Rubery online talk next week (9/17)

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In a bit of kismet, Matthew Rubery, whose pioneering work on the audiobook and oralizations of novels we will be reading and discussing, is giving an online lecture next week at U of IL. Details below: I’m going to try to catch part of it around my teaching schedule.

The Center for Children’s Books at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is having an online lecture that will be of interest to those DHers with audio interests. Please see abstract below and attached flyer:

Prof. Matthew Rubery, “Book Audio”
Sept 17, 12-1pm CST

Audiobooks do more than reproduce printed books. Although the audiobook’s reliance on sound is sometimes perceived as a liability, there are numerous instances in which the addition of sound effects might be said to enhance the reading experience. This presentation examines recordings that take advantage of the audiobook’s affordances to go beyond simply replicating print. Drawing on sources ranging from children’s books to celebrity memoirs, it takes up the question: What happens when publishers experiment with sound to create “book audio” instead of audiobooks—that is, recordings whose soundtracks go beyond the verbal description of sounds by using actual sounds?

To sign up, check this URL for the Zoom info on 9/17: https://ccb.ischool.illinois.edu/ss/

The Oak and the Reeds ~ Audio Book Reflections of the Aesop Fable

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For this post, I chose to focus on one of the Aesop fables because they are in the public domain and have been translated and reinterpreted many times.  I was interested to learn what that would mean in terms of how audiobook producers might treat them.  Also, as a child, I had a collection of recordings by Boris Karloff, and one of them had the actor reading the fables.  The Oak and the Reeds was always one of my favorites.

For those not familiar with them, “Aesop’s Fables—also called the Aesopica—are a collection of stories designed to teach moral lessons [they are] credited to Aesop, a Greek slave and story-teller thought to have lived between 620 and 560 BCE …aphorisms such as ‘sour grapes’ and ‘a bird in the hand’ can be traced back to these cautionary tales” (Aesop). In the traditional telling of these fables, the last sentence is always reserved for the moral of the story.

Using LibriVox as my source, a simple key-word search for “Aesop” yielded ten results, and “Æsop” found one.  I listened to all of them and chose three for this post.  However, before we examine that audio, here is the complete text of The Oak & the Reeds from The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter.

The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter

The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter

A Giant Oak stood near a brook in which grew some slender Reeds. When the wind blew, the great Oak stood proudly upright with its hundred arms uplifted to the sky. But the Reeds bowed low in the wind and sang a sad and mournful song.

“You have reason to complain,” said the Oak. “The slightest breeze that ruffles the surface of the water makes you bow your heads, while I, the mighty Oak, stand upright and firm before the howling tempest.”

“Do not worry about us,” replied the Reeds. “The winds do not harm us. We bow before them and so we do not break. You, in all your pride and strength, have so far resisted their blows. But the end is coming.”

As the Reeds spoke a great hurricane rushed out of the north. The Oak stood proudly and fought against the storm, while the yielding Reeds bowed low. The wind redoubled in fury, and all at once the great tree fell, torn up by the roots, and lay among the pitying Reeds.

Better to yield when it is folly to resist, than to resist stubbornly and be destroyed. (Aesop)

Our first audio passage uses the text of The Oak & the Reeds from The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter but interestingly, does not credit that book. However, it does point the reader to this link http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19994 which is a Project Gutenberg asset.  There we find that Project Gutenberg does cite Milo Winter.

The reader for this recording is Claire Schreuder.  Ms. Schreuder does an able job with the text, but she sounds a bit tired toward the end.  She tries to make character voices for the oak and the reeds but doesn’t follow through on it.  What is interesting here is that she does a 6:15 minute recording without a break, and in it, she reads four different stories, with The Oak and the Reeds coming last.

Click to listen (fast forward to 4:54) (Schreuder)

The Aesop for Children

Figure 2 Cover Art (LibriVox)

Reading for six minutes straight may not seem like a long time, but it is!  I did voiceover work for a living and use to volunteer to read newsprint to the hearing impaired. One of the things I learned was five minutes is about as much as you want to do in a single stretch in order to keep your voice flexible.  In other words, it is good to take frequent breaks when you need to read long passages.

