperberg-McQueen’s assertion that “tools always shape the hand that wields them; technology always shapes the minds that use it. And so as we work more intimately with electronic texts, we will find ourselves doing those things that our electronic texts make easy for us to do” (1991, 34). How is it different for a biologist or researcher, to interact with these insect specimens online – ‘three-dimensional’ on a flat, digital screen? What do they ‘make easy for us to do’, or not? Are there aspects that couldn’t be observed in person, interacting with a fragile, precious specimen? Similarly, is there an ‘aura’ to the insect that is lost in digital form? That is untranslatable?

In a strange leap of brainstorming – this question also took me on a couple of separate (but I hope related) tangents.

One is London-based artist Stanza’s ‘The Binary Graffiti Club’, referred to as “a user friendly public participatory spectable [sic] and public engagement event across urban space creating new narratives for the playfull [sic] engagement of the environment, spectacle, performance, politics and art” (Stanza, 2013). The participants, made up by young members of the public, “[encode] the city with messages of binary code” (Stanza, 2013). Check it out here: http://stanza.co.uk/binary_club/index.html.

People dressed in black and white binary hoodies roam the city, tagging physical objects with messages in binary code. There’s something here, I’m just not sure what, yet. Stanza opened the Frequency Festival of Digital Culture in 2013 in Lincoln, England. The festival co-director noted that, “youths dressed in black hoodies swarmed the historic city streets of Lincoln during Frequency Festival 2013, their backs emblazoned with bold white digits, the zeros and ones. Their ominous presence was marked with a series of binary code graff-tags on official buildings throughout the city; messages of insurrection for a digital cult now active among us or analogue reminders of the digital soup of signals we wade through on a daily basis?  There’s an engaging playfulness and an aesthetic pleasure to Stanza’s work that pays rewards on deeper investigation.  His urban interventions remind us of the invisible occupation of the cyberspace around us and encourages us to ask whose hand manipulates these systems of control.” (Hale, 2013 in Stanza).

Speaking of hands, all of this has also made me think about the flurry of news a few years ago regarding the ghostly figures of Google book scanners’ hands appearing in books. Artist Benjamin Shaykin collected examples of this and other scanning mishaps and published them in a book called “Google Hands” (http://benjaminshaykin.com/Google-Hands). A similar collector, Paul Soulellis, curates ‘Library of the Printed Web’ (http://libraryoftheprintedweb.tumblr.com/), consisting of stuff pulled from the internet and bound into paper books, including a print-on-demand novel by Sean Raspet called “2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD 25RZ6KW4ZMAZSLJ0GBH0WNNVRNO7GU 2MBYMNCWYB49QDK1NDO19JONS66QMB
2RCC26DG67D187N9AGRCWK2JIHA7E2
2H1G5TYMNCWYM81O4OJSPX11N5VNJ0 A Novel,” (http://libraryoftheprintedweb.tumblr.com/post/52408927041/raspet-sean-2gfr24smezz2xmcvi5l8x9y38zj2jd)  which is “an accumulation of CAPTCHA test results,” which are “designed to verify that a user is human by requiring her to perform a visual recognition task (such as deciphering a distorted string of characters) and input the result into a text field. They thus screen out automated programs or “bots” from exploiting website weaknesses” (http://thehighlights.org/#captcha).

Again, I can’t help but think about the human labour of digitizing Google books (and how, despite attempts to efface it, it still sneaks its way into the final, digital product). Or about how the random results of tests meant to see if a computer user is human are now being compiled by humans, using computers, and printed on demand in physical book form. Or about humans dressed up as physical representations of binary code and tagging the city itself with binary messages that humans, not computers, will process and decipher. Or 3D digital renditions of insects, created in part, as a way “of documenting what we are about to lose” (Wheeler in Olsen, 2015). So, what have we lost? What is being reclaimed?

 

Bibliography:

Goldsmith, Kenneth. (2013). The artful accidents of google books. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-artful-accidents-of-google-books.

Olsen, Erik. (2015). Museum specimens find new life online. The New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/science/putting-museums-samples-of-life-on-the-internet.html.

