pages tagged bookENETDOWNhttp://enetdown.org//tag/book/ENETDOWNikiwiki2013-09-21T18:44:00Zthree books on readinghttp://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/three_books_on_reading/zaki2013-09-21T18:44:00Z2013-09-17T17:15:47Z
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<p>In the past year, I’ve read three books about reading and books. I’ve been
working on a document reader, so I thought that it would be a good idea to
learn from people that have already thought about how we read.</p>
<h1 id="scrollingforwardlevy:2001">Scrolling Forward<span class="markdowncitation"> (<a href="http://enetdown.org//tag/book/#Levy:2001">1</a>)</span></h1>
<p>When most people think of documents, they think of the big things: books,
articles, bills, and the like. Instead of starting off with these, Levy uses
the lowly example of the receipt to address the question of what exactly a
document is. He points out that the receipt as a document is not just a piece
of paper, but a cultural artifact that only gains meaning through how we
interact with it. There are many unwritten assumptions we make when we deal
with documents — for example, when we use receipts, we assume that they will be
adequate proof of our transaction at a later date.</p>
<p>He then goes into the historical context behind how each type of document
developed its form and function. He explains that much of the bureaucracy that
we deal with from day to day is a result of the Industrial Revolution.
Increases in distances and production meant that the handling of logistics in
large organisations quickly became complex. Writing had to likewise become
faster and thus, the memo was born. Now that there was so much paper flying
around, naturally, the filing cabinet was created. Many of the office
supplies that we take for granted were invented to adapt to these changes in
how we worked.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/gfx/scrolling-forward.jpg"><img src="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/three_books_on_reading/150x-scrolling-forward.jpg" width="150" height="225" alt="Cover of 'Scrolling Forward'" class="img left" /></a></p>
<p>Another point that Levy makes is how print has developed a system of trust that
we still have not replicated in the digital realm. The system of book
publishers, editors, reviewers, and libraries provide an infrastructure for
fact-checking, distribution, cataloguing, indexing, versioning, and
preservation that facilitate our interactions with literature. Again, because
of all this infrastructure, we make assumptions about the information we get
from books that their electronic counterparts lack. Levy recalls a medical
visit he made where the doctor needed to verify a fact in order to make a
diagnosis. Instead of looking in a textbook, the doctor suggests searching for
the information online. There is a fleeting moment where both Levy and the
doctor pause to justify their trust in the electronic information — a
justification that would not occur with a textbook. This infrastructure
was developed over a very long time<a href="http://enetdown.org//tag/book/#fn:middle-ages-tech-support" id="fnref:middle-ages-tech-support" class="footnote">1</a> and duplicating
it for electronic books will take some effort.</p>
<p>To me, the most important thread in <em>Scrolling Forward</em> is Levy’s commentary on
two different kinds of interaction with documents. Levy presents these two modes
through the figures of Walt Whitman and Melvil Dewey. Walt Whitman represents
the ephemeral experience of reading as an activity. By pointing out that
Whitman constantly tinkered with the interpretation of even his earliest work
by issuing new editions, Levy illustrates that a document is rarely static. The
passage of time and the reader’s shifting life experience determine how we
understand a document. This sort of interaction requires introspection — we
allow the document to speak to us and we reflect on not only the semantics of
what we read, but how the text is connecting our thoughts to the author’s. It
is this connection that characterises what Levy terms the “spiritual” side of
reading.</p>
<p>This is in contrast to the more rational side of reading represented by Melvil
Dewey. Dewey has had a huge impact on how we deal with information. In his
twenties, not only did he invent the Dewey Decimal Classification system, but
also founded <em>The Library Journal</em> and was among the founders of the American
Library Association. He was quite a meticulous thinker — to the point that his
attempts at spelling reform extended to his own name, which he changed from
“Melville” to “Melvil”. He was very much a product of an aged that strove for
efficiency and our present age echoes the same sentiments. As such, Levy
associates with Dewey the kind of thinking that is primarily
“information-seeking”, which thrives in an environment where information
is organised and readily available. This describes Dewey’s libraries quite well,
and in some ways, the Internet has been an improvement in terms of scale and speed.</p>
<p>Consequently, Levy likens Whitman to the technology of paper and Dewey to the
screen. These technologies, of course, do not occur in isolation, as paper has
bookstores and reading rooms and screens have the Internet and search engines.
