Second-generation open-tagging system for sharing multimedia, links, files, and blogs in a way that allows users to annotate them as belonging to shareable categories:

“TagWorld is helping build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience.
        The Social Web empowers people’s ability to engage in self-expression and communicate and share information with whomever they choose. As the Internet’s influence evolves, a new social phase is emerging that calls for enabling people to place and have access to a broad range of personal information that they wish to place on the web. To support users, TagWorld sees five fundamental components for building out this new social web infrastructure: people, photos, blogs, tags and storage.” (from About on TagWorld site)

Starter Links: TagWorld home page | PC Magazine review

One of the paradigm-setting open-tagging systems that allows users to share links to “favorite” online resources and annotate them as belonging to particular categories of interest:

“del.icio.us is a collection of favorites – yours and everyone else’s. Use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite – they’ve already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.” (from About on del.icio.us site)

Starter Links: del.icio.us home page

Paradigm-seting open-tagging system for organizing and sharing photos. Though it does not bear directly on the Transliteracies problem of online reading, Flickr is relevant because it helped establish the model for open, shareable metadata—that is, for allowing users to annotate online resources in common:

“Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos – not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes around the photos as metadata, you can find them so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.” (from About Flickr on Flickr site)

Starter Links: Flickr home page

With the VRD a new technique of Head Mounted Displays evolve that don’t produce a real image on a physical screen any more, but project a virtual image directly onto the retina. They promise on the long run, low costs, light weight and higher resolutions which might make convenient reading possible for the first time in the history of HMDs.

“The VRD was invented at the University of Washington in the Human Interface Technology Lab (HIT) in 1991. The development began in November 1993. The aim was to produce a full color, wide field-of-view, high resolution, high brightness, low cost virtual display. Microvision Inc. has the exclusive license to commercialize the VRD technology. This technology has many potential applications, from head-mounted displays (HMDs) for military/aerospace applications to medical society.

The VRD projects a modulated beam of light (from an electronic source) directly onto the retina of the eye producing a rasterized image. The viewer has the illusion of seeing the source image as if he/she stands two feet away in front of a 14-inch monitor. In reality, the image is on the retina of its eye and not on a screen. The quality of the image he/she sees is excellent with stereo view, full color, wide field of view, no flickering characteristics. Using the VRD technology it is possible to build a display with the following characteristics:

• Very small and lightweight, glasses mountable
• Large field of view, greater than 120 degrees
• High resolution, approaching that of human vision
• Full color with better color resolution than standard displays
• Brightness sufficient for outdoor use
• Very low power consumption
• True stereo display with depth modulation
• Capable of fully inclusive or see through display modes” (from the NPS Article)

Starter Links:
Microvision|Product video|NPS Article

With better display quality, more storage space and a very sophisticated web infrastructure to support it, the IPod is growing into a multipurpose device for different kinds of media, that exceeds the original intention of a mp3 player by far.

The IPod video is much more than a mp3 player. In fact, it is a full-sized computer that is even able to have a version of linux installed. With video and audio podcasts there is a new way to handle content transfer of any kind. Furthermore, the IPod can be used as a ebook. With the IPodulator websites can be viewed and several books like for example the bible can be heard and read on the IPod on the go.

Starter Links:
IPodhacks.com|bibleplayer|ipodulator

Transliteracies Research Report By Marc Breisinger

Invention and adoption of the codex book:

The codex form of book – a “sheaf of bound pages? – became prevalent in Europe over the previously popular format of the scroll sometime around the fifth century A.D. In its inception and subsequent technical improvements, the codex revolutionized modern thought to include, among other things, a new understanding of individual and informative portability – through space, likewise through time. Increased efforts at portability of the codex not only directly added to the spread of literacy to different economic classes, but also contributed to changes in the format of writing towards the use of academic research and towards general “user-friendliness.? Notably, such technical developments mirror, or at least relate to recent concerns and trends in personal computing, including but not limited to the size and appearance of computer hardware, the layout and graphic design of web pages, and interface design of computer software.

Starter Links or References: Carter, John. ABC for Book Collectors. Revised by Nicholas Barker. 7th ed. Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1995 | Chappell, Warren. A Short History of the Printed Word. Edited by Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks Publishers, Inc., 1999.

Transliteracies Research Report By Robin Chin

Online multimedia library initially devoted to giving the reader access to works of antiquity. Since its inception the project has expanded to include literature of different time periods.

“Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Our primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas.” (from the Perseus Digital Library.)

Starter Links: Perseus Digital Library

Online archive of past web sites, including defunct or no longer operable pages. Takes its name from “Peabody’s Improbable History,” a frequent short on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

“Browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.” (from Archive.org.)

