The online experiment during Roundtable 3 on “Reading as a Social Practice” - in which audience members wrote their thoughts to the conference site during the panel discussion- generated 195 posts from 17 users in 90 minutes, ranging from comments that engaged with the panelists’ remarks to those that reflected on the features of the online experiment itself. One member of the panel (Kevin Almeroth) also actively participated in the online discussion, while a few other panelists were able to read the discussion as it developed—leading to interesting flows of communication between the “backchannel” conversation and the “front channel.” The online discussion was displayed on the screen during the Q&A session after the panel. (See transcript of the online discussion).
      Warren Sacks, who earlier in the day presented his Agonistics project (a visualization filter and reading tool for Usenet or blog discussions), produced an Agonistics visualization of the Roundtable 3 online discussion immediately after the event. (See visualization.)

 
State of the Project:

• Beginnings of the project:
  • Past collaborations between:
    • UCSB English Dept (Transcriptions Project)
    • UCSB Art/Media Arts & Technology, Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS)
    • UCSB Films Studies Program
    • UC Digital Cultures Project (DCP)
    • UC Digital Arts Research Network (DARnet)
    • UC Multicampus Research Group proposal ($434,000 over five years; $175,000 from UC Office of the President and the rest from UCSB)
    
    
  • Future of the Project:
    1. Project Goals and Scale
    
    
    2. Structure of the Group
    
    
    3. Plan of Work
    
    
    4. Grants
    
    
  
  

                                                                                  

  1. Project Goals and Scale

  » Develop a technology “tool” (or tools) that improves online reading.
  

  From MRG Proposal: “A good guess—given the current state of the Internet and the interests of many of the Transliteracies participants—is that the initiative will focus on a demonstration technology that both augments the ability of readers to be part of a community of readers (in ways that online technologies are uniquely able to foster) and accommodates different experiences of the same collection of texts based on varying ages, literacy levels, backgrounds, and so on. Balancing flexibly between public and private perspectives, indeed, may be the problem that online technologies—including the new media of reading—were born to address.”

  » Develop a robust, cross-disciplinary research community (humanities and arts, social science, computer science and engineering) behind the technology effort that sets the coordinates for meaningful “improvement.”

  » Scale: from seed grant to implementation grant

  Discussion:
  

  
  
  • Basic goals and scale of the project
  
  
  
  

                                                                                  

  
  
  2. Structure of the Group

  » Disciplinary coverage: humanities, arts, media studies, communiction, political science, sociology, education, computer science.

  » Currently, UC system.
  Discussion:

  
  
  • Disciplinary coverage
  • UC and other people, programs, universities
  • Industry?
  
  

                                                                                  

  
  
  3. Plan of Work

  » Original Plan of Work:

  Project Stages:

  • Year 1: Three working groups to study online reading from humanistic, social science, and computational perspectives (with cross-membership among groups).
  • Year 2: Convergence on the development of a technology to enhance online reading.
  • Year 3: Publication of research in online “casebook” series (clustered publications of articles, technical papers, software, etc.)
  • Years 4-5: Building out, placing, and evaluating project technology (contingent upon grant-seeking)

  Ongoing Annual Activities:

  
  
  • Annual conference
  • Annual week-long seminar for graduate students
  • Inter-campus site visits
  • Participation in online collaboration supplemented by teleconferencing or web conferencing
  
  

  Discussion:
  

  
  
  • Stages of the project
  • Annual activities (see UC Office of the President critique of MRG proposal)
    
  
  
  
  

                                                                                  

  
  
  4. Grants

  » Initial Survey of Possible Grant Targets:

  Discussion:
  

  
  
  • Do you think the project is grantable?
  • Grant strategy
  • Other grant targets

 

[full text of introduction]

Plato, Phaedrus:

1.         At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt. . . . To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. . . .
        But when they came to letters, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

2.        But when they came to novel, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of the novel, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and salaciousness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

3.        But when they came to TV, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of TV, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external media and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

4.        But when they came to WWW, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for productivity and entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of browsing, searching, blogging, IM, social-networking, massive online gaming, etc., from a love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the network and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

The base story (and its variants through the rise of print and of analogue electric media) we now know something about:

• orality —> writing: (20’s-60’s: Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong)
• print (Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, Roger Chartier)
• electronic media (collision of print with photography, film, radio, telegraphy/phony in the early 20th century: avant-garde typography and design arts) (60’s: Marshall McLuhan)
• [Even digital or hypertextual media we now know something about (Vannevar Bush —> Ted Nelson —> George Landow)]

What about reading online?

