Graduate Student, English Dept., UCLA (more…)

Graduate student, English Dept., UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Graduate Student, Visual Studies Program, UC Irvine (more…)

Graduate Student, Art Dept., UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Graduate Student, School of Education, UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Graduate Student, Media Arts & Technology Program, UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Graduate Student, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Essay arguing against the perceived tendency in new-media art/literaryworks to reduce language to just an element in a larger, multimedia field:

“The word is not valued in a hierarchy over other media elements…. It doesn’t appear to be of great import to new media writers, especially those involved in interactivity, 3D spaces and multimedia, that they might actually utilize the technology to magnify the impact and specificity of language as we have come to know it through the centuries. Rather, the tendency has been to reduce or evaporate this impact for the sake of something else—experience of language in space or time, for example, or of language as some sort of ambient experience, or, in this case, of language as a participant in a recombinant universe jointly occupied by sounds, images, videos and the user’s interactions…. However, I’d like to argue that one cannot simply say that the word is another element to be treated like a sound or a color if one is to do justice to the notion of language as a very specific ability that humans possess, one that has been shaped by the sediments of conventions and conversations layered over several centuries.” (from section 1 of essay)

Starter Links: Essay in Electronic Book Review, 5 November 2005

Survey-based study of the change in reading practices over time in digital environments:

“Previous studies attempted to explore reading in the digital environment through examining the evolution of reading or observing how people read documents (especially electronic documents) within a specific period of time. The goal of this study is to explore reading in the digital environment from a different perspective. Instead of observing how people read electronic documents, this study attempts to investigate reading behavior in the digital environment by analyzing how people’s reading behavior has changed over the past ten years. Understanding changes in reading behavior would help in designing more effective digital libraries and empower users in the digital environment.” (from introduction to article)

Starter Links: HTML and .pdf versions of article in Journal of Documentation, 61, no. 6 (2005): 700-12

Transliteracies research reports focus on one or more of the “Objects for Study” in the project’s Research Clearinghouse. Reports are relatively brief documents designed to give a broad, multi-disciplinary audience a quick, efficient grasp of the object of study, its context, and its possible relevance for the issues important to the Transliteracies Project.

The standard report format is as follows:

1. Summary: 200 words or less.
2. Description: Description of the object for study (accompanied by appropriate images, screenshots, etc.). The description is designed to be as objective and efficient as possible, in the manner of who / what / where / when / how / why. It may include brief excerpts quoted from home pages, mission statements, introductions to articles, and so on.
3. Research Context: Identification and quick description of the relevant, contemporary field of research, together with a suggestion of why this object for study might be of current interest to the field.
4. Technical Analysis: Synopsis of main technical specifications, methods, or approaches. “Technical” has varying meanings depending on the nature of the object for study. A report on a hardware invention, software innovation, or new technical protocol (e.g., the early codex book, woodcuts, lithography, e-ink, interface technology or design, search technology, XML, text-encoding, etc.) might include a hardware, software, or usage description as appropriate. A report on a social-science, humanities, or art work might include a description of theoretical approach, evidentiary method, etc. (evidentiary method, for example, is one of the innovations of William St. Clair’s 2004 book on The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period). A report on an artistic form (e.g., ode, ballad, emblem, electronic poem, new media art installation) might include a description of such features as structure, versification, typography, layout, graphic design, software platform, database design, etc.
5. Evaluation of Opportunities/Limitations for the Transliteracies Topic: Speculative commentary on what the object for study might offer to the Tranliteracies goal of understanding and “improving” present-day online reading practices. What are the Transliteracies research opportunities or directions suggested by this object of study? What are the limitations or problems of such an approach?
6. Resources for Further Study: Short bibliography of works or links.
7. Optional: Point(s) for Expansion: Links or cross-references to related items in Objects for Study or other related issues that a fuller article might research.

Research reports should be sent to the Transliteracies administrative research assistant (Lisa Swanstrom) for copy-editing, formatting, and posting to the site (with a cc: to Project Director Alan Liu). [Contact info]

Classification and taxonomy are not the main work of the Transliteracies Project. However, such work necessarily reflects, or influences, the research of the project as it evolves its working definition of “online reading” and moves toward specifying a full “framework” for research and development. Categorizing the “objects for study” that Transliteracies uses to guide its research is part of the underlying thinking that goes into the research process.

Such classificatory thinking emerges from the purely pragmatic into speculative inquiry at the point where the categories strain the default ordering schemes of alphabetization or chronology (themselves technical innovations in the history of text that are objects for study). At this point, there is a need for logical sequences or meta-categorizations that expose underlying hypotheses about the structure and scope of “online reading” as a topic.

