electronic publishing at the HvA [Hogeschool van Amsterdam] and director of Kircz Research Amsterdam.
29. Reading As Event – Matthew Kirschenbaum
Reading is an event, not an act. Books are incidental (in the fullest meaning of the word). Texts are signals, transmissions. This is where I am now when I read, not a place but a mode, not a favourite chair but a state and frame. Think of it as resolution.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English ( University of Maryland ), Associate Director of the MITH, and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity.
30. Reading the Network – Tanja Koning
As editor of an independent magazine, I am naturally crazy about paper; nothing is as fine as the smell of a new magazine. Yet when it came to writing this piece, I didn’t think of that. What is fascinating me most about reading at the moment is the new carrier of information: the network. Networks hang over us like a thick mist; we cannot see them, and certainly cannot touch, leaf through, or smell them. And yet it is the carrier of much of our reading matter.
Are networks fine? Is there are difference between one network and another? And when making a network, can we talk about a craft comparable to binding a book or a medieval handwriting? In short: does a network have a face?
A number of artists and designers have recently unmasked the network by representing it as a phenomenon that is almost like a landscape.
A good example of this is the visualization Aron Koblin made of SMS messages on Queen’s Day, the Netherlands . Thanks to data from KPN, he made a inventory of the quantity and place where messages were sent and compiled this information into a visualization that is most reminiscent of a skyline, floating like a layer over the floor plan of Amsterdam .
Or the project YOUrban by Einar Sneve Martinussen. Together with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, he developed a way of visualizing WiFi in Oslo . He marched through the city with his research team, armed with a long stick with LEDs that can measure the signal strength of WiFi through radio waves. Thanks to photography using long shutter times, a screen of these signals became visible and thus showed, literally, 'the networked city.' For a moment. And that’s what we’ll have to make do with for the moment. The face of the network is always different and only visible for a moment.
Tanja Koning is freelance programme maker and project leader of Discovery Festival and O.K. Periodicals.
31. Nearby and Global in Its Impact – Steffen Konrath
Many people have stopped reading newspapers on a daily base. Circulation figures are on the decline worldwide. Don't worry. It is a declining interest in a content presentation form not in reading. Demand for stories is still high. While on the move many already prefer access to stories worth reading at the time they like and wherever they are. But the stickiness to a specific story brand, a specific publisher, is also likely to lose its strength. Highly connected and globally aware, people are open for changes, new reading experiments, and experiences. We are already living in the era of News3.0.
A (near) future day – my smartphone is always on. Push services send me short little messages of breaking news to my little device making information available wherever I am and at any time of the day. The latest push notification tells me, without going into too much detail, that the dictator in the North African country has now been arrested. It is enough to catch my attention. My tablet in my pocket allows me to read the follow up on the news online while driving through a rural area in Southern Bavaria, Germany . So far it is only a ticker message without much more concrete information and more and more questions pop up. Who has confirmed the news? Are photos already available as visual evidence or video footage to support what I read before?
The story is 'hot' enough for me to decide to open a Liquid Newsroom*, a virtual on-demand environment for collaborative writing. I label the topic ' Northern Africa ' and set up the topical 'room' for it on- demand and in real time. I quickly check my social network of trusted news sources – people in the area of interest, Northern Africa – to see whether anyone can be reached and can provide me with details or material. When the new topic working space on the Liquid Newsroom platform is opened, a new portal front-end comes into existence, where readers connected to the Internet via PC or mobile devices can easily check in to stay informed. The Liquid Newsroom is not run by a publisher, it is an on-demand network for publishing news as a team that can vary over time, only connected via the topic they like to address.