Starter Links: Internet Archive |

Transliteracies Research Report By Lisa Swanstrom

Service that aids scholars in the organization of academic reading materials online.

“CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software.

Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. ” (from CiteULike.)

Starter Links: CiteULike

Learning tool that uses voice-recognition technology to assist the student with reading aloud.

“Research shows that reading aloud to a supportive listener is one of the best ways for children to develop fluency. Soliloquy Reading Assistant provides kids with this guided oral reading experience, using the computer as the supportive listener. We deploy cutting-edge speech recognition technology and research-validated intervention to help students master a text and allow them—and their parents and teachers—to chart their progress. The result is a fun, interactive experience for kids and a comprehensive real-time assessment tool for teachers.” (from Soliloquy Reading Assistant.)

Starter Links: Soliloquy Reading Assistant | project description from next/text

Online resource out of Brown University for reading Boccaccio’s Decamaron. Includes links, maps, and other digital supplements.

“The site can serve as a primer for newcomers to the Decameron, with useful sections on Boccaccio’s period and literary influences, and profiles of major characters and themes. A more advanced scholar can take advantage of complete, searchable texts in Italian and English, period music recordings, an extensive critical bibliography, and analytical tools such as a motif index and a concordance. The “pedagogy” section provides resources that teachers and students can use in their courses – reading guides, sample papers, course modules, and a variety of articles on the meaningful use of technology in the classroom.” (from next/text.)

Starter Links: Decamaron Web | Project description from next/text

New reading inteface which reconfigers the page into a landscape of interlinking information.

“The page itself, one of the most fundamental components of the book, is undergoing a material and conceptual transformation as the static, flat, delimited space of the paper page gives way to the animated, interactive, unlimited, deep space of the digital book. “Hypermedia Berlin”—which grew out of a collaboration between the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL) and UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH)—represents an excellent example of the formal innovation made possible by digital media. This project crafts an entirely new kind of page out of a gallery of highly detailed, interlinked, illustrated and annotated map interfaces, which can be navigated with an easy-to-use zoom feature. In other words, the page itself has been re-oriented to “landscape.” This alternative book form organizes its content topographically and chronologically; encouraging readers to interact with and consider its subject differently. History, the map interface tells us, is tied as strongly to place as it is to time.

Presently, the site offers 25 navigable maps, “each map, corresponding to a key date in Berlin’s nearly 800 hundred year history, consists of an array of virtual reality “hotspots,” popup information screens, and critical essays documenting and analyzing significant regions, architectural structures, events, people, and cultural products from that moment in Berlin’s history.” Using the zoom function, students and scholars can study the maps in detail. The overlay function, which makes maps semi-transparent so that one can be placed on top of the other, allows the reader to analyze changes in Berlin’s landscape.” (from next/text)

Starter Links: project description on next/text

“Magic Book” project that employs augmented reality to create three-dimensional images that change with each page.

“Without goggles, someone approaching AR Volcano would only see what looked like a conventional paper book propped (albeit one which is only six pages long) on a podium. With the goggle, the computer software recognizes special patterns embedded in the book and replaces them with photo-realistic 3D objects. In this photo, a volcanic eruption takes place over the course of several minutes. The image will appear no matter where the user positions themselves around the book, and a new image can be seen by simply turning the page.

AR Volcano has a significant feature that sets it apart from Billinghurst’s previous magic books and makes the technology much more suitable for creating learning environments. In earlier books — such as the Black Magic Book, which tells the story of the America’s Cup Race — the user was positioned as a passive spectator in an enhanced “reading” environment. AR Volcano, however, provides an interactive slider that allows the user to control volcano formation and eruption as well as the movement of tectonic plates. In the image above, the slider (a physical slider attached to the book podium), is adjusted so that the volcano is erupting at a rapid pace; in the image below, the slider is adjusted downwards so that the movement of tectonic plates on the earth’s surface occurs more gradually. The audio narrative also adjusts, so that it keeps pace with the user’s movement through the pages of the book.” (from the next/text web site.)

Starter Links: next/text’s works in progress page

Institute for the Future of the Book’s project to encourage the evolution of the book from printed form to new-media entity.

“In this networked age, the printed textbook has likely reached the end of its useful life cycle, but a robust digital competitor has yet to emerge. The nexttext project seeks to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook. The work presented here offers multiple visions of what might be possible. “(from next/text.)

Starter Links: next/text | Academic Commons article about next/text | Institute for the Future of the Book

Web site devoted to discussion about information, literacy, and new media. Publishes essays, reviews, and interviews, and showcases educational tools.