The ideal grouping and sequencing scheme for topics will suggest enough order to be useful, but not be so firm or intricate that it freezes things in place and constrains what can enter into the scheme. Theoretically, of course, a complete taxonomy would be a complex, multi-dimensional matrix viewable from the angle of any of the following key factors: historical precedence, hardware innovation, programming or encoding innovation, interface or formatting innovation, impact on individual user experience, impact on social or collective experience, institutional value, and so on. (An n-dimensional visualization generated by a self-organizing map program might be the ideal means of creating such a matrix.) But the drawback of such a complex matrix if introduced too early in a research project is that it imposes an “overhead” whose creation and maintenance siphons off a disproportionate amount of work.

The current grouping and sequencing of categories for Transliteracies’s “Objects for Study”, therefore, is purposely looser and more dynamic—merely a receiving and holding structure for bottom-up curiosity about the actual “objects.” It consists of just one approximate axis through the multi-variant matrix. This axis may be conceived as a set of topical “stacks” running from hardware through software and interface design ultimately to user (and socio-cultural) experience (as well as the history of reading). Categories convened in any one stack usually have multiple connections to other stacks. But initially it makes sense to situate them where they are because that is the focus that is “dominant” in the research. (The Russian Formalists used the phrase “the dominant” to describe the particular device in a literary work that focalized the active area of experimentation or governed other features. Thus, for instance, all poems may contain lines, stanzas, meters, alliteration, rhymes, metaphors, and so on [or their deliberate opposites]; but in certain periods, poets focused on experimentation with one feature or another and let that experimentation carry the momentum of their overall agenda. In early twentieth-century poetry, for instance, the metaphor or verbal “image” was the focus of experimentation, and tended to suppress such other features as meter or rhyme.) A relatively clear case, for example, is the MIT Media Lab’s plans for a ”$100 Laptop” for developing nations, which (if implemented on a wide scale), would have many socio-cultural implications for online reading. But this object is categorized in the “hardware stack” in the Transliteracies scheme because engineering and manufacturing innovation is the leading edge of research.

The Transliteracies ordering scheme of categories will flex and change as further objects for study suggest revisions.

Originally Japanese innovation of serial, small-chunk novels and soap operas for cell-phone users:

“While some traditional publishers cling to the belief that consumers will forever prefer paper publications over reading from a PC or a laptop screen, Japanese teens are happily reading novels on some of the smallest screens available: cell phone displays! With millions of Japanese carrying phones with online access, checking and reading email on the go has become common place. This paved the way for novels written especially for phone owners, and sent to them in email installments of up to 1,600 characters.” (from 2004 Springwise Newsletter article)

Starter Links: 2004 Springwise Newsletter article | 2005 Associated Press story | Wired.com article

Project created in 2002-5 in the Brown U. CAVE-Writing Worshop; features dynamic, interactive text in a CAVE environment:

“Screen was created in the ‘Cave,’ a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave’s walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play – as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn’t settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster, struck words don’t always return to where they came from, and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse…. In addition to creating a new form of bodily interaction with text through its play, Screen moves the player through three reading experiences – beginning with the familiar, stable, page-like text on the walls, followed by the word-by-word reading of peeling and hitting (where attention is focused), and with more peripheral awareness of the arrangements of flocking words and the new (often neologistic) text being assembled on the walls.” (from )

Starter Links: Description with images on Noah Wardrip Fruin’s Hyperfiction.org site | Iowa Review Web Interview with Noah Wardrip Fruin (with videos of Screen) | Brown U. CAVE-Writing Worshop

Software from Jibble.org to visualize the social network created in an IRC channel:

“PieSpy is an IRC bot that monitors a set of IRC channels. It uses a simple set of heuristics to infer relationships between pairs of users. These inferrences allow PieSpy to build a mathematical model of a social network for any channel. These social networks can be drawn and used to create animations of evolving social networks. PieSpy has also been used to visualize Shakespearean social networks.” (from Jibble.org’s PieSpy site)

Starter links: Jibble.org PieSpy page | Visualization of the social network implied in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, treated as a communicational network

Project to create text-mining, pattern-recognition, and visualization software to enable the discovery of significant patterns across large digital text archives:

“In search-and-retrieval, we bring specific queries to collections of text and get back (more or less useful) answers to those queries; by contrast, the goal of data-mining (including text-mining) is to produce new knowledge by exposing unanticipated similarities or differences, clustering or dispersal, co-occurrence and trends. Over the last decade, many millions of dollars have been invested in creating digital library collections: at this point, terabytes of full-text humanities resources are publicly available on the web. Those collections, dispersed across many different institutions, are large enough and rich enough to provide an excellent opportunity for text-mining, and we believe that web-based text-mining tools will make those collections significantly more useful, more informative, and more rewarding for research and teaching.” (from Nora project description)