This next recording is taken from the book Aesop in Rhyme and was written in 1820 by Jefferys Taylor.  An engraver by trade, Taylor wrote several children’s books, including these interpretations of the fables.  I found a digital copy of the text on the Internet Archive site.  The images below were captured from that source.  The first thing to note is that Taylor’s version of the fable is almost twice as long as the Winter’s one.  And he wrote it in a rhyming verse, which can be very tricky to recite and not have it sound sing-songy.

In this LibriVox audio recording, Noel Badrian reads.  Mister Badrian has a beautiful English accent, and there is a reediness to his tone, which is an asset as it helps to even the rhyme.  The quality of the audio is excellent, and Badrian does not embroider his delivery by making distinct character voices for the oak or the reeds; instead, he makes good use of pauses both to break up the rhyme and to allow for the character’s voices to translate naturally.  A visit to Badrian’s page reveals that he has recorded 833 selections for LibriVox, so while they might not refer to him as a professional voiceover artist, I would.  He has put in the bench time!

The Oak & the Reed

Engraving from Aesop in Rhyme, with some originals.

Click to listen. (Badrian)

Fable I. The Oak and The Reed.

Digital copy from the first edition of Aesop in rhyme, with some originals (Taylor and Aesop)

Page Two from the Oak and the Reed

Digital copy from Aesop in rhyme, with some originals (Taylor and Aesop)

This last selection is a fascinating recording, in part, because the text has been transformed.  It runs 2.28 minutes; with the first fifteen seconds being the standard LibriVox disclaimer, the fable itself runs 45 seconds, and the rest is moral commentary.

In the previous iterations, the oak and the reeds live together, and it is only when the storm approaches that their survival strategies are revealed.  However, in this tale, the oak has already been struck down and is floating in a stream.  When it passes a reed that is unhurt, they strike up a conversation. The reed admonishes the fallen oak, advising, “I secure myself with a conduct the reverse of yours, instead of being stubborn and stiff, and confiding in my strength, I yield and bend to the blast and let it go over me, knowing how vain and fruitless it would be to resist” (Fables of Aesop and Others).

Click to listen. (Seaquill)

Cover Art from Fables of Aesop and Others.

Cover art from Fables of Aesop and Others.

The “application” which follows, is even harder on the dying oak, accusing it of temerity and a weak understanding.  Then follows religious prescriptions to be persons of “quiet, still temper” so as to “allude the shocks or to receive them with the least detriment” (Fables of Aesop and Others).  The LibriVox editors give no additional indication who actually wrote this version of the fable, but from the language and the fact it is public domain, I would guess it comes from the late 1800s or early 1900s.  However, our reader Seaquill clearly had a greater comfort performing the beginning of the piece than they did the end.  They struggled with some of the sentence structure and sounded unsure about where to put the emphasis on certain words.

Practice is key when reading text that hails from a different era.  The meaning of words can change over time; some research is needed so the reader understands the text fully.  Humans are very good at hearing indecision in another’s voice.  As a reader, first, understand the text fully.  Then mark up the script so you know when to breathe.  And most importantly, never be afraid to take your time!

Bibliography

Aesop. “The Oak & the Reeds.” Aesop. The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter. New York: Rand, McNally & Co., 1919. eBook. <http://read.gov/aesop/011.html>.

Badrian, Noel. “The Oak and the Reed.” Æsop in Rhyme, with Some Originals. 2017. Digital Audio. <https://librivox.org/aesop-in-rhyme-with-some-originals-by-jefferys-taylor/>.

LibriVox. Fables of Aesop and Others. <https://ia802902.us.archive.org/12/items/fables_of_aesop_2003_librivox/fablesofaesop_2003.jpg>.

LibriVox. The Aesop for Children. <https://ia800708.us.archive.org/25/items/aesopforchildren_1308_librivox/Aesop_Children_1309.jpg>.

Schreuder, Claire. “The Oak and the Reeds.” The Aesop for Children. 2013. Digital Audio. <https://librivox.org/the-aesop-for-children-by-aesop/>.

Seaquill. “Fables of Aesop and Others.” 2020. Digital Recording. <https://librivox.org/fables-of-aesop-and-others-by-aesop/>.

