A/N: Natalie and I were coworking when we wrote these blog posts, so if you see any similar ideas, it’s because we had a conversation! Also, I remembered that read more tags exist so y’all can handle my long ass posts. Cheers!

First, a defense:

When considering what audiobook I wanted to do for this assignment, I had to first question what counts as an audiobook. Because obviously, knowing me, I can’t just do something easy; I have to sit here and question whether Tumblr posts count as a work of fiction. And I decided that hell yeah they do. First of all, they’re quite literally fiction (usually), but also they’ve created a large cultural canon. Tumblr users know these posts by heart, primarily auditorily (which I’ll explain why in a moment), and seek to locate and preserve them for future Internet users all around. In its heyday (the 2010s), Tumblr posts most often spread orally when offline/”IRL”, I can only assume due to wifi only slowly beginning to spread to public spaces and data still being LTE, but I truly couldn’t tell you precisely why. A major part of Tumblr culture is dramatic readings, perhaps because of the oral retellings of posts. These dramatic readings are exactly what they sound like- people read posts aloud a la Shakespearean monologues. Nowadays many Tumblr posts are hard to find; there are actually whole accounts dedicated to archiving historic Tumblr posts (especially ones that created phrases that are now used as references in speech to key people into the fact that they’re in one fandom or another, or a Tumblr user in general, such as “I like your shoelaces”).

Here, I present a video from four years ago (that I actually watched when it came out, so this video and I have some history) of dramatic readings of “3am” Tumblr posts (AKA posts that are unhinged like someone suffering from lack of sleep).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShbp0jfQ9U

The creator, PM Seymour, is a hobby voice actor whose MO on YouTube who makes a lot of this sort of thing; he mostly reads out posts from Tumblr for this purpose of giving them to another medium to share and further document, and boy is he good at it. Seymour puts on a wide variety of voices and tones to illustrate these posts. Unlike traditional novels, Tumblr posts typically don’t have any cues that tell the reader how to perceive their speech, so Seymour adds an additional layer of characterization of to the speaker in the post with his voice acting. He’s been voice acting since 2011 with professional equipment, and started posting to his YouTube channel shortly after his voice acting career began, so his YouTube channel has fairly good production value aside from the graphic quality. He characterizes primarily by how the user types their message, with CAPS LOCK BEING SCREAMING, FOR EXAMPLE. He also assigns gender seemingly arbitrarily and tone in absence of indicators, adding a lot to the text and how it’s interpreted. Posts that I personally wouldn’t have found funny before I find funny when he reads them because of this. It is also in this way that he tends to deviate from the text, especially by adding funny vocal effects like screams (I promise it’s funnier than it sounds). It is in this way that his dramatic readings are not only transformative/transforming the text posts into a different medium, but he’s also adding an element to the existing fiction that I’d argue as before makes them audio’books’. Though, I suppose that that’s not really what makes audiobooks audiobooks, because they don’t have to be transformative in that way- they just have to read the thing out loud. Something to think about for the future…

Originally I intended to listen to the first episode of The Sandman audiobook. I love the graphic novel series—have read it multiple times—and just finished watching the series on Netflix. I’m not much of an audiobook person, having only listened to books on tape during long road trips. So I was extra curious to see how they would/would not be able to translate the color and the aesthetic that is prominent in the art of this series. I am still very curious to listen to this fully, but for my review I went in another direction. The teaser sample of this audiobook series is of such high production value and has many famous actors voicing the characters—if you didn’t know it was only audio, you would think it was from a big-budget movie—so I decided I’d be better served listening to something else for inspiration for our own project.

As my group is going to be working with short stories, I turned to one of my favorite authors and perhaps her most famous short story: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

This was the first hit that came up when I searched for an audiobook, and I appreciated that this seems to be part of a ghost story audiobook/podcast series, so I gave it a listen. The intro (and outro) are very stylized, with creepy imagery and very eerie background music with voice clips from other horror stories. It’s a bit over the top, but mostly fun. In contrast, the reading of the text itself is very plain and even understated.

Tony Walker reads the story with an English accent. At first I thought, ugh, is this to make it sound more literary or more serious in some way? Jackson has said the setting is rural New England. However, after he completes his reading of the story, he spends some time talking about the story, wherein he says he felt he could read this story in his native Northern English accent expressly because it feels so much like a story that could be set in any rural, anglicized area. I’m inclined to agree with him. It also made me curious to listen to some of his other stories and see how he chooses accents for those, and how well they fit those stories. From his discussion, it seems Walker is a bit of a voice actor and seems able to make decisions on accents based on the stories he chooses to record.

I read along as Walker narrated, and I noticed a few alterations in some words between his version and mine. The changes were so slight I’m unsure if it was human error while he was reading, or if there are subtle differences in versions depending on the edition you have, or if indeed he deliberately chose to change some of the language. (I have Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, published in 2010 by The Library of America, but here is a link to The New Yorker, where it was first published in 1948: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery). When he discusses the story after reading it, he shows a lot of reverence for Jackson, so I’m inclined to think he accidentally changes a couple of words as he’s reading it, or else there exist slightly different versions of this story. [Example: In the opening paragraph in my version of the story, it reads, “…but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours….”; the version he gives, and which I also see in The New Yorker, reads, “but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours…”.]

