Knowledge Systems

When Books Go Blu-ray

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50 GB still seems pretty big to me. We can all date ourselves in the computer age by the amount of storage that first seemed huge. I was 11 when my father brought home a computer that had 220 Megabytes on its hard drive, and it was like the new sublime, until I tried importing a CD in WAV format; I remember looking in horror at how much of that space Pearl Jam’s Ten took up on that previously sublime amount of space.

But 50 GB, that’s still pretty big for a book, right? I take it from the standard size of Blu-ray discs of movies, which confer upon most blockbusters (and even movies that score very low—very rotten—on RottenTomatoes.com) the laurels of multiple commentary tracks, interactive features,  making-of featurettes, and so forth. It feels to me like a “deluxe” treatment for a movie that came out last year.  Even though this treatment seems to be a purely industry-driven form of added value, at the same time, why not?

So: What would a 50-GB edition of a book look like?

Or, to ask it another way: what materials would be worth putting onto a sublimely huge edition of a contemporary book?

We have great models already, of course. The Norton Critical Editions series is great, and I teach with these all the time: they collect a good edition of a text with explanatory footnotes, letters from the author, information about different editions of the text, early reviews of the novel, and excerpts from critical essays. The edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing, a novel about an African American woman passing for white in 1920s New York, contains news clippings and other materials about a major contemporary court ruling on a “passing” case, as well as excerpts from many of the other books from that era that also addressed passing as a social issue. I love teaching students from this edition, and it’s just paper, but: this is still in the Mere Megabytes. (It would even have fit onto that 220 MB hard drive in 1992.)

There are lots of terrific online archives for authors like Walt Whitman, the pre-Raphaelites, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Cervantes, and many, many others. These stretch our imagination about what a “deluxe” treatment would be for a great book—images, sound recordings, films, and more that can enhance the experience of learning about a text—and they’re also edging into Gigabyte Territory.

The big change with contemporary fiction in the age of the web has been just how much readers and critics respond to texts on fan sites, discussion forums, fiction sites, and in other creative modes—I think that’s how we fill our Blu-ray book. And I think such a book would be an amazing record of what books do—and what we do with books—in the world. The Blu-ray book would trace as much of the network of a book’s presence on the web as possible, aiming for the maximum. We could have an edition of Twilight that aggregates fan fiction, discussion forums, records of cosplay events, and so forth.

Would we read it all? Probably not, but we could create features that would make it navigable. If we want to read fan stories with particular tags—centering on a particular character, with a certain number of “thumbs-up,” or in a particular alternate world of the novel. And sure, this “edition” of a novel is already how the most avid readers interact with a text already. Imagine the way a Harry Potter fan might scour the web for more fiction and discussion about Ronald Weasley’s further adventures at Hogwarts.

The 50-GB book would have to be dynamic. (Wait: okay, if our hypothetical book has to be an object, then let’s say it’s a rewritable Blu-ray disc). Scripts could aggregate the kinds of materials from fan sites I’ve mentioned already, along with allusions, TVtropes.com entries (the Wikipedia of the conventions of science fiction, fantasy, and more), reviews of the book in publications and on websites like Amazon and GoodReads, and so forth. We could add feeds into it, and it would change every time someone tagged a new allusion.

Most crucially to the Blu-ray book, we’ll be able to use computational methods to “zoom out”: we could make, say, word clouds, network visualizations, and other sorts of snapshots of the big phenomena that literature make in the world. The ability to zoom in and out, to consider the phenomena of literature as big data and as individual and collective stories, is certainly exciting to me.

And there is, to me, something both exciting and reassuring about the possibility of seeing the big-ness of the book, of bringing a text and its world well into Gigabyte Territory (for now). The Blu-ray book would be a demonstration of an important message for humanists, for publishers, and for policymakers: that people are as enthusiastic about good books now as they’ve ever been.

The Book (and E-Lit) as Nostalgic Object

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Not only does digital fluidity facilitate the creation of printed media that have no right to exist physically (that should stay digital and not “waste” paper—the using up of these resources clearly pushes our buttons because of both concern over conservation and over cultural capital—that gets to be a book?), expanding (or shrinking, depending upon your perspective) authorship, it also raises questions of access—how do we ensure these texts remain available as platforms change? As Michael Simeone notes, digital books are far more brittle than their physical counterparts and decay in a far different fashion. Sally Ball has addressed the way this ephemerality impacts conceptions of authorship—knowing that our works are likely to become dated within a short span of time prevents many writers from experimenting with new media and alternative or app-based publishing forms (many poets won’t even reference the contemporary moment in their work, lest a temporal reference prevent its resonance for subsequent generations). I myself collaborated on a book of augmented reality poems whose content can change at the drop of a hat—since the text does not appear on the pages, but only comes to life when those pages are presented to a webcam, emerging from barcode-like markers on the page’s surface (in fact, the reader herself can now change what appears on-screen, thanks to a web-based tool my collaborator Brad Bouse developed). That very terror, though, of dating oneself, can alternately be seen as liberatory—if we fail, we can erase the evidence, and we can even adapt or update our work to meet a new audience. If Michael Simeone’s doomsday predictions are accurate, then what me worry? about whether my book is accessible a year or two from now? Poets are always accused of fiddling while Rome burns, so to worry about who’s listening only expands our image of writerly narcissism.

To be serious, though, this state serves as a reminder that a book is an event, a performance between reader and page. Artists have known far longer than writers that the best way to save the ephemeral (happenings, performance, some land art) is through documentation.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a Philadelphia purveyor of fascinating goods and spirits.

Though I may be willing to give up on work that can no longer be supported, scholars like Lori Emerson, Dene Grigar, and Stuart Moulthrop are doing wonderful work to build archives of new media writing (from magic lantern slides—which once upon a time, of course, told highly immersive phantasmagoric stories—to hypercard works and Flash-based texts). In addition to this scholarly interest, what about the resurgence in pop culture of “antiquated,” outdated, even obsolete aesthetics? It’s no coincidence that I picked up letterpress printing in graduate school while studying electronic literature, or that my students are fascinated when I bring a typewriter into the classroom, or that we are so inundated by nostalgic-looking image filters that we need a #nofilter hashtag to assure us what we are seeing accurately reflects “reality.” Perhaps the electronic literature projects being made today, even those that seem glossy, interactive, and lovely in the best ways (like Aaron Koblin’s interactive music videos, and mass collaborative artworks created for Google) will indeed look wonky and wiley and willful to future readers (perhaps they may be utterly inaccessible), but it is also possible that, like the resurgence of interest in glitch and animated GIFs, their very stylistic issues will make us treasure them more.

