Why are we here?

This week the University of Western Sydney held a symposium, New Avatars of the Book in Digital Culture. I was invited to contribute to the event, in my capacity as eResearch manager. One member of my team thought it meant I was going to get to slap on the blue body paint, but sadly it wasn’t that kind of Avatar.

This symposium focuses on the changing nature and status of those peculiarly useful interactive objects we call ‘books’ in online contexts. In contrast to web-pages, files, ‘sites’ and ‘contexts’ of reading, the book still presents a useful model of rich ‘containment’ and productive constraint.

But are books possible in digital form? What elements of the book survive online? Which ones are transformed and in
 what ways? The end of the book has long been prophesied,
but how do we replicate the particular functionality (such as searching without knowing what you’re looking for), and forms 
of knowledge particular to books in online environments? 
What forms of interface can be envisioned bearing in mind 
the characteristic feedback loops between (especially) literary reading and writing? Distinguishing between the form of the book and its functionality, this symposium will explore possibilities for replicating the book’s useful functions in online environments.

(Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel, from the invitation to the event)

In this context I didn’t want to present too formally but prepared some notes for the discussion, after the keynote talks. This post contains my pre-event note/slides and a few observations from the event.

The keynotes

The keynotes were both really engaging discussions of digital culture (not so much the book).

Mitchell Whitelaw, from Canberra University talked about building “generous interfaces” to online databases. The idea is to enable a browse-based interface that attempts to show as many entry points to a collection as possible. Mitchell’s visual tools allow you to see the shape of large archival collections and explore them using both visual cues and metadata facets such as dates or creators. Dan Cohen recently asked how this might work for university web sites, I can’t see how, but it’s an interesting design challenge (hint for uni web teams – the big images that take up a third or more of the screen and change all the time don’t improve the utility of the site).

Mitchell talked a bit in the discussion about how a ‘generous’ book interface might look, showing the ‘weight’ of items in the Table of Contents, giving a sense of the shape of a work,  a potential site for further research.

Jason Nelson, from Griffith uni talked about his practice as a digital poet, which didn’t involve any pretentious reading out loud, but did involve an array of amusing, rude and occasionally moving online stuff, which I won’t attempt to describe or critique it.

As Jason demoed various Flash and HTML stuff he’d made I was thinking about all the problems he’d create for archivists, and indeed he does; he told us about how he’d had to deposit screen-capture walk-throughs into the Griffith repository as proxies for the actual games and interactive poem-things he creates[1]. He’s a textbook example of the difficult-to-archive new media artist. See game game game and again game, which apparently may ruin your life.

I was glad I didn’t have to follow Jason directly with my rather more sedate stuff about techno-socio-political considerations, standards and such. But at least my cut-price embedded slide-shows don’t look too shabby compared to his low-tech, low-culture hand-drawn stuff.

The readings

There were two readings for this symposium. One is a long essay Graphesis: Visual Knowledge Production and Representation by Joanna Drucker (2010). It’s a well-referenced survey of different approaches to “critical understanding of visual knowledge production” with only passing reference to books. I thought this was a really useful way of mapping the jagged edges of a huge theoretical hole, but it doesn’t provide any answers about how we might explore bookishness, or redefine the book.

The second reading is a piece from Alan Liu, (2009) which, I think, assumes that the end of the book is obvious, apparently because we can put books online and search and tag them and dismember them in an online environment. He cites three scholarly web applications to demonstrate that books are dead, but I don’t really buy it. One of them is the Open Journal Systems software, which is not about books anyway, it’s a workflow system for managing journal production. Last time I checked it was mostly used by editors to produce journals consisting of PDF files, on the web but not of the web.

The end of the book?

Liu says, in reference to some other symposium:

As suggested by the title of this symposium (Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age), the best way to think about the book in the digital age may well be to focus on bookishness. From the point of view of the digital, the book has already gone away. So the remaining question is “what happens to bookishness?” Or, again, “where does bookishness go?”

I don’t know where bookishness goes, or what happens to it.

From the point of view of this eResearch person books have not gone away. And from the point of view of the digital (who knew the digital had a point of view?) books have most emphatically not gone away and do have digital analogues:

It goes without saying that an e book is different in many ways from a paper book but nobody in the mainstream is having any trouble with the concept of delivering or buying books digitally (though they may be less relaxed when they finally realize that they’ve been renting the books, not building the family library). Scholars can have all the fun they like debating the demise of the form, and speculating about function, but the book is obviously very much alive.

I think that Mod’s list of qualities looks like at least a good check-list for any bookish project to consider.

The book is not the only bounded object to make the transition from the physical to the virtual.

Singles:

I should point out that this workshop was not about the end of the book. In fact, Maria Angel asked, in the introduction; how might the constraints, and bounds of the book create an interesting space for innovation?

Interesting things about C21 books

Useful functions of the book?

Potential projects?

I figured there might be postgrads and others at the symposium interested in where to direct their bookish work here’s a list from the technical perspective.

Conclusion

Well, there isn’t a conclusion really as these are just notes but I’m sure that continued work led by Anna and Maria and the Writing and Society Research Centre will be critically important to UWS, seeing as we’re the first Australian university to give Every New Student a Free iPad.