Taylor, Jefferys, and Aesop. Aesop in Rhyme, with some originals. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1828. Digital Copy. <https://archive.org/details/aesopinrhymewith00tayliala/page/2/mode/2up>.

The Infamous War of Worlds Broadcast

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For this week’s audio project, I didn’t go too original. I choose the original 1938 broadcast radio for World of Wars by Orsen Welles and the Mercury Theater. The ensemble of cast/characters, audio producers, and technicians retold the story of the fictional alien invasion and the unnamed human survivor written by famous science fiction novelist H.G. Wells. The audio adaptation by Howard Knoch changed the story from the original English town to a town in New Jersey, here in the US. Another alteration took place at the beginning of the broadcast for a more dramatic yet realistic effect over the radio. The change consisted of fictional news bulletins that interrupted regular programming. These reported on the events taking place during the invasion. It was supposed to play out as if it was happening right now. 

Though the original broadcast didn’t reach a substantial amount of people, the legend of it provoking panic and total evacuations of its listeners after thinking the broadcast/invasion was “real” is a wild and overly exaggerated tale all media students learn about in Media 101. The point of telling us media scholars about this “event” is to demonstrate the power and reach of the media, a great story, and of course, an excellent storyteller (both Wells and Welles).  

I enjoy science fiction and horror, but I prefer these in the audiovisual medium. Though the novel, War of Worlds, is well written, there’s no doubt that’s a great story; I can empathize with the impact, engagement, and entertaining factor that it has in the audio realm. What’s great about the written word is that readers can take their time with the material; they can put it down if it becomes too overwhelming. Readers can also look back through the pages and recall details or confirm doubts. Listeners, on the other hand, are taken on a wild ride of audio sound effects. In this case, for example, the urgency in the actors’ voices and the rhythmic tick-tock of a clock added to the listener’s engagement.  However, at that time, if you missed vital information or the name of a place or thing, you would be lost. In order to enjoy the story, one must have great attention and listening skills. This is why SOME folks that missed the introduction to the piece, tuned in during the middle of the broadcast, lost and inferred that an actual invasion was taking place!

LISTEN HERE

Thoughts on Reading Groups – Blog Post #1

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As an adult, I prefer the comfort of reading alone, making annotations, and developing my own conclusions before discussing a book/story with others. This wasn’t always the case. Growing up, as a Latina immigrant and ESL student, nothing made me happier than reading in a large group. I prefer listening to my English teachers pronounce the words the proper way, I liked following along on the page, and of course, participating in the collective: wow! gasp! what?! with my fellow classmates. When I was in 7th grade, I attended a struggling public school in the Bronx. There, English and reading, in general, were taken as a joke. That all changed when a new sweet but stern English teacher came along and challenged us all to read together: To Kill A Mockingbird. She refused not to challenge us intellectually because we were ESL students, nor did she gave up on us when she was warned about our tough group. This was the first time in my public school experience that an entire class full of the rowdiest, loudest, easily distracted ESL students, not only listened and participated but collectively immersed themselves into a story. We even refused to go to lunch until we found out the verdict during the court scene! Linking this anecdote to our reading of Leah Price’s book What We Talk about When We Talk about Books, this amazing English teacher didn’t follow the prescribed curriculum for our class based on preconceived notions about who had the right to read this American classic or who had the intellectual capabilities to understand it and appreciate it. She took a chance, and we read the same book as the high English performers in our school.

As a writer, I should love reading/writing groups, no? Well, as much as I learned a lot from them as a student, as a professional, I see them as elitist, always trying to box people in. This is especially true online. I felt empowered and as part of the creation process when I started writing fan fiction. Like Alan Lui’s article (From Reading to Social Computing) suggests I was part of this Web 2.0, and I loved it! However, in other sites like Twitter, and even Goodreads, I didn’t feel like part of the reading/writing community that I once loved. Web 2.0 also allowed for one single thought, sentence, one piece of dialogue, not only be overly analyze but attacked from thousands of bots and faceless handle/usernames. One of your comments might be liked and commented on by a “regular Joe” who also enjoyed reading the epic tale. But this same comment will also receive a disturbingly aggressive response from an elitist bibliophile who believes, similar to the students in the Community Reading and Social Imagination article, that tale was “too imaginative” or “too unrealistic.”