                                        

Transliteracies Project
Research in the Technological, Social, and
Cultural Practices of Online Reading
Initial Project Members

Project Goals

• Three working groups to study online reading from humanistic, social science, and computational perspectives (with cross-membership among groups).
• Convergence on the development of a demonstration technology to enhance online reading. (A good guess—given the current state of the Internet and the interests of many of the Transliteracies participants—is that the initiative will focus on a demonstration technology that both augments the ability of readers to be part of a community of readers (in ways that online technologies are uniquely able to foster) and accommodates different experiences of the same collection of texts based on varying ages, literacy levels, backgrounds, and so on. Balancing flexibly between public and private perspectives, indeed, may be the problem that online technologies—including the new media of reading—were born to address. ) There are many other possible technology projects that Transliteracies could settle upon. The ultimate goal of such a demonstration technology is not the technology itself but the demonstration of “how to make a technology” in the most meaningful way—through the collaboration of humanities, arts, social sciences, and computer science.
• Clustered publications of articles, technical papers, software, etc. in Transliteracies online “casebookâ€? series.

                                        

Conference 2005: UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading”

Participants:

Kevin C. Almeroth * Anne Balsamo * Walter Bender * Bruce Bimber * John Seely Brown * Nicholas Dames * Judith Green * N. Katherine Hayles * Yunte Huang * Adrian Johns * George Legrady * Cynthia Lewis * Alan Liu * Peter Lyman * Jerome J. McGann * Tara McPherson * J. Hillis Miller * John Mohr * Christopher Newfield * Robert Nideffer * Lisa Parks * Carol Braun Pasternack * Christiane Paul * Leah Price * Rita Raley * Ronald E. Rice * Warren Sack * Schoenerwissen/OfCD (Anne Pascual & Marcus Hauer) * Bob Stein * Brigitte Steinheider * Matthew Turk * William B. Warner * Curtis Wong

Format

• Three keynote presentations to mark out the diversity of disciplines and approaches needed to address online reading (Adrian Johns, Anne Balsamo, Walter Bender)
• Three conversation roundtables (1. Reading, Past and Present) (2. Reading and Media) (3. Reading as a Social Practice)
• A presentation session on “The Art of Online Readingâ€? (Christiane Paul, George Legrady, Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen, and Robert Nideffer)
• Planning Workshop for the Transliteracies project.

                                        

Conference News

Thanks:

• Sponsors


• Conference/Project Credits

Reading, online. What wonder—and, danger, too—there is in that concept. A double reflex of wonder and risk that is profoundly part of the history of reading from the beginning.

Here is Plato expressing that double sense of wonder and risk in his story about the invention of reading—of writing and literacy. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story:

1.         At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt. . . . To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. . . .
        But when they came to letters, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

To bring the story up to date through the succeeding history of media, let me just play a few variants on Plato’s fable as follows:

2.        But when they came to novel, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of the novel, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and salaciousness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

3.        But when they came to TV, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of TV, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external media and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

4.        But when they came to WWW, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for productivity and entertainment.”
        Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of browsing, searching, blogging, IM, social-networking, massive online gaming, etc., from a love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the network and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

The base story and its variants through the rise of print and of analogue electric media we now know something about.

• orality —> writing: (20’s-60’s: Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong)
• print (Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, Roger Chartier)
• electronic media (collision of print with photography, film, radio, telegraphy/phony in the early 20th century: avant-garde typography and design arts) (60’s: Marshall McLuhan)
• Even digital or hypertextual media we now know something about (Vannevar Bush —> Ted Nelson —> George Landow)

What happens, then, when we throw “online” into the mix? Far from diminishing in the digital, networked “new media,” it seems, textual experience is proliferating as part of the networked new media. “Reading” is adapting to email, WWW, IM, Blogs, rich-media, indexes, search engines, etc. even as, reciprocally, the new technologies actively remember older habits of reading. (Using a browser, search engine, or blog site, for instance, subtly inflects reading; but, equally, familiarity with historical reading technologies—with “documents,” “pages,” or “indexes”—shapes the use of new technologies.)

We know much less about online reading than its predecessors. And, in particular, we don’t yet know exactly what to do with the “unknowledge” that online reading produces. (Each of the predecessor domains of reading produced a standing wave of “unknowledge”—of “forgetfulness,” etc.—that could not be theorized at the time or appreciated for what later turned out to be hidden, lurking intelligences. Each, in other words, produced a vast, emergent theater of mental and other activity that could only be conceived as low-cognitive or no-cognitive.

                                        

So we’re starting a project to study, and act on, the possible hidden intelligences at work in something we don’t presently know much about: the practices of online reading.

Currently, “we” are a group of Univ. of California faculty from seven of the UC campuses (though the group is extensible and will hook up with scholars and programs elsewhere as it develops). We’re humanists, artists, social scientists, and computer scientists whose disciplines each have equal contributions to make to the problem of online reading.

The project we’re starting is at present drafted in the following form:

Transliteracies Project
Research in the Technological, Social, and
Cultural Practices of Online Reading

• Three working groups to study online reading from humanistic, social science, and computational perspectives (with cross-membership among groups).
• Convergence on the development of a demonstration technology to enhance online reading. (A good guess—given the current state of the Internet and the interests of many of the Transliteracies participants—is that the initiative will focus on a demonstration technology that both augments the ability of readers to be part of a community of readers (in ways that online technologies are uniquely able to foster) and accommodates different experiences of the same collection of texts based on varying ages, literacy levels, backgrounds, and so on. Balancing flexibly between public and private perspectives, indeed, may be the problem that online technologies—including the new media of reading—were born to address. ) There are many other possible technology projects that Transliteracies could settle upon. The ultimate goal of such a demonstration technology is not the technology itself but the demonstration of “how to make a technology” in the most meaningful way—through the collaboration of humanities, arts, social sciences, and computer science.
• Clustered publications of articles, technical papers, software, etc. in Transliteracies online “casebookâ€? series.

