Resources for Students Wishing to Study Digital Text Reading Behaviors

Image of my print copy of Bolter with (excessive?) marginalia p. 77 

        Documents without punctuation or word division may seem bizarre (Bolter 76-77 and 83), but think about writing as a representation in text of what someone has said.  Is there clear word division in the stream of sound we make when reading this sentence out loud?  What form does punctuation take, or should it take, when we read this sentence?  Note that modern logical punctuation differs from ancient "musical" punctuation; the former was for the eye, the latter for the ear.  When silent reading replaced the habit of reading aloud, punctuation conventions appear to have grown more important to help the eye bring order to the silent text on the page.  For another unpunctuated MS, see a full, 2-page "opening" of the British Library's fragment of the Biblical Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its all-capital alphabet in Biblical majuscule (i.e., caps) is similar to the script of the Vatican Library's Virgil in Capitalis Quadrata.  By about a thousand years later, a combination of changes in writing alphabets and punctuation, painting guide letters and illuminations, and complex page layout (cf. "Windows") produced complex, information-packed, dialogic documents like this page from the Beinecke Library (Yale) MS fragment of  the Book of Numbers (5.14 ff.) with the "glossa ordinaria" by later Christian scholars surrounding the biblical text and annotating between biblical lines (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 126 folio 6 verso).

        Some Possible Questions to Discuss about Bolter.

1)  In Bolter's analysis, what is "linear reading" (76-8)?

2)  What kind of reading does Bolter call  "dialogue" (78-80)?

3)  What is reading a "network" (81-84)?

4)  What old-print typographic (or "paratextual") features may change in the new hypertextual environment (86)?

        Students who want to explore the claims made by Bolter and Sven Birkerts about the nature of reading in a hypertextual environment (i.e., online) may want to read Stephenson, Wen. "The message is the medium: a reply to Sven Birkerts and 'The Gutenberg Elegies'." Chicago Review 41.n4 (Fall 1995): 116(15). Goucher College Library. 8 Jan. 2007.  Available online from this stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25305997  

     Students who want to think about the broader cultural implications of the Bolter-Birkerts debate might be interested in Neil Postman's 1985 book about the shift from a reading culture to a network-TV-watching culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death.  Although broadcast television officially ceased in 2013, to be replaced by cable TV and streaming media on the Internet, the change increased rather than decreased our cultual reliance on video as a favored medium for information delivery.  Postman's comparison of the dystopian futures offered by George Orwell's 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (London: Chatton & Windus, 1932) has often been revisited--click here to read it. Special collections contains first editions of both Brave New World and its sequel, Brave New World Revisited.  A short paper based on either might be interesting.

      Students interested in a sociological and cognitive studies approach to on-screen reading compared with print-text reading should read Ralf Schneider, "Hypertext narrative and the reader: a view from cognitive theory."  European Journal of English Studies; Aug2005, Vol. 9 Issue 2, p197-208, 12p.  [For fifteen years, this article was available online via the Library's EbscoHost subscription, but that subscription has lapsed--unlike an article in a print journal in the Library stacks, we can no longer see it.  Copies of Schneider's article from a Word file may be obtained from the instructor, who resorted to Interlibrary Loan for his reference copy.  Think about this when you rely on online sources that need to last as long as your career, or even your life.]

1)  What does Schneider say are ordinary reading's "non-linear processes" (199-200)?

2)  What does Schneider say may change about "character" in hypertext fictions, and how might that also affect hypertext non-fictions (e.g., blogs, ordinary web pages like this one, Wikipedia entries, etc.) (203)?

        Students interested in the Internet's effect on social coherence and reliable information definitely should read Cass Sunstein's 2001 article (a section of a book chapter), "Fragmentation and Cybercascades" in Writing Materials, pp. 453-66.  In his introduction, Sunstein, writing eight years before the events, predicted the emergence of the "tea party" movement of 2009 and QAnon since 2017, and calling them "cybercascades," what we now call "fake news" that submerged the 2016 presidential election in debates about false or misleading charges that misled voters and encouraged low turnout.  One possible midterm paper topic might collect what is currently known or suspected (by reliable/scholarly sources of course) about the origins, operation, effects, and future of QAnon.  Just take care to derive some of your own conclusions from the evidence rather than merely reporting its existence.