For this reason, I was content reading the epic fantasy tale of Harry Potter, on my own. I never read it as a young child, but as an adult, I had the opportunity to read the first four books on paper, and the last three books via a free PDF and free audio narration. This mixture of these reading utensils allowed me to escape to a magical world while on my commute. I had this intimate yet communal experience similar to that from the 7th grade. I listened to a great narrator, I followed along with the page, and occasionally had auditable gaps! It’s a series I cherish. Strangers of the different ethnic groups, socioeconomic backgrounds, and even different intellectual levels came up to me while on my commute. They not only to wish me luck on my reading journey but also to foster a passionate conversation that I wouldn’t be able to have online. I guess reading while on train/commuting is the best of both worlds for me.

Unpacking My Notes

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Our relation to a cloud-based approach to unify data sources depends on how difficult the task is to compile a set of our thoughts when reading Ebooks spread across many devices. Far from the idyllic cumulus set against a patch of baby blue drifting overhead, my cloud has rendered sopping my highlights and notes, raining on any attempt to facilitate distributed reading. 

Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books presence grew in embodied size and complexity as the Mobi file was passed from Kindle app on my iPhone, to Amazon Fire tablet, and finally the Kindle software for Windows over the period of a week. I’ll leave it for Ebook historians to gauge how my conclusion Marginalia is opposed to the format of an e-text holds up; but as the “reverse bell drive” of Price’s estimation that will see books “bear witness to the mental and emotional lives of their readers” and drive readers’ annotations back to the fore, the problem of HCI has to be dealt with first. It may have to do with the legal limitations set when we “borrow” or “license” a text from Amazon. That each device, with their unique manufacturers, has built-in limitations regarding how a text can be modified. DRM and strict EULAs could also be culprits. But don’t highlights sit on top of a text, whereas notes and annotations sit alongside, and from this perspective there is hardly any modification of the original text going on?

Price notes that in East Asia the phone is the preferred method of reading ebooks, in France its laptops, and in Britain “e-readers have begun losing ground to phones”. But what about a peripatetic American who will read a text on three different devices before getting through it? Price writes that a company called Rebook allows users to generate “association copies” and “give away ebooks that they’ve underlined or annotated”. We really hold our own thoughts on texts in such damn high esteem, and still are relegated to the Sidebar! It’s a shame there isn’t a universal design system that emulates the notation capabilities of hypothes.is, Manifold, and Markdown.

Yellow announces its return Zelig-like from far-flung devices in shades of pale, mellow, and stark. I now have three sets of yellow tints to mark highlights, and their varying shades are refocusing my attention where they ought to have been uniform. I’m naturally led to believe that the stark yellow lines of text are of more importance than the mellow ones, and following the hierarchy down, pale yellow lines should be considered an afterthought. Accounting for differences in screen resolution, color calibration, and refresh rate, my laptop ought to be seen as the source of truth, but I fear that it has exacerbated differences due to its position as a Gaming laptop that supports sRGB colors. 

With my highlights proving unreliable, I move on to the notes section which has imported properly from my devices, but sits puerile. Alan Liu takes this up in “From Reading to Social Computing’: that scribbling in the margin is “a whole zone of literary activity that is undecidably readerly and writerly”. But he equates historical margins with the commentary sidebar on a blog, and the two don’t square. True marginalia allows you to get in the guts of the system and attack head on, or defend upfront a point that you found worthy. The etymology of the word might mean off to the side, but the historical development of a term should never be seen to offer teleological guidance. The sidebar is a skeuomorph, pandering to polite and perceived notions of where our own thoughts should sit in relation to the author’s.

Here’s a hope for the future of commentary on the internet. Blog commentary applications like Disqus won’t be relegated to the bottom of an article or post, but rather allow for literary zones that are messy, moving in the intestinal tract of the text where real work and digestion happens. I call for a mainstream rollout of the niche products that researchers have been using to do deep research on articles.