Walker reads slower than I would if I was reading on my own, but not so slowly as to draw the story out unnecessarily. His pacing is very methodical and even throughout, though he does slow down as we get to the climax and realize that something is very much amiss in the town ceremony. Indeed, he adds more repetition and emphasis on “the black dot” when we realize it’s Tessie Hutchinson who’s been selected for the lottery. Jackson wrote: “It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office.” But Walker adds in an extra “The Black Spot” so the spot is mentioned three times instead of two. I believe this change from the original text was an intentional editorial choice on Walker’s part, and that it enhances the audio experience.

Walker does slightly alter his voice for different characters’ dialogue, just enough to help a listener who isn’t also reading along, but not so much that he sounds cartoonish or mocking of any of the characters. And he slightly alters the level of his voice when people are talking versus whispering or speaking in hushed tones. Again, I think his choices enhances the text, rather than detracting from it. He does not use any background noise or add music or sound effects, which we know was a deliberate choice for him based on the way he’s chosen to style his intro and outro for his series. From his discussion after the story, I learned that he has specialty audio recording equipment, and you can tell the sound quality is very high, and his diction is crisp. He has a podcast, and he’s clearly very comfortable in front of a mic. I also learned that he started doing live readings, which included video of him, which his viewers gave mixed responses to. As such, he seems to be making two versions of each of his stories: one live with video of him reading; and another with some sound-editing that is just his voice. It seems like a lot of work, but I appreciate that he’s open feedback and understands there are pros and cons to each type of audio experience for his audience.

Overall I think his reading of The Lottery was very good. I felt very much like he could have been sitting in my living room and reading directly to me.

INTRO                                                                                                                               

I want to start my post with full transparency and say that before this class, I had never delved into the world of audio books! Reasoning behind this doesn’t stem from any distaste for the medium, it’s just something I haven’t really considered for myself when “reading”. So with no prior experience with an audiobook I decided to hark back to the days of childhood where books were often read to me. Although these reading sessions weren’t professionally recorded the objective of it remained the same as it was still a text being read out loud for me to hear rather than see. With this in mind along with the general knowledge of knowing digital literacy has been prevalent in the modern age, I knew it would be very easy for me to find and access children’s books in audio format. Although I am not all too familiar with how the youth of today consume their literature, I assume prerecorded texts are a favorable method for parents and/or teachers who are inclined to introduce their children/students to reading methods that don’t require their direct assistance. I want to note that this isn’t a bad thing, audiobooks are often used as a form of convenience so why not use it in all aspects? I imagine children’s audio books are a great way to keep the child engrossed when the caretaker in question is preoccupied with other tasks.       

AUDIOBOOK/QUALITIES     

Through a quick google search I was led to a bevy of YouTube channels littered with “read aloud” versions of popular children’s books (Storytime Anytime, Toadstools and Fairy Dust, Storybook Nany Read Aloud etc.) Luckily I was able to find the very particular children’s text I was hoping to discover through one of these channels. The book I decided to present in this post is Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. A book that I’ve read and had read to me numerous times as a child. The general premise of the text revolves around a young mouse who is consistently teased at school due to her unique name. Through the help of her parents and teacher she learns to accept the name she once loved so fondly. The book revolves around themes of self acceptance and bullying from peers and is a text  I recall heavily relating to as a youngling, as I also unfortunately suffered the wrath of bullying due to my name (being an ethnic kid in America kind of sucks). Nonetheless I remember taking solace in the fact that this was an issue not specifically delegated to me. Although I was aware the book was a work of fiction I felt a special connection with that little mouse. Hearing the audio for this book again definitely tugged at my heart strings a bit. 

The audiobook itself was taken from the aforementioned channel Storybook Nany Read Aloud. The female voice behind the audio enlists the use of various auditory accompaniments to bring the story to life. Background music, the sounds effects of objects moving, background noises as well as voice distinctions between characters were all utilized. Below are some time stamps of when these effects were used 

0:30- 0:40 (Mother and Father speaking)

1:05 (Sounds of Birds Chirping)

1:16 (Sound of faucet running)

2:15 (Sounds of taunting giggles)

2:30 (Voice of Main bully Victoria)

6:43 (Sound of dice)

6:50-7:07 (Music change indicating nightmare)

The production value of this video definitely made for a mentally stimulating experience. Although the video itself does feature still images of the illustrations taken from the book I decided to minimize the window for a complete auditory experience (I hope this doesn’t count as cheating, I know it’s not a legit audiobook but I figured it used the same elements). Even without the images I felt as if I could picture every scene of the book inside my head. The background noises coupled with the descriptions provided by the narrator made “reading” this text all the more enjoyable. Reading a print copy of a children’s book can be a delightful experience unto itself, but there’s honestly something about having a children’s book read to you. I believe in order to read children’s literature the speaker kind of always has to have an air of enthusiasm and animated whimsy in their tone and delivery. Although I feel these voice modulations can sometimes be a distraction and cross into “cheesy” territory, in the context of children’s’ books it always works! 

This assignment has sparked my interest in audiobooks and I look forward to discovering more in the future. 

A/N: I’d like to formally apologize for the length.

