Digital Bibliography

When the eReader craze first started a few years ago, I was pretty uninterested. Not because the functionality of such technologies was still immature, but because I balked at the idea that we, as a culture, are so interested in remediating digital technologies to be more like old technologies like books. I still pretty much feel like that. I love books. I think they might be the most important complex physical technology that humans have ever developed (nod to semiotic technologies like writing and language). But I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. So I bought a Kindle. Wow. It’s amazing. But not because it’s like a book. Because it’s light, portable, very low-power-hungry, stores a ton of books, and makes the reading experience really quite enjoyable. I don’t care what anybody says, the current state of e-ink is much, much different than reading on LCD monitors and laptop screens. Some people prefer one over the other, and each has it’s own affordances. That’s not the conversation I want to have. My point is…

I’m sick of destructive paper-book nostalgia. I’m talking about the people who are critical of eReaders and eBooks because they’re not paper. Or they don’t have bindings. Or they don’t smell like dusty pages and musty paper. Or they can’t write practically illegible notes in the margins. I love all those things about traditional books. I do. But not for the sake of themselves. Those things don’t make my experience of Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath any richer. Certainly, I associate those attributes with my memories of reading some of my favorite books, but they’re little more than associations, not functions. Another way of saying it? Window dressing. Enjoying a wine because you think it has a pretty label.

This is a difficult argument to make. I know. But here’s something to consider. The development, adoption, and further development of an given technology, but especially one as complex as a book or an eReader, is a cultural phenomenon. Certainly, and most obviously, the phenomenon is a technological one, and also clearly a financial one. But it’s more than that. Neither technologies nor businesses can flourish without a public component. Advertising, news coverage, research, controversy, etc. So when you (yeah, you know who you are!) launch into nostalgic jeremiads against the advent of ebooks, you’re not doing anyone any favors. And your cynicism is by no means harmless. It matters. Because people listen.

I’m not saying that your nostalgia is wrong headed. It’s real. For the most part, I share it. But just don’t let it be destructive. And don’t let it come from a place of fear. Most simply, don’t forget that this nostalgia, yours and mine, comes from a place of love, and memories formative to the things we like most about ourselves. There’s no reason to think that ebooks can’t facilitate the same sorts of nostalgia. Think mp3 players. I remember my first. 264MB. Drag and drop. No iTunes. Blue and Green. Tiny LCD screen. $150. And it was a HUGE deal for me. So is my Kindle. So is my iPad. And as they obsolesce, I’ll do what I should. I’ll let them go. I’ll look for technologies that maintain what makes them great, and improves on their flaws. I hope you’ll do the same.

(“eBook Readers Galore” by Michael Porter via Flickr; creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike 2.0 generic license)

I’ve been busy lately. Like everyone else out there who reads this blog, most likely. Grading. Prepping. Teaching. Reading. Researching. Adds up, I know. You know. So today, and maybe for at least the next couple of weeks, I’ll be pointing at some things with a bit of commentary. Hope you like it enough. Here’s the first of several…

I am in love with this animation. (I don’t think it’s stop-motion. Most likely CGI, given the smoothness of the transitions and other clues. Maybe.)

What strikes me first is that the video emphasizes the close connection between the words on the page and what we construct out of them in our heads. Language is certainly material. Paper, ink, printing presses, glues, etc. And it’s representational as well. And it’s more complicated than that, of course. The details of those clarifications are not what’s important to me about this. What’s important is the idea of construction. Texts as constructed objects. Texts as constructed experiences. This video seems to be working on either eliding those two concepts or highlighting just how much they have in common.

Let me explain. I first want to foreground and then get to the other side of the concept of the physical book as a constructed object (see above). It’s got pages, a cover, title page, inks, fonts, etc. And the form of the book (the codex…) is social constructed as well. A quick look at this history of binding technologies and textual circulation will point out that there are all sorts of forms for textual organization possible. The book evolved socially along with the technologies we use to preserve and circulate our texts. So… I’m going to move on to a different sort of construction.

I’m thinking of the difference between the work and the text that Roland Barthes makes (see S/Z, From Work to Text, and Theory of the Text for a nice long discussion and realization of that distinction). In “From Work to Text,” Barthes offers an alternative to the decoding practices he worked out in Mythologies, to the linear chain of significations articulated by Derrida. Instead of a single center, Barthes suggests that “the text is plural… it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible… plural. … it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers” (“From Work” 159). Any reading of a text must be understood as one of an infinite multitude of possible readings. Thus meaning and infinite signification no longer contradict each other. But fundamental to such a theory of the text is the advent of the reader in the meaning making process. Barthes, likening the text to a musical score, writes that “the text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work? … Nowadays only the critic executes the work” (163).

Basically, as I read his work, he defines the text as the work of the author in constructing the arguments, images, references, and linguistic styles which appear on the page. And it is the reader who, effectively, repurposes these assets into a meaningful experience/object for themselves. In this way, writing and reading have very close meanings. And they are both obviously activities of construction.

Which is what I think is so amazing about this particular video, the way that it foregrounds the “constructed” nature of reading a book. What’s ironic, and refreshing, is that it uses the material assets of the book to do so… in a way that Barthes’s work, by focusing only on the semiotic, fails to recognize.

Here’s another response to Joe Harris’s blog. To this post. I have no opposition to Harris’s position. Instead, I offer another way of considering the origins of the extraordinarily long delays in the scholarly publications process, as well as pointing to a possible avenue of addressing them.

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I’m curious about your associating publication lag time with paper-publishing. I agree that the physicality of printing certainly contributes to the delays about which you’re writing. But I’m not sure that going digital in lieu of paper would reduce the lag time. Having worked on several born-digital publications, both as author and editor, it’s been my impression that the “sending to the printer” component of the process usually comes at the end and involves a few extra weeks (or a few months, at most). Given the timelines you work out here, that doesn’t seem to be the primary cause of the delays, right?

Do you think that these delays might be due more to the nature of the scholarly model of publication? Multiple peer-reviews, multiple revisions, and highly complex and variable labor models? I’m thinking graduate student and faculty who are often paid only in “experience” or “vitae capital.” And because of this sort of compensation, the turnover is high with a constant atmosphere of on-the-job learning. So much variation and turnover result in unpredictability and inefficiency. And the only way the academic publishing model has seemed to respond is to work with relatively long deadlines for different parts of the publication process in order to accommodate all of this unpredictability.

These are the factors that I’ve always understood to be the driving force behind the extended deadlines for scholarly publication. And that’s why I’m not sure it’s a realistic expectation for digital publication to address this significant problem.

One possible way to address this problem is through better systems of coordinating this complex system of labor and textual distribution. For instance, Kairos was just awarded a grant toward implementing an Open Journal System which has been developed to address these very problems. Instead of an editor serving as a clearinghouse for work associated with a publication where he/she receives work, processes it, and sends it back out to the appropriate people or entities, OJS works to automate those relationships in a way that allows editorial collaborators and co-workers to communicate and work together more directly. Not only does it speed up the process, but it reduces certain types of mundane tasks traditionally relegated editors-as-editorial-hubs.

In this way, I could see digital publication models as a potentially effective response to the lag time associated with more traditional editorial models.

(and it might even be a way of increasing the pace of print publication, too!)

image: “Stopped Watch” by practicalowl via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.