ASSIGNMENT: “found” audiobook + presentation

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For our next meeting on 9/10, I want you to write a blog post and report on it with a very brief (max 5 min) presentation on any audiobook version of a fiction text that you can get your hands on. Sources might include:

  • free/open texts read by amateurs on librivox.org (which Rubery mentions in his article)
  • texts you download/check out from your local library or the GC’s library
  • texts you buy from iTunes or Google Play or audible.com
  • texts you own or discover at flea markets/secondhand stores

I’d like you to think about and comment on some of the following:

  • production values: how much went into the recording, in terms of vocal training, editing, recording technology, etc.?
  • style: is there a single voice or multiple voices? Does the narrator (or do the narrators) do “voice characterization,” modulating the voice for different characters, or not?
  • fidelity: is the recording abridged or unabridged? Does it stick rigorously to the text or deviate from it?
  • affect: what does it feel like to “read” this text? How does it differ from reading a printed work of fiction?

On Twitter

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Frankly, the first thing that came to mind after I read the prompt for this week’s blog post was Twitter, and I’m interested in parsing out the ways in which textuality and literary sociality occurs through and about Twitter—this analysis happening in conjunction with today’s readings, resonating in a lot of ways. My interest in this sort of thing resonates, in particular, to Liu’s consideration of “social computing as an object of literary study” as well as his juxtaposition between social computing and social reading: “I recognize that much of what provoked me to turn to literature in the first place—vital, daring, and meditative expressions of human experience—is there. It is there in the naked lyric of a blog post celebrating or mourning some personal or public event. It is there in the classical drama of a brawling, controversial Wikipedia article whose behind-the-scenes “talk” page stages the chorus of the “rule of many” or “wisdom of crowds.”” Throughout his article, Liu articulates the decentralization of reading in post-structuralist theory that falsifies the binary between the reader and the author (+ publisher) that has been traditionally conceived of as making up The Literary. Indeed, as Price articulates, this work of decentralization is in opposition to”the myth of the self0made reader—of an unmediated communion between a reader’s mind and an author’s” that effectively “erases all the third parties who sell books, lend books, catalog books, give or withhold them.”

I think, now, critically about what textuality and political education means has meant in this current moment. While digital humanities and humanities scholarship, with regards to Twitter, have largely read its function in social movements around political action and protest tactic, there is less discussion around how publics are formed on Twitter in and through reading: For examples, what this calls for is the impact of Twitter in spurring reading groups, the creation of anti-racist syllabi, etc. But perhaps what is more interesting is the way in which Twitter exemplifies reading in the 21st century: the decentralization of authorship and ideas, the clarity of reading a public and mediated activity, and the spurring of new technologies for reading (e.g., digital tools that turn Twitter threads into sharable, easy-to-read PDFs). Overall, whether we like it or not, Twitter is a space of political education, and thus an important node in a larger, media-literary ecology. I’m thinking about the way my reading group is formed by friends on Twitter, and how our readings are guided by conversation we see on Twitter.

Trace of the Past

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In his article, Alan Liu outlines social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting. When talking about books, especially rare books, which researchers and scholars of the book often regard and compare to museum objects, of particular interest is a history of those copies that survived and became part of libraries. Such publications are the transmitters of history not only of a particular copy, or of an owner’s library it used to be part of, but of an intellectual history of several decades, if not centuries, that could be traced back by examining one particular copy. Therefore, searching for and studying such copies is an enriching and gratifying endeavor because it helps us–by researching marginalia, book provenance, library stamps–to understand and restore a path this book took to get from one place to another. These little, trifling as someone might think details of the book, might lead to a greater understanding of a particular era–the then reading habits, the nuances of book collecting, the palette (or its lack) of book publishing.

Of distinct interest and challenge is to trace down books published in eighteen or nineteen centuries, their print-run was traditionally pretty modest. Typically, we would already know of several existing copies of such publication–and often the copies we are aware of, which are part of libraries, had mysterious stories before they ended up in a climate-control section of special collections.

One such example is a collection of Ukrainian fairy tales published in 1835; it is one of the first collections of fairy tales in general, making this book extra valuable. Back in the day, the book like that would have a relatively modest print run, and therefore it is not surprising that only several copies are available at the libraries. According to the OCLC catalog, the book that captured attention was available just in two academic libraries.