Sustainability/Ephemerality: What Thy Mind Cannot Contain You Can Commit to These Waste Blanks

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Once upon a time, it was a commonplace to think one lived on after death either by having children or by creating art. Art was permanent: Lascaux and Stonehenge achieved a kind of mega level of permanence (who made them? imagine lasting so long!) and Sonnet 17, the Canterbury Tales, the Pièta—these gave (are still giving) centuries of life to the names of their makers. Also, destroyers of civilizations have long known that to incinerate the art, or the library, is to eliminate culture, to wipe the slate clean for one’s own use: Alexandria, Sarajevo.

As we’ve spent today talking about the future of the book, I have this gnawing (Luddite?) question about what other than digitization plays a role in that future? Every answer circles back to at least the effects and implications of technology. One thing I have noticed among writers is that if they still believe their writing promises some type of immortality, they don’t let on. We are resigned to the ephemeral (even as we love and hate the Internet because whatever we put out there is there FOREVER). But ephemerality has won, or it’s the less terrifying name we’ve given to what is really a matter of flood and surge. No one is going to read us or notice us because the life cycle of a book is less than a year, the influx of new books drowns the already-old ones within shorter and shorter periods of time. Web publications too, zoom, on to the next thing. Who will ever find the previous tables of contents, except for someone who knows to look? Ephemerality has advantages: it encourages experiment; it makes us feel brave.

If my book is an object made of acid-free paper, or if it’s a letter-press throwback, lovingly made by hand in Tucson or Manhattan, it can take a lot of wear and tear. Maybe there are 1000 (or 100) of them in the world (75 percent in the publisher’s garage, okay). They have a scent; there may be pretty endpapers with a shiver of flaxen texture. If it’s a download, there could be infinitely many, but…one knows better. One knows that particular infinity is easily all promise and no count.

We might worry that the sprawl of the internet, or, say, the pffst of whatever server houses one’s work (the squirrel who fried New England…) we might worry that together these possibilities, as well as questions about data storage, built-in obsolescence, etc., make the future of the electronic book comparatively delicate. And as we now know, you can’t sneak things around on the Internet (not in America), and books have a long clandestine history. So there are good reasons to recognize that what seem to be advances have a downside.

I’m thinking of Robert Pinsky’s poem “Book,” in First Things to Hand (2006). It’s a poem that, at first, seems nostalgic, luxuriating in the language of bookmaking and stories of books worth dying for, almost, and even the mouthsounds bk, bch of the very word in English, in German. The poem is full of the voluptuary pleasure of holding books and the mental voyages books enable. And then:

…the passion to make a book—passion of the writer

Smelling glue and ink, sensuous. The writer’s dread of making
Another tombstone, my marker orderly in its place in the stacks.

Or to infiltrate and inhabit another soul, as a splinter of spirit
Pressed between pages like a wildflower, odorless, brittle.

The stacks themselves a cemetery.

 

 

Ada’s Morning

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The bird chirping started again. “Dammit, Adelaide Rosario Dawson,” she told herself as she pressed the “postpone” button on the wall clock again, seeking another eight minutes of rest. Ada’s ambition was to wake early to review her notes from the last tutor session before her morning shift at the scan-out desk at the Folger Library, off the Mall. She wallowed in her foolhardiness—she should have slept in rather than activating the snooze again and again.

As she rushed out the door with last night’s cold pizza squares dinner for breakfast, and down into the Metro Mag Lev, she tore off the thermals with her notes at foot of the stairs.

Ada was looking forward to her work trip to the UK Union in two weeks. She was taking a group of museum volunteers to the Shakespeare trail and she would gain her the next level of expertise. The highlight for her would be being on stage at the Globe, a perspective she had only watched through record performances.

Her paper notes darkened in the heat of her hands as she tried to review them in the shuddering light through the windows on the train. The wrinkles and smudges started to look like the manuscripts she would soon be checking out to visitors at the Folger. The Capitol South stop arrived.

The Future of Creativity and Books in the Face of Probable Doom, Part 2: The Resolution Race: None of This Is Sustainable. But That Is Why It Is Interesting

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Doom2

This kind of conversation is possible because we’re not currently thinking about how there are millions of people today who will use more than a gallon of fresh water to dispose of a mere cup of their own urine. Or how it will be impossible to feed the world without honeybees (who are all dying, but you know that already). We are, in so many ways, plummeting at maximum velocity toward impact. The idea of a digital platform for books should seem laughable if you’ve ever seen the burning e-waste trash pits of Lagos, or the island of plastic floating in the Pacific. Do we honestly expect that the age of digital books will last even a quarter of the time of the print book? Surely we will choke on our own garbage before we perfect the art.

But that is what makes this arresting. We are making things possible now at the expense of the future. We are nearly maxed out on credit.

The rapid advancement of display technology really is an incredible thing. You already know very much that “technology grows rapidly,” but it is easy to take for granted what our eyes expect. In 2004, the display on a mobile phone was about the size of a Fig Newton, and graphics looked as if they were constructed from Legos. That is, if they were even in color. In 2014, it is possible to procure a portable full color HD display that fits in pants pockets for less than the cost of a mediocre wool area rug. Screens are now the size of a reporter’s notebook and we can debate the merits of various pixel arrangements and color reproductions on pocket-sized displays rather than that they are in color at all. And displays are only getting bigger! Their resolutions are increasing as well. HD has gained widespread diffusion as a standard for graphics, only to see 4K emerge. Blu-ray barely had any time beating out HD DVD.

This is not to be facile and lament that things are changing too quickly, or that this growth is somehow manufacturing interest where there is no need. We are already doomed, so why not look for the good in things? Instead, let’s take a moment to appreciate the quality and detail of images that are becoming more and more accessible. A 75 dollar phone purchased at the grocery store can outperform a television from the 1990s. High resolution digital images are not everywhere, but they certainly are in more places than ever. This breakneck acceleration in display quality has a deep history that stretches back to the 1960s and 1970s. As shown by the career of pioneers like Sutherland and Fuchs, the history of computer graphics is intertwined with the search for optimal display solutions. What we see today is not different. To say that the world is visual is a cliché, but the impulse to increase resolution and quality of images holds such generative potential when we think about the future of books and knowledge systems.

