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ransliteracies
Research in the Technological, Cognitive,
Social, and Cultural Practices of Reading
in Online Environments
- Document
version:
1.4 (
January 2, 2005
)
- Document
release status:
This statement can
be shared with people in
other programs, projects,
and campuses as a basis
for wider consultancy and
further revision. The statement
is preliminary to the Transliteracies
2005 planning
conference (June
17-18)
and subsequent
formal
planning documents.
- Site
status: This
is a temporary mounting
site. A Transliteracies
site based on an open-source
content management system
is being designed.
-
Contact:
Alan Liu
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Narrative Overview
Users of
today's digital, networked
information spend an increasing
amount of time each day "reading" online
textual and multimedia materials
(for example, email, Web
pages). Yet the practices
of digital reading in online
environments are not well
understood according to the
protocols of reading that
arose in the last two centuries
to support the individual,
organizational, and social
needs of late-literate societies–for
example,
- the protocols
that govern the sustained,
solitary reading of books,
novels, or newspapers "all
the way through," whether
for self-improvement or
leisure,
- the protocols
of rigorous "close reading," rereading,
and peer-review in scholarly
research,
- the protocols
of document usage that
first arose in large
organizations of the
early twentieth century
(e.g., retrieval from
a "filing" system,
document "review," or
document "summarizing")
Instead,
reading on the Internet
or in other networked environments
often places a premium
on searching, scanning,
jumping, filtering, aggregating,
organizing, and other kinds
of radically discontinuous,
low-attention, peripheral-vision,
or machine-assisted reading
practices that do not map
exactly over predecessor
practices of individual or
organizational literacy.
Networked, digital environments
also make more important
the social, collective experience
of reading (as instanced
by Web blogs or the Google
search-engine technology
that filters hits according
to popularity or relevance
in a community of referring
Web pages, each of which
is in effect a "reading" of
the referred page). Finally,
the new online reading complements
the emerging technologies
that increasingly allow computers
to read/write autonomously
to each other across platforms
and applications—as
in the XML-based technologies
that underlie the new online
text archives, "Web
services," and RSS newsreaders.
How are
people today in fact "reading" online
individually, in organizations,
with social others, and in
league with a burgeoning
society of semi-"literate" machines?
What innovations in technologies
or interfaces are possible
to increase the productivity,
variety, and pleasure of
these new kinds of reading?
And how can the historical
diversity of human reading
practices provide a metric—quantitative
and qualitative—against
which to gauge the robustness
of the new digital practices?
Reciprocally, how can contemporary
practices provide new ways
to understand the technical,
social, and cultural dimensions
of historical reading?
Can online reading be improved
through new technologies
in complementarity with an
understanding of the history
of reading practices?
These are the questions
to be addressed by the Transliteracies
Project. Launched initially
by the organizers of the
UC
Digital Cultures Project and UCSB
Transcriptions Project,
Transliteracies
is designed to bring together
teams of researchers from
the humanities and arts (e.g.,
history and theory of reading,
study of interpretive practices,
comparative study of reading
and media across different
societies or languages,
new media design arts),
the social sciences (e.g.,
the sociology, political
science, and communications
of online communities),
the sciences and engineering (e.g.,
computer science, human interface
research, database design,
cognitive science,
speech- and text-recognition
engineering), education (e.g.,
technical writing, literacy
studies), and the library
and information science communities
(e.g., metadata and text-encoding,
the study of knowledge classification
systems).
The working
hypothesis of Transliteracies
is that searching, scanning,
jumping, filtering, aggregating,
browsing, and so on are
not just "low-cognitive" activities
(as judged by traditional
modes of high-literate reading)
but instead contain their
own kinds of intelligences
and tactics. Transliteracies
will map these practices,
discern their heuristics,
and create demonstration
technologies to show how
existing digital environments
can be improved to facilitate
different kinds of socially
or organizationally useful
reading. For example, Transliteracies
could build a demonstration
search engine that allows
users to organize the relevancy
of "hits" based
on such optional criteria
as "scholarly-level
discourse," "journalistic
discourse," or "grade
five discourse" (or
such contexts as "U.S.-centered," "global," "business," etc.)—where
such criteria can be applied
on the fly through algorithms
that pre-filter materials
according to evolving, society-based
metrics of internal complexity
and pattern-recognition.