I started my reading for today’s class with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books” and felt immediately at home in the topic Price is discussing. I’ve so recently found myself a Master’s student in Digital Humanities, which, being a humanities, has quite a bit of reading involved. And therein lies the problem… I don’t generally read. Now, of course, I just said “I started my reading” so perhaps I’m being too critical of myself. I read. I read some. I definitely read more now than I did last year. But I certainly don’t read in the way I did when I was a child hopped up on Adderall. I could spend this entire blog post lamenting “the ADHD generation” and how none of us can focus anymore and it’s an epidemic blah blah blah. Or I could talk about how awesome, yet tinged with a hint of sadness, it is to see librarians advocating for anything that has words in it to count as reading (see here – seen at Decatur Library, Alabama). Which, as a brief aside: I love libraries. I love how they are becoming a space that is truly public and has everything as Price talks about. I think it’s a beautiful thing. And I think it’s interesting how she’s bringing in all these statistics that say in the 20-teens that reading was actually on the up-and-up again, and without even Googling it I know that in the aftermath of 2020 reading climbed its way back up to the top of entertainment. I think it’s also worth another blog post entirely of its own to discuss how bound books are combatting the ephemerality of the Internet.

But what I actually want to talk about is based on my experience as a Linguist: reading is not natural.

Yeah, I said it. Reading isn’t natural to humans. Spoken word far predates written word by a few thousand years or so. Writing was often restricted to the highest classes and their scribes for most of early history. Of course, this all changed with the printing press. When all this knowledge that had previously been restricted to a certain class of people with private tutors became essentially public, it fundamentally revolutionized how learning itself works. Instead of needing to apprentice with someone in your field, you could read books on your own and become an autodidact, which many societies quite admired (as tough as it is to be successful that way) as we still do today in the Western world. So, reading became the standard. Now, however, we’re seeing a return to the spoken word. Written word takes time that we in our late-stage capitalist era haven’t much of. Written word takes effort that we can’t sacrifice. Price talks about the ‘myth of exceptionalism’—the idea that we’re not living in the ‘unprecedented age’ we believe we live in. She continues to talk about the rise of TV, and the rise of radio, and this is exactly what we’re living through all over again. When these new technologies become widely available, we see people shift to using them more than books, and then books prevail once again after those technologies have been around for a while. But personally, as I’ve said in my topic sentence, I believe this is because audio technology is, for most of us, more natural to us than reading. What we’re also seeing, though, is remnants of the original mentality that the Internet was this thing that was… well, cringe, because it was for nerds. Ew, nerds! Who would want to be educated?! Losers. You read fanfiction that’s longer than any book you’ve ever read? And it’s about some… fictional characters?! Laaaaame. That’s not real reading.

What I’m talking about, dear readers, is the ever-present gatekeeping. Why it is that humans like to cage their stuff up so much for no one else to enjoy I’ll never be certain. But reading (not books) is thoroughly gatekept. Books themselves are old news. Widely available, widely owned. But reading can only be done in books—if you do it anywhere else you’re doing it wrong! Truth of the matter is, those librarians are right: all reading is reading. As Price calls it: the myth of the ideal reader. However, there is something to be said for the art of the written word. Graphic novels don’t have that, most often they have the art of… well, art, more so than they do the written word. Magazines aren’t known for it, though there are some particularly good pieces I’ve read in The Atlantic. I’m getting side-tracked, but point is: if it’s ‘easy’ to understand and readily available, it’s not books, and so it’s not reading.

Reading, and reading of specifically books, is equivocated with intelligence just as it had been pre-printing press and now post-so. If reading becomes widely available, and no longer so gatekept, it can’t be a mark of intelligence… how can it be that someone who reads exclusively grocery store romance novels is intelligent? Simply impossible! Preposterous! Not all of us can be blessed with such intelligence as to be capable of reading. As Price says, “this [is] the latest version of the centuries-old attempt to distinguish trashy escapism from intellectually challenging and therefore morally respectable fiction”. But the reality is that with the advent of public schooling, reading became not only common amongst all classes but also second-nature. We as a people became more intelligent because we were more educated. But on that note…

The notion that Google makes us stupid is absolutely ridiculous. What we’re actually doing is reducing our memory recall, which… well, we don’t always need it anymore. And that’s totally fine. There are people who work on upping their memory recall for things like trivia shows or to prevent dementia. Personally, I think it’s a fun exercise to try and just remember that actor’s name from that one TV show all on my own. But the argument can absolutely be made that Google has actually made us smarter by giving us access to almost literally every bit of knowledge in the world. Surely that must count for something.

And of course, this is all at the detriment of our attention spans. Yep, I couldn’t avoid talking about it as much as I want to. It’s unfortunately just the truth- it’s not that we don’t need our attention spans anymore, it’s that algorithms are literally designed to keep your attention for as long as possible by tapping into that short-term reward part of your brain. ‘Ooh, a piece of candy’ scroll ‘Ooh, another piece of candy’ scroll. Except that’s happening faster than you can even process. Some of these algorithms have even been outed as using the same mechanics as drug addiction. Not having an attention span is definitely a side effect of all of this, and unfortunately only feeds into…

The death of the book.