Although there was another copy–not included in the OCLC catalog–as part of the collection at a research institution that I used to work at. That copy was truly intriguing because of several stamps it had: one by the former owner of the book and one a library it used to be part of; in addition to that, the copy had marginalia notes. The stamp of a former owner was from the second part of the nineteenth century. Another significant copy component was an inscription by a prominent Ukrainian linguist, literary scholar, and a writer who probably bought the book from its previous owner and then donated to a library the book was part of. Finally, the copy contained a call number assigned to this copy sometime at the beginning of the twentieth century. Last but not least, the copy has marginal notes which, I tend to believe, might have been left by someone who prepared the second edition of this anthology at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If trying to decipher these coded messages of the book, which are not that obscure and illegible as one might think, the readers might get an image of cultural, intellectual, geographical movement and usage of this particular copy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. There are other vital questions still unanswered: what was this book’s path to the United States and did it happen–this could be figured out while doing comprehensive research of this copy.

Fear

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Have the anxieties of our time inspired us to find comfort in a fictional idea of what reading used to be? Are we living in an unprecedented new era, marking the end to a golden age of reading? In her introduction to What We Talk About When We Talk Novels, Leah Price argues that these digital-age questions about the printed word are not new and the golden age of reading was never what digital-age writers conceive. Making comparisons of current concerns with each historical reinvention of the book, she argues that “our own era continues rather than breaks with, a tradition of innovation that has seen new formats emerge over and over again for half a millennium.” (4)

Exploring the golden age of print from the “rise of mass audiences in the eighteenth century to the Cold War-era triumph of the paperback”, she identifies and counters three fundamental myths. The “myth of exceptionalism”, our twenty-first-reader sense that we are experiencing unprecedented change; the “myth of the ideal reader”, or equating reading with virtue; finally she lists the “myth of the self-made reader”, or the idea of an “unmediated communion between a reader’s mind and the author”, which “erases all the third parties who sell books, lend books, catalog books, give or withhold them.” This idea also erases how important and inevitable the community that connects other readers is.

One of the central arguments in the essay is that reading a book as a solitary immersive experience may have never existed in the way that is commonly assumed in the digital age. Yet the image of peacefully curling up in a comfortable chair with a good book, is pervasive in our culture ,beyond the academic conversation. Still I am not able to conceive of reading as a solitary experience, and I have not yet sensed a great difference between reading a printed book or a tablet or computer screen. This statement is always met with some level of horror, but I still enjoy both equally and I have never longed for one or the other. What has always mattered the most to me was the community of others reading the same words, but seeing and experiencing something different. 

As a child, I would immerse myself in a novel, often completely focused on the conversations that would follow. I wondered what landscapes and faces looked and smelled like to other readers, and I impatiently waited for my friends to finish the book so we could finally argue about the female protagonists. This were the last years of communist Albania, but many books were still forbidden. My older cousins secretly shared books, and sometimes handwritten stories, whose darkened corners and falling edges were covered in handwritten notes. 

It was one of my greatest aspirations to be part of their group. The thrill of peeking into a forbidden world proved irresistible and I read many novels that I was not ready for, and academic texts that I did not understand. I am still traumatized by The Stranger and just about everything that happens The House of Spirits. 

I was reminded of this when Leah Price looks at the tension between print and handwriting. Handwriting lasted up to late 18th century in Europe, and its ability to avoid censure, in a way print cold not, allowed for radical writers and thinkers to publish their ideas. The same way reading forbidden literature worked in a communist country, this fostered a feeling of community and “forged a collective through the act of forwarding or exchanging ideas.” In many ways she argues this is similar to Twitter or blogging. I agree.

Evolution of the Book

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This week’s readings were a roller-coaster ride about Western literacy and the book.  I began with Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.  I am of an age that I, too, remember the fear that the rise of electronics would be the death keel for analog content.  When Price writes, “[a]s magazines migrated from doormats to laptops, articles vied to diagnose the disappearance of a way of life that American had once read” (Price 2), I recalled the shock I felt in 2012 when the weekly news magazine Newsweek ceased to publish its print edition, offering instead “a paid, subscriber-only product for the tablet” (Thompson). 