Starter Links: Nora Project home page

“Online reading” may be defined as the experience of “text-plus” media by individuals and groups in digital, networked information environments. The “plus” indicates the zone of negotiation—of mutation, adaptation, cooptation, hybridization, etc.—by which the older dialogue among print, writing, orality, and audiovisual media commonly called “text” enters into new relations with digital media and with networked communication technologies. Aspects of this “plus” include:

1. The negotiation between technology and usage to create a material practice of reading, where “material practice” indicates the necessarily blended realms of technology and human experience. Just as historians of the book have detailed the relation between the invention of printing and the way people communicate, think, and live, so future historians of “online reading” will need to study contemporary innovations in both technology and usage.

• Toward the technological side of the continuum, specific topics of interest include: hardware inventions for the fixed or portable display of text, networked transmission technologies, search and browsing technologies, human factors interface (HFI) innovations, text-encoding or “markup” innovations (e.g., XML and TEI), graphic design innovations.

• Toward the usage side of the continuum, specific topics of interest include: browsing, searching, scanning, jumping, filtering, aggregating, organizing, and other kinds of discontinuous, low-attention, peripheral-vision, or machine-assisted reading practices that only partially map over predecessor practices of literacy. But also: new ways to focalize or intensify reading among the clutter (as in the ability of RSS and similar tools to create a virtual “my newspaper”).

  2. The negotiation between individual and social practices of reading. Networked, digital environments not only alter the way an individual reads with the enhancement of a standalone computer, PDA, or cell phone; it also brings back into prominence the historically important social, collective dimension of reading (as instanced by Web blogs or the Google search-engine technology that filters hits according to popularity or relevance in a community of referring Web pages). Specific topics of interest include:

• The formation and conduct of geographically distributed social groups at various levels of scale on the Internet based on such means as email, listservs, blogs, social-networking Web sites, and so on.

• The currently underdeveloped technologies and practices for reading online together at a single location, as in a classroom.

  To some extent, the problem of online reading and social groups is shadowed by a technological facsimile of that problem: the pseudo-community of machines reading autonomously from each other across platforms and applications through the XML-based technologies that underlie the new online text archives, “Web services,â€? and RSS newsreaders.

  3. The negotiation between media. “Text” has historically existed as a negotiation between media, including oral, written, print, visual, and from the nineteenth-century on, electronic media. Currently, it is a constitutive element in the age of “multimedia” at both the level of displayed communication (as in the intermediation of text, graphics, and animation on a Web site) and of underlying code. Specific topics of interest include:

• The reconfiguration of text in relation to audio, graphic, and tactile (haptic) elements in contemporary information design.

• The way that changing standards of “information literacy,” artistic practice, and even hacking are altering the relation between reading the intended communicational “content” and reading at the level of source code (literacy as code literacy, or code as itself an evolving media form).

  4. The negotiation between historical and contemporary reading practices. As indicated by such terms as “page,” “scroll,” “list,” or “index” as applied to the World Wide Web, online reading necessarily recalls historical reading technologies and usages even as it evolves those material practices. No research into contemporary online reading, therefore, is possible without considering the interplay between inherited conventions and recent inventions, expectations and improvisations. The currently vigorous “history of the book” and “print culture” fields—along with the newer field of “media archaeology”—are necessary adjuncts to the exploration of online reading.

Self-organizing graphing program for visualizing large bodies of data, including Web forum posts; being developed at UCSB’s Four Eyes Lab:

“pStruct enables content to organize itself dynamically, based on similarities to other pieces of data, as well as users’ interaction with the forum. The result is an unstructured graph that responds in life-like ways to the interaction of data and users…. pStruct is built on a multithreaded Java architecture designed to maintain system responsiveness when faced with hundreds of users and millions of pieces of content. Every post to the forum is stored in a database for archival purposes. A subset of the posts are kept in memory as ‘live’ content which users are presented with and can interact with. When a post is no longer live, it is saved to the database for later retrieval. Each live entity runs as a separate thread, maintaining connections to other entities (posts, users, etc.), responding to requests and seeking out new relationships. While pStruct is currently built to act as a web forum backend, the architecture is general enough to allow for management of any data storage and content retrieval system.” (from UCSB Four Eyes Lab site)