Each technology has ardent supporters that bemoan the existence of the other,
but he notes that both can co-exist in a supplementary fashion; they can each
support very different ways of thinking. In fact, 12 years later, in 2013, it
seems that they are doing just that — e-books have not replaced paper books and
the Internet has not replaced libraries: book readers use different
technologies to fulfill different needs.</p>
<p>However, Levy makes an assertion that we are beginning to lean more towards the
Dewey style of thinking and that this is a dangerous trend for the future.
Because this style is so focused on seeking information, it downplays the
importance of the kind of environment we need to facilitate lateral thinking.
He explains this more in a Google Tech Talk titled
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA">"No Time to Think" (March, 5 2008)</a>.
New technologies and the world’s never-ending drumbeat are vying for our
attention which could be spent thinking about problems creatively. IBM’s
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk">"Paperwork Explosion"</a>‘s
key phrase ("machines should work; people should think") sounds quite cloying
when we realise that machines are making us "think different", but not more
effectively. This is important to me because I enjoy joining different threads
and finding links between subjects. Losing this ability is particularly
disturbing as I believe complex problems require interdisciplinary thinking.</p>
<h1 id="proustandthesquidwolf:2007">Proust and the Squid<span class="markdowncitation"> (<a href="http://enetdown.org//tag/book/#Wolf:2007">2</a>)</span></h1>
<p>Whereas <em>Scrolling Forward</em> is more about our sociocultural interactions with
written language, <em>Proust and the Squid</em> looks at the neuroscience of reading
and how it changes how we think. I previously wrote about some of the
<a href="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/10/programming_and_reading/">thoughts</a> I had while
reading this book, but I’ll expand on more of the book’s content.</p>
<p>Firstly, Wolf discusses how the brain was never meant to read. Our ability to
see glyphs hijacks parts of our brain that are used for object recognition and
the development of the alphabetic principle hijacks our speech processing
circuits. This reuse is just another example of the brain’s amazing
neuroplasticity.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/gfx/proust-and-the-squid.jpg"><img src="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/three_books_on_reading/150x-proust-and-the-squid.jpg" width="150" height="230" alt="Cover of 'Proust and the Squid'" class="img right" /></a></p>
<p>There is some discussion of humanity’s early history with written language and
Wolf takes this opportunity to share the how different writing systems use
different parts of the brain. Quite literally, the brain of a Chinese reader is
different from that of an English reader when viewed with the tools of
functional imaging. Later on, Wolf writes about Socrates’ rebukes of reading
(in <em>Phaedrus</em>) which I found to be extremely interesting. Socrates’ first
objection is based on his view that written language does not dialogue with the
reader the same way a teacher would with a pupil. Wolf and many others argue
that reading dialogises differently and written language has advanced in ways
Socrates never foresaw. Socrates’ second objection is raised from his
elevation of oral culture’s capacity for memory — in his view, written language
will diminish this capacity to the point that students will no longer be able
to achieve of the fluidity of retrieval needed for dialogue. Socrates’ final
objection is that reading will make knowledge available to those that do not
appreciate it fully. It will give people a false impression that they have
knowledge when they have only understood the surface. This recalls Levy’s
arguments in “Scrolling Forward” and Wolf also wonders if the Internet will
have a similar effect on readers.</p>
<p>Much of the rest of the book is devoted to explaining how the brain adapts to
written language in the few years of childhood, a development which took
humanity many millennia to attain. As you can imagine, there are lots of
potential stumbling blocks in this marathon. Wolf has separated learning to read
into the stages of: 1) emerging pre-reader, 2) novice reader, 3) decoding reader, 4)
fluent comprehending reader, and 5) expert reader. As I read about the details
of each stage, I joyfully saw the points in my own reading development where I
entered each stage; Wolf shares her own experiences in each stage as well as
those of children that she has helped at the <a href="http://www.ase.tufts.edu/crlr/">Center for Reading and Language
Research</a>. She closes with a description of the
intricate neural pathways that allow expert readers to decode and understand
words in the space of hundreds of milliseconds.</p>
<p>The final part of the book discusses when the brain can not learn to read —
dyslexia. As a society, we make many assumptions about literacy that may need
to be rethought. There is a stigma associated with unfluent reading that can be
quite damaging to those with dyslexia especially if it remains undiagnosed.
Wolf expands upon the neural pathways involved in reading with several theories
as to why dyslexics have difficulties reading. She stresses that, at a very
basic level, dyslexics’ brains work differently and that we should embrace the
creativity that comes from that.</p>
<p>Wolf really loves the reading brain and after reading this book I watched a
recording of a her <a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Squi">book discussion on C-SPAN</a>.