Or again, Transliteracies
could create ways to visualize
and understand organization-
or community-wide patterns
of reading in a manner similar
to UC Santa Barbara researcher
and digital artist George
Legrady's current "Making
the Invisible Visible: What
the Community is Reading" project
(which dynamically interfaces
with a library's information-technology
system to visualize the collective
circulation and use of books
in a community). Particularly
useful will be comparative
research into the relations
between online reading communities—for
example, between mainstream
business or media communities
and other ethnic, national,
or age communities of literacy.
The premise
of Transliteracies is that
a multi-disciplinary approach
to online reading of the
sort afforded by an integral
university system like
the University of California
(in collaboration with other
research centers) is the
most fruitful way to invent
new understandings and practices
of digital literacy.
Is it better to read more
information faster, for example?
Or to search and sort information
more effectively? Or to situate
ourselves in information
as a means toward creating
new kinds of community or
new modes of engagement
with other
communities? Or, again,
to enjoy information ("cool," it
is often called on the Web)
according to a complex equation
of aesthetics and social
identification? These are
the sorts of questions that
a full university research
environment, collaborating
with other institutions
and industry,
is ideally equipped to address.
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Project Scale, Structure,
and Funding
The appropriate scale and
structure of the Transliteracies
project will be honed as
the project proceeds through
its preliminary planning
and consulting stages to
its seed-grant and implementation
stages. The goal will be
to establish a scale/structure
suited to identified clusters
of researchers and programs.
In principle, however, Transliteracies
can scale up to a cross-disciplinary
and cross-institutional project
positioned to seek funding
from a range of science,
arts, humanities, and business
sponsoring entities. Transliteracies
may also function in alliance
with other projects or initiatives
(e.g., NSF
IGERT grants,
UCSB
Center
for Information Technology
and Society initiatives,
UC
Digital Arts Research Network). |
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Project Stages and Deliverables
- Preliminary Planning
and Consulting (2004-5):
The UC Digital Cultures
Project (with additional
funding from UC Office
of the President and the
UCSB Center for Information
Technology and Society)
is sponsoring
a Transliteracies
planning conference being
organized by Alan Liu for
June 17-18, 2005. (See
conference
announcement).
The purpose of the planning
conference will be twofold.
Part of the conference
will be an opportunity
to gather scholars from
UCSB and elsewhere together
to share research on
the topic through a series
of "conversation roundtables" and
a limited number of keynote
and project presentations.
The other part of the conference
will be a working session
devoted to planning for
Transliteracies. The basic
idea is to convene people
from UCSB and elsewhere
who might be participants
in the project, or who
can provide access to
likely people and programs.
During the year prior to
the conference, Alan Liu
and Rita Raley are
approaching a variety of
people and programs to
solicit ideas and leads.
- Seed Grant (2005-6):
Transliteracies will
apply for a seed grant
to initiate a sequence
of further exploratory
workshops both on campus
and at several UC campuses.
The purpose of the workshops
will be for project organizers
to meet with other scholars
and relevant communities
of research to identify
possible project participants
and define a small set
of first-phase study
projects, each centered
in a research "node" or
cluster of people in
a particular campus or
program. The workshops
will also define common
project goals as well
as the standards, protocols,
and technologies needed
for collaboration, publication
of deliverables, and
preservation/archiving
of research.
Transliteracies would finish
its seed grant by working
up a set of grant proposals for major extramural funding
as well as industry funding.
- Implementation Grant
(2006- ):
[Details to be determined]
- Deliverables:
Transliteracies will
produce a variety of "deliverables"
in each of its phases to
accommodate a range of
disciplines and researchers—including
demonstration
technology projects; conference
proceedings; technical
papers; essays, white
papers, or position papers;
Web sites gathering materials
related to examples of
community reading practice;
etc. The goal is to orchestrate
a diversity of products—conformant
to a diversity of disciplinary
protocols—that will
enrichen each other.
For example, it would
be very satisfying to
be able to deliver simultaneously
(with cross-referencing)
a collection of essays
and Web site titled "Community
Reading Practices, 500-2000
A.D.: Five Case Studies";
a technical paper on
human interface, text-encoding,
or database technologies;
and a white paper on best
practices for reading
in networked organizations.