For instance, very high-resolution images and videos allow for more visual detail in digital platforms. And detail is a transformative feature of image reproduction. For instance, the University of Illinois’ Medici allows users to zoom and inspect the image in a way that simulates the changing perspectives brought on by increasing the number of pixels used to represent an object. To understand this image as a collection of specimens is a standard definition perspective. To see that each specimen is visually distinct and interesting is a high-definition perspective. To appreciate every hair on the legs of each insect as part of an impossibly intricate collection, as a miraculous panoply of specialized components (such as we see when fully zoomed in), we require a format beyond HD.

And so there will be more visual information in knowledge systems. Not explicitly in the sense of increased numbers of charts, videos, and pictures, but in a very non-referential way, that of visual richness. As they increase in resolution, images could simulate more than represent. Or even represent more than they currently represent. In textbooks and fiction alike, there is a difference between demonstrating an example and calling that example into presence. Presented by better and better displays, future knowledge systems could be aggregations of simulations, narratives, and representations in a far more graceful and viable way than print or current mobile tech will allow.

This assumes that displays will always be pocketable or handheld. Perhaps they will not. Perhaps they will be part of our eyes one day. Perhaps we will run out of resources for batteries and there will be far less mobile technology in the next 20 years. Or both.

 

 

Vernacular Criticism

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One term that has come up in our discussions at Sprint Beyond the Book is vernacular criticism, and it’s one that I think is worth picking up on as a useful concept for considering the relationship of readers to the machinery of textual production which Robert Darnton sets out in his diagram of the circuit of communications (recently updated for the late twentieth century and for self-published authors by Padmini Ray Murray and Clare Squires). A great deal of smart stuff has been written about this already, for example Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics (2000) and Jan Radway’s ethnography of readers of romance novels, Reading the Romance (1991), one of the foundational texts for the field of reception studies. In the contexts examined by these studies, the “real readers” in question had no opportunity for making their readerly preferences known, and for pushing back on the publishers and authors who produced content they may or may not have liked. Many of Radway’s romance readers described their dislike for insufficiently happy endings, for instance, but the only opportunity they had to register this discontent was to refuse to read and/or buy such titles.

Now, however, digital platforms that take account of reader preferences—both consciously delivered feedback and unconsciously delivered metrics about, for instance, how far a reader gets through a text before abandoning it—make it possible for those at the production end of the communications circuit to take into consideration aggregated data about reader preferences as they produce the texts those readers will consume. On my flight to Arizona, the in-flight magazine had an article about precisely this (Boyd Farrow, “The Happy Ending You Asked For”) and what struck me was not the content of the article—which is not news to anyone who studies digital books, or even keeps half an eye on the culture pages of major newspapers—but the fact that this disruption of publishing practices is sufficiently interesting to feature in a publication such as an airline magazine that is designed to appeal to as a wide a range of readers as possible. Farrow cites publishers who take reader suggestions on board and require authors to alter their storylines accordingly, and points to some historical precedents (the 18th-century rewriting of the ending of Romeo and Juliet). Digital interfaces for reading, however, have both sped this process up—reader feedback can be delivered to publishers far more swiftly—and allowed it to happen at a level of greater granularity (the exact page a reader stopped reading vs. a petulant letter to a publisher that might or might not reach an editor, agent, or even an author).

There are several ways to look at this development. One response is to be delighted at the disruption to conventional structures of literary authority whereby a small cadre of elites dictates who, and what, will be published, and a second cadre of elites of critics decides on where these published texts will sit within the field of cultural production: the cultural space where some artistic products occupy positions of prestige (e.g., “difficult” texts such as the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot), some are deemed popular (e.g., comics, television soap operas, romance novels), and others sit somewhere in between (e.g., “middlebrow” books such as might feature on the reading lists of book clubs). Self-publication has helped with this process of disruption: examples abound of feel-good stories of authors who began self-publishing fiction that had been summarily rejected by publishers, and found acceptance, fame, and eventually wealth through the magic of the interwebs. But for those who read rather than write, their preferences as readers now have the power to be examined by publishers, and to shape what those publishers deliver, in ways that may or may not be visible. If you are a reader who has ever been dissatisfied with the way a book has ended, or the way a character has been treated, these kind of readerly interventions may be appealing.

Another response is to think about this development in terms of the threat to authorial autonomy. An author has a vision for her text, and having to attend to, and fall into line with, readerly desires is unlikely to be conducive to that. Authors, of course, have never been free of external strictures: publishers put pressure on them to deliver certain kinds of texts, editors shape their prose, and many other elements contribute to a cultural product that is not conceived in isolation. But digital platforms for reading are delivering a whole new kind of reader feedback that—especially at a time when publishers are struggling with the financial implications of the advent of digital technology—make it easier for publishers to demand texts that deliver what the market wants. I’ll nail my colors to the mast here: part of me is horrified at the thought of the difficult, challenging narratives that I love being in some way tempered to fit audience expectations, in the way that blockbuster films produced by the major studios undergo audience testing so as to deliver the ending that audiences want. Think of twentieth-century literature without the magnificent polyphony of Ulysses, the bewildering ending of Coetzee’s Disgrace, the abjection of Dolores Haze at the end of Lolita, and the lack of closure of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Our cultural heritage would be the worse for it. I think of a study I did some years ago which looked at audience responses to Joss Whedon’s (hilarious) superhero musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, serialized and disseminated over a period of weeks on the Internet. When the final installment aired, fans were initially dismayed, as the narrative contained developments that did not initially appeal to them. But as they discussed their responses to the story together and tried to make sense of it as an interpretive community, they came to understand and appreciate the narrative in a different way, in part by resituating the text in a different genre, that of the origin story. (The study, which is one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, is here, if you are interested.)

So: should vernacular criticism, and the voices of real readers, play more of a role than they have previously in the mechanisms of book production? Should literary criticism be opened up to a wider range of people than just book reviewers and literary scholars? Has this ship already sailed, and are these questions therefore purely rhetorical? I’d like to think that some corners of the literary field could be protected from too much encroachment, even as we welcome the changes to conventional structures of literary authority that have already begun to change the shape of the publishing landscape.

Bad Links

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It is my intention here to convince you that links are bad. They are bad when it comes to writing for the web in general, bad for books, bad for long-form journalism, and even worse in academic publication. It is not that I am against the idea of links. As we will see here, the problem lies in the way links are used. That is also to say that we can do something about using links better. But first, why are links so bad?

