Ever since I discovered that many of the books listed for 712 this
semester are searchable in Google Books,
I’ve been thinking about some of the ways to merge the full-text search with my
reading and note-keeping habits, especially as an added aid to memory and for tracing themes/topoi.
End-of-book indexes are, for the most part, adequate for the kind of thing I’m
talking about. I can turn to the back of Gunther Kress’s Literacy in
the New Media Age, for example, and find all of the pages where "design"
turns up. I suspect that the indexes at the ends of books are automated in
many cases with, perhaps, a slight amount of customization from the writer and
editor. Still, there are times when indexes don’t list the terms I want to
put in a row, follow. I’m aware of the labor-intensive manual methods for
tracing terms, and still I’m warm to shortcuts for what can be needlessly
exhaustive chores. Smarter, not harder, like my dad always says.
Tag: reading
Kress – Literacy in the New Media Age (2003) II
In Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress settles into a gradual
progression from long-held presumptions about alphabetic literacy to an
increasingly hybridized and "multimodal" literacy based on the screen. The
screen’s proclivity for combining images and text has profound consequences,
Kress argues, for the temporal/sequential logics of letter, word and clause as
units of meaning. Kress contends that syntactic complexity is compromised
as the frenetic reading pathways of the screen condition readers and writers to
mixed-mode framings that, in turn, impact how they read and write.
Contrary to my expectations, Kress is none too sour on this trend; in fact, his
movement through dense sociolinguistic explanations of literacy, genre and
punctuation as framing are impressively nuanced. Yet, very little of the
first two-thirds of the book is explicit about the ways in which new writing
technologies are entangled in the shifts he describes, and in this sense, I find
Kress to be frustrating in how patiently he advances his back-analysis on
traditional alphabetic literacy (replicated in formal Western schooling)–while
the matter at hand–screens as a site of particular kinds of changed
writing activity–hovers as a given. This book is far more about
"Literacy" than about "the New Media Age;" it inches toward actual discussions
of interfaces, and finally, near the end of chapter eight, offers a screen-shot
of a web page with eleven (by Kress’s count) "entry-points" for reading.
Kress’s point with the screenshot: "’reading’ is now a distinctively different
activity to what it was in the era of the traditional page" (138).
Barthes – Rhetoric of the Image (1964)
In the advertising image, nice bright colors–a net-sack of Panzani pasta and
assorted spaghettimakers including vegetables, fresh and plenty.
Though non-linear, many of the signs accord with a variety of "euphoric values,"
says Barthes: domestic preparation, freshness, an unpacking, the casual
market-knowledge of slow foods of a pre-mechanical pace (no need for
preservation, refrigeration). Also, in the coordination of colors and types,
Barthes suggests second meaning–Italianicity or a gathering of things
Italian, much of this "based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes"
(34). Each of these meanings match with distinctive kinds of knowledge.
Adobe Agitation
Without extensive qualification, this is a working-through-hang-ups kind of entry.
Warning: check.
Increasingly, I find myself annoyed by PDFs. One or two PDFs, I can
handle. When they come in lesser installments, I’m fine. But more than
that, and I bristle, fume. In a graduate seminar, for example, I
understand that we might read widely from an assortment of sources. I
think of PDFs as supplements, add-on, and because they’re harder to scale to the
screen’s dimensions, unlike fluid web texts with which I can enlarge the font, I
struggle to read them on the screen. I can read scalable web texts on the
screen; even when the font is wonky, it’s easy enough to enlarge it or otherwise
alter it for readability. Plus, I’ve been using Scrapbook for annotations,
highlighting, and tabbed browsing in Firefox keeps all of it manageable.
PDFs, depending on how they’re laid out, can be nearly impossible to read on
the screen. And so I print them out. And I don’t mind printing them
out, especially when they come in the range of 1-3 per week, let’s say.
But let’s just say they come in a wave of more than that–say 10 or 15,
hypothetically, of course. If that were to happen, now I become a
book-making friggin print-house manager. I have to print, collate,
arrange, run to the store for more printer cartridges, etcetera. It bumps
the needle on my "busy work" dial into "Pain in the Ass" range. Warning
lights start to blink.
I printed out 300 pages of PDFs last evening. The docs were copied one
codex page to one PDF page, so gobs of white space make margin around a 5×7
peninsula of text. Room for notations, I guess. But I can only print
the PDFs single-sided, rather than double-sided, as I might do with a
photocopier. Late Wednesday night, when I drove over to Kinko’s thinking
they’d have a way of helping me switch 15 PDF files from my USB drive to a
photocopier, through which I could churn them out back-front for under a dime a
page, it was another zinger to learn "Um, no, we can’t do that. Print them
from the computers for 25 cents per page, but only if you’ve fewer than three
files." I didn’t even try to talk about it, just thanked him and walked on
out.
These intermediary forms leave a lot to be desired, and yet I get the feeling
that lots of folks see PDFs as the wondrous saving grace of print in a digitized
world. PDF it, that’s easy. Easier even than pre-determined course packs. In fact, the department photocopier is set up
to PDF with amazing efficiency, even emailing it to you when the conversion of copy is complete. As I think through this, I guess I see it as a convenience to
teachers and an inconvenience to students. It’s a kind of relocation of
the photocopier burden or paper chase from one to the other. And I’ll be
using three PDFed chapters/essays with 205 students this spring. It’s as much a matter of threshold, especially when variforms of text are criss-crossing
in all these different spaces, the result of confusion among incommensurable
mediations. This morning when I opened yet another PDF–reading for a
Monday meeting–and found it, like to oh so many others to be a 1:1 scan, one
page per, and copied with huge smears of black toner-noise filling half of the
lower margin, I had an attack of PDF agitation. Since both print and
digital texts are with us–all around us–and both necessary and pertinent, I’ll
continue to work on my hang-ups about PDFs, roll my neck until it pops, take a
deep breath, and carry on reading.