Just kidding! You think I really believe books are going anywhere? No way. Not anytime soon. But reading in the traditional sense—what Price calls the idealist sense—is definitely taking a dive. And maybe that means it’s high time for it to. I’d love to be able to argue that we’re living in a very proletariat era with widespread access to knowledge, but the reality is that that access to knowledge is actually skewed by the companies that spread it. Google is chock-a-block with ads, and the companies at the very top of the results are major monopolies. It’s not just a search engine anymore; long gone are the days of Googling a hyper-specific question and finding niche forums at the top of the list (DuckDuckGo is really your guy if you want that-though those forums are usually pretty old and outdated now). Not to mention, you really need to know exactly what you’re looking for to use Google now. It used to function more like an encyclopedia, you search for ‘vampires’ and bingo, top result of azvampires.com and you’re reading about every kind of vampire mythology known to man. Now you have to search for ‘define vampire’, ‘vampire Wikipedia’, ‘what is a vampire’ to get anything of use. And I could spend more time than I already have talking about why Google’s algorithm appears to have changed so much, but my point is really this: it may seem as though this widespread access to information is a good thing, but our widespread access to information is painfully biased in favor of whatever it is that large corporations want you to think, and if you actually want to do any meaningful research on a topic with a wide variety of opinions, you’re best off Googling ‘vampire mythology books Reddit’, because the last major forum on the Internet will give you 20 opinions/suggestions for one question. So while the notion that Google is making us stupid is total baloney, what’s not baloney is that Google and the Internet as a whole cannot replace books. As much as I’d love to say I can find anything I want to learn on the Internet, there is SO much of my undergraduate degree that I would have never learned about on the Internet. Some knowledge is still gatekept… and that might be for the better given our current political climate.

Finally, I’ve reached my conclusion. I know, I’m quite long-winded. In its current state, the Internet simply cannot replace books. Rather, in its current state, the Internet shouldn’t replace books- but it is. And that’s scary.

The rise of technology has long been said that would diminish physical copies of books, affect our reading habits, and exhaust our attention spans. Price, in the book What we talk about when we talk about books, argues against this prediction by discussing various reading patterns in history that always seems to be challenged by lifestyle changes. She gives historical examples like multitasking readers, bedtime stories, and bookshops selling non-book items (Price, pp. 9–11) to present us with an image of a less ideal reader and a more realistic world of readers in the history of books. I support her ideas on multiple ways in our history people can get distracted when reading and also would avoid the word “golden age” in describing any periods. Besides her point on distraction, I would like to raise the issue of literacy and reading as a luxury. Price writes about certain kinds of reading experiences like the “aristocrats had their hair curled while listening to a servant read aloud” (Price, pp. 9) and “poetry lovers scissored pages apart to paste scraps of one collection into the margins of another.” (same as above) There might be a golden age in the past for people who could afford this reading habit and lifestyle (even for some working classes’ lifestyles mentioned by her in the introduction) but technologies in the digital age do help to enable more accesses to content and information.

But are we in a golden age of reading now? My answer is no. Even with the support of accessible media, I still see status indicators in our reading experiences. The decrease in our attention spans could be a by-product of our digitalized and digital-born lifestyle. However, I do not think technology is the only one to blame. On a digital platform, the requirement for productivity has been further enhanced so that free time is unfairly distributed and racial, gender, and other inequalities are shaped along the way. Productivity and the increased requirement/desire to obtain the most updated information to make a living sometimes force people to give priority to “useful” information over immersive mental and emotional simulations, an experience we often acquire through reading novels and stories.

Liu’s article “From Reading to Social Computing” provides another perspective examining the “roles of literary sociality.” (Liu, paragraph 22) According to Liu, marginal ones in reading and literary activities are more visible thanks to the development of social computing. I think it will be possible to discover invisible nodes in the social networks of reading practices if we use some of Price’s examples. My question on Liu’s article is about how to balance “distant reading” (Liu, paragraph 39) and close reading and how to organically combine social science methodologies with more conventional literary approaches. Moreover, in the last paragraph, Liu asks a question for further studies: “what is the differentia specifica of literary social computing.” (Liu, paragraph 53) I think this methodology is facing great challenges brought by Web 3.0. Will our reading habits and literary experiences be transformed again by a decentralized and permission-free world in Web 3.0 built on blockchains and supported by the VR, AR, and metaverse? Pressman’s article and introduction of the three novel types in book-based or book-like formats inspired me a lot while I imagined a world of Web 3.0: how would ergodic literature and our understanding of the materiality of literature change as the literary social computing and Spatial Web develop?

Additional notes: The game Disco Elysium might be of interest to you. The digital novel Pry (2015) reminds me a lot of Disco Elysium.

“Aren’t we after all the vanguard of what’s known as print culture? And isn’t print the natural enemy of pixels?” (Coady, 12). A recurring theme kept surfacing for me in this week’s readings on reading – the dichotomy between the printed and the digital as forms of media. Printed books have a physical presence “as hunks of paper, ink, and glue” (Price, 7) whose survival is constantly being questioned in our digital age of electronic books, the internet, and technology. However, I would argue that digital media also has a kind of physical presence, one that cannot be measured by weight, length or number of pages, but a presence nonetheless.