To start with, links are opaque. The worst of lot are links like this and this. Of the two “thises,” the first leads us to Google and the second to Bing. But your readers would not know that just by looking at the text. The best they can do is “hover” over the word with their mouse cursor, relying on the browser interface to show them where the link is going. And once they get there, there are no easy ways to get back. The writer must have faith in the browser to “do the right thing” in guiding the reader through an intertextual maze. And that is not right when it comes to writing. In most situations, the author should architect that experience explicitly. If you think about it, the old-fashioned apparatus of quoting an external text is itself a type of linking. But rather than quoting the whole text, the author only quotes the relevant bits. Sending readers away to do that work on their own is lazy and irresponsible. Imagine a tour guide who tells his tourists to “just go over there and look at some stuff,” and “come back when you’re done.” Links can be that disorienting.

Links disrupt the reading experience, and that is the second reason for why links are bad. It is possible that you want the reader’s experience to be disrupted. But in many cases you don’t. And the reader is already distracted by the proliferation of parallel windows and devices that augment their reading in some way. Do we need to make that distraction easier? Should I link the Wikipedia article on media multitasking or is it enough for my purposes to simply mention Wikipedia, or to trust my reader to look something up later, in a reference source of their own choosing? Or better yet, should I help the reader along by summarizing the findings? It mentions that most folks already read with a second screen in tow. It is not that unusual to see someone look something up on their phone or tablet while reading a newspaper or an e-book. Why? Because they don’t want to leave the flow of the first screen. There is great pleasure in immersive, uninterrupted reading.

Besides being disruptive, links are ugly. They are ugly together, as in when many links conspire to produce a tangled mess. And they are also ugly when naked on their own, like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TaGiFBG_WSEGKFey9sR0pafjjKK7Fuc0jhF5d4K1ouA/edit. That string of characters is not meant for human consumption! The period at the end kills me entirely. Meaningless punctuation inside of links coupled with regular punctuation ruins the sentence and the paragraph. Of course, I could just tell you to read something on Google Docs. That looks much better, but then we are making the opaqueness problem worse by hiding the address behind words that may or may not be related to the destination. It seems that we are stuck compromising on either transparency, reading flow, or visual impact.

Links aren’t very secure to begin with, but hiding links behind words further compromises security. You’ve probably heard of link-baiting: the purposefully malicious attempts to trick a reader into revealing personal information when following a link that masquerades as a legitimate destination. You can visit my site to learn more about link-baiting. You shouldn’t have clicked that! (Don’t worry, that was the real Google login page.) But even if one means well, viruses and browser exploits can inject bad links into your otherwise legitimate ones. A common technique is to install a browser script along with some seemingly useful “search bar” that will redirect all legitimate links to a site that makes money by advertising. Worse yet, you could end up on a site that attempts to further compromise your computer. Links are not secure because in linking, we outsource the relationship between reader and content to the browser.

Links are opaque, disruptive, ugly, unsafe, and they rot. Links don’t last because the content at the address is dynamic. It is not guaranteed to be there decades, months, minutes after your initial visit. In that case, why even bother? The link works best for ephemeral output (like a tweet). We must think of something much more robust for any “serious” writing that hopes to survive to the end of the week. And for the really good stuff, the kind of stuff that is the purview of librarians, we need to cultivate sustainable, long-lasting, responsible practices of online citation. It should work as well, if not better, than the familiar bibliographic citation in print. This practice should combat digital decay, not aid it. We need to think about the ways our links can be accessed, mined, and preserved with the archive-grade zeal of the rare book librarian.

Finally, links are terrible for accessibility. It is bad enough that clicking on a small word like this is difficult for people with any sort of fine-motor control problems. Being a little older in itself can make the online reading experience painful. Things are much worse for those with Parkinson’s or for the blind. Sina Bahram, a blind usability expert (who is himself blind) reports that some sites contain thousands (!) of links in advance of actual content. Screen readers for the blind must read each one of them out loud. For the screen reader, there is no difference between garbage links and useful content. If you thought looking at links is disruptive, imagine listening to a robotic voice that pronounces every slash and every useless number in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo. And that is why Sina Bahram listens to his reader at 950 words per minute.

Any one of these issues alone should give us pause. Together, they are a cause of grave concern. How did we get here? And what can we do to make links good again?

How did we get here is not an easy question. A part of the story is surely the excitement we once felt about hypertext. Links were supposed to break the hegemony of linear narrative, ushering in a new interconnected world. To some extent the dream came true. But links also brought with them such things as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google’s PageRank algorithm tracks, among other things, the number of incoming and outgoing links. This bias for connectivity encourages “link farms”: sites that attempt to game the system by aggregating links or cross-linking their own content. A sure sign of a vacuous SEO-driven piece of writing is a certain cynical and strategic use of links to other popular sources. How long until the SEO logic infects poetry, fiction, or investigative journalism?

What can we do to make links better? There are a few things we all can do now. First, let’s use links sparingly. Think smartly about whether you need to link or whether you can make do with a good, old-fashioned quote or citation.  Don’t link just because you can. Second, link explicitly: Youtube.com is better than this. Third, realize that online content is dynamic. It makes no sense to link a dynamic resource when the intent is to create a link to a static version of a document. Tools like the Save Page Now service, hosted by the Internet Archive, do just that. You can find this essay at http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/2014/02/bad-links/ but its earlier draft is best captured in a snapshot here: http://web.archive.org/web/20140208220625/http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/2014/02/bad-links/. Finally, do not neglect the humble footnote. Footnotes provide a nice blend between usability, transparency, and good knowledge design.1

1: http://web.archive.org/web/20140208220625/http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/2014/02/bad-links/

Proscenium and Thrust

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The traditional mode of book publishing maps cleanly onto the dominant mode of theatrical performance of the last 19th century, one that has with some exceptions carried forth into the present day: a mode we could call Proscenium Realism. The proscenium first appeared in 1618 at the Farnese Theatre in Parma, Italy. However, it was not until the 19th century that it fully came into its own. It provided quite literally a frame for the performance as if it were a photograph, or an aperture through which the audience could peer into some actual “real” scene unfolding before their eyes. The Realist playwrights of the time wanted to create a sense that there was no artifice, that life as actually lived was occurring before the audience’s eyes—the proscenium enabled that. The more fantastical performances, including opera and ballet, could benefit from the picture window effect, that the audience was witnessing a complete and total illusion, that of a painting come to life.

