An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Electronic Book
The power of the book has preoccupied readers since before the Renaissance, a crucial time during which the human record entered print and print, in turn, facilitated the radical, crucial social and societal changes that have shaped our world as we know it. It is with as much potential and as much complexity, that the human record now enters the digital world of electronic media. At this crucial time, however, we must admit to some awkward truths. The very best of our electronic books are still pale reflections of their print models, and the majority offer much less than a reflection might. Even the electronic document – the webpage mainstay populating the World Wide Web – does not yet afford the same basic functionality, versatility, and utility as does the printed page. Nevertheless, more than half of those living in developed countries make use of the computer and the internet to read newspaper pieces, magazine and journal articles, electronic copies of books, and other similar materials on a daily basis; the next generation of adults already recognises the electronic medium as their chief source of textual information; our knowledge repositories increasingly favour digital products over the print resources that have been their mainstay for centuries; and professionals who produce and convey textual information have as a chief priority activities associated with making such information available, electronically – even if they must do so in ways that do not yet meet the standards of functionality, interactivity, and fostering of intellectual culture that have evolved over 500 years of print publication.
Why, then, are our electronic documents and books not living up to the promise realized in their print counterparts? What is it about the book that has made it so successful? How can we understand that success? How can we duplicate that success, in order to capitalize on economic and other advantages in the electronic realm? Building on the SSHRC Strategic Research Cluster grant “Implementing the New Knowledge Machine: Human Computer Interaction and the Electronic ‘Book’” (2005/6), in the program of research outlined here we seek to discover how we can best contribute to the essential development of the new book, in electronic form.
The team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of the fields of textual studies, reader studies, interface design, and information management, and has already articulated a foundation for the identification of characteristics of electronic book interfaces that respond to the expectations and serve the needs of a broad constituency of readers, professional and lay-readers alike. Necessarily interdisciplinary and international, and based primarily in the humanities and social sciences, our group has already established pertinent networks, partners, and stakeholders. Together, we will establish new parameters for electronic book interfaces and provide functional prototypes that have the potential to transform the way we, as scholars, engage with the electronic materials that comprise our personal and professional reading. To do this, our textual studies group will respond to the need for further understanding of what components of existing print media that are essential to represent in electronic books and reading devices; our reader studies group will identify characteristics of effective reading in electronic environments; our interface design group will focus on extended continuous reading and scholarship involving digital texts through interface and environment; and, through iterative processes with all research groups, our information management group will build prototype electronic reading interfaces that promote active reading patterns and draw on dynamically-integrated collections of supporting reading materials.
Our approach promises a synergy that will advance our understanding of key issues that is greater than the sum of individual disciplinary contributions alone, and will deliver prototypical reading environments that, through integration with the work of research partners and collaborative stakeholders, will have the potential to enhance significantly the way we exchange and receive information online, both nationally and internationally.
Biography
Dr. Raymond Siemens is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Professor of English at the University of Victoria. Siemens is also Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, and Visiting Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University.
The editor of several Renaissance texts, Siemens is also the founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies. He has authored numerous articles on the intersection of literary studies and computational methods and is the co-editor of several book collections on humanities computing topics, among them Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities (with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth) and Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Susan Schreibman). In addition to his teaching and research activities, Siemens serves as Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, President (English) of the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI) and Chair of the MLA committee on information technology.
In the past, he has chaired the MLA discussion group on computers in language and literature. Siemens' research has been supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Killam Trust, the Canada Research Chairs program, and others.
Siemens' current literary studies work centres on two early Tudor manuscript miscellanies (BL Add Ms 31922 and BL Add Ms 17492; the Henry VIII Manuscript, and the Devonshire Manuscript). Larger research projects focus on the Human-Computer Interaction, Interface, and the Electronic Book (HCI-Book) project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the Professional Reading Environments (PReE) project, and initiatives associated with the TAPoR and Synergies projects.
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