While I appreciate Pressman’s three case studies of novels in the digital age, the examples are mainly focused on the materiality of the format, reiterating the differences between print and digital instead of demonstrating how these lines can be blurred to afford new reading experiences. Danielewski’s twenty-seven volume narrative The Familiar takes a new approach by using digital technology for production, distribution, marketing, and perhaps some digital humanities tools for analysis, but it’s still a printed book whose presence is marked by its bigness. Its size is emphasized while the digital methods employed are subsequent. Dominguez’s “it-narrative” novel The House of Paper highlights books as objects which are used as bricks to build a house, a commentary of the fate of books in the digital age. Pressman equates power with a physical presence, “The book is not presented as a medium for reading; it is powerful just by being there.” (261). Can the digital also have a physical presence which is just as powerful?

I believe Pressman’s last example, Pry, a digital novel/app, has such a presence. It encourages the reader to interact with the text by pinching and zooming in to find more layers to the story, “Reading between the lines is literalized as an activity… which is particularly poetic and ironic because this reading machine (the iPad or tablet) is flat. Unlike a book, the reading medium that inspired depth-based metaphors of reading, the digital tablet is not comprised of physical layers or, of course, paper pages.” (262). Instead of lauding the qualities of the digital tablet which allow the experience of Pry to exist, Pressman instead compares it to the physicality of paper. But, are digital tablets flat? Sure, the latest version of the iPad is 0.25” thick but the technology behind it (and Pry) is composed of layers upon layers of code which can either come to the forefront or move to the background depending on the reader’s gestures. This is a dimension and physical presence created by technology which enables readers to (physically) use their fingers to get information and experience text in new ways. Innovation here creates a different kind of tangible encounter with text that doesn’t involve wood pulp. Pressman begins to ask these questions but did not address them in the examples, “at a time when data and scale are configured on databases and interfaces that don’t seem to possess any heft – when Google Books and the World Wide Web can contain the content of infinite bookshelves within a slick machine whose girth measures little less an inch in width – the physical presence of information becomes an ontological and epistemological subject as well as an aesthetic one.” (256)

Similarly, Lui describes databases as an important component of social computing. Databases can be measured in size and have a physical presence – they can be as small as 50 kilobytes of information or as large as 100 megabytes of information. While they cannot be put on a scale to be weighed or measured with a ruler, do these facts negate their physical presence? Even perusing the internet, we have some perspective of size and physicality simply by noticing the difference between a tweet and a Medium blog post, both types of text readers today are familiar with.

Both Coady and Price also mention the physicality of “curling up with a book” (Coady, 59 and Price, 10), how readers take pleasure in the book’s object-ness, “Human beings are sensual creatures. We like things — objects we can touch, smell and hear” (Coady, 40). While this may be true, are phones, tablets, and laptops not objects? Personally speaking, I admit to having “curled up” with my digital devices, even looking forward to it sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong, a book’s object-ness does indeed make it special and worthy of discussion in the digital age. However, instead of wondering whether these physical objects will survive, let’s appreciate the physicality of the digital too. And, recognize how both forms continue to transform reading experiences. As Coady points out (via Margaret Atwood), digital technologies produce more opportunities to read various types of text, “the variety of reading we can do online is endless. You can read texts, emails, The New Yorker (which has a splendidly designed app for this purpose), newspapers, Twitter, Facebook and— yes— books.” (Coady, 26)

The quote that has struck me most from this week’s readings is from Lynn Coady’s Who Reads Books?: Reading in the Digital Age: “The problem with this conversation we’ve been having over the past couple of decades is that it perpetually confuses capitalism with technology and technology with culture itself. Technology exists apart from, but is profoundly influenced by capitalism, and the same can be said of culture” (p. 35).

I’m not sure she goes far enough in her arguments about this distinction, but I’m at least glad to know she’s aware of them. For example, Jessica Pressman uses Mark Z. Danielewski’s series The Familiar, which was meant to be 27 volumes, as an example of the future of the novel in the digital age. But would publishing companies have gone along with this if someone less famous had pitched the original idea? Even with his fame, the series was ended after only 5 volumes were published because of low readership (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Danielewski#The_Familiar).

How many great books have been written and we’ll never get to read them because they never make it off the slush pile based on the preferences of a small group of people and/or marketing concerns over what sells? The publishing industry as we know it is built on the exploitation of rank and file workers who want to work in publishing because they love books so much (see Coady, pp. 36-37; and, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/the-book-industry-isnt-dead-thats-just-an-excuse-to-keep-salaries-low), so it probably needs to go or massively change how it operates.

Will Self’s arguments about the loss of the “serious[ness]” and “cultural primacy” of novels (Coady, pp. 13, 17) reminded me of multimillionaire James Patterson complaining about how hard it is for older white men to get published (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/james-patterson-discrimination-white-men.amp.html; I find myself wondering whether Self would agree with Patterson or disassociate himself because Patterson’s writing isn’t “serious” enough). Similarly, Jonathan Franzen’s argument about modernity ruining books (Coady, pp. 32-33) is also annoying. Neither Franzen nor Self seem to question who gets to define so-called serious literature and who gets to enjoy it, as if the literary cannon hasn’t been carefully curated by and for a very small number of privileged people over the years. And by harkening back to it, it feels like they’re actually limiting what the future of the novel can be.

