Process Volume I: Concept by Alison Rowan

Process Volume I: Concept ALISON ROWAN

Process Volume I: Concept

Process Volume I: Concept ALISON ROWAN

1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

“How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet” Douglas Adams, 29 August 1999

3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Introduction OVER THE SUMMER, when I was starting to think about what topic I wanted to explore this year, I spent a lot of time getting nowhere. My mind kept circling back around to the subject of books and print, but each time it came around, I dismissed it. It’s a tired subject, I thought. “Print is dead,” blah, blah, blah. “Print will never die,” blah, blah, blah. We’ve all seen enough of these headlines to last a lifetime. I spent weeks trying to come up with something different to look at—something that would interest me, but that I hadn’t explored too much, yet—without the smallest figment of an idea of what that might be. A couple of weeks before the semester started, this resulted in me flopped on my friend Jay’s futon complaining, “I have no ideas!” and him, helpful as always, pointing to random objects off his balcony. “Do your thesis on… that streetlamp over there.” “Sure thing.” “Do your thesis on… the garbage can.” “I’m sure that would be fascinating.” “How about this weird little plant thing growing over here?” Jay wasn’t completely off track, either. To me, that’s how everything was starting to feel. Any topic that popped into my brain might as well have been a random garbage can in Markham for all the excitement it inspired in me. All the while, images of books marched through my head, like a triumphant little victory parade that I was refusing to acknowledge. About a week later, with just enough time to start working on the presentation that I would have to give on the first day of class introducing my area of focus, I caved. I’ve been a reader as long as I can remember, I’ve been drafting a novel every year since I was thirteen, and despite working in the undoubtedly visual field of graphic design, my work has always focused on typography and lettering. In hindsight, it’s hilarious that I ever thought I might choose to focus on something different. My life is about letters. It always has been. I resisted the topic for so long because I didn’t know if I had anything new to say. So much has already been said on the topic. There are articles, books, documentaries, artworks. Did I actually have something new to offer? I started the semester still unsure of that answer, but I figured I would find out—the topic apparently wasn’t going to leave me alone until I did.

1. Granted, “Armistice Reached: Print and Digital Each Good For Different Things” isn’t quite as flashy a headline as, “The Death of Print”.

2. That question has been answered many times, and is perhaps best summarized by International News Media Association executive direction Earl Wilkinson: “Will publishers be primarily print or digital in the year 2100? Silly question, digital. Will publishers be primarily print or digital in the year 2013? Silly question, print” (Edmonds).

My position on the subject stemmed from my dissatisfaction with the narratives I kept encountering. There were a lot of highly logical people offering highly logical arguments as to why digital formats were the highly logical choice. There also were a lot of attached, emotional accounts about why digital formats could never compare to print. It always seemed to be a question of which would come out on top in the Battle Royale of the publishing world. If there were more measured, moderate arguments being made, they certainly weren’t the ones I was seeing1. Those that did seek to strike a balance often did so by attempting to mash the two formats together in a clumsy hybrid that had neither the stability and longevity of print nor the unrestrained dynamism of digital. Instead of helping one another to create the ideal reading experience, they hindered. Rather than focusing my attention on which direction the publishing industry will be moving as a whole2 or picking a side, I elected to concentrate on the issue from a more bottom-up perspective. Using my own personal experience as a reader as my foundation, I chose to explore how the two mediums can co-exist within the life of an individual on an everyday basis, each serving their own purposes according to their own strengths and weaknesses. My goal is to find a way to celebrate the legacy of print without vilifying technology, and to welcome technology without relegating print to obsolescence. Thus far, my work has approached this subject from different angles: at times through conceptual work that aims to provoke thought, as in the case of Like Pixel Like Paper, and at times through more literal means as in the case of Rabbit Hole Books, which aims to bridge the gap between reading across disparate media. My body of work as a whole places emphasis on the chosen medium, encouraging the viewer to be mindful of their own reading choices. The effects can range from becoming more invested in a work of fiction to improving retention of information. Through the careful selection of media according to a variety of factors, the reading process can be optimized for each individual text, both making reading a little easier for those who do it regularly, and making it more accessible to those who don’t normally enjoy it. Written language is something that the majority of us interact with on a daily basis, near constantly. If we’re not engaged in long text, we’re encountering signage

My goal is to find a way to celebrate the legacy of print without vilifying technology, and to welcome technology without relegating print to obsolescence.

and logotypes and the fine print on the back of the shampoo bottle. We read our emails for work, our textbooks for school, our books for fun, and the recipe for dinner. Lather, rinse, repeat. Its sheer pervasiveness in our lives makes it a crucial topic. Language has always been fluid. Our words have developed over centuries, and are still in flux. New words are being forgotten and made up every day, while old ones are shifting in meaning. It’s easy to be offended by the current propagation of “literally” to mean the exact opposite of its original definition, but the English language is made up of countless such shifts3—we just didn’t have to live through most of them. Just as the words we use change, so too do the ways we record them. At some point, each of the punctuation marks we use today was invented, introduced, and subsequently adopted. It’s a gradual process, and one that still continues with new punctuation marks emerging every few years and vying for traction. The SarcMark4 hasn’t made it, but emoticons certainly have, which punctuate language in their own way. The surfaces we use to both read and record our language have always been changing, too. We’ve had tablets ranging from stone to Galaxy. While many place new digital technologies in opposition to thousands of years of paper-based development, this kind of change isn’t new. eBooks arguably have more in common with the scroll than the codex ever did. Change always carries with it some reservations, and adoption is never immediate, but as new developments come at an exponential pace, we must learn to get over our fear of the unfamiliar and evaluate new options on their own merits. This is not to say that we must evaluate them objectively—our subjective relationships with a given medium have as much to do with our reading experience as its objective qualities—but we must evaluate them openly. For most, words are the bridge between us and the rest of the world. They are how we express ourselves and understand others, and the more exposure we have to more varieties of expression, the better equipped we will be. If eReaders are getting people reading more often, they’re helping. If books are getting people reading more analytically, they’re helping. Neither one must negate the other. Ultimately, I think we need to stop speculating about what may or may not happen and what it may or may not mean, and focus on how we can optimize the media forms we have available to us right now. Maybe one day, technology will be sophisticated enough that it will encapsulate everything we love about print and more, replacing it once and for all. Or maybe one day, an apocalypse will wipe out every electronic device on the face of the earth, and paper is all we’ll have. But today, we have both, and I’m interested in making the most of them.

3. Today, “to peruse” is widely used with reference to a noncommittal glance through something, while it used to mean the opposite. The Merriam-Webster dictionary continues to list the following definitions: 1. a. to examine or consider with attention and in detail 1. b. to look over or through in a casual or cursory manner 4. A proposed punctuation mark used to indicate sarcasm. Given its widespread use, it was clearly deemed a great idea

Letter to Troy Library Isaac Asimov, 1971.

Table of Contents Introductory Presentation Print-Based Texts One-Week Project Digital Texts Photograph Collections Midterm Presentation Intersections of Print & Digital National Novel Writing Month The Science of Reading Final Presentation Like Pixel Like Paper Bibliography

15 23 39 47 63 69 77 89 97 105 111 127

Introductory Presentation This presentation, intended to introduce my topic to the class, was presented on September 9th, 2014 as an audio-visual Pecha Kucha. To see it as it was originally presented, please visit: vimeo.com/111985714

A pecha kucha is a presentation consisting of 20 slides lasting 20 seconds each.

SLIDES 1–3 Cultural background, interests, spiritual/political beliefs, motivation, etc.

Hi! My name’s Alison Rowan. I’m 21, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Ontario. Naturally, I ran off to OCAD U in the city the minute I turned eighteen, and given my birthday is at the start of September, that’s not much of an exaggeration. In terms of background, I’m your standard European mutt. Some French, some English, some Scottish, some Irish, none of it recent enough or a significant enough fraction to feel like an identity. I know it’s cliché, but art has always been part of my life. When I was little, I was ambidextrous because I didn’t want to stop colouring when one hand got tired. I’ve been a reader and a writer as long as I can remember, I’ve played piano since I was four and I’ve always been known for an entrepreneurial bent, even as a kid. Design came later on, when high school introduced me to this magical thing called Adobe Illustrator. As personal beliefs go, I’m an agnostic, a feminist, an attempted environmentalist—I can be admittedly bad at living up to this one sometimes—and an optimist. I place a lot of value in intellectualism and open access to learning, because I believe knowledge is one of the most powerful tools you can have.