Olsen, Erik. (2015). Digitizing natural history. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003978105/digitizing-natural-history.html?smid=pl-share.

Shaykin, Benjamin. (2009). Google hands. http://benjaminshaykin.com/Google-Hands.

Soulellis, Paul. Library of the printed web. http://libraryoftheprintedweb.tumblr.com/.

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. (1991). Text in the electronic age: Textual study and text encoding, with examples from medieval texts. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6 (1), 34-46.

Stanza (2013). The binary graffiti club. http://stanza.co.uk/binary_club/index.html.

The highlights. http://thehighlights.org/#captcha.

ZooSphere. http://www.zoosphere.net/.

When thinking of  a digitized object that impacted my experience of with am object the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Audiobook read by Stephen Fry comes to mind. I have read the original books awhile ago but while listening to the audiobooks my experience with the story was impacted in several different ways. Firstly the reader made choices as to which words to emphasis and how to pronounce them. At times the vocal choices the reader made were different from my original interpretation, changing my perception of the meaning of the words. Secondly, Stephen Fry read the book at a faster rate then I read. Generally, I read slowly as I imagine the scenes as I go and may pause to consider something I have read. When listening to the story I was not able to imagine or pause as I normally would. Lastly the audiobook version I was listening to did not save the place where one was listening to and thus every time I returned to I had to find my place. It felt very similar to loosing your bookmark when reading a book. While frustrating it made me wonder why this was not considered in the design and interrupted the flow of the story.

Though little dressed in scholarly research, several debates exist surrounding the benefits of reading versus listening to an audiobook. While some argue that the experiences to be cognitively similar, this is dependent on the type of story and lacks the emotional connection prevalent in holding a physical artifact (Khazan, 2011). Often these formats are experienced  differently, as audiobooks are associated with multitasking and books remaining stationary and focused. User interaction with audiobooks may be reflected in the choices the creator/ reader makes. Stories can move quicker as a listener driving to work may not need to reflect on the story as those sitting on their couch. Therefore users may come to expect differences their experience with a story whether a book or and audiobook.

Kali

Bibliography:

Khazan, Olga. (2011). Is Listening to Audio Books Really the Same as Reading? Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/olgakhazan/2011/09/12/is-listening-to-audio-books-really-the-same-as-reading/#2a22090576df

One book that has made a lasting impression on me in terms of its materiality has been Douglas Coupland’s JPod. As the story engages with the digital world of video game programmers, so does the format, pushing the boundaries between print and the digital.

There are a number of unusual characteristics that are in conversation with the digital text. There are continuous streaming sentences right on the insides of the book covers and first pages (which are usually left blank) in a Helvetica-esque modern looking sans serif font (Figure 1.).

 Figure 1.

There are also just pages that list numbers and computer code. At one point in the book a character locates a website that generates the first hundred thousand digits of pi and Coupland subsequently lists them page after page. The book even sets up the reader to engage with the story as if it were setting up a video game, giving the reader the option to “Play as Gene Simmons” or “Play as Iron Man” among the prefatory pages. Among  these pages, one cleverly fuses print and the digital and simply says: “Click Here” (Figure 2.). This particular example stood out for me because it implies an action on the reader’s behalf, a reference to a totally different type of reading experience that can’t be explored in print, and yet is cheekily employed here.

 Figure 2.

The sense of self aware hybridity is especially intriguing as it serves to further Emphasize Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner’s discussion of how “all books today are ‘born digital’ in the sense that at some point in their composition, editing, layout and printing they become (re)configured as data objects” (41). JPod works in almost the opposite sense, seeking to make the reader self aware of the book as digital in ways it can’t typically be. The aforementioned title page, encourages the reader to think of the narrative of the story in a leaping hyperlink sort of way, jumping to the next page instead of turning it. This serves the purpose of making the reader aware of how they read in different environments. It also serves to further blur the lines between the print and digital dichotomy bringing the migratory nature of text into the spotlight.

Bibliography:

Coupland, Douglas. JPod. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007. Print

Kirschenbaum, Matthew and Sarah Werner. “Digital Scholarship and   Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline”. Book History, Volume 17, 2014: 406-458. Online Journal.