To launch the project, we have invited a remarkable cast of well-known technologists, humanists, social scientists, artists, education researchers, industry people, and others to consult with us on the topic of online reading.

Participants:

Kevin C. Almeroth * Anne Balsamo * Walter Bender * Bruce Bimber * John Seely Brown * Nicholas Dames * Judith Green * N. Katherine Hayles * Yunte Huang * Adrian Johns * George Legrady * Cynthia Lewis * Alan Liu * Peter Lyman * Jerome J. McGann * Tara McPherson * J. Hillis Miller * John Mohr * Christopher Newfield * Robert Nideffer * Lisa Parks * Carol Braun Pasternack * Christiane Paul * Leah Price * Rita Raley * Ronald E. Rice * Warren Sack * Schoenerwissen/OfCD (Anne Pascual & Marcus Hauer) * Bob Stein * Brigitte Steinheider * Matthew Turk * William B. Warner * Curtis Wong

Format

• Three keynote presentations to mark out the diversity of disciplines and approaches needed to address online reading (Adrian Johns, Anne Balsamo, Walter Bender)
• Three conversation roundtables (1. Reading, Past and Present) (2. Reading and Media) (3. Reading as a Social Practice)
• A presentation session on “The Art of Online Readingâ€? (Christiane Paul, George Legrady, Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen, and Robert Nideffer)
• Planning Workshop for the Transliteracies project.

                                        

Conference News

Thanks:

• Sponsors


• Conference/Project Credits

During Roundtable 3 on “Reading as a Social Practice,” conference participants and members of the audience who have wireless-enabled laptops with them are invited to participate in an experiment in the social practice of conference-going by using the “commentsâ€? section of the Roundtable 3 page to post reflections, questions, or reactions in real time during the roundtable conversation. While these comments will not be displayed on the screen simultaneously with the roundtable conversation (because it would be distracting), they will be shown during the question-and-answer period. They will also remain on the conference site as a record of the audience’s engagement with the roundtable. If you wish to participate in this experiment, please ask the conference organizers during the conference for instructions on logging on to the conference wireless network and add your comments during Roundtable 3.

Books

• Alchemy: An Installation (Simon Biggs): a digitally illuminated Book of Hours


• Beyond Pages (Masaki Fujihata): a virtual picture book


• Illuminated Manuscript (David Small): “Combining physical interfaces with purely typographical information in a virtual environment, this piece explored new types of reading in tune with human perceptual abilities.”

Displays

• E Ink Electronic Paper Display (EPD) (“Products made with E Ink’s revolutionary electronic ink technology possess a paper-like high contrast appearance, ultra-low power consumption, and a thin, light form”)


• Electronic Paper Prototypes: E-Ink; Bridgestone; SiPix Imaging

Screen Environments

• Cave Writing (Brown University)


• Poetry Machine 1.0 (David Link): interactive installation


• Wired: Cell phones put to novel use

Text & Typographic Tools

• Chronotext


• I’Ching Poetry Generator


• Intersection: a study in typographic space


• Ivanhoe (SpecLab, UVa): “an environment for textual interpretation, designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which students and scholars understand humanities documents”


• News Reader: “software for reading and playing the network news environment”


• Newsmap


• TextArc: a visual representation of a text on a single page


• txtkit: “an Open Source visual text mining tool for exploring large amounts of multilingual texts”


• Wordnews

Visual Text

• Calliscopes (dataisnature)


• Letterscapes (Peter Cho)


• RoboType (Paco Bascuñán + Inklude)


• Textension (Josh Nimoy): “visual experiments in interactive text layout”


• Typedrawing and Typo Scope(storyabout)


• Typographic Illustration (Ni9e.com)

David Marshall, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara will join William Warner, Director of UC Digital Cultures Project and Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara, in opening the Transliteracies conference on June 17th at 9 am. Their welcome to conference participants and audience will be followed at 9:15 by an introduction to the conference by Transliteracies project director Alan Liu

Digital artist and UC Irvine Associate Professor of Studio Art & Information and Computer Science Robert Nideffer will be joining Christiane Paul, George Legrady, and Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen as a presenter in “The Art of Online Reading” session, Saturday, June 18th, 9:00-10:45 am (6020 HSSB).

Saturday, June 18th, 9:00-10:45 (6020 HSSB)

A session on new media art related to the experience of text. Presentations by Christiane Paul and digital artists George Legrady, Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen, and Robert Nideffer.

Projects to be discussed include:

• Christiane Paul, “Forms and Models of Online Reading” (links to projects presented in talk)


• George Legrady, Making Visible the Invisible


• Schoenerwissen, txtkit – Visual Text Mining Tool