SLIDES 4–6 My creative work

This painting is almost five years old now, but it’s one of my favourite fine art pieces that I’ve done. Drawing and painting have taken a back seat to graphic design for me and I don’t do them very often, but they were a big part of my life for years, and this is the kind of work that built the foundation for my design. That, and it pays tribute to New York, a city I’ve been in love with since I visited there just a few months before I painted it.

This is the project I’m best known for. What started as a first-year Communication Design project that got a mediocre grade ended up going viral online and winning an RGD Social Good award last year. Its main proponents have been Tumblr users and unexpectedly, though in hindsight quite obviously, teachers who’ve written to me about the difference they’ve made in their classrooms—by far the best response I’ve gotten to something I’ve made. All the Books You’ll Never Read was my version of a “noisy book” for Lewis’s class last year, preying on every reader’s fear of running out of time. Pages are filled with titles and summaries of over 200 books, each perforated so that you can tear it out if you do read it, allowing you to silence the massive volume one page at a time. As a complete bibliophile, this became a pet project for me and largely took the place of sleep for the two weeks it took to design and produce. Matte Stephens is a contemporary artist I’ve loved since I was in high school. As a graphic designer with my own fine arts background, his simple, graphic forms paired with his traditional medium have always appealed to me, as a hybrid of the two things I love. His playful style and whimsical colour palette makes his work instantly recognizable. His were three of the four first art prints I ever bought.

SLIDES 7–9 Creative work that I admire

I don’t have the patience for animation. I know this because when I’ve tried it, I’ve ended up in tears, screaming at my computer. But I’m completely astounded by those who do, like Walt Disney Animation Studios. There’s little I find more inspiring than the fact that every single thing you see on screen started as a thought, and was produced sketch by sketch, frame by frame, by hand or digitally. As Walt said, “I hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing— that it was all started by a mouse.”

Jessica Hische is an American designer known for her hand lettering. She directly inspired me to get into lettering, but I think more important is that her massive success has demonstrated that beautiful scripts and traditionally “feminine” designs aren’t just for wedding invitations and desktop publishers, elevating them to mainstream, acclaimed design. That, and she’s living my dream job, with several Penguin book covers under her belt. SLIDE 10 A favourite text

SLIDE 11 A favourite image

SLIDE 12 A favourite online/smart tech resource

I adore A Passage to India. Despite being published 90 years ago, it still has so much to say about our ongoing struggles with internalized racism, confronting them honestly, but with hope. I expected a stuffy British novel and was bored by the first 100 pages. Then we discussed it in my lit class, and I realized it was funny. It had real heart that I’d completely missed, and from there, I loved it. It’s scary how much your preconceived notions can affect what you get from something. I took this picture in October of first year when I climbed out the 7th-story window of my apartment to sit on this tiny patch of roof and work on an urban landscape for my drawing class. I was freezing cold, wrapped in sweaters and scarves and fingerless gloves, trying to draw with numb hands and definitely breaking a major rule if not a law, but being out there made me feel more like OCAD was where I was supposed to be than any else had. I use Evernote on a daily basis. It’s a free note-taking app that syncs online so you can access it from your computer, phone, or any web browser. Its tons of features mean everyone uses it differently, but it’s great for saving and annotating images, clipping articles, jotting down lists, and even drafting out this presentation. It’s quick, convenient, and its interface is way easier than browsing through a million tiny text files on your computer.

As far as my future career in design, I want to stay self-employed. I am now, and for me it’s ideal. I have a couple of steady clients that provide me with a consistent income and new clients who pop up often enough to keep things interesting. I’m considering a studio job after school ends for a couple of years for the experience, but ultimately I want to be working independently—and preferably on contract for Penguin.

SLIDE 13

While it seems like there’s been a push toward designers as jacks of all trades in recent years, expected to design for print, web, mobile and whatever else, this just doesn’t seem sustainable to me. As technologies get more complicated and more new forms of media pop up that require their own specific skills, I think specialization is going to become more prominent if the design is going to be half-decent—it’s going to have to. Maybe then I’ll stop getting so much flak for focusing on books.

SLIDE 14

That said, is my direction about books? Well, kind of. It seems like every day I read something about how either “print is dead” or “technology is evil”. It’s in newspapers, YA Dystopian novels, blogs, and at my grandparents’ dinner table. It’s print vs. digital, you’re on one side or the other, and eventually one will reign victorious. But I know this is a false dichotomy. I want to explore how they relate, intersect, co-exist, and influence each other.

SLIDES 15–19

Future design career intentions

Speculating on the future of graphic design as a profession

Introduction to proposed area of focus

I’m interested in how the written word is affected by its vehicle. How does a page or a screen or an app determine how we structure sentences, the tone we use, if we use emoticons, and how easily written language can adapt? Most punctuation marks we have now have existed since the days of scribes, when new marks could emerge organically through error or inspiration in a way that’s inhibited by fixed keyboard layouts, whether on a linotype or a Macbook.

Twitter gets a lot of criticism for allegedly shortening attention spans and reducing our collective intelligence, but I think there’s all too much bias in that interpretation. I think Adams has a point, here. Why can’t Twitter be an exercise in concision, vocabulary, and editing? I can’t be the only one who’s tested her linguistic and grammatical skills, whittling a message down to 140 characters one word swap and structural alteration at a time. Every new outlet for written communication takes on a role in society where it’s judged for its merits against the ones that already exist. Is it high-brow? Low-brow? Accessible? Academic? Digital emergences like Twitter tend to get shafted, while other fixedform outlets like haikus and sonnets have been celebrated in carefully-bound poetic volumes for centuries. Why?

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “The medium is the message”. I don’t think that’s entirely true, because it doesn’t account for massive variances in the content itself or subversive use of a medium, but I think it’s clear at this point that written language is affected by its medium both in the way we write, and the way we read. The medium is more than just a surface—it’s an active participant in our reading experience. SLIDE 20 Fundamental research question

I’m interested in how every written medium plays a special role—how it differs from others, what it excels at, fails at, how it shapes written communication as a whole. How would the same original text appear if it were modified to best suit the conventions and constraints of ten different types of written media? Ultimately, I’m asking one question: Why is where we read something so crucial to what we read and how we read it?

Print-Based Texts “Which of us hasn’t drawn sustenance from the simple smell of the books on the shelves, despite them not belonging to us. Gazing at books in the hope of extracting knowledge. All those books you haven’t read and that are so full of promise.”

This is Not the End of the Book Umberto Eco, 2009.

Matilda “Books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

Matilda’s classic red wagon was the inspiration for “1000 Literary Classics” on page 107.

IKEA bookbookTM FULL COMMERCIAL SCRIPT You know once in a while, something comes along that changes the way we live, a device so simple and intuitive, using it feels almost familiar. Introducing 2015 IKEA catalog. It’s not a digital book, or an e-book. It’s a bookbook™. The first thing to note is no cables, not even a power cable. The 2015 IKEA catalog comes fully charged and the battery life is eternal. The interface is 7.5-by-8-inches, but can expand to 15-by-8-inches. The navigation is based on tactile touch technology that you can actually feel. Content comes pre-installed via 328 high definition pages of inspiring home furnishing ideas. To start browsing, simply touch and grab, right to left to move forward, left to right to move backwards. Notice something else? That’s right, no lag. Each crystal clear page loads instantaneously, no matter how fast you scroll. If you want to get a quick overview just hold it in the palm of your hand, and using just your thumb speed browse the content. If you find something you want to save for later, you can simply bookmark it and even if you close the application, you could easily find the bookmark again. Amazing. What about multiple users, for that we introduced a simple color coding system to avoid confusion. If you want to share a particularly inspiring item, you literally share it. Another special feature is password protection, which is voice activated. Excuse me, that’s mine. At IKEA we feel that technology this life-enhancing should be in the hands of everyone. So the 2015 IKEA catalog is free. You can download one from your mail box the one you open with a key, if it is not there try to refresh the next day or you can upload yourself to the IKEA store and find one there. Experience the power of a bookbook™.

IKEA highlights the timeless benefits of print in an ad that parodies the Apple style.