I very much admire Coady’s and Pressman’s optimism about the future of the novel. Technology has its limitations, and when we borrow technological tools built by private industry for expressly capitalist purposes—which isn’t uncommon in DH—we have to be careful about how we use them and acknowledge any shortcomings therein. I’m very curious to check out the digital game/novel hybrid experience Pry that Pressman discusses in their article. I love how each of their examples speak to different aspects of what people love about books: getting absorbed/lost in words (The Familiar), the physicality of books (The House of Paper), and the experience of being part of/creating a story (Pry). Pressman’s examples certainly speak to Coady’s Twitter poll participants sharing what aspects of books they love (p. 40).

And this cautious optimism has me thinking about what’s possible for our projects in this class. How can we contribute and save the novel (if it indeed even needs saving) and/or challenge what a novel can be?

Though I had a hard time overall digesting Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing” article, I did find parts of it inspirational. For instance, in paragraph 18, where he quotes D. F. McKenzie: “…each reading is peculiar to its occasion…”. I think it speaks to people rereading books and rewatching shows and movies, and it also reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books where this is even more literal. Could we capture this experience somehow in a tool or platform? Maybe if you have a story you love to reread regularly and annotate your experience of it each time, and you have a history of yourself reading the book. Maybe this could be achieved with Hypothesis if the copy exists digitally, though I’m not aware of a way to filter annotations with this tool, and it would be interesting to see your annotations together and also separately based on date or some other organizing feature.

I was also intrigued by Liu’s example of sailors having their own presses on long voyages (paragraph 21)—I had no idea this was a thing. Could we use an existing digital database of text and somehow recreate this experience? Or let people import their own text—a la the desert island question game where you decide what things are most important to you.

Similarly, I was struck by this note from Leah Price about historical reading practices: “Instead of respecting the anthology’s boundaries, poetry lovers scissored pages apart to past scraps of one collection into the margins of another.” Could we recreate this experience digitally? Perhaps using an existing text archive like the English Broadside Ballad Archive, Poetry Foundation, or Academy of American Poets as the base from which people can choose text to curate for themselves.

When beginning to analyze the decline of pleasure reading in favor of digital platforms, the initial thoughts that often come up correlate the need for books with the time and era in which print novels seemed to be most popular. As novels were one of the few semi accessible forms of entertainment offered to an individual in the pre digital age, it is easy to make the call of judgment on modern society today and point the finger at the generation of internet dwellers who supposedly spend majority of their day to day lives behind the luminescent screen of their devices instead of the pages of a book. However I think it’s safe to say that this argument like many others crafted by the generations before us, is generally baseless. Too often then not the technological advancements crafted for the modern age have gotten criticism from boomers for its delivery of ease and simplicity. Because we as humans have evolved to a phase of everyday living where computers and the internet are always on hand, the argument of whether or not this has, for a lack of a better term, “dumbed us down” has been prevalent. However I along with the various authors cited in this post will make the case for the age of the internet and its many added benefits. 

The first argument I want to zero in on revolves around the question of: does using a search engine equate to laziness and unintelligence? In Leah Price’s essay What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, she cites an article by Nicholas Carr brashly titled Is Google Making us Stupid? Carr mentions how immersing himself in a book or a lengthy article used to be so easy but in the digital era he found himself getting fidgety, and what was lost wasn’t just the information that he was no longer absorbing, but the taste for being absorbed (Price pg 2) Of course I can’t speak for Carr’s personal feelings regarding his lack of attention span spurred by the influx of cyberspace we have been experiencing for years, but I can say that a person making this argument the general consensus of how all of humanity generally feels, seems a bit injudicious. Yes, life has been made easier when an answer to a question does not involve the drawn out process of going to the local library to search through books and journals, but why is that necessarily a bad thing? Does the notion of taking a supposed shortcut diminish the fact that a person still went out of their way to try to find an answer to a query? Regardless of how the answer was obtained we can’t disregard the fact that knowledge was still acquired and absorbed. What is the need to add unnecessary labor and why does that equate to how intelligent we are? There seems to be a misguided understanding that the internet does more harm than good when it comes to the human psyche. I won’t deny there are frivolous and sometimes harmful assets to the world wide web, but the frivolous nature in particular doesn’t seem to be all that damaging to humans in the grand scheme of things. Lynn Coady touches on this in her novel Who Needs Books? when addressing the idea of the “serious writer” (Coady pg 11) although I found her take to be prevalent when it comes to readers as well. Coady’s tongue and cheek criticism of the “serious writer” was quite poignant as I too have also felt that the distinction between academics and “low brow” entertainment to be quite pretentious. It is quite possible to be well read and academically inclined and still participate in frivolous entertainment such as reality tv and internet memes. Assuming your life to a standard that is particular to your brand and profession has always seemed a bit try -hard in my opinion. Moreover I also appreciated the not so subtle judgment to the idea that writers can only be taken seriously if they devote their life to writing and nothing else. Coady is quick to call out how the overall privilege of one’s lifestyle is a big proponent to that (Coady pg 38). I would also like to connect this back to readers as well. Perhaps those that deem the internet a shortcut have never given thought to the fact that many don’t have the time available to get to the library and scour through various texts to get what they need. Maybe they have forgotten that the average individual probably has a job and social/familial obligations that prevent them from going through the aforementioned process. In other cases it may very well be possible that printed materials are not accessible to them at all. Coady brings this up again when mentioning Margaret Atwood’s anecdote about the co-founder of Wattpad recounting to her the time an old man from an African village had written a letter thanking the site for being a platform to read and share stories. The village itself did not have access to schools, libraries, landlines or books (Coady pg 45). Even though it is a bit jarring to think that there are regions in the world that have access to mobile devices and Wi-Fi and not educational institutions and books, we can choose to see this as a somewhat positive thing. The internet and the age of digital literacy has brought us resources that were not previously accounted for. Today almost anyone can have a world of information available at all times which in itself has become a pivotal benefit to the well being of our minds. Without the internet I can’t imagine knowing half the things I do now. 