“Academic Commons publishes essays, editorials, thought pieces, screeds, and musings about digital tools and innovative practices for teaching, learning, and publishing with technology.” (from Academic Commons.)

Starter Links: Academic Commons | LoLa (learning objects-learning activities) Exchange

Organization of various entities devoted to the digitization of books in the public domain.

“The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation.” (from the Open Content Alliance web page.)

Starter Links: OCA | “Microsoft, Joining Growing Digital-Library Effort, Will Pay for Scanning of 150,000 Books,” Jeffrey Young’s article in the Oct. 27, 2005 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education | “Scribes of the Digital Era,” Jeffrey Young’s follow-up article in the Jan. 27, 2006 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education

Random House’s new plan to offer their books online on a pay-per-page basis.

“Unwilling to let a Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft dictate terms in cyberspace, Random House Inc, the world’s largest trade publisher, is taking the industry lead. In early November it outlined ways it would begin to offer its books directly to consumers on a page-per-view basis. Random House will get at least four cents a page and split that roughly in half with authors for fiction and narrative nonfiction. Other types of books, such as cookbooks, will have different pricing models. Random House is discouraging copying fo the texts by delivering pages in low-resolution files.” (from “Digital Is Our Destiny.” )

Starter Links: Random House Announcement | “Digital Is Our Destiny,” Tom Lowry’s article in the November 28, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek

Teaching tool created by Ned Bates and Gail McDonald that presents the canto as a hypertext.

“Why hypertext Pound? This question can be read two ways, Why hypertext Pound?, or of what benefit is computer technology to the understanding of the Cantos? or, Why hypertext Pound?, of what value is the work of Ezra Pound to the postmodern technologies and the postmodern mind?

The Cantos are littered with obscure and didactic references which require the curious reader to consult a variety of texts which span time, space, and culture. In Canto IV Greek, Latin, Provencal, Japanese, Chinese and American poetry and lore are cited. So to be able to leap from the poem to the cited reference and back again certainly saves the reader several hours at the library and a lot of juggling and flipping of books. And yet there is more to this application than just the employment of a postmodern convenience to a modernist text. ” (from the Kybernekyia web site.)

Starter Links: Kybernekyia

Avant-garde project described and planned in the early 1930s to create a reading machine that would use cinematic technology to make words move across a reading surface.

Note: The article describing the “Readies” was published in transition (1930) and in the stand-alone publication The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930). It also inspired a collection of short works created for the machine, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931), which included poems by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Filippo Marinetti.

“The written word hasn’t kept up with the age. The movies have outmanoeuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies. I’m for new methods of reading and writing and I believe the up-to-date reader deserves an eye-ful when he buys something to read. I think the optical end of the written word has been hidden over a bushel too long. I’m out for a bloody revolution of the word” (1). (from Bob Brown’s The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930, UCLA Special Collections.)

“Writing must become more optical, more eye-teasing, more eye-tasty, to give the word its due and tune-in on the age. Books are antiquated word containers…. modern word=conveyors are needed now, reading will have to be done by machine; microscopic type on a moveable tape running beneath a slot equipped with a magnifying glass and brought up to life size before the reader’s birdlike eye, saving white space, making words more moving, out=distancing the flatulent winded ones and bringing the moment brightly to us” (13).
(from Bob Brown’s The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930, UCLA Special Collections.)

Starter Links or References: The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930) | Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931)

Transliteracies Research Report By Jessica Pressman

Online journal for critical discussion about new media and electronic literature.

“Electronic Book Review (ebr) is an online scholarly journal promoting print/screen translations and new modes of critical writing on the Internet… Over the past two years, the ebr site has hosted a prominent and largely spontaneous series of debates on electronic textuality, cyberculture, and the value of digital design literacy for scholarship and critical writing on the Web.? (from Electronic Literature on the Web.)

Starter Links: electronic book review

Transliteracies Research Report By Jessica Pressman

Online literary journal for new media poetry.

“...Poems that Go explores the intersections between motion, sound, image, text, and code. The work we feature explores how language is shaped in new media spaces, how interactivity can change the meaning of a sign, how an image can conflict with a sound, and how code exerts machine-order on a text.” (from Poems that Go.)

Starter Links: Poems that Go | PTG discussion forum

Transliteracies Research Report By Jessica Pressman

Project from the MIT press that couples traditional (print) book technologies with new media innovations.

“Mediawork Pamphlets pair leading writers and contemporary designers to explore art, literature, design, music, and architecture in the context of emergent technolgies and rapid economic and social change.” (from the Media Pamphlets web site)

Starter Links: Media Pamphlets | Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines

Transliteracies Research Report By Jessica Pressman

Blog exploring the intersections between literature, literary practice, and new media technology.