Starter Links: UCSB Four Eyes Lab description of pStruct

New digital projection display device; UCSB’s Four Eyes Lab is currently working on adding interactivity to it:

“The FogScreen is a new invention which makes objects seem to appear and move in thin air! It is a screen you can walk through! The FogScreen is created by using a suspended fog generating device, there is no frame around the screen. The installation is easy: just replace the conventional screen with FogScreen. You don´t need to change anything else – it works with standard video projectors…. With two projectors, you can project different images on both sides of the screen.” (from Fogscreen company site)

Starter Links: Fogscreen home page | UCSB Four Eyes Lab’s Interactive FogScreen project

Transliteracies Research Report By Marc Breisinger and James K. Ford

Amazon.com’s recent extensions of its “Search Inside the Book” feature:

“Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) today announced two innovative programs to benefit readers, authors and publishers. Building on its successful Search Inside the Book technology, which allows customers to search the complete interior text of hundreds of thousands of books, the company is currently developing two new programs that will enable customers to purchase online access to any page, section, or chapter of a book, as well as the book in its entirety.
     The first program, Amazon Pages, will ‘un-bundle’ the physical-world experience of buying and reading a book so that customers can simply and inexpensively purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, an entrepreneur interested in marketing his or her business could purchase the relevant chapters from several best-selling business books.
     The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to ‘upgrade’ their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access.” (from 2005 )

Starter Links: Amazon.com press release | CNET News.com interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com | LibraryJournal.com article

Google’s controversial, large-scale effort in collaboration with several major research libraries to put print books online:

“Search the full text of books to find ones that interest you and learn where to buy or borrow them…. Just do a search on Google Book Search or on Google.com. When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we’ll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you’ll see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows information about the book plus a few snippets – a few sentences of your search term in context. You may also see the Sample Pages View if the publisher or author has given us permission or the Full Book View if the book is out of copyright. In all cases, you’ll also see ‘Buy this Book’ links that lead directly to online bookstores where you can buy the book.” (from Google site)

Starter Links: Google Book Search | Google’s “About Google Book Search” | Google’s Blog for the Book Search Project | 2004 Washington Post article | 2005 CNET News.com article on the ensuing copyright controversity with publishers

Transliteracies Research Report By Lisa Swanstrom

The Dialogue company’s Flybook computer:

“Among the Asian makers of Windows laptops…the game for some time has been, ‘How small can you go?’... A Taiwan company called Dialogue has placed a new dot along that curve with an intriguing micro-laptop called the Flybook. It’s a full-blown Windows XP computer, complete with touch screen and stylus, that’s not much bigger than a DVD case (9.3 by 6.1 inches, 2.7 pounds).” (from )

Starter Links: Flybook home page | New York Timesreview of the Flybook

Flexible, paper-like display technology based on “eink” concept:

“An Electronic Paper Display is a display that possess a paper-like high contrast appearance, ultra-low power consumption, and a thin, light form. It gives the viewer the experience of reading from paper, while having the power of updatable information. EPDs are a technology enabled by electronic ink – ink that carries a charge enabling it to be updated through electronics. Electronic ink is ideally suited for EPDs as it is a reflective technology which requires no front or backlight, is viewable under a wide range of lighting conditions, including direct sunlight, and requires no power to maintain an image.” (from the E Ink corporation’s page on EPDs)

Starter Links: | E Ink, Inc. home| Business Week Article

Current initiative to create flexible, rollable display screens based on OLED technology:

“The display is functionally similar to the LCD (liquid crystal display) panels used inside TVs and notebooks, but with a crucial difference. Instead of containing glass substrates, the screen features a substrate of flexible plastic, allowing the display to bend.” (from CNET News.com article on flexible screens)

Starter Links: Wikipedia article on OLED | CNET News.com article on Samsung flexible LCD

Basic concept of TEI (and of text-encoding in general) as a markup approach to digitizing literary and other texts:

“The TEI was founded in 1987 to develop guidelines for encding machine-readable texts of interest in the humanities and social sciences. Its work was supported by the Association for Computing and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Association for Computational Linguistics, and received generous grant funding from the Mellon Foundation, the EEC, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other institutions. The “P3” Guidelines were delivered in 1994, and have become the de facto standard for encoding of literary and linguistics texts, corpora, and the like.” (from the TEI FAQ)

Starter Links: TEI home | See also Michael Sperberg-McQueen’s “A Gentle Introduction to SGML” for an overview of the text-encoding or text markup concept

Basic concept and implications of XML (and markup language approaches in general):

“Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.” (from W3C Page on XML)