In both cases, of course, there was an elaborate apparatus undergirding the entire performance. Actors running off-stage to get props, gas and then electric lights dimming as night falls, trees moving on and off, angels being lowered by winches, all carefully hidden by the walls and (when necessary) by the curtain closing and reopening to a new vista no less real than the one that preceded it.

Meanwhile, the world of publishing had been building a machine not dissimilar from the apparatus for producing the theatrical illusion. Theatre has its playwrights, yes, but also stage managers, lighting designers, scenic artists, actors, and composers, its lights, its rigging, its costumes, its sleight-of-hand around forced perspective, the clacking of coconut shells mimicking the clip-clop of horse’s hooves, and so forth. So too with publishing, though in that black box the machine was a manufacturing and distribution apparatus. As with the theatre there were wordsmiths yes, authors yes, at the beginning, but also agents to help frame and contextualize the authors for the editors, editors to evaluate the authors, but also to ensure the author’s writing fit style guides that wouldn’t trip up the ultimate consumer with anachronisms and inconsistencies, designers to create covers to serve partly as images to represent the book, in the manner of classical architecture, but also to help sell the book, like the tried-and-true maneuvers of the strip tease, showing a little of what’s there but suggesting that more, oh so much more is to come. Sales reps, whether the door-to-door snake oil peddlers of the 19th century selling subscriptions out of a bag, or the 20th century model of showing up at the retailers persuading them to stock that publisher’s inventory. Then too over the course of the second half of the century, all the innovations around distribution, often using computing power of the mainframe and PC variety—just-in-time inventory, demand forecasting, tighter product cycles, granular sales data.

And the writers and readers, opposite ends of the supply chain, in a strict producer-consumer relationship, stand at either end of the machine, marveling as its mysterious processes, selecting a handful of writers and magically transforming them into bestsellers, consigning readers to gape slack-jawed at its marvelous outputs, then rushing, after it was all over, the magical words THE END, read, to the stage door, where they hope to catch a glimpse of the creator before s/he is hustled to a waiting car.

In the theatre along comes Brecht and to rip down the curtain. While that is, and what is to follow is, a radical simplification of very complex processes, Brecht, for reasons combining the political and the aesthetic, proposed to blow up the entire architecture of illusion and realism, to show how things are actually made, to show why things were the way they were. Stage hands walked around, handed props to people, brandished the coconut shells, proudly ate the banana the peel of which would be dropped just in time for the actor to slip on it, actors changed costumes in full view, the lights turned around, no longer mimicking the dawn rising, instead turned onto the audience, now suddenly busted for being Peeping Toms. The means of production had been laid bare.

And to book publishing now enters the Internet, stage left, stage right, stage center. The fluorescent lights now turned on. Freelance cover designers now available as guns-for-hire since everyone has Photoshop now, agents trawling Wattpad for the popular writers, forums discussing royalty structures, kerning and leading. Short-run digital printing via Lulu, Lightning Source, Blurb, CreateSpace. Retail access via Amazon and Amazon and Amazon and Amazon. Tablets, phones, and E Ink devices rendering almost all the foregoing optional. The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The world is now the stage.

Interfaces and Commitment: Do Read the Comments?

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LibraryThing logo

Extract from LibraryThing homepage (http://www.librarything.com/home)

To think about the ways that interface design and architecture contribute to the kinds of digital textual communities generated is to immediately be struck by the ballooning number of interfaces that are out there, and the fact that any single scholar can only grasp a small selection of them. (And also: what counts as a “text”? and what is a “community,” anyway? But those are questions that I hope we may address later on.) My way into this complex knot of problems is to take a small number of examples and to think about what it means to commit to them as a user. What’s involved in participation? And how does the level of a user’s commitment inflect the forms that their participation may take?

I think first of all about that most ubiquitous (and despised?) form of online textual participation: comments on articles. “Despised” because of the view that comments are invariably a cesspit of illogical, unsustainable, and poorly-spelled opinions: an interpretive community that the “don’t read the comments” meme tells us we don’t want to be involved in, either as readers or authors of the content being commented upon. The context with which I’m most familiar in this respect is the Guardian, a British newspaper with an overtly left-wing orientation whose reader-commentators, from their generally high level of spelling and orthography, could be broadly assumed to be middle-class and generally well educated. There is a very robust community that has grown up in the comments section, to the point where posters will refer to one another’s contributions in other threads, warn others about particular users (for example “we all know about [username x] – ignore him, he’s got a history of doing y”), and perform other behaviors familiar to anyone who participates in online discussions. What is interesting about this community is that its members have been very vocal about the technical limitations of the commenting platform, and eventually the paper made technical changes to its platform, including moving to threaded comments, which made following different conversational threads much easier. The newspaper has also recently begun to do little profiles of different commentators, which is a way of acknowledging both their presence and the value of their contributions. Despite this acknowledgement, the generally civil level of discourse, and users’ ability to shape, in a limited way, the form of the commentary platform, it’s striking that this comment space is still far from an utopian space of mutual enlightenment, and illustrates that this kind of online textual participation is, at its lowest level, drawn towards what could be termed “drive-by” commentary. Users’ comments aren’t necessarily subject to the same kind of filters (for civility, misogyny, racism, etc.) as exist in face-to-face communication, and at their most debased may be simply be a user’s rapid-fire opinion delivered, and published, without many consequences for future interactions or one’s real-world identity. The level of commitment required, in other words, is low.

Now consider Twitter. Also well-known as a hospitable home for drive-by commentary that can give voice to the kinds of opinions and text that are socially unacceptable in other contexts, its interface—in which one’s followers see one’s tweets—can act as a counterbalance to the freewheeling, putatively consequence-free discourse that can overwhelm the kind of spaces in my first example. You can, in other words, also use Twitter to do drive-by “critique,” but your followers will see what you’ve said, so that is a part of the context that shapes what you say. But participation on Twitter is of course also governed by the various interfaces one uses to access it. Simply using the Twitter.com website makes it hard to see others who, for example, are tweeting with the same hashtag; a desktop client such as TweetDeck or Janetter makes it much easier to see existing conversations, and hence to be inducted into the various social conventions that go along with that hashtag (which ties into the literacies/grammars of participation that others in this Textual Communities group will be addressing). A smartphone can also facilitate users’ ability to find groups of others who are tweeting on similar topics, though they make it more difficult to do other things such as reading long-form text to which other users may be linking. Twitter, then, requires a somewhat higher level of commitment than commenting on an online article.