“The science fiction writer Harlen Ellison once described a stunt in which he sat in the window of a bookshop all day writing a story. He was curious about what would happen if writing became a public spectacle rather than the mysterious, solitary endeavor it usually is. That scene piqued my imagination and stuck with me, enough so that when I explored the idea of writing an electronic dissertation in the mid-1990s (at the same time the Web was emerging as a popular medium) I immediately decided do it it “live,? in “real time? on the network. That is, I would simply publish drafts of my work, and revise them, and the whole would take shape as a massive, interlaced hypertext.” (from the author’s blog.)

Starter Links: MGK blog

Group blogging community designed to help foster scholarly dialogue in a digital mileau.

“ElectraPress is a collaborative, open-access scholarly project intended to facilitate the reimagining of academic discourse in digital environments. What’s here at the moment is little more than a few electronic hammers and some virtual nails, but I hope that this site might enable the kinds of free experimentation what will produce a highly integrated collection of resources for the online publication of new scholarly projects. These resources might include — but would hardly be limited to — RSS feeds for scholarly blogs, repositories for digital articles, and an electronic imprint for the publication of monograph-length work of both traditional textual and newer “born digital? forms.” (from the Electrapress web site.)

Starter Links: ElectraPress | ElectraPess Forum | wiki

Group devoted to studying, understanding, and enabling the evolution of the book in new and multi-media formats.

“Over the next several decades, electronic, screen-based technologies will emerge which preserve all that is good and wonderful about printed books but which add profoundly powerful new capabilities. For example, future books will:

• allow authors to express ideas using audio, video and simulations in addition to text and graphics.
• contain significant and direct links to materials stored elsewhere on the internet.
• create a community of readers and authors by enabling people reading the same document or exploring the same subject area to connect to each other directly over the internet.

While it may be argued that the form of printed books (pages bound together by a spine) was inevitable, screen-based books have no inevitable, physically-imposed form. The challenge confronting us is to develop new forms that empower both authors and readers and enhance intellectual and social discourse throughout society.” (from the Institute of the Future of the Book web site.)

Starter Links: Institute of the Future of the Book Home Page

Online conversation hub devoted to the discussion of a variety new media literature and art works.

“A group blog about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, shared virtual environments, and more. Andrew, Mary, Michael, Nick, Noah, and Scott all work as both theorists and developers, and are interested in authorship, design, and technology, as well as issues of interaction and reception. about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art. ” (from the Grand Text Auto Web Site.)

Starter Links: Grand Text Auto | ifwiki.org

On-line journal focused on the future of the book in the Internet age. Inaugural issue features a roundtable discussion about the “Future of the Printed Word.”

“We experience a world of ever-expanding websites, CD-ROMs and other digital electronic media led by the developed industrial nations today. What will become of the paper-printed media of books in relation to the rapid evolution of this new media?

“Much has been discussed about digital media in the context of multimedia and its interactive features, but not in relationship to carrying printed words and characters. If they were discussed at all, a negative outlook has been very pervasive. Is there any way we can expect a positive effect of the new media on books?

“Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?” (from the Book and the Computer web site.)

Starter Links: Book and the Computer Journal |
Roundtable Discussion | First issue’s table of contents

Project devoted to considering strategies for information storage and retrieval.

“People are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of information about themselves, including emails, web browsing histories, digital images, and audio recordings. This tsunami of data presents numerous challenges to computer science, including: how to physically store such “digital memories? over decades; how to protect privacy, especially when data such as photos may involve more than one person; how to extract useful knowledge from this rich library of information; how to use this knowledge effectively, for example in knowledge-based systems; and how to effectively present memories and knowledge to different kinds of users. The unifying grand challenge I to manage this data, these digital memories, for the benefit of human life and for a lifetime.? (from the Memories for Life project proposal.)

Starter Links: Memories for Life (.pdf file)

Interactive typing tool that allows the user to type letters into a field and create text art with them.

“I feel a great interest in application or software to communicate and represent one’s mind and thougth through internet. Board(bbs) is very easy and useful thing for communicating and board is evolving day by day such as blog. but why we have to type words in the same way such as typing from left to right. that is typical and easy to recognize but not interesting, sometimes boring. This is one of the easy and exquisite way of showing one’s word. You can say anything with your letters by drawing them.” from the typedrawing web site.)

Starter Links: typedrawing | storyabout.net

Interactive writing/art project that makes use of the user’s keyboard input.

“Textension is a series of ten interactive typing expressions. Its goal is to explore metaphors and aesthetics used for designing automated typesetting process on the personal computer beyond the traditional convention of typewriting. Each of the ten pieces is a typing exp