Her enthusiasm there matches what I encountered in her book perfectly.</p>
<h1 id="readingandwritingtheelectronicbookmarshall:2009">Reading and Writing the Electronic Book<span class="markdowncitation"> (<a href="http://enetdown.org//tag/book/#Marshall:2009">3</a>)</span></h1>
<p><a href="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/gfx/reading-and-writing-the-electronic-book.jpg"><img src="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2013/09/17/three_books_on_reading/150x-reading-and-writing-the-electronic-book.jpg" width="150" height="185" alt="Cover of 'Reading and Writing the Electronic Book'" class="img right" /></a></p>
<p>This book is more concrete when it comes to designing my document reader. It is
mainly a review of prior work in the design of e-books and psychological
studies of how we read both on paper and electronically. I found Marshall’s
characterisation of the different kinds of reading quite informative and early
on, it stressed to me that the needs of readers can vary greatly. This theme is
carried throughout the book, for example, in the study of annotation types and
of group reading.</p>
<p>Catherine Marshall references David Levy when she calls reading an “inherently
social” activity. That is why I am writing this review, right? Readers discuss
what they’ve read on their own, and in some cases of group reading, discuss
what they’re reading through shared focus. Studying these kinds of interactions
between readers may help facilitate collaboration.</p>
<p>However, reading studies are difficult to run because watching people read is
considered “creepy”. When it comes to doing a study on electronic-based
reading, one could use both eye-tracking and software instrumentation to log
the reader’s interactions. I actually plan on doing this, because I am
interested in the aforementioned different reading strategies and how an
interface can shift to accommodate each one.</p>
<p>The final chapter is really worth a read because it talks about all the
different ways we can bring the book into the digital age by giving it
capabilities that are difficult to realise with paper. Some, such as search and
hypertext, have been done many times, but there is still room for improvement.
Others, like document triage and browsing, really must be incorporated into
tools that the general public can use so that electronic books can achieve
parity with paper.</p>
<p>I think one thing I got out of this is that to validate my designs, I will have
to do user studies. When I get to that point, I’ll write another blog post!</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:middle-ages-tech-support"><p>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE">Middle Ages Tech Support
skit</a> imagines how the codex might
have been introduced in the Middle Ages.<a href="http://enetdown.org//tag/book/#fnref:middle-ages-tech-support" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</div>
<div class="bibliography">
<hr />
<p>Bibliography</p>
<div id="Levy:2001"><p>[1] <span class="item"><a href="http://dmlevy.ischool.uw.edu/">David M. Levy</a>: <em>“Scrolling
Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age”</em>. Arcade Publishing. New
York, NY. 2001. <a href="urn:isbn:978-1559706483">ISBN: 978-1559706483</a> </span></p></div>
<div id="Wolf:2007"><p>[2] <span class="item"><a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/epcd/faculty/wolf.asp">Maryanne Wolf</a>:
<em><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Proust-Squid-Maryanne-Wolf/?isbn=9780060186395">“Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”</a></em>.
HarperCollins. New York, NY. 2007. <a href="urn:isbn:978-0-06-018639-5">ISBN: 978-0-06-018639-5</a>.</span></p></div>
<div id="Marshall:2009"><p>[3] <span class="item"><a href="http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/">Catherine C. Marshall</a>:
<em><a href="http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009">Reading and Writing the Electronic Book</a></em>.
Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Morgan & Claypool. 2009.
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009">doi:10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009</a>.</span></p></div>
</div>
early printed bookshttp://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2012/08/14/early_printed_books/zaki2012-08-14T22:19:36Z2012-08-14T22:18:04Z
<p>The <a href="http://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2012/08/14/old_medical_texts/">last post</a> made me curious about other old books that
are available online and I came across this list. This allows me to mention one
of my favourite words: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable">incunabulum</a>.</p>
<p>Link: <a href="http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/earlybks.htm">Early Printed Books on the Web</a></p>
old medical textshttp://enetdown.org//outgoing/posts/2012/08/14/old_medical_texts/zaki2012-08-14T22:17:35Z2012-08-14T22:12:51Z
<p>This site from the National Library of Medicine allows you to interact with old
medical texts dating as far back as the 17th centry BC.</p>
<p>Link: <a href="http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/v2/">Turning the Pages</a></p>