This Is Not the End of the Book One can’t help remembering all the fires in which so many books have burned and continue to burn. The history of book production is thus indivisible from the history of real and continuing bibliocaust... We still read Europides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, and think of them as the three great tragic poets of ancient Greece. But Aristotle mentions none of them when he cites the most illustrious tragic writers in his Poetics. Were the lost plays better, more representative of Greek theatre? How can we not wonder? ***

This book partially inspired one of my previous projects, All the Books You Will Never Read. (See Page 27)

The book has been thoroughly tested, and it’s very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes. Perhaps it will evolve in terms of components; perhaps the pages will no longer be made of paper. But it will still be the same thing. *** Even if our entire audio-visual legacy were to be lost in a power cut, we would still be able to read books in the light from the sun, or in the evening by candlelight. The twentieth century is the first century to give future generations moving pictures of itself, of its own history, along with the sound recordings – although on formats that remain insecure. ***

This Is Not the End of the Book Excerpts from Umberto Eco

That’s the authority, the familiarity and the relevance of a great work of literature: we open it, and it speaks to us of ourselves. Because people have been alive since that time, because our experiences have added to and become part of the book. ***

The truth is that we all own dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands (in the case of an extensive library) of books that we haven’t read. And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find that they are already familiar. *** The temptation is to say that any object that can be read is a book. But that’s not true. A newspaper can be read but isn’t a book, and the same goes for a letter, a gravestone, a banner in a demonstration, and label or my computer screen… It occurs to me that one way of defining what characterizes a book is by considering the difference between a language and a dialect. Linguists have been unable to agree on this distinction. And yet we can illustrate it by saying that a dialect is a language without an army and a navy. Venetian was considered a language because it was used in diplomatic and commercial affairs, which was never the case for the Piedmontese dialect.

All the Books You Will Never Read Alison Rowan, 2013.

One of my own past projects, All the Books You Will Never Read encapsulates the reader’s greatest fear: the impossibility of reading every book. Two hundred works, ranging from classics to contemporary, fiction to non-fiction, fill perforated pages. Each is to be torn out once its respective book is read, slowly silencing but never entirely defeating the fear, for as the foreword states, “…this may simply be considered Volume I.”

Print Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Dead People of Print, 2014.

Traumgedanken Maria Fischer, 2010.

This book about dream theory uses embroidery thread to capture the confusion and interconnectivity of dreams.

William Morris’ Ideal Book BY THE IDEAL BOOK, I suppose we are to understand a book not limited by com-

Ironically, Morris’ manifesto is available online at www.marxists.org, where the typographic choices are so dismal that Morris, himself, would be horrified.

The Ideal Book Excerpt from William Morris

mercial exigencies of price: we can do what we like with it, according to what its nature, as a book, demands of Art. But we may conclude, I think, that its maker will limit us somewhat; a work on differential calculus, a medical work, a dictionary, a collection of statesmen’s speeches, of a treatise on manures, such books, though they might be handsomely and well printed, would scarcely receive ornament with the same exuberance as a volume of lyrical poems, or a standard classic, or such like. A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book (non bis in idem is a good motto); again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration must almost certainly fight. Still, whatever the subject-matter of the book may be, and however bare it may be of decoration, it can still be a work of art, if the type be good and attention be paid to its general arrangement. All here present, I should suppose, will agree in thinking an opening of Schoeffer’s 1462 Bible beautiful, even when it has neither been illuminated nor rubricated; the same may be said of Schüssler, or Jenson, or, in short, of any of the good old printers; their works, without any further ornament than they derived from the design and arrangement of the letters were definite works of art. In fact a book, printed or written, has a tendency to be a beautiful object, and that we of this age should generally produce ugly books, shows, I fear, something like malice prepense—a determination to put our eyes in our pockets wherever we can. Well, I lay it down, first, that a book quite un-ornamented can look actually and positively beautiful, and not merely un-ugly, if it be, so to say, architecturally good, which by the by, need not add much to its price, since it costs no more to pick up pretty stamps than ugly ones, and the taste and forethought that goes to the proper setting, position, and so on, will soon grow into a habit, if cultivated, and will not take up much of the master-printer’s time when taken with his other necessary business. Now, then, let us see what this architectural arrangement claims of us. First, the pages must be clear and easy to read; which they can hardly be unless. Secondly, the type is well designed; and Thirdly, whether the margins be small or big, they must be in due proportion to the page of letter.

Pamphlet Helmut Smits, 2006.

This installation piece allows visitors to type a message on a laptop, which is immediately printed and dropped directly out of the printer from a 10th story window. The work explores the human instinct which draws us toward print, and which might inspire someone to pick the sheet up off the street, and also reflects on the narrowing distance between production and public consumption of a written message (Ludovico 68).

Self-Help Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Biggest Bookstore Demolition. Personal photograph, 26 November 2014

10 Crazy and Unusual Book Designs Flavorwire, 2012.

The Drinkable Book Water Is Life, 2014.

The Drinkable Book aims to both educate about safe drinking water and act as a functional water purification system capable of providing for one person for four years.

One-Week Project This project was the response to an open ended assignment to create a design related to my topic in one week, and aims to ease the transition between print and digital books to grant the reader access to the advantages of each.

As the owner of both an eReader and a large library of physical books, I often wish it were easier to switch between the two formats. I prefer a traditional book when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m settled at home, but the lightweight, one-handed reading enabled by digital texts is ideal for reading on the go.

Rabbit Hole Books Inaugural book selection & thumbnail sketches

Rabbit Hole Books Cover design sketches & specs

The process of switching from one to the other is tedious, first requiring a digital copy to be found of a book you already own, and then lots of flipping through pages in an attempt to locate your place in two versions of the texts where the page numbers donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t align. As a result, we usually stick to one format for the duration of a book. The Rabbit Hole Books project aims to solve this problem, giving readers the freedom to read however they want, whenever they like.

Rabbit Hole Books Imprint logo design sketches and digital roughs

The name Rabbit Hole Books, a nod to the first title in the series, was chosen to convey the ability to travel instantaneously from one â&#x20AC;&#x153;worldâ&#x20AC;? to another, between print and digital, without concern for how you got there.

The physical version of the book allows the reader to enjoy the familiar comfort of print with the ability to jump to their exact page in a digital version by scanning a QR code, located on each page, with their laptop or mobile device.

Rabbit Hole Books Final paperback design

Rabbit Hole Books Final digital text design

A digital version of the book is hosted online, which features page numbers in the margin that correspond to the printed book. This allows the reader to use the digital version to increase text size, search for key terms, etc., and still be able to easily find their place when they want to switch back to print.

Digital Texts “The Internet has returned us to the alphabet. If we thought we had become a purely visual civilization, the computer returns us to Gutenberg’s galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read.”

This is Not the End of the Book Umberto Eco, 2009.

Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.

This is a paraphrasing of a quote from Henry Jenkins with no known source, often misidentified as the original.

Fanfiction & Reading THERE IS SOMETHING absolutely splendid that I have witnessed in my classes in the past year. Students who have talked at length about how much they hate to read or write have told me that they love to read fanfiction. To them, they do not consider this “reading,” because they have been told that reading looks like a boring book shoved in their face in their high school English class. But this illustrates even further the value of fanfic. It entices young people to read and to interact with text in a way that they may have avoided before. It helps them consider motivation, word choice, setting, and tone. It allows them to actively take part in discussions about writing and allows them to be a part of a community. Students who usually shy away from reading even the smallest of books are devouring fanfic that is often longer than books they detested in their school careers, and in turn they are beginning to write fiction themselves. They are finding a voice they didn’t even know they had. This is a wondrous thing to see, especially in students who have often struggled with reading and writing.

They do not consider this “reading,” because they have been told that reading looks like a boring book shoved in their face in their high school English class.

“Fanfiction & Reading” Urbanhymnal

Writing Skills Randall Munroe, 2014.

The â&#x20AC;&#x153;Canned Libraryâ&#x20AC;?, or Optigraph, was developed in the 1930s as an early attempt at digital books, which allowed the reader to access many texts with one machine, cranking a handle to scroll through the text.

Tweet-Length Literature FÉNÉON’S THREE-LINE NEWS ITEMS, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism…. They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.

Introduction to Novels in Three Lines Excerpt from Luc Sante

***

“‘If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,’ M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inférieure, had declared. He killed himself.” “On the doorstep of the rectory in Suippes, Marne, a harmless box nevertheless caused excitement on account of its lit fuse and its wires.” “Fearless boys of 13 and 11, Deligne and Julien were going off ‘to hunt in the desert.’ They were brought back to Paris from Le Havre.”

6-Word Short Story Urban legend attributes this work to Ernest Hemingway, though the author remains unconfirmed.

En Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an 2000 Villemard, 1910. Postcard.

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This 2014 publication is a review of research to date on the subject of text messaging in an attempt to form conclusions about its impact on literacy.