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Related Projects
[list in progress]
- Annenberg
Center Institute for Multimedia
Literacy. This
project focuses on bridging
from traditional notions
of literacy to audiovisual
or multimedia (visual,
audio) "literacy." Its
focus is on the audiovisual
and on multimedia.
- Memories
for Life Grand Challenge
Proposal . Like other
recent "store your
whole life digitally" initiatives
(cf., Gordon Bell et al., MyLifeBits),
the UK-based Memories
for Life proposal foresees
the need not just to store
vast amounts of personal
digital information but
also to search and model
such information. One aspect
of the proposal bears on
Transliteracies. Memories
for Life envisions
developing "detailed models of
an individual's abilities,
skills, and preference by
analysing his or her digital
memories" and then
using these models to "optimize
computer systems for individuals."
For example, "a short-term
challenge could be to develop
a model of a user's literacy
level by analysing examples
of what he or she reads
and writes, and linguistically
simplify web pages based
on this model; this would
help the 20% of the UK
population with poor literacy."
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List of Identified Project
Research Participants
- Initial UCSB Project
Group:
- Alan Liu, English
(UCSB) [project convener]
- Kevin C. Almeroth,
Computer Science (UCSB)
- Bruce Bimber, Political
Science, Center for
Information Technology
and Society (UCSB)
- Yunte Huang, English
(UCSB)
- Wolf Kittler, Germanic
Slavic and Semitic Studies
(UCSB)
- George Legrady, Media
Arts and Technology/Art
Studio (UCSB)
- John Mohr, Sociology
(UCSB)
- Christopher Newfield,
English (UCSB)
- Lisa Parks, Film Studies
(UCSB)
- Carol Pasternack,
English (UCSB)
- Rita Raley, English
(UCSB)
- Ronald
E. Rice, Communication
Dept., Co-Director
of Center for Film
Television and New
Media (UCSB), incoming
president of International
Communication Assoc.
[consultant to project
group]
- Matthew Turk, Computer
Science (UCSB)
- William Warner, English
(UCSB)
- Other Project Partners
and Participants:
[Names
to follow . . .]
- 2005 Planning Conference
Participants: (see
conference
announcement)
[descriptions
of participants are preliminary]
- Anne Balsamo (Interactive
Media Division at USC,
previously of Georgia
Tech and Xerox PARC)
[Keynoter]
- Walter Bender (Director
of MIT Media Lab) [Keynoter]
- John Seely Brown (former
director of Xerox PARC;
co-author
of The Social Life
of Information)
- Nicholas Dames (Columbia
Univ. English Dept.;
specialist in 19th-century
literature and cognitive approaches to reading novels)
- Paul Duguid (historian/sociologist
of information and
documents; co-author
of The Social Life
of Information)
- N. Katherine
Hayles (UCLA English Dept., specialist in science and literature,
new media literature, author of How We Became Posthuman)
- Adrian Johns (Univ.
of Chicago historian
and author of The
Nature of the Book)
[Keynoter]
- David Link (a digital artist in Germany, creator of The
Poetry Machine installation)
- Peter Lyman (UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems)
- Jerome McGann (U.
Virginia English Dept.,
specialist in textual
editing theory, humanities computing, 19th-century literature,
author of Radiant
Textuality,
creator of the online
Rossetti Archive)
- Tara McPherson (USC Cinema-TV, founder of the Vectors journal at the
USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy)
- J. Hillis Miller (Prof.
Emeritus, UC Irvine
English and Comparative
Literature; former
President of the Modern
Language Assoc., author
of many critical and
theoretical books focused
on on the nature, act,
ethics, and "joy" of
reading)
- Anne
Pascual & Marcus
Hauer of Schoenerwissen
(creators of the Txtkit open-source
visual text mining
tool for exploring
large amounts of
multilingual texts)
- Christiane Paul (Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, NYC; author of Digital Art)
- Leah Price (Harvard Univ. English Dept; specialist in 19th-century literature
and the history of the book)
- Brigitte Steinheider (Psychology Dept., Univ. of Oklahoma, specialist
in collaborative and interdisciplinary organizations and work processes)
- Curtis Wong (Director of Microsoft New Media Research Group)
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