My third example is the website LibraryThing. Billing itself as a site that “catalogs your books online, easily, quickly and for free,” LibraryThing is intriguing to consider in this context because it offers its users a range of ways to engage with other readers, and to respond to books. To take advantage of the full functionality of the site, you need to upload the titles in your personal library—whole or partial, real or imagined—into LibraryThing. Once this is done, the site gives you the chance to see a list of algorithmically-generated recommendations that might appeal to you, based on the similarities between your library and those of other site members. (It appears that subject headings also play a part in these recommendations, though LibraryThing is cagey about how exactly its algorithms work.) Previously, in order to obtain book recommendations of this sort, you needed to go through this process in “meatspace” with a few select friends whose physical bookshelves you were able to see and get ideas for your own reading list from. LibraryThing widens the net of such “friends” out to the global membership of the site, and adds a bunch of bells and whistles familiar from other social media: the ability to give one-to-five star ratings, to write reviews, to engage in threaded online discussions, and more. As an interface, LibraryThing provides some wonderful affordances for its users: the opportunity to see how your book collection stacks up against those of others; the chance to find out what others think of a book via ratings and reviews (also a feature of Amazon, though LibraryThing has important differences from Amazon, the most obvious being that it is not driven by commercial imperatives in the same way—they aren’t interested in getting you to buy the books); the chance to see how it has been tagged by other members. If I was to generalize, I’d say that these can be boiled down to seeing how a book “means” for others, and getting the chance to tell others how a book signifies for you. The price of admission, though, is a higher level of commitment still: inputting the details of some or all of one’s books and investing time in getting to know the different affordances of the LibraryThing website.

These feel like very obvious points to make about three digital spaces for reading, but they illustrate some of the basic differences that I see in the way interfaces call forth different behaviors in readers, and the varying levels of commitment that are engendered. As a final thought, I’d also like to think about how identity management, and how different reading interfaces, stimulate different forms of image construction: the extent to which someone is using their literary tastes, discussions about texts, and so forth as a proxy for their learnedness/hipness/etc. That is, of course, a part of the context of participation in an interpretive community that has always been in play, whether the space is digital, analogue, or at a place on the continuum somewhere in between.

Choose Your Adventure: Ada’s Education

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7:42 pm. It had been a long day, but Ada arrived at the learning pod and exchanged nods with the other knowledge consumers who also preferred the evening shift. Today was a big day. While she normally preferred to study while commuting from Georgetown, Ada chose to come into the pod so she could attempt to level up without distracting the other commuters. Two weeks before, Ada had been notified that she was eligible to demonstrate the learning objectives for L3 Shakespeare, especially good timing because she was planning a trip to Stratford the following week and was hoping to visit the sites reserved for L3s and above.

She grabbed a charged SmartSpace by door, found an open seat on the couch, adjusted the level of ambient noise on her SmartEars to medium, and used SmartEyes to navigate to her learning space through a series of eye movements. Once in the space, she began by reviewing the work from her L2 students. She watched a video of a virtual chat recorded a few hours earlier and annotated it with comments, indicating both when she agreed and disagreed with the iModerator. She was grateful that the system generated transcripts and translations because while she had her L6 Chinese badge, she was just starting her L2 Spanish badge and would have had difficulty following Nina’s contributions. Before switching to her next task, she made individual notes in each of her ten apprentice’s files and reviewed the comments from the other L3 knowledge leaders to see if she agreed or had anything else to add.

At 7:55, her SmartEars chimed, indicating that her review was about to begin. When she signed up for her L3 badge she elected to demonstrate mastery through discussion, so she was soon joined by three L4 knowledge consumers who began evaluating her understanding by asking questions about the papers she had submitted and reviewing footage of cohort discussions. Ada hoped that Chris wouldn’t be on the panel, but knew that she had no control over the matter: panels were convened through a random selection of L4s who happened to be on-call at the time.

If you want Chris to be on Ada’s panel, turn to page 63.
If you don’t want Chris to be on Ada’s panel, turn to page 72.

Exploring the Spindles

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“Listen to many, speak to a few.” The quote immediately struck her as both a revelation and a cause for anxiety.

Badging “Shakespeare’s Reality” has been a holistically enlightening experience for her. Her “structure” setting on low, Ada’s been jumping around the TOC, diving in at the various node heads and exploring the hyperlinks within, tapping between experiences inside the nodes. So as not to get too lost, she has avoided links that take her inter-node. Her cousin Brady loves to do this, but she finds that even with the handy “spindle map” navigation, she still gets lost and loses focus. Besides, her subscription to LearnVerse is node-specific. Cross-node linking costs extra.

And her explorations have been rich. With her “author width” set to wide, she’s been discovering the rich array of content authored by other users. These are often quite useful and seemingly always more creative than the usual spindles and subs created by the sponsored authors. She’s particularly enamored with the marginalia of a user from Portland, whose comments are all in the form of insightful yet lewd limericks.

Recently she found a rich vein—a collection of Shakespeare lines, speeches, and scenes which sync up to one’s private-side system. The API scans email, texts, searches, e-book content, recent purchases, etc. and offers handy Shakespeare quotes and scenes based on your life. These arrive by text, email, and even phone calls with recorded quotes or actors citing The Bard. She heard a rumor that someone had a group from the “Enacting Shakespeare” badge perform a recommended scene for her right in front of the restaurant where she had 6:00 reservations. That’s what you get for having your “transparency” set to high.

Just now, 8:00 am at the kitchen table, while exploring the Hamlet/Advice branch, she stumbled on a branch authored by student last year. That’s where she found “Listen to many, speak to a few” from Polonius’ famous advice to Laertes. This has sorta been her motto. Ada is shy and thoughtful. She doesn’t like standing out, doesn’t like being visible. However, an original performance module is required for her badge. That, or authoring a minimal spindle. And she just doesn’t have the time for that. It’s time to give back—to “speak to many.” And she’s drawing a blank.

Time to fire up a brainstorming sesh. Ada navigates to the commons and posts an invitation. Turns out three folks had the time to help out. They all synced up in the video chat with whiteboard enabled and got to work. They were all familiar with the usual battery of brainstorming activities. In about 40 minutes, they had all worked out a few good options for Ada’s performance. Also, one of the folks (a guy from Peru!) offered a link to a great acting coaching spindle from his Theatre Badge days. Ada would have to pay a small fee for accessing an outside node, but it’d be worth it. And it would count towards her badge. Cross-node exploration always does.