Text Messaging and Literacy THE STORY we have described is simple in some ways, but it should not be oversimplified or misrepresented to suit a particular purpose. So below we lay out and clarify what can and cannot be said based on the data available so far: Text Messaging & Literacy Excerpt from Wood, Kemp & Plester

If adults are exposed to misspelled forms of words this can impact negatively on their own spelling of those words. If children are exposed to misspelled forms of words this is unlikely to affect the accuracy of their spelling of those words in the future. Exposure to correctly-spelled words improves spelling performance for adults and children. The act of creating incorrect ‘made-up’ spellings does not affect children’s or adults’ ability to learn the correct spellings of new words. Children who demonstrate the greatest knowledge of text abbreviations (textisms) also demonstrate better knowledge of conventional spellings. Children who tend to use the most textisms when asked to write a text message also tend to have the best reading ability. Textism use by children who have access to mobile phones appears to contribute to growth in the development of spelling skills over time. Textism use appears to be associated with reading and spelling ability because of their common links with phonological awareness and rapid phonological process abilities. Children with specific language and literacy problems do not seem to use phonetically-based textisms to the same extent as non-dyslexic children, and tend to use more of the non-phonetic forms. Use of predictive text by children does not appear to impact on their literacy. The types of phone used by the children, or the keyboard types used, are also not related to performance on literacy measures. There is no strong evidence to date to suggest that giving children who do not own phones access to mobile phones for texting messaging significantly boosts their literacy skills, although the work in this area so far has been limited in scale and scope, and needs replication.

When giving children access to a mobile phone, it appears to be better to do this when they are older rather than when they are younger. The results of studies which have looked at literacy skills and texting in adolescent and adult samples are more mixed, and this is likely to be the result of differences in the methodologies used across these studies and the impact of the technology used by these samples on texting speed and other behaviours. It would seem to be better for children to text a smaller rather than a larger network of friends, if phone use is to impact on their phonological awareness. Understanding of conventional grammar is not clearly associated with the tendency to make grammar-based errors when texting. It is hard to know whether the spelling and punctuation errors reported in these studies are intentional or accidental, or affected by the intended recipient of the message, as different levels of care and attention are reported to be applied depending on who may receive the message. These interrelationships need further unpacking. There is little evidence that children are â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;addicted toâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mobile phones. There has been a wide variety of methodological approaches applies to the study of texting over the course of the studies reported in this book. The wide variation in approach contributes to a lack of clarity with respect to adult populations, and the need for standardised tests and greater methodological care should be an important consideration for future work in this area.

Children who tend to use the most textisms when asked to write a text message also tend to have the best reading ability.

Does Digital Storytelling Work Best in a Crisis? “Does Digital Storytelling Work Best in a Crisis?” Excerpt from Lyndee Prickitt

Mixed media sits most comfortably in non-fiction as some proponents of digital reportage are beginning to show and as educational publishing has been doing for years. But issue-based fiction that captures a crisis moment benefits most from this digital 360-degree treatment, because every issue is based on real facts, stats, references, background information. Why not provide it all for the reader at one click or tap? How often do you Google something when you’re reading a story, particularly one that has roots in a real issue (the holocaust, surviving HIV, working on Wall Street, even high art heists or CIA entanglements)? Why shouldn’t that supplementary information be part of the package? Yes, like school book annotations, but more.

Electronic literature or digital storytelling will not replace the book because, simply, it is not a book. It is whole new paradigm in storytelling. And it’s at its most powerful when used to capture a crisis moment in our time.

Haptic Dissonance The experience of a disconnect between the physicality of an object and its other characteristics. Although a digital text has a length...it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust’s magnum opus or one of Hemingway’s short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough “haptic dissonance” to dissuade some people from using e-readers.

“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens” Exerpt from Ferris Jabr

“Maybe old people always fooled themselves pretending that the world was going to hell in a handcart because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind…”

A Spot of Bother Mark Haddon

Photograph Collections The following image series document the roles played by varying media in my day to day life.

The Influence of Medium

These images document intersections of print and digital in my own life, as well as experiences in either one that are unique to their medium. Left to right: 1. Handwriting changes on different surfaces; 2. Paper sheet music and my digital piano; 3. Using a print agenda while at my laptop;

4. Digital library receipts; 5. Online trend of holding up handwritten messages on paper to share digitally; 6. Notebook planning and video editing;

7. Netflix chat date with a faraway friend; 8. The digital budgeting software that I dumped its print counterpart for; 9. Marking quotes for an inclass essay where a digital, searchable copy canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be used.

In the Wild

Sightings of books and related objects spread around my apartment in a single day. Left to right: 1. Book-themed scented candles; 2. Kleenex box with moveable type design; 3. Jar full of titles of books I own and have not read (To Be Read);

4. Primary bookshelf at my desk; 5. Extra books stacked on top of primary bookshelf; 6. â&#x20AC;&#x153;A room without books is like a body without a soulâ&#x20AC;? pillow;

7. The Great Gatsby T-Shirt; 8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Sweatshirt; 9. Le Petit Prince Sweatshirt

Left to right: 1. Floating bookshelves beside my bedroom door; 2. Sheet music books at the piano; 3. Book necklace;

4. Books currently in use, taking over the bed; 5. Floating bookshelves above the piano; 6. Secondary bookshelf in my bedroom;

7. Book cover design postcards; 8. My roommateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bookshelf.

Midterm Presentation This presentation, intended to update my class on my progress at midterm, was presented on October 21st, 2014 as an audiovisual Pecha Kucha. To see it as it was originally presented, please visit: vimeo.com/112185396

A pecha kucha is a presentation consisting of 20 slides lasting 20 seconds each.

SLIDES 1–2 Revisiting and modifying my research question

This is how I defined my topic in week one. Why is where we read something so crucial to what we read and how we read it? The more I worked with this question, the more I found that it was just too broad. It encompassed too many different things, like linguistics and psychology and the science of reading. These are all things I find interesting, and they were a helpful foundation, but I found they were pulling me away a little bit from things I actually wanted to look at. Since then, my question is more focused. I’m looking more specifically at print and digital as they relate to each other as different mediums for print communication. Now, my question looks something more like this. How is our relationship with print different than our relationship with digital? And why? How do we perceive them differently and interact with them differently? What are they each good at? What do they fail at?

SLIDES 3–5 Mind map use for topic exploration and research documentation

In week two, I created a mind map. It helped to lay out all the little bits and pieces but I found that after this week, it didn’t really expand a whole lot more, because I found myself wanting to dig deeper rather than wider and the mind map form just wasn’t really conducive to that. I still go back to it all the time when I’m stuck. I’m just not finding it a useful tool to expand on anymore, and instead I’ve been sort of scribbling down thoughts in my sketchbook. My research mind map on the other hand has been growing consistently. This is where I’m documenting all the different things I’m reading about my topic. Where I’m reading, how I’m reading them, where I found them. Sometimes it involves print, sometimes it involves digital, sometimes it’s a combination of both. Tracking my own reading habits in this way has forced me to consider why it is that I do these things because surely they’re not arbitrary.

So far, as it turns out, most of my research has been done on a device. Sometimes I printed things out—why did I print these out those times? Hard to say. Some combination of how focused I felt at that point, how much I felt I could resist the distractions of the Internet, even though most of my research is digital, one thing that I find interesting here is that I’m obviously not afraid to flip back and forth between mediums. In week three, I decided to focus on ways that print and digital can be used in tandem, so you can reap the benefits of both. It’s not uncommon for me to flip back and forth between a print copy of a book and an eReader, just depending on what I’m doing, but it’s not a very sophisticated process at this point, unfortunately. There’s a lot of flipping through pages to try to find your spot when the two mediums don’t line up. This is the problem that I was trying to solve.

SLIDES 6–7 1-Week Creative Project merging print & digital advantages

I called the end result Rabbit Hole Books. Each page has a QR code that will take you to the exact spot where you were in the book, in a digital version. This way, you can enjoy the comfort and focus of reading on the page, but if you want to do something like search for a particular word, you can easily do that. This is the kind of interaction between print and digital, where they’re both supporting one another as valid mediums with their own advantages, that I’m interested in encouraging. Next I started looking at precedent. What kinds of things had been made before to combine print and digital in some kind of way? Most of what I found was disappointing. Instead of allowing you to reap the benefits of both mediums, they all seemed like a hindrance. Things like having to have your phone in your hand while you read a magazine so that you can scan things in the magazine to then watch a video on your phone to get the full content experience.

