Writing in Books
I have found reading Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2001) using SocialBook’s reading space to be jarring. Socialbook invites annotation and commentary, but I felt that it didn’t support my usual reading style. When I read journal articles, I work with a pdf copy and I make frequent annotations (highlighting, underlining and cryptic notes of varying lengths), but that type of annotation doesn’t seem appropriate on a shared copy. I found it very difficult to read without making my usual marks, and I want to explore this further to understand the contrasting types of annotations.
Ong (2003) recalls Plato’s argument that a written text is unresponsive, “if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place”. There is a long history of writing in books that argues against this view of written texts as unresponsive. Readers engage in a written conversation with a text, and with other readers of the text, through annotations. As Bolter (2001) tells us, ”medieval scribes slowly refashioned the writing space . . . They began to insert critical notes and glosses into the margins of the text, sometimes in several layers. In some scholarly medieval codices, the page became a web of text and interpretation, tradition and innovation.” These annotations augment the text, and communicate with other readers.
From the broad margins of manuscripts to interleaved books bound with a blank page facing each printed page, we can see that books have been produced with the intention of their being written in. There is also a selection of tools available specifically for annotating books, such as highlighters and post-it notes. We also see, with Socialbook, an online forum which intends for annotations to be made, and shared.
Writing in books raises questions about the purpose of the writing, and the intended audience. Often, readers make notes or underline selections of text for their own purposes while reading and the annotations are not shared, unless the notes are made on a textbook that is resold, or on a library copy of the book. But annotations in Socialbook are deliberately made to be shared. Marshall and Brush (2002) compared the annotations students made for personal use, and those they shared in an online setting. They found that only a small fraction of the personal annotations were shared, and that the personal annotations underwent “profound transitions” when they were published.
We can ask why readers make personal annotations. What purpose do those annotations serve, if they are not in a form that is sharable? Marshall (1998) characterizes annotations on an array of continua such as formal vs. informal, permanent vs. transient and public vs. private. Many of the annotations found in students’ textbooks are “private notes, scribblings, and markings that were intended as meaningful only to the reader”. Marshall finds that personal annotations made in textbooks disrupt the linear printed text and make associations between passages, and that “annotations on paper are hypertextual . . . in fact they are a direct reflection of a reader’s engagement with the text.”
Socialbook, with its space for shared annotations, doesn’t support the informal or tacit personal annotations that readers make as they become immersed in a text. However its shared space can make the printed book become responsive.
References
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Marshall, Catherine C. “Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation.” Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. ACM, 1998.
Marshall, Catherine C., and A. J. Brush. “From personal to shared annotations.” CHI’02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2002.
Ong, Walter J. (2003). Orality and Literacy. Routledge. Retrieved 31 May 2015, from <http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=1960>
I think you have made a really interesting about reading styles. I am now doing more reading in a virtual environment which has changed the way I read. I found the section in the reading about how the monks would copy annotations while reproducing the scripts. I think that illustrates how we are interested in seeing how others interpret printed works, but I agree that annotations are very personal notes and are often intelligible to any others.
Catherine
It’s interesting how unique the experience of reading can be. I’ve never been able to write in textbooks, or highlight them either. I annotate in a word processor – a separate page (once it would have been a notebook). Interestingly, the social book tool has not been very user friendly for me. The pages of the book jump around at the slightest impression on the screen, and I couldn’t download the pages I wanted (within the 10% limit) so persevered for hours with the jump around. Having people’s comments from 2014 was interesting but I wouldn’t say that asynchronous comments were conversation. Interesting experience.
Socialbook’s potential for conversation around a book is very exciting, but the experience certainly isn’t smooth. I found myself echoing E. Annie Proulx’s complaint – “twitchy little screen”.
Something I would want to be able to do to enhance Socialbook would be to be able to link back to this discussion area, and to link from here to Socialbook. As it is, it’s like trying to keep up with conversations going on in two different rooms.
I had similar feelings as you while I was reading on SocialBook. Like you, I also make annotations, highlight, underline and make notes to myself while I read, but these comments are just to help me keep track of ideas, not necessarily to share with others. I actually made my own separate notes on a piece of paper as I read because I did not want my notes that probably make sense only to me, to clutter up the pages. I found it took me much longer to read because I kept stopping to read the comments, and then had to go back and re-read the text again as I had forgotten what I had originally read. It also bugged me that I could not find page numbers (which might just be my lack of looking) and so if I wanted to make a personal note for myself or use a quote, I had to figure out a system for being able to find it again.
With that being said, I think reading other people’s comments is useful, especially for raising ideas that may not have been previously thought of, or clarifying content for the reader. I disagree with Proulx’s belief that the genre of the novel will continue to survive as is (Bolter, 2001), just look at the number of e-readers, Kindles, Nooks, Tablets and iPads, and the numerous ways to borrow or buy electronic copies of books that are available.
As you mention, Plato’s “argument that a written text is unresponsive”(Ong, pg. 79) does not necessarily hold up when people are able to ask questions and comment on the text using a tool such as Socialbook. If we were simply reading Writing space independently, discussions about the text may not be as rich or as numerous, as they are when you can read and share your comments directly “on” the book.
References
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge.
Oops, apologies folks. I got this messed up. It was Ong’s book that I was having trouble with in terms of the ‘twitchy screen’. The social book platform for Bolter’s book has been fine; no troubles with online reading at all. Just thought I should correct what I said !
Hi Janette,
I also found Ong’s book nearly unreadable through the UBC library. The solution I found was simply searching through Google Scholar and free downloadable PDF versions popped right up. I was able to save a PDF which was much easier to read, plus you can then highlight and/or add comments. It might be too late now, but I found that the PDF was much preferable to use.
Dear Janice:
“Socialbook, with its space for shared annotations, doesn’t support the informal or tacit personal annotations that readers make as they become immersed in a text. However its shared space can make the printed book become responsive.”
This is a great point and I really thank you for raising it. I would ask though, if the Social Book is really trying to support this affordance (personal notes). The way I see it is that in print books, any annotation is personal unless you have the explicit intention to share that text and your notes with someone else. I am guessing (without really knowing) that there must be a way to keep your notes in Social Book personal. I’ll have to take a look at it.
Somehow related, I don’t know if you are familiar with annotate it <http://annotateit.org/>, but I recommend you to take a look at it.
Hi Ernesto
I didn’t realize, when I wrote the post, that it is possible to save annotations as “draft” so that they remain personal. At the time, I was frustrated with trying to read Bolter’s book without being able to make my usual notes and underlinings. Reading goes much more easily since I’ve found out how to create personal annotations.
Thank you for the link to AnnotateIt; I hadn’t heard of it before. Besides allowing text commentary, the annotations can include videos, audio and even links to other web pages. Bolter tells us that the supporters of print say that hypertext only gives the illusion of control because it doesn’t allow the reader the choice of making associations. AnnotateIt gives this control back to the reader by allowing the reader to create links to other pages. This may be an example of what Bolter has in mind when he writes that “digital technology seems to reduce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author herself”.