Now that we’ve established the web as being a valuable resource, let’s center this argument around books and its evolution. Another point that has come up has been the question of- Can reading a novel on a tech based platform make us want to completely disregard the need for a printed physical copy? And what does that say for the legacy of printed novels? Price brings up that the debate between print vs. electronic has shifted between generations but the previous consensus has revolved around fear. Fear of printed literature being forgotten and written off as an old medium. However rather than being referred to as an old medium, Price believes that it’s a format being reinvented (pg 4 Price). This reinvention allows for the reader to engage with the text in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible with print. Take for instance the app based novel Pry referenced by Jessica Pressman in The Novel in the Digital Age. The composition of the novel is not traditionally served in a format that allows the reader to flip through pages to read a text. Instead readers use the “forefinger and thumb to pry open or pinch close a virtual window, a space on the surface of the screen” (Pressman, 9). The nuances and physical participation of the reader can transcend written text in new and creative ways. Ways that can very well encourage more people to read and engage with literature. Alan Liu in his essay From Reading to Social Computing praises the web as “one of the most powerful publishing platforms ever invented”. The internet acts as a halfway point for author and reader as an individual is actively using text to convey what they want from the web. Community reading and writing is more pervasive than ever thanks to twitter threads and comment sections. A thought or opinion is written for the public sphere to then elaborate, relate or argue on. Individuals can now even use social media sites like Facebook to model a text e.g. students using Facebook to convey Romeo and Juliet. This puts a fresh take on the classic play, one that may be more intriguing to the youth of today. 

I want to end this post by saying that I don’t think the death of the print novel is something that’s going to happen immediately. However I will say the internet is here to stay and will only get more revolutionized. Instead of harking back to the days of yesteryear we should embrace change as it comes and look for the value in the new rather than reminiscing on the old. If you are someone who wishes to continue your foray into print literature then that is your own prerogative. At the end of the day we have always chosen what to engage in. Let’s not blame the web for we as humans choose to consume. 

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Nicolas Carr) Is the novel dead? like Will Self proclaims, struck down by modern communication technology? Each of these questions, honestly, seems a little beside the point, when looking at the development of communication technology over the ages. Generational trends, which loom large when viewed up close (i.e. are familiar and ubiquitous to you in your time (hello, wired phone!)), can blot out other possibilities, making the arrival of the new technology can feel shocking and instantly threatening. But technology is simply the tools overlaid on the resource of our collective knowledge to extract its truths—much like a web browser visualizes written code. We should trust that on a whole, when it comes to communication technology, we humans tend to craft tools that help us understand more of the universe than we did before, and each tool has brought us closer to connecting and engaging our collective understanding and experience of the world to help us navigate the “why” of our existence on both a personal and social level. 

Think of it! The written word itself, the codex, wood pulp paper ( Price, pg. 7), the printing press, the newspaper, the novel, television, and the internet. Each a wonder—providing more effected tools to share, learn, and discuss — and each creating a broader reach, creating access to and for more hearts and minds. They are different modes— each conveying information differently, varying in speed, scarcity, and complexity, but each tapping into the resource of collective human knowledge and powered by our human need to engage.  As Alan Liu puts it in relation to recent technologies and online behaviors—“… social computing and literary activity are both aspects of a single communicational phenomenon: the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.” (Alan Liu) 

Communication technology is often a target for disparagement. It is, after all, one of the quickest evolving and most often used.  In fact, the criticisms lobbed at modern digital communication technology are not even unique to this era. Reading habits predating our digital world exhibit similarities to today’s, and the ills prescribed to digital tools were once prescribed to everything from the written word itself to newspapers and novels. For example, people never really universally devoted full attention to their books, because we’ve always multitasked, and we’ve always recombined and skipped around in our reading and inquiry. (Price, pgs. 9-10). Even pegging the internet as the death of the bookstore is shortsighted—conveniently forgetting the impact of the Barnes & Nobles’ of the world on independent book stores which paved the way for Amazon’s gobbling up of the bookselling market. (Coady and Kennedy pg. 36). The impact of digital technology on our ability to remain present has been document with older forms of communication technology, as illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s mid-forties photograph featuring a subway car filled exclusively with passengers with their noses buried in newspapers. ( Lynn Coady and Kennedy pg. 42). All of this suggests that these behaviors are tied to underlying human tendencies that digital tools simply brought to the forefront in a more visible way. (Price, pgs. 9-10)