So this is what she will do. She will use those little figurines she printed from her “Artifact Manifestation” badge and shoot that speech from Polonius. She will do the voiceover and submit the whole thing to the Share Spindle. There, others will likely add music, filters, or maybe include it in a larger piece. From these, she will choose her favorite and publish it. Her scene may be helpful for others’ experience of Shakespeare as they explore the Shakespeare Reality spindles. Who knows, maybe some brave soul with their transparency set to full will get her piece as a text message as they prepare embark on a journey….

Ada’s Settings:

Language: English
Prior Badge Analysis: On
Structure: Low
Transparency: Low
Author Width: Wide
Analytics: Temporal, Physical, Content

Rhetorical Interfaces and Designed Affordances

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via flickr user Eric Holsinger

via flickr user Eric Holsinger

I was reminded recently when reading rhetorician Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd’s work on genre in the blogosphere (2009) that psychologist J.J. Gibson’s concept of “affordances” (further developed by his student Don Norman as “perceived affordances” and applied to the design of environments) emphasizes the ways that users’ experiences with interfaces are, in part, determined by the suasory qualities of its affordances. Miller and Shepherd note:

 An affordance, or a suite of affordances, is directional, it appeals to us, by making some forms of communicative interaction possible or easy and others difficult or impossible, by leading us to engage in or to attempt certain kinds of rhetorical actions rather than others. (p. 281)

In other words, what we can do with a designed tool or object is necessarily shaped somewhat by “those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing can be used” (Norman, 1988). By their very nature, these “fundamental properties” are suasory—they shape and limit and push us to interact, interpret, perceive, and do (or not). Interaction is never without some kind of inferred restriction, whether material or rhetorical. We are always working within what we perceive as some kind of designed thing or space with its own capabilities, as we understand them from our own situated perspectives.

Therefore any basic interface engagement with a digital tool requires us to quickly assess what can and cannot be done with it. We tinker and push upon its limits like nonverbal toddlers exploring the limits of their own behaviors, pushing and hitting and biting until someone or something tells us “no.” And it’s interesting to think about the many ways that we almost instinctively push back on designs’ efforts to persuade us to use them only in the ways that their designers intended.

I’m reminded of when I once watched an expert gamer pick up a new first-person shooter for the Xbox. The first thing he did was readjust the controller’s settings, inverting the X/Y axis. He flipped to the inventory screen, assessing the character’s weapons and their damage capabilities. Within seconds, he had read the map and determined an exit strategy. And surprisingly (to me), he spent the next ten minutes repeatedly figuring out all the ways his character could die. I instantly realized that I had been playing the game all wrong: I hadn’t been willing to fail miserably as a method of learning how to play the game better. I needed to play with the affordances of the game in order to gauge my ability to master it. I wasn’t going to get better if I wasn’t willing to make mistakes. And I wasn’t going to be able to make mistakes if I didn’t push back on what the game was designed to allow me to do.

[Truthfully, this is exactly what good writers do best: break and remake language in order to push  it to the limits of its own design. We value those texts that most ardently force us to think differently about what language can and cannot do.]

My interest is in everyday literacies and the ways that people make meaning with texts within particular contexts. I am deeply interested in how we almost instinctively and habitually push back on designed technological affordances and mold them to our liking. We constantly seem to expect different tools to behave the way we want them to, and when they don’t, we abandon them. I like to think of this process as a response to an almost ambient argument: a designed tool or application has its own perceived affordances that, as Gibson argued, have suasory qualities. When we take up these designs, we are responding to their insistence that we use them in the ways they were intended. What’s funny is how often we naturally resist the rhetorical “argument” that the designed object is trying to make. We almost always want it to be and do something else entirely.

When the Google Android operating system was introduced, I tried switching from my iPhone in hopes that I would enjoy the Android interface better. I was in favor of the principle of what Google was trying to do and wanted to give it a shot. But the first thing I did was configure all of the phone’s settings to make it more familiar to me (i.e., I changed its settings to make it more like the iPhone). Predictably, I eventually went back to my iPhone because, as I think I said at the time: “although it does all the same things my iPhone does, it’s not my iPhone.” (The same is true now as I write this on my Chromebook: I’m wishing I had chosen to bring my Macbook to write on instead. As much as I love the Chromebook, it’s not my Macbook.)

I think that over time, these habits and practices and ways of “talking back” to designs are the foundations of the kinds of “textual communities” we’re writing about today. If we agree that the term “community” is to be broadly construed (we could also use the terms “networks” or “affinity spaces”) then we might see how this way of organizing ourselves by our interactivity can represent the starting point for larger nodes and networks over time. We might gravitate toward certain digital literacy practices (e.g., collecting images; buying and selling objects; curating resources) based on how different tools—and their designed affordances—respond to our attempts to redesign them. That’s why people who use Flickr regularly are a different community than those who use Instagram, and those who spend their days on DeviantArt share some overlap with those who use Imgur.

The “arguments” that designed interfaces make by attempting to determine what users can and cannot do are almost always taken up and redesigned by their communities, and this is a natural and organic process. If we are to become real fans and experts in our chosen digital communities, we must necessarily respond to the interface’s attempts to convince. To participate in an online textual community, passive response to interface is not an option.

The Calibans at Night

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2:03 am. INCOMING MESSAGE FROM Mary S.

Mary: Ada, you’re good for a Calibans meeting?

Ada: What? I’m just coming home. Sorry. What?

Mary: Just you’re supposed to be one of the Calibans and we want to do a quick round-up on leading the discussion tomorrow. Dai and Sasha are good to go. Can you meet now?

Ada: I’m US-East, I was just headed to bed.

Sasha: You shared your location stream with us :)—you’re still at least 1500 meters from home.

Ada: Yeah, I’m out, but I’m about to walk in the door.

Mary: I know it’s late, can you give us 10 minutes just so we’re on the same page.

Ada: Same page…yeah, makes sense. I’ve just been out, and I’m a little spacey.

Sasha: Lightweight.

Mary: Can you see block text?

Ada: No, I’m reading from my hand-tat. I’ll be in front of a projector in 10. But I can tachiyomu if need be.

Mary: It’s just a short piece. It’s that main speech in Act Three. Tossing you a cursor now.

Ada: OK, got it, yeah.

Mary: We have your vitals and searches on that. We all had a bit of a heart-race on the “I cried to dream again,” but you had a peak right from the start and looked like you were really into it. It looked like you ran the first two lines four times.