SLIDES 8–9 Existing explorations of combining print & digital technologies

Or digital books that actually have no print counterpart, but yet get limited by trying to fit into the template of a physical book. As much as these were disappointing to see, it did help to clarify what it is that I’m looking to do, which is to actually allow print and digital to co-exist and enhance each other’s advantages rather than take away from them, or feeling like every experience has to integrate both at the same time. SLIDE 10 The influence of Haptic Dissonance

SLIDES 11–12 Notebook idea collection process

One of the things that I’ve come across in my research that’s influenced my process the most is an idea called Haptic Dissonance. This is a disconnect that we experience between the physical, tangible object we can feel in our hand and the content that it holds. It makes us feel that something is off. This is one of the disadvantages of reading on a device. When I think of final outcomes now, I’m always looking at them in terms of haptic dissonance. Since I stopped using the mind map, I’ve just been scribbling down thoughts as they come to me and letting them sit until I think of something that develops the idea a bit further. This has been helpful for reflecting on the personal relationship that we tend to have with books. I think the most important thing that’s emerged from this process is a collection of reasons why the book is special as a physical object, and why reading on a device is inherently different. I’ve jotted things down like, ‘Opening the cover of a book is a lot like opening a door. Does that make us automatically more invested than we are in a device, because it’s somehow committing us to the experience?’ And, ‘A book is special because it’s an object devoted to a single purpose. Unlike a device where you can read anything, a book is a vessel for a particular story. It’s a physical manifestation of words that have come to mean something to us, so the object is meaningful too.’

I confess to being behind on the photography assignment. I struggled getting started, because my subject is so text-oriented. I didn’t just want it to be a series of different typefaces on different pages or screens, but I didn’t know what else it could be. I finally got somewhere when I started to document intersections of print and digital in my own life, noting how I often use them together, but for different purposes.

SLIDES 13–14 Photographic documentation assignment progress

For instance, my agenda is there because I tried for years to start using a digital planner consistently because it just seems to make so much sense but it never worked. As it turns out, I’ve now been using a print agenda every single day for a year, now. For some reason, for me, the medium made the difference. Most recently, I went around my apartment taking pictures of all the different places you can find books. I am basically surrounded at all times. I’m okay with this. A few weeks into class, I got an idea for a potential outcome, to explore what a book would look like if it were designed to embody a particular advantage of digital text. This would be a series of objects where each book would be designed to mimic one of these things. It might be inexpensive by being printed on really terrible paper and photocopied and just stapled together, or it might be portable by being a miniature book.

SLIDES 15–18 Final outcome proposal

I thought it would be an interesting way to explore the relationship between print and digital, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I was trying to say through it. The idea stuck around in my head, though, and as I found myself trying to explain it to people, it started to make more sense. I realized it would be most effective if I threw practicality out the window. The portable book wouldn’t just be pocket-sized, it would be so tiny you couldn’t read a word. The books would be deliberately unusable.

In that way, they’re a concession, that there are some things that print just can’t do as well as digital, and that’s okay, because it’s also a reminder of what we love so much about print. This also connects to the idea of Haptic Dissonance, because by creating a physical embodiment of a digital characteristic, I’m by necessity altering the physicality of the object to make it work. If you want to be able to search any word in the text, you have to deal with an index that’s ten times as long as the book. I’m currently sorting out exactly what books the series will contain but other than the searchable and portable books, I’m also considering doing one that embodies the continuous flow of a scrolling webpage, which takes the form of an unwieldy accordion book, and a book that’s made skimmable by having each page have one key sentence in giant print, while the rest of the page’s content is a tiny footnote below it. SLIDES 19–20 Further research & project plans

Because most of my research so far has been done on devices, one of the other things I’m going to be doing next is reading some books. One is called, Text Messaging and Literacy: The Evidence, which I’m hoping will be helpful in looking at the way that we react differently to written communications on a device than we do on paper. The other is a book called Novels in Three Lines, which is an interesting middle ground between print, which we typically think of as being long form, and digital. As well as reading books, I intend to write one to be used as the text for my socalled ‘digital book’ series. This November, during National Novel Writing Month, I’ll be writing a novella-length personal essay of sorts. I want to really examine my own relationship with reading over time—why it is that I’m so attached to books, why it is that even though I spend the vast majority of my waking hours in front of a computer screen, it’s still the book that I love the most.

Intersections of Print & Digital

Print & Emerging Technologies ESSENTIALLY, ANY NEW medium always claims to possess characteristics superior to those of printed paper, and thus to be in a position to potentially supplant it. And yet, not a single one of these media has ever managed to seriously threaten print’s dominance of its native market, or its deeply rooted status as a universal medium. Perhaps this is all about to change, with the arrival of the newest generation of mobile devices interconnected through wireless networks? Perhaps. Nevertheless, the overblown tone in which the death of the paper medium is currently being announced, should give us reason to pause and consider more closely the qualities and drawbacks of the currently emerging digital alternatives – and also how print, instead of disappearing, may instead adapt and evolve, as it has already done several times before. Historically, the unchangeable, static nature of the printed medium has always been the main justification for declaring it to be obsolete. Paradoxically, it is this very immutability of paper which is now increasingly proving to be an advantage rather than a weakness, particularly in the context of an ever-changing (thus ephemeral) digital publishing world. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the role of printed paper within the media landscape will have to be thoroughly redefined

Post-Digital Print Excerpts from Alessandro Ludovico

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IT’S NEVER EASY to predict the future, but it’s completely useless to even attempt to envision it without first properly analysing the past. Looking back in history, we can see that the death of paper has been duly announced at various specific moments in time – in fact, whenever some ‘new’ medium was busy establishing its popularity, while deeply questioning the previous ‘old’ media in order to justify its own existence. In such moments in history, it was believed that paper would soon become obsolete. (Historical note: paper as a medium was first invented by the Egyptians around 3500 BC using the papyrus plant, then definitively established in China starting in the 2nd century CE, before it was combined with the revolutionary movable type print technology – first introduced, again in China using woodblocks, and later on by Gutenberg in Germany in 1455 using lead alloys).

Time and again, the established mass-media role of paper has been called into question by a number of media theorists and marketing experts, who attempted in various ways to persuade society at large to get rid of paper, and choose instead some newer and supposedly better medium. This ongoing process seems to have originated in the early 20th century, when the death of paper was predicted â&#x20AC;&#x201C; probably for the first time â&#x20AC;&#x201C; after centuries of daily use.

The development of public electricity networks, which enabled the mass distribution of new and revolutionary media, inspired visions of a radical change in the (still two-dimensional) media landscape, following a fashionable logic of inevitable progress which lives on to this day.

The Art of Google Books This Tumblr project collects instances of physical anomalies found in the digital Google Books library. These are sometimes glitches produced in the scanning process, and sometimes physical markings in the books, themselves.

Stackview Jeff Goldenson, 2011

Goldenson wants to create a Google Streetview for libraries, to return the happenstance and visual cues to the experience of book browsing in a virtual space.

A Next-Generation Digital Book Mike Matas presents a digital book that includes embedded multimedia content which can be pulled out from the page, interacted with, and restored to its place. While incorporating the planar nature of paper by utilizing complex fold animations, the project feels far removed from a book and would arguably have been more successful by foregoing the label of â&#x20AC;&#x153;bookâ&#x20AC;? entirely, freeing itself of the contraints of that base format.

Is This The Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Most Interactive Print Ad? Todd Wasserman

This Lexus ad incorporates the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iPad to add dynamic lighting and typography.

Layar Creator Layar is an augmented reality service that enables print content to be scanned to launch content on a digital device. This eases processes that already require the use of a device, such as searching a product online that was featured in a magazine, but can be cumbersome when required for core content, such as video.

National Novel Writing Month During the month of November, I wrote a 50,000 word draft of a personal essay to explore my own relationship with written language.

NaNoWriMo Profile & Statistics Screenshot from 30 November 2014

A Life in Type Excerpts from my 2014 personal essay rough draft about reading and language, written during NaNoWriMo. Emphasis on ‘rough’.