Why all of this animosity towards new technology time and time again? Pushing us to reconsider how we do things and step into a new framework can feel like a threat to the methods we’ve used to build meaning and security in a world that is so often nonsensical. In a reactionary state, we might assume the arrival of a new technology instantly implies its predecessor is of little or no worth (it doesn’t). Whether it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald disparaging film and his perceived limitations of it to capture the full range of the human emotional experience, Joyce Carol Oates accusing television of reducing humans to small and trivial beings (Coady and Kennedy pg. 14-15), or ministers railing against the novel as a great distraction and threat to our eyesight and doctors diagnosing newspaper addiction (Price, pg. 12)— we as humans can’t help but bristle with suspicion at the new. In all fairness, if new technology marks our location on the long human path to greater understanding, it acts, equally, as a marker of our finite place on that path. It can feel like being pulled out of the game by the coach when what you believed to be tried and true (physical books!, scholarly pursuits!, “serious” literature!) is called into question, or worse, set aside. You’ve, after all, pushed the ball forward as much as you could with the tools you had, and played by the rules. And Bam— the game changes, and with it systems of discourse —the “core circuit” as it were, is thrown up in the air. That could even make a person a little bitter (hello, Will Self!) — that loss of status and being able to keep up. The trick is to not look at getting benched as a negation of all you’ve contributed. As the unbothered WNBA superstar, Sue Bird, recently said about losing the last game before her retirement “It’s not the story. It’s not the story of a career.” (The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2022). 

We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize—on the “career”—the long path we as a species are plotting across the ages towards deeper understanding and connection. The word “technology” comes from the Greek roots “teckhne” (art, craft) and “logy” (study of). In this configuration it means art and craft, which both imply humanity and its creations are what is being studied. So in a sense, technology is really all about crafting tools to help us understand what it means to be human. In studying the progression of technology we can map the the many ways we’ve moved closer to tapping into our collective understanding of the human experience. Modern digital communication is just the latest iteration of our human desire to connect, understand, express, and learn. We should maintain a healthy suspicion of what’s new (not all tech serves us well), but we should also ask if, regardless of how it relates to existing practices, it serves our longer goal of gaining better understanding of the world and each other. If a criticism lies only in that a new technology challenges existing norms — what’s “serious” what’s “meaningful” (these terms coming with their own myriad of assumptions, we should take a beat to consider if this isn’t just an emotional reaction to realizing that the human search for understanding and connection will go on without us. 

The overarching purpose of this project is to put the theories of Barthes, Bauer/Zirker, Iser, Drucker, et al. into practice by collaborating on “editions” of a text, in this case Melville’s Benito Cereno. Obviously, it takes many hands and several years to create a publishable edition of a literary text, so we will keep our expectations modest and emphasize the process of collaboration and the experimentation with the affordances, design choices, and relationship with “implied readers” that digital publication allows.

In class, we decided by consensus to work within the following parameters (apologies to those who were absent, but the deadline is looming!):

• two roughly equal groups will each create an edition: to enroll in a group, sign up here
  • the groups need not be perfectly equal, so follow your interests. But if things start getting very imbalanced, be a mensch and take your second choice, please!
• each group selected a relatively narrow “frame” for the edition. Whereas the Norton edition we have in print, for example, aims to tell a “general reader” everything they need to know to feel oriented to the text, both editions will focus on a narrower (but more novel) issue:
  • group one (Anthony, Jenna, and Lisa so far) will create an edition focusing on the geography of the novella, providing links to historical maps and perhaps providing some context from historians of the period as to the global flows of goods, bodies, and capital that sailor/merchant/sealer/slavers like Delano and Cereno engage and enslaved Africans like Babo and Atufal attempted to wrest away for their own liberation.
  • group two (Sabina, Patrick, Travis, and Kelly so far) will create an edition that links the text to its own “reception history,” embedding quotes and links that give readers a sense of how Benito has been read, from its publication in the tumultuous 1850s to the present day.
• both groups began discussing next steps:
  • choosing a platform (some suggestions are here), creating a division of labor and workflow, and scheduling things out to ensure finishing within two weeks.
  • I want to emphasize that I want you to experiment and enjoy the collaboration: I am realistic about what you can do in two weeks and am perfectly happy with a partial edition that is a “proof of concept.” For example, group two might limit itself to the mid-19th century reception of the text, or it might add “reception history” only to the first 1/3 of the text. Group two might also “map” only a part of the text, or discuss representations of the slave trade in the visual culture of the period. Be realistic and follow your interests where they go.
• instead of formal presentations like last time, we will have an informal discussion of the process/product on 10/25. I do ask that, as for the first group project, each team member compose a brief post for the blog (500 words max) reflecting on a) the process/product as a whole and b) your specific role within it, with an emphasis on what the experience taught you that theorizing about annotation, marginalia, readers, and editions, or consuming such editions, didn’t.
• evaluation will be very similar to last time, with a group comment/grade and an individual comment/grade. The criteria are only slightly changed:
  • adventurousness: does the text take risks, or just play it safe? Does the edition resemble other standard “critical editions” in print, or does it do something new, using digital affordances to engage readers in novel ways or devise a new angle on the text that will be fresh to readers?
  • quality: is the product accessible and user-friendly? Does it articulate a clear relationship between the “primary text” and your “secondary” comments on it? Was some attention paid to aesthetics and design?
  • reflectiveness: does the presentation (and the discussion in the seminar and on the blog) reflect careful thinking about the project? Did the secondary readings by Barthes, Bauer/Zirker, Iser, Drucker, et al. inform the project in any way?