I grew up with Time Magazine and Newsweek, the former a voice for the more conservative thinkers in my family and the latter a sop to its younger, more liberal members.  When I moved into my twenties and thirties, I dutifully kept subscriptions going to both, the better to keep the conversations less lively at family gatherings.  My annual Christmas gifts of a subscription to Newsweek to my conservative uncles were accepted, if not embraced.  But, when Newsweek died, I remember thinking that its loss did not bode well for the civil discord of my family, and I was not mistaken.  Their attitudes hardened, and discourse soon was relegated to family gossip, fishing, and the weather.

Alan Liu’s From Reading to Social Computing was a comprehensive overview of how the arrival of the Internet has forever changed the ways that we communicate.  Of particular interest to me was the section on Web 2.0 that spoke to the evolution of specific platforms into content management systems.  Liu writes, “blogs and their derivatives (including all manner of sites powered by the WordPress blog engine and Drupal community-message-board engine that have evolved into general-purpose content management systems)” (Lui).  As both a maker and a user of these derivatives, I often think about their archives’ ephemeral nature.  A recent example is Yahoo.  When that platform was sold to Verizon, the new owner promptly shuttered Yahoo Groups to new content, and old content was deleted (Brodkin). 

While Verizon did give admin users the ability to download the data, and platforms like Groups.io created mechanisms to copy Yahoo group content to their servers (at a charge), the content of orphaned Yahoo groups was lost forever. Those archives dated back to 2001 and contained much of the history of the early Internet.  And, because Yahoo Groups was free, it was used by a wide variety of people.  I belonged to a beading group curated by an older person in Arizona; they had meticulously documented different beading methods and were generous with their historical knowledge of pattern design. When they died suddenly in 2010, there was no one to admin the group, so it went dormant.  However, the content remained visible to anyone who found it.  And now it is gone.

Perhaps it is the oddly ephemeral nature of online content that makes physical books so appealing, even if they are repurposed into other objects.  Leah Price turns to this theme in their article Reading in Place and asks the question: “What spawns this use of fake books as real reading migrates online?” (Price B10).  She posits that one reason is we live in spaces designed to house books, so we continue to collect them.  Another is pleasure reading and the advent of the paperback, which can be read anywhere.  For Price, “Books continue to connote stillness” (Price B11), and that is something that we who dwell in the cacophony of modern life often need to embrace.

Professor Allred grapples with the need for quiet reflection in his article Novel Hacks when he asks “whether students’ capacities for intensive focus and critical orientation will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking at the margins of the window, a mere click away” (Allred 115).  For Allred, the solution is the ability to give students the tools to make “their own reading, and the technologies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism” (Allred 115).  In this way, the dusty tome from a bygone era becomes a living monument to how the meaning of the novel has changed over time. For example, he shares that “students are often shocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth, scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality” (Allred 116). 

The digital tools used by Allred’s students include the ability to “share highlighted passages and marginal comments with their social networks” (Allred 117), which invites the students to become co-writers and collaborators when they create a new digital object from the source material.  I was particularly intrigued by the section on creating an Audiobook.  I did voice-over work for many years, and in the 1990s, one of my pro bono efforts was reading New York Magazine over closed-circuit radio for the blind and reading impaired.  Two readers would share the text, one would read for several paragraphs and then hand the mic over, and the second would read for a while.  That way, our voices would not tire, and we could read for several hours without a break.  I was particularly amused by how challenging one group of students found producing an audiobook of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when they initially opted to do it on live radio, but when confronted with those complexities, instead opted to assign a single chapter to each individual and have them record it privately.  I am very excited to see what our class will decide to do!

Bibliography

Allred, Jeff. “Novel Hacks, New Approaches toTeaching the Novel Genre.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagog (2014): 121-137.

Brodkin, Jon. “Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups.” arsTechnica. 17 Oct 2019. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/yahoo-is-deleting-all-content-ever-posted-to-yahoo-groups/>.

Lui, Alan. “From Reading to Social Computing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. 2013. eJournal. <https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/from-reading-to-social-computing/>.

Price, Leah. “Reading in Place.” Chronicle of Higher Education 59 (2012): B10-B11. eJounal.

—. What we talk about when we talk about books: the history and future of reading. First Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Hardcover.

Thompson, Derek. “Who’s Really to Blame for the Death of Newsweek?” The Atlantic. 18 Oct. 2012. eMagazine. <https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-death-of-newsweek/263814/>.