EVERYONE HAS their own rules about their books. Some people say the more worn, the better. Better loved. These people horrify me. On the other hand, I know that my own preferences would horrify just as many. I can’t stand the thought of cracking a spine or dog-earing a page, but I don’t hesitate to mark up a book with highlights and notes if I’m reading it for a class. I know a sizeable portion of readers just had a heart attack reading that statement, and for this I apologize, but that’s exactly the problem: We all prioritize the state of our books differently. I do everything I can to keep my books looking pristine on the exterior, but the inside is a free-for-all. Business on the outside, party on the inside. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or just poetically apt that this is my definition of a party.) ***

I THINK IT COMES right back to the idea that a good book is a door to another world. When I’m willing to put a book down to pick up something else, I haven’t

made my way through that door yet. The author is hollering, “Come in!” from the other room, but they haven’t actually opened the door and ushered me in, so I’m tiptoeing in hesitantly—“Am I supposed to be just letting myself in?” It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable, and I’m not entirely sure someone would notice if I just left. The ones I ditch those for, on the other hand, are the ones who, from page one, have the door wide open and their arms just the same. They’re the ones ready to let you in before you even have your car door closed, even though there is always someone calling from the living room, “Close the door! You’ll let all the heat out!” But they don’t care. It might be Dorothy holding open the door, smiling at you sweetly in her little gingham dress, or it might be Count Dracula hissing from behind the veil of his cloak, but they wait for you all the same, and when you step over the threshold, there’s no question that you’re welcome (even if ‘welcome’ means different things in different stories). You step inside, they whisk away your coat, and you’re free to enjoy your evening. The world has embraced you, for better or for worse, and once that happens, there’s really no putting that book down, because if you try, someone is going to notice you’ve left. (Better hope it’s Dorothy.) ***

I’M NOTORIOUSLY BAD at remembering plots. I’m not sure I could give a confident summary of even a tenth of my library. Events pour into my mind as I read, and promptly escape when the closing of the book opens the flood gates. I may or may not remember characters’ names, and I usually don’t remember how their stories end. But I do remember, without fail, how they made me feel. Maya Angelou knew what she was talking about. A quick scan of my bookcase is a flood of emotional memory, of atmospheric sensation. Each spine sucks me momentarily back into its world and the visceral sensation of being part of it. Movies love to show travelers fixing world maps to their walls, twisting in a pushpin for each new place they visit until the map is cluttered with tiny markers of adventure. I’m not sure whether this is something anybody does in real life. I’ve yet to see such a map. Perhaps my bookshelf, though, isn’t far off. The objects on my shelves, as much as books that I’ve read, are markers of places that I’ve been, people that I’ve visited, and thoughts that I’ve pondered. It’s impossible for me to look at the cracked, peeling spine of The Catcher in the Rye and not be instantly brought back to tenth grade, sitting against the window on a lumpy bus seat. I hear Dashboard Confessional pumping through my earphones as

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is an annual event where writers from around the world pledge to write a 50,000 word draft of a novel in the month of November.

I read the book for… Who knows. I’ve read it more times than I can count. I feel the weight it adds to my bag, small but discernible, as I carry it around with me every day for months. No book had ever garnered that status before—the bag book. The book that went everywhere, and was allowed to get beaten, bent, cracked. I remember the feeling of being able to flip to any page and dive in, knowing I’ve read it so many times that it frankly doesn’t matter where I pick up next, because there isn’t a page of it that isn’t familiar. All of these things that I haven’t physically experienced in six years come back in an instant. That little tattered paperback is a portal to Holden and his sister Phoebe, to unrestrained teenaged angst and stubbornness, to a fictional voice that sounds so real I can’t be sure it isn’t, but it’s also a portal to a snapshot of my own life. My fingers wander my shelves the same way they wander my scrapbook, pausing over each new item, basking in the associations it carries. Books are inextricably linked to their readers. To who we were when we read them, where we were, how we felt, what we cared about. As the words pour into our minds, we pour ourselves back in their place, filling pages and pages with a part of us.

NaNoWriMo Winner’s Certificate Received on 30 November 2014

Alison Rowan A Life in Type

MY SHELVES are filled with pulp, mashed together into paper. They’re weighed down with glue and string and headbands and cardboard and gallons and gallons of ink. They’re filled with rectangles, little recyclable bricks dotted with black marks that we happen to know how to convert into words, whether it came easily to us or we struggled for years. These objects are the vehicles for the thoughts that we carry in our minds, that we wish to record before we forget. Before we’re unable to pass them on any further. The same types of thoughts that used to be transferred by word of mouth, around bonfires, in endless groups of people. Stories have never needed books. They existed long before. These objects are functional, ways of keeping these words around longer, preventing them from being mixed up as they pass from the mouth of one person to another. But somewhere between their conception and them finding their way onto our bookshelves, they became something more. Not just vehicles, but bodies, tied forever to what they contain. People ask you about your favourite book, not your favourite story. Never mind that functionally, the word ‘book’ simply means a printed document bound in codex form. It’s a binding process, not the particular words that it might carry, but somewhere along the line, the two have become the same thing. The physical object that weighs heavy in our hands as we read is as much a part of the experience as the words, themselves. We shove bookmarks between its pages, add notes and scrawls in the margins if we don’t find the thought horrifying, and scour bookstores both online and off in search of the edition we want most. Books may be vessels for words, but a particular book is a vessel for a particular combination of words that it unveils to us and shares with us. If the story is the soul, then the book is the body, and neither is complete without the other. According to that metaphor, my Kobo has some kind of The Host situation going on. It’s a body that can be inhabited by one of any number of souls. A book for any number of stories. Any connection between the two is temporary, and always superficial. The arrangement of pixels on the screen will change, but Great Expectations and An Abundance of Katherines will always weight the same, be the same colour, have the same texture.

2014 marked my ninth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and my first year attempting a non-fiction piece.

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TWO YEARS AGO, I moved into the apartment I currently find myself in. It’s a tenth floor unit in one of the city’s oldest condo high-rises, so it offers generous floor plans and overly frequent plumbing problems. My roommate and I are just a block away from Yonge and Dundas, and have both streetcar and subway stops right outside our

In NaNoWriMo, there are no prizes—the only thing you “win” is your finished draft, so while the official NaNoWriMo rules specify that qualifying projects should be works of fiction, the community is also open to “NaNo Rebels”, who go in other directions.

door. And it was in our budget. To say the place was a steal would vastly devalue the burglary profession. I found the ad on Craigslist at one in the morning while I waited for my school’s registration to open for my second year courses, trying to do anything to keep my mind off the anxiety of the count down to registration time. A good time to do the apartment hunting I had been putting off, naturally. When I first found it, I was focused on a few things: it was in a great location, it cut the length of my walk to school in half, and again, the price tag. As to the part of this apartment that would prove my absolute favourite, I had no idea. It wasn’t until my family and I were downtown to sign the lease papers that the real best feature of the place revealed itself. Somehow, without any idea, I was now renting an apartment directly beside two bookstores. One of them was The World’s Biggest Bookstore, a massive (though not quite as superlatively sized as its name suggests) place sprawling with as many books as you could possibly fathom. The other was a tiny fraction of the size, a small used bookstore called BMV. In that moment, I was Matilda Wormwood discovering the library for the first time. I had access to thousands and thousands of books, within steps from my home. (My wallet wasn’t nearly as enthused as I was.) And I had them in two completely separate spaces that I could explore. I’m fairly certain that the only thing that kept me from dying on the spot of a heart attack from the sheer shock of my excitement was the grave news that came alongside my discovery of the World’s Biggest Bookstore: the pervasive rumour that its lease was up for renewal in 18 months, and didn’t look like they were going to go through with it. At the time, I shrugged it off. 18 months was an eternity, and surely it would work itself out, anyway. They would stay. Somehow, I was sure of this. If I had to keep it open by single-handedly buying every book I could, I would do it. You’d be hard-pressed to say I didn’t try. I think I bought more new books in those 18 months than I’d bought in a decade. Unpredictable things happen when you take a bookworm who has lived her entire life a twenty-minute drive from any sort of capitalist civilization without a driver’s license and plunk her in a city, within walking distance of a bookstore.

The Science of Reading

The Reading Brain

“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens” Exerpts from Ferris Jabr

BEFORE 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people’s attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper. “There is physicality in reading,” says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.”

Recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.

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BEYOND TREATING individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters. In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text. In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. ***

SURVEYS INDICATE that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose.

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SUBCONSCIOUSLY, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once. When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way….Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people’s attitudes continue to change.

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Deep & Non-Linear Reading MANOUSH ZOMORODI, managing editor and host of WNYC’s New Tech City, recalls a conversation with the Washington Post’s Mike Rosenwald, who’s researched the effects of reading on a screen. “He found, like I did, that when he sat down to read a book his brain was jumping around on the page. He was skimming and he couldn’t just settle down. He was treating a book like he was treating his Twitter feed,” she says. Neuroscience, in fact, has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards “non-linear” reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page. “They call it a ‘bi-literate’ brain,” Zoromodi says. “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.” So what’s deep reading? It’s the concentrated kind we do when we want to “immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don’t typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.” Linear reading and digital distractions have caught the attention of academics like Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.

“Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren’t the same thing” Excerpts from T.J. Raphael

“I don’t worry that we’ll become dumb because of the Internet,” Wolf says, “but I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation. That’s, I think, the nub of the problem.”