A first flow of information hits my virtual desktop in the ' Northern Africa ' newsroom. News sources have started to pick up the story. But now it is time to guide my readers through the growing stream of information and update it, analyzing the value added by each of the new stories coming in. I publish the information I have gathered almost immediately to the front-end to create a constant flow of what's new to readers who opt-in to the content stream e.g. subscribing to the feed via their smartphone devices. They do not stay in a passive mode. Some are concerned about what's happening and return questions via the integrated Q amp;A-button in their smartphone app. The questions from the readers connected to the topic stream provide a constant feedback in the editing and updating process. Together with real-time statistics (active views, reading, retweets, and the like) monitored on the screen as well, I decide which stories to follow up. In the meantime, friends working and living in the East and West Coast of the US have joined my ' Northern Africa ' liquid newsroom to work on the stories as well. I'm exhausted after hours of curating and am happy to pass the story lead on to these colleagues, knowing that they will pass it on in turn to Asian colleagues at the end of their day. In the virtual room we've already started to exchange thoughts via live chat, simultaneous editing of articles, and voice-over IP calls. Our discussion is interesting enough that we decide to make our editing process transparent on the corresponding website, so that readers can watch the process flow. It is time to relax and yes I know that after a few hours of sleep I will be back again.
Steffen Konrath is editor-in-chief of nextlevelofnews.com and blogs about the future of journalism.
The Liquid Newsroom is an open innovation project. It is currently under development and updates will be published on Konrath’s blog at www.nextlevelofnews.com.
32. The Interface of the Graphic Novel – Erin La Cour
I was first drawn into the world of graphic novels while working as an editorial assistant at a New York based publishing house where I was assigned to assess the potential sales benefits of acquiring graphic novels for my imprint. This was a daunting task on multiple levels, not least of which was my naive assumption that publishing companies are primarily interested in disseminating poignant new literature, not sales figures. The book my boss put on my desk was Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis , which at the time had sold over 500,000 copies, a huge feat in the publishing industry for any genre, and an even more impressive number for a memoir written by an unknown author. This fact led me to question what it was about the graphic novel that could generate such a large readership.
The growing interest in graphic novels in popular culture further confirmed that there has been a visible shift in the way in which we consume and process information, and a movement from textual to visual narratives. Indeed, today we consume information at a much faster rate than ever before due in large part to our increased use of technology, where it has become the norm to process information in quicker clips using various modes of communication, often in combination with each other, such as text and graphic, or audio and visual. But while this readership could indicate a lack of attention span or a dumbing down of culture, and certainly comics have long been dismissed as lowly kitsch (Greenberg, Krauss), it was clear that Persepolis, like many other graphic novels, could not be categorized as unsubstantial either in content or form.
What the graphic novel highlights is that with the surge in multimodal dissemination of information, we are perhaps getting closer to a better means of comprehending information available to us that is less obtuse than language alone. By presenting information in multimodal means, which are based on the five senses rather than in just the codified system of language, we are more likely to understand what is presented to us as it is more closely linked to our nature as sensual humans.
Through the structure of its layout, including its 'boxes of time' (Chute and DeKoven), frames, gutter space, images, and onomatopoeic words, alongside text that is often handwritten and therefore offers a 'trace of the human' (Kittler), the graphic novel creates a new interface, so to speak, for what has long been considered a limited, static media. The graphic novel thus dismantles the idea of the obsolescence of the book in the age of new media, illustrating how the book can adapt to changes in readership, offer a challenge to its readers to learn to read differently, and perhaps more importantly, highlight that the book can be a platform encouraging a new means of interaction between media and user.
Erin La Cour is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) where she researches graphic novels and cultural memory.
33. Minimal and Maximal Reading – Rudi Laermans
Nowadays, information is not scarce – there is far too much of it, or rather, far too many information possibilities, as I will explain. But why speak of a surplus; what is actually lacking? The scarcest good in an information society is our vastly time-bound individual perception. We live in an attention economy, distinguished by intense competition among innumerable producers and mediators of information. Using every rhetorical ploy, they want to capture and modulate our perception, then aggregate it, creating momentary attention communities or publics. Nevertheless, attention depends on the individual observer: information is in the eye of the attentive beholder. Why does this, and not that, image, title,