Ada: Yeah, well, it just hit me hard for some reason. Where I grew up…well, whatever. My mother used to tell me not to be afraid, that the house was full of noises. Used to freak me out a little as a kid. Now…I kind of miss the noises. I live in new construction. Thin walls. So I have to choose between hearing my neighbor the aspiring opera singer or have phones on and block out everything. I saw Sasha peaked late on that phrase…

Sasha: No, I stubbed my toe. It was a false read…

Ada: And then did a lookup on the “twangling instruments” bit?

Sasha: Just wondered whether “twangling” was a normal word and was used contemporaneously or in anything modern.

Mary: I was manipulating the semantic net you put together. I like this bridge to “bangling” as well as the link to 20th century references to “twangy” country-western music. Anything worth teasing out there.

Tach: Sorry, excuse me for a moment. Can you help me and tell me the context for the “bangling” reference. It is not in dictionaries. And I have no access to this book Grace?

Sasha: Sending it now.

Tach: No, sorry, please no. I have no rights.

Sasha: Just one page then?

Tach: No, no page, no verbatim, please. Can you maybe read to me.

Sasha: Voice? Seriously?

Tach: No, nevermind. I will ask library to get rights so I can see.

Mary: Anyway, I found the “twangy” bit more interesting. He uses “twangling” in Shrew as well?

Ada: Sorry, y’all, I am still five minutes away from a screen, I can’t see the visualization of the semantic net.

Mary: You don’t need it, really. Basically, he uses “twangling” as a variant of “twank” which is the same as the modern “tweak.”

Sasha: So Caliban was a tweaker! I like him even more now…

Tach: Also, Twangdillo was used by many people in 1700s in English.

Mary: Cite?

Tach: Sent.

Mary: OK, good, so I want to make sure we are opening up an avenue of discussion here that no one has covered, and I like the country-western music theme. I did a lit review and no one seems to have picked it up. One of the badge requirements indicates “original insight” and I think this would count.

Ada: Actually, I know two of the sempai on the badge, want me to do a quick consult.

Sasha: Already Quorad it. Figured it was a good way to lay public claim to originality. Nobody has found any prior art so far, and it’s got over 1200 looks to date.

Mary: Ada, if you don’t mind, it might be good to see if there’s a good way to present it.

Ada: Just a sec, checking profiles, looks like I’ve got four friends with the badge. Let me just…“Thanks for the microconsult. Looking to present twanging in Tempest and Country-Western. Thoughts?” I’ll CC y’all if I hear back. OK if I provide them with some gradient permissions on our logs?

Sasha: OK with me.

Tach: Me also.

Mary: Yep, that’s OK. Ada, do you think we can work in the house sounds.

Tach: Maybe a Raymond Williams City and Country thing?

Mary: Yeah, how would you frame this?

Tach: I am sorry. Now I have to go to a meeting.

Mary: Can you go subvocal?

Tach: No tat, no subvocal. Very super old-school. I will check the log later. If you give me jobs I will do.

Mary: Thanks Tach. And can everyone go over our log and elect elements of our work for our portfolio.

Tach: Bye-bye everyone!

Sasha: Are you looking at the Google Alert from our discussion?

Mary: I have them turned down, is it any good?

Sasha: It’s constructing a search engine results narrative. It’s not bad, should I incorporate it in our log?

Mary: Can you just summarize it?

Sasha: It is already summarized.

Mary: I mean, like a human would.

Sasha: It does it better. It has my voice and face profile for a video version. We can always edit it together.

Mary: Let’s give it the badge.

Sasha: Google: It’s everything you’ll someday know!

Ada: I may be slow on responses. Elevator.

Mary: And then there were two…

Sasha: Actually, I’m going to have to go in a little while too. Real life and all.

Mary: Are you coming to London.

Sasha: Yeah, the Moscow People’s University is distributing crowdsourced travel funds among those with the Shakespeare L4 and above badges, as long as they also have the Open Collab badge. I’ve done an audit, and I think there are only three of us, so I should be good to go.

Mary: If we get the badge.

Sasha: Actually, I should be able to double-dip on our assessment tomorrow. Will you co-endorse?

Mary: Hold on. Have you already elected? Oh, OK, I see it…and…done. I gave you my full collaborator endorsement. I’ll attach evidence and context in the morning.

Sasha: You rock!

Ada: Can I get in on that too?

Mary: Yeah I’ll take a look when I get the chance…

Ada: Thanks. Anyway, I’ve been polling my personal archive for recordings of my old house, if we want to use it for some background audio. Also I’ve crossed reviews that mention “twang” and pulled up a playlist we can link out to as a sidenote in the doc, for fun and elucidation.

Sasha: I’ve already pulled in some of the other narrative assessments that reference this section. There are a lot of them. I will see which we might want to reference.

Ada: I’m at a keyboard. I’m going to bang out a text narrative to tie together our portfolio. I am a write-geek.

Mary: Why do you think we asked you to join our group? Thanks, Ada. Nothing like just-in-time production.

Ada: What makes the world go round. I’m going to run silent for a bit here to get some work done.

Sasha: You mean sleep!

Ada: Ha! Yes, that too. But I’ll stim up long enough to get this out to you tonight. Mary, you were going to sift our log for presentation permissions, yes?

Mary: Right. And Sasha, everyone but you has done a permissions and copyright check. Can you do that, like now?

Sasha: Not now, but within five hours. Good?

Mary: Yep, that’s fine.

Ada: Night. Catch you all live on tomorrow.

Mary: And hopefully in the flesh in London next month.

Sasha: Except Tach. I’m not sure he’s really a human.

Ada: So few of us are these days.

Ada palmed her connections closed. Emergencies only. She could still bang out text with the best of them. The OLED tattoo that made up her palm and forearm curled itself into a random image, a scripted quote from her namesake: “In this, which we may call the neutral or zero state of the engine….” She didn’t feel like writing. The buzz of the evening and the physical presence of old friends still had her excited. She heard a party somewhere in a nearby apartment and dialed in noise reduction. As she reached out to the keyboard, Sonify noted her vitals and her intention to write and constructed an appropriate playlist, heavy on the Ko Mak and German Cajun Chill bands like old Boozoo Bajou. But she found herself aching for the creaky sounds of her childhood home, and the voice of her mother.

She reached to a drawer and pulled out a ragged, dog-earned paperback with a missing cover. The title page read The Tempest and in the corner