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Deep Reading & Cognition GRADUALLY WE ARE BEGINNING to understand the stunning complexity that is involved in the expert reader’s brain circuit. For example, when reading even a single word, the first milliseconds of the reading circuit are largely devoted to decoding the word’s visual information and connecting it to all that we know about the word from its sounds to meanings to syntactic functions. The virtual automaticity of this first set of stages allows us in the next milliseconds to go beyond the decoded text. It is within the next precious milliseconds that we enter a cognitive space where we can connect the decoded information to all that we know and feel. In this latter part of the process of reading, we are given the ability to think new thoughts of our own: the generative core of the reading process. Perhaps no one better captured what the reader begins to think in those last milliseconds of the reading circuit than the French novelist Marcel Proust. In 1906, he characterized the heart of reading as that moment when “that which is the end of [the author’s] wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours.” A bit more than a century later, in 2010, book editor Peter Dimock said that “[this] kind of reading, then, is a time of internal solitary consciousness in which the reading consciousness is brought up to the level of the knowledge of the author—the farthest point another mind has reached, as it were …” The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. When it comes to building this reading circuit in a brain that has no preprogrammed setup for it, there is no genetic guarantee that any individual novice reader will ever form the expert reading brain circuitry that most of us form...Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read—and what we absorb from our reading—will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.

How we read—and what we absorb from our reading— will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.

“Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions” Excerpts from Maryanne Wolf

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Final Presentation This presentation, intended to update my class on my progress at midterm, was presented on October 21st, 2014 as an audiovisual Pecha Kucha. To see it as it was originally presented, please visit: vimeo.com/112185396

A pecha kucha is a presentation consisting of 20 slides lasting 20 seconds each.

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FRAMES 1–3 Introducing the topic

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about the future of information and the form that it will take. Some argue that print is on a steep, steady decline to obsolescence, while others maintain that print will never die. There are articles and articles and articles, books and even documentaries that delve into the debate.

But in all this framing of print versus digital, the Hunger Games of the textual world, the conversation seems to be missing something important: The fact that the two coexist every single day, as we speak. The way these conversations tend to go, you could be forgiven for thinking that one day, someone is just going to pull a giant plug and there will never be another printed page as long as we all shall live— —but scribes stayed in business for decades after the invention of the printing press, and print and digital media carry a lot more contrast in functional attributes than a scribe’s bible versus Gutenberg’s ever did.

FRAMES 4–5 Personal connections

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This is my bookshelf. So is this. And this. And this. And this. Obviously, I’m of the belief that print has its reasons for sticking around. But that doesn’t change the fact that 75% of my research thus far has used digital texts, and I’ve only chosen to print out 15% of those, nor the fact that I sometimes use an eReader rather than a physical book, nor the fact that my laptop use makes up a horrifying majority of my waking hours.

Because so much of my work is production-based, whether that’s writing or designing, I’m constantly making choices about what tools I want to use—we all are, and these choices aren’t always consistent. Sometimes writing by hand affords a focus we can’t find on our screens, with the call of the internet, and sometimes our keyboards are the only way we can keep up with the speed of our thoughts. Instead of taking sides, or speculating which medium will make up how much market share in 20 years, I’m interested in making this balancing act easier. This applies both theoretically, in terms of critical design that challenges the reasons why we opt for one over another and the biases that we bring to each, and practically, through the creation or conceptualization of methods that will allow us to choose our preferred media on a case by case, moment to moment basis. This isn’t about merging the two experiences—that is already being addressed by many, many, many different people and organizations. Instead, it’s about celebrating and encouraging contrasting vehicles for written language based on each of their unique strengths and attributes that others cannot mimic, and simply bridging the gap, so that the process of moving from one platform to another involves a little less friction.

FRAMES 6–7

Next semester, I want to continue building off the projects that I’ve already started. I’m going to begin turning some of these illustrations of what facets of digital texts would look like in print form, into real books that can be interacted with. These ridiculously inconvenient, often unwieldy books address the haptic dissonance that we experience with digital texts between their robust capabilities and their slim devices, resolving these capabilities into a print counterpart ...

FRAMES 8–10

Project goals

Next semester’s plan

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... which responds in size and shape to these capabilities where digital texts do not. These actualized books will be displayed alongside the illustrations that I have already done as part of a single series. I’m also interested in continuing these illustrations to explore more capabilities of digital texts and how they would translate to paper—attributes like crowdsourcing, live editing, typographic customization, backlighting and brevity. When the series is complete, these illustrations and photos of their physical counterparts will be bound into—you guessed it—a book which chronicles the project, and true to its digital roots, it will also be published online.

FRAMES 11–14 Other possible outcomes

On the more practical side, I have been spending a lot of time looking at the existing research on the impact of different print and digital media on the ways that we read and what we gain from it, including things like information retention and literacy rates. This data doesn’t reveal a clear protagonist or antagonist, but simply different strengths and weaknesses for different platforms.

As another piece to add to my body of work this year, I want to distill these findings into something that is simple and easy to understand, so that readers can make their own informed choices about how they want to read. Right now, I imagine this taking the shape of a flowchart which asks the reader questions about their current reading mood and needs:

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Are you tired? Are you having a hard time focusing? Are you on the go? Are you studying?, and then directs them to the reading tool that makes most sense for them at that time, whether it’s a printed book, an ereader, a backlit screen, or whatever else. We have a tendency to simply read material in whatever way it’s immediately presented to us—it makes sense. This is by far the fastest way to delve into a text. But by informing readers of the different advantages offered by each medium, they are encouraged to make active choices about how they read—it may take an extra couple minutes to print out an article from the web, but those few minutes they lose could save fifteen in the focus they gain. It’s about turning a default decision into a conscious choice through education.

That’s what this is all about, really. Taking an issue of medium that’s dragged all around on the industry level, with executives, bankruptcies and market forecasts dictating the next step, and handing the choice back to the individual. Neither print nor digital are going anywhere anytime soon, so we might as well make the best of them both.

FRAME 15 Conclusion

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Like Pixel Like Paper This series of illustrations explores how characteristics of digital text would appear in print. The resulting objects, blatantly impractical as they are, are both a concession to the achievements of digital technologies that print cannot emulate, and a celebration of its resilience and persistent charm nonetheless.

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Paperless Alison Rowan, 16 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Infinite Scroll Alison Rowan, 9 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Searchable Alison Rowan, 16 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Made for Skimming Alison Rowan, 4 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Shareable Alison Rowan, 4 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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1000 Books Wherever You Go Alison Rowan, 23 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Portable Alison Rowan, 9 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Automatic Updates Alison Rowan, 23 November 2014, Acrylic gouache & ink on paper.

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Like Pixel Like Paper Concept sketches

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Thumbnail-sized mockups allowed me to figure out the mechanics of some of the more complex book ideas.

Like Pixel Like Paper Images 1–4: “Infinite Scroll” accordion book Images 5–8: “Shareable” carbon copy paper book with perforation

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Like Pixel Like Paper Assorted Sketches

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Like the books themselves, the illustrations were a fusion of analog and digital techniques. Each illustration began as a sketch which was then scanned and resized digitally, printed, traced onto watercolour paper, painted and finally inked, forming a loop from print to digital to print again.

Bibliography

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work by Margaret Atwood, uses print as its medium of choice to preserve stories written by different authors to be released in 100 years, questioning the short-term focus typically held toward the future. Gansky, Lisa. The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing. New York, NY: Portfolio Penguin, 2010. Print. Gansky advocates for a move away from physical objects, enabled by digital technologies and open sharing platforms. Gerlach, Jin, and Peter Buxmann. “Investigating the Acceptance of Electronic Books—the Impact of Haptic Dissonance on Innovation Adoption.” AIS Electronic Library. AIS Electronic Library, 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. 2011 research study suggests that a phenomenon called “Haptic Dissonance” may be to blame for slow adoption of digital reading technologies. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “The Artful Accidents of Google Books.” The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 4 Dec. 2013. Web. 28 Oct. 2014. Goldsmith profiles Krissy Wilson’s The Art of Google Books project, with an emphasis on its revealing of the human hands at work behind the digitization process. Gosling, Emily. “Print Isn’t Dead.” Design Week. Centaur Communications Ltd, 21 Mar. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Gosling introduces Print Isn’t Dead during its funding stage, a new magazine looking to celebrate print for its craft. Haddon, Mark. A Spot of Bother. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Print. Haddon’s novel about a dysfunctional family touches on the generational issues of communication and new technologies. Hanna, Kathleen. “Riot Grrrl Manifesto.” Enjoy Your Style. Enjoy Your Style, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. The Riot Grrrl Manifesto highlights the importance of self-publishing as a means of public expression for marginalized groups and radical ideas.

