Guardian provides a solid ov if the context and origin of the work

how danah gathers her news

Interview with Shirky on social reading, which point to the how people use what they read. A few side remarks on publishing:"Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done."

ebooks as crippleware

Mid-length consideration from a tech writer on short form text reading. Reviews some of the more recent arguments, and tries to set a lower limit on brevity. with "The same people who clipped back my copious callouts into a few marketing bubbles would have also pruned this post from 2,000 words to 200. Would that make the text more valuable? Just as there’s a balance between simplicity and obscurity, there’s a balance between length and learning. More people might read a short text, but a longer text yields more learning. Is there no pleasure in learning anymore?" Tends to skip over the Clive Thompson notion that he mentions: "The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation."

Author considers revision of first draft of a taxonomy. An illustration of how scholars work socially.

A little upset here on the visual side: designing texts for difficult reading: "disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing ... Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes."

Nifty thesis:" "All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them. ... Such a claim begins to suggest that the reasons we read blogs may be slightly different than we have often imagined; through this understanding, blogs offer not simply a voyeuristic peek into someone else’s life — though, obviously, that numbers among their pleasures, too — but they also offer a form of writing that engages the reader by requiring her not simply to consume the content presented but also, in some sense, to produce that content, to complete what is present through a knowledge of what is past, an exploration of the ways that that present is situated, and a commitment to return in the future."

Some interesting consideration of how to move the act of once-considered-private reading (annotations, notes, synopses, summaries, responses, discussions) into an online social environment. Ties to aggregate and remix in Downes's frame of a MOOC. Might be good to ease readers into PLE frames and repurposing.

A complete history of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War (the second one) in XII volumes, printed. We *so* need a semiotics of writing. "Four years later, we don't yet have the tools that would let people read Wikipedia articles in "a new way" but hopefully Bridle's very impressive experiment with this one article will spur efforts to develop new tools for reading online works which are constantly being changed and edited."

Reading on a device is 10% slowed and less satisfying. compresension not measured.

Knew it.

"slow viewing of a movie – Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. " S/Z comes to the movie screen. Hadn't thought of how well DVD and random access support this kind of viewing - but that's because I don't teach film.

Readers using scrolling material had lower recall of information. More study necessary.

a response to Ted Genoways "The Death of Fiction?""We could buy books directly from authors whenever possible so that they're getting a more just cut. We need to re-conceptualize how we think about exchange and consumption. "

End of year, communal reading of FW, social media.

"The purpose of this new set of notes is to expand the thinking beyond how a specific text is presented or interacted with. Reading (and writing) do not happen only at the level of the individual work. There is a broad ecology of behaviors, activities and micro-environments that surround each work and our relationship to it -- how things come to be written, how we choose what to read, how we make the purchase, how we share our experience with others. Currently (i.e. toward the end of age of print), that ecology is defined by agent/editor mechanisms of acquisition, sharp delineation between authors and readers, top-down marketing, heavy reliance on big mainstream media to get the word out, the bookshelves that make our books part of our daily life, bookstores and -- yes -- Amazon."

From ordering to unboxing to reading. I saved the article to Instapaper so I can read it later, in leisure, on my iPhone.

"I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words."

ambient awareness. An ok entry article for FYC students. Deals with live twittering as a fundamental move / difference: "Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. " Follow up with students twittering a class session for another group of students who aren't attending.

"And the Web is full of belles lettres. Now and then in my wanderings around the Web, I come across something and think 'That's a really important essay'. And I worry about the ability of the Web to take care of it for me: link rot always sets in eventually, Wayback Machine or no. I can't print it all out. So how do I keep such articles? I would welcome a device designed for downloading and archiving essays I think are important, a virtual library device for the belles lettres of today."

"the most tendentious part of Birkerts's argument has little to do with the Kindle or context. It's that he believes humanity would wittingly adopt deficient tools at the expense of effective ones. This fundamental cynicism is, to a point, understandable; much of marketing and advertising, after all, devotes itself to convincing us that what's new is necessarily superior ... But Birkerts underestimates, I think, the functional and aesthetic requisites of an average reader. If Heidegger is right, then the catastrophic, decontextualized info-culture of Birkerts's imagination is patently absurd -- readers won't, in the short- or long-term, shutter our libraries just because some novel, convenient alternative has asserted itself.

I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

A lead in to Annie's session at Amplified08

Annie sums up her observations of reading in motion.

Experimental interface

Over the past few days, much discussion has occurred regarding the nature of Shyftr and its service.