Starter Links: W3C Page on XML | Wikipedia article | See also Michael Sperberg-McQueen’s “A Gentle Introduction to SGML” for an overview of the text-encoding ot text “markup” concept

Transliteracies Research Report By Marc Breisinger

Rubrication from the age of manuscripts to that of digital search “highlighting”:

[under construction]

Starter Links or References:

The invention of word spacing and punctuation:

”... the earliest hieroglyphic and alphabetic inscriptions had no punctuation symbols at all. No commas to indicate pauses and no periods between sentences. In fact, there weren’t even spaces between words. Nor did the early Greek and Roman writers use any form of punctuation. Knowing exactly how to read the words, where to put the intonations, pauses, etc., was an art, and one that required practice…. The use of spaces ( ) for interword separation didn’t appear until much later, roughly 600-800 AD. By the seventh century, the convention was quite common. In some early medieval manuscripts, two vertically aligned dots represented a full stop at the end of a sentence. Eventually one of the dots was dropped, and the remaining dot served as a period, colon or comma, depending on whether it was aligned with the top, middle, or base of the lowercase letters.” (from “History of Punctuation,” Complete Translation Services, Inc.)

Starter Links or References: Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996): 47-50 | Complete Translation Services, Inc. article on “History of Punctuation”(article on site)

The historically unique invention of the phonetic alphabet and its later evolution:

[under construction]

Starter Links or References:

Project to design and produce a $100 laptop to be distributed to users through government programs:

“Why do children in developing nations need laptops?
Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to “learn learning” through independent interaction and exploration.” (from MIT Media Lab $100 Laptop site)

Starter Links: $100 Laptop site | CNET News.com articles (1 | 2) | Chronicle of Higher Education article

Transliteracies Research Report By Kim Knight

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Riverside (more…)

Visiting Graduate Student, Computer Science Dept., UC Santa Barbara, from the Ludwig – Maximilian – University Munich, Germany (more…)

Graduate Student, English Department, UCLA (more…)

Online journal designed to publish peer-reviewed work on digital humanities research in such a way as to establish technical standards adapted to born-digital or hybrid print/digital research (inaugural issue scheduled for March 2006):

“an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), DHQ is also a community experiment in journal publication, with a commitment to:

• experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
• co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
• using open standards to deliver journal content

• developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly international character of ADHO

  DHQ will publish a wide range of peer-reviewed materials, including:

• Scholarly articles
• Editorials and provocative opinion pieces
• Experiments in interactive media
• Reviews of books, web sites, new media art installations, digital humanities systems and tools
• A blog with guest commentators

Starter Links: DHQ home | Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)

Experimental online journal from the Annenberg Center for Multimedia Literacy:

“This investigation at the intersection of technology and culture is not simply thematic. Rather, Vectors is realized in multimedia, melding form and content to enact a second-order examination of the mediation of everyday life. Utilizing a peer-reviewed format and under the guidance of an international board, Vectors will feature submissions and specially-commissioned works comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. Vectors doesn’t seek to replace text; instead, we encourage a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. In so doing, we aim to explore the immersive and experiential dimensions of emerging scholarly vernaculars. ” (from Vectors site)

Starter Links: Vectors

Transliteracies Research Report By Jessica Pressman

Center focusing on networked, multimedia “literacyâ€?:

“As a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication, the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy develops educational programs and conducts research on the changing nature of literacy in a networked culture. The IML’s educational programs address students, teachers, and faculty across the educational spectrum: including K-12 teachers, student teachers, and higher education faculty. The IML supports faculty-directed research that seeks to transform the nature of scholarship within the disciplines.” (from Center site)

Starter Links: Annenberg Center home

Article comparing Renaissance-era reading practices, both individual and collective, to today’s online reading practices:

“Renaissance reading habits and those fostered by the hypertext environment (which has become synonymous with the Internet), are similar with regard to four broad issues: 1. non-linearity; 2. a protean sense of text and its functions; 3. affinity with oral models of communication, and 4. a changing concept of authorship.”

“Interactive reading in the Renaissance was part of the characteristic model of learned reading based on the intellectual technique on collecting ‘commonplaces.’ A reader read texts in order to ‘extract quotations and examples from them, then note down the more striking passages for easy retrieval or indexing,’ or for later use either in writing or in speaking. The ‘reference’ style of reading is symbolized in the reading wheel, ‘a vertical wheel turned with the help of a system of gears permitting the readers to keep a dozen or so books, placed on individual shelves, open before them at one time.’ â€? (from article)

Starter Links: Tatjana Chorney, “Interactive Reading, Early Modern Texts and Hypertext: A Lesson from the Past,” Academic Commons, 12 Dec. 2005