“Henry Jenkins.” Weblog post. Quotes of Quotes. Tumblr, 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. <http://quotesofquotes.tumblr.com/post/11567107148/fanfiction-is-a-way-of-the-culture-repairing-the>. This uncredited interpretation of a Henry Jenkins quote advocates for the importance of fan culture enabled by digital technologies in gaining ownership over the contemporary equivalent of folk tales. Houston, Keith. Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and Other Typographical Curiosities. New York: WW Norton, 2013. Print. Houston details the long and storied development of various typographic marks, demonstrating the fluidity of the English language and revealing the challenges to new developments posed by digital technologies with fixed input methods. Hurley, Dan. “Can Reading Make You Smarter?” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 23 Jan. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Hurley outlines recent scientific studies which confirm that reading is strongly associated with all three widely recognized types of intelligence: crystallised (book smarts), fluid (street smarts), and emotional. IKEA: Experience the Power of a BookBook. YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. IKEA satirizes the style of Apple advertisements to demonstrate the many advantages of print over its digital competitors. Ingall, Marjorie. “That Is Not a Henry Jenkins Quote.” Web log post. Marjorie Ingall. Wordpress, 22 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. <http://marjorieingall.com/that-is-not-a-henry-jenkins-quote/>. Ingall compares a true Henry Jenkins quote to a paraphrased version commonly attributed to him online, and in doing so demonstrates the malleability of content in digital contexts, like a game of broken telephone. Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American. Scientific American, Inc., 11 Apr. 2013.

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Web. 20 Nov. 2014. Jabr suggests that, as studies showing that readers retain less information when read on screens versus paper become less conclusive, it is likely that the problem of retention lies more in the multitasking mindset that readers bring to screens than inherent qualities of the medium, itself. Jemison, Mae. “Teach Arts and Sciences Together.” TED2002. TED. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. American astronaut Mae Jemison deconstructs the false dichotomy between arts and science in a Ted Talk which proposes hybridity between subjects in a way that closely parallels the potential of employing print and digital technology together. Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar. “Marshall McLuhan and The Gutenberg Galaxy.” The Electronic Labyrinth. N.p., 2000. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. This summary of various Marshall McLuhan theories explains the concept of the “Gutenberg Man”, someone living in a society where the senses, once shared equally, are now dominated by sight as a result of the growing prevalence of the printed word, a change which has only accelerated with digital technologies. Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Decline and Fall of the English Major.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 22 June 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Klinkenborg discusses the rapid decline in numbers of students majoring in the humanities in favour of fields with more immediately practical applications as student debt becomes a growing concern, despite the rich merits and career flexibility afforded by a language-based education. Kunz, Marnie. “Paper Design World Shines in ‘Print Isn’t Dead’ Magazine - PSFK.” PSFK. PSFK, 15 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. The new crowd-funded Print Isn’t Dead magazine proves just that by having surpassed its fundraising goal and making full use of

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innovative print techniques to celebrate the print medium. Layar Creator. YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wi80g9WJvmw>. This video introduces Layar technology, one example of attempted print/digital hybrids. It aims to enliven print by integrating digital content accessed by scanning the page using a cellphone. Life After Digital. Dir. Marc De Guerre. TVO, 2014. TVO. The Ontario Educational Communications Authority, 16 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. De Guerre provides a level-headed account of the capacity for digital technologies to both connect and alienate. Louis CK Honors George Carlin. Perf. Louis CK. YouTube. N.p., 5 Sept. 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Louis CK proposes that the creative process is helped by daring to throw all of your work out once in a while, beginning anew instead of constantly revising. Ludovico, Alessandro. Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012. PDF. Ludovico discusses print’s persistent capacity to co-exist with new technologies by looking at its history in relation to new innovations, analysing its merits, and citing relevant critical artworks. Lupton, Ellen. “Free Font Manifesto.” Design Writing Research. Design Writing Research, 2006. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Lupton suggests a need for balanced contributions to the open source typographic movement between maintaining the value and profession of typeface design and gifting typefaces to the community as social contribution. Lyiscott, Jamila. “3 Ways to Speak English.” TEDSalon NY2014. New York. TED. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Jamila Lyiscott’s description of her own use of three separate modes of speech highlights

the fluidity of language and the legitimacy of colloquial developments. Mangen, A., P. Robinet, G. Olivier, and J.-L. Velay. “Mystery Story Reading in Pocket Print Book and on Kindle: Possible Impact on Chronological Events Memory.” Academia.edu. Academia, 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. This paper details the conclusions of a study on chronological events memory as influenced by Kindle versus paper book reading, which found that the print readers performed significantly better than the Kindle readers, and that print was overwhelmingly preferred by readers, possibly as a result of ergonomic differences. “Manifesto.” CertifyD. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. This manifesto underscores the importance of a strong theoretical and ethical basis in the practice of design. Matas, Mike. “A Next-Generation Digital Book.” TED2011. TED. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. In another example of attempted print/digital hybridity, Matas introduces a digital book intended to be revolutionary, yet borrowing heavily from the physicality of a book in ways which appear to confuse rather than augment its functionality. Matilda. Dir. Danny DeVito. 1996. Matilda discovers that books help her find an escape from her emotionally abusive family, demonstrating their personal impact. Morris, William. “The Arts and Crafts of To-day.” Marxists Internet Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Morris stresses the importance of the “applied arts” as necessary additions of beauty to otherwise bleak lives of labour and repetition. Morris, William. “The Ideal Book.” Marxists Internet Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Morris outlines with great specificity the qualities that go into a beautifully designed book, demonstrating the craftsmanship that goes into printed works but is generally lacking in digital texts due largely to limited typographic

control in browser-based and reflowable text environments. Murphy, David. “Bridging the Gap Between Print and Digital: Interactive Print.” INMA. INMA, 21 Jan. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Murphy discusses the potential for near-field communication chips to revolutionize the print experience by integrating mobile devices seamlessly into the experience simply through proximity, enabling things such as instant online shopping for items displayed on a magazine page. “Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon.” New York Review Books. NYREV, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Fénéon’s exceptionally brief stories demonstrate the breadth of storytelling achievable within the equivalent length of a Tweet. Prickitt, Lyndee. “Does Digital Storytelling Work Best in a Crisis?” Publishing Perspectives. Publishing Perspectives, 26 Nov. 2014. Web. 27 Nov. 2014. Prickitt advocates for the use of digital storytelling to communicate complex matters and time-sensitive issues by allowing an instantaneous, multimedia experience that incorporates a wide variety of informational tools. Self, Will. “Will Self: ‘The Fate of Our Literary Culture Is Sealed’” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 3 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Self argues that “deep reading” is a thing of the past, and that there is no longer a purpose for writing that demands it, as such readers are in negligibly short supply. Shariatmadari, David. “8 Pronunciation Errors That Made the English Language What It Is Today.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 11 Mar. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Shariatmadari’s article enforces the role of error and mutation in the development of language. Temple, Emily. “10 Crazy and Unusual Book Designs.” Flavorwire. Flavorpill Media, 7 Apr. 2012.

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Web. 21 Nov. 2014. This roundup blog post highlights the flexibility limitations of print by profiling 10 books that push the medium to its limits. Wasserman, Todd. “Is This The World’s Most Interactive Print Ad?” Mashable. Mashable, Inc., 9 Oct. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Mashable presents a new Lexus print ad, designed to integrate the viewer’s iPad to create a dynamic viewing experience in an attempt to merge print and digital technologies. Wilson, Krissy. Web log post. The Art of Google Books. Tumblr, 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2014. Wilson’s collection of physical artifacts and technical glitches within the pages of Google Books reveals the extent to which the digital world continues to be based in print. Wolf, Maryanna. “Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions.” Nieman Reports. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 29 June 2010. Web. 18 Nov. 2014. Wolf expresses concern that the movement toward increasingly fast reading is in danger of limiting our capacity for deep, critical thought and understanding, encouraging slower reading of fewer sources in more detail. “Your Paper Brain and Your Kindle Brain Aren’t the Same Thing.” Public Radio International. Ed. T.J. Raphael. Public Radio International, 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. This article parses the different reading styles commonly brought to paper versus digital reading environments, cautioning that the parts of our brain which enable us to read dense texts with focus require exercise which the non-linear reading commonly applied to digital texts does not provide.

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ALISON ROWAN is a graphic designer and book hoarder from Toronto with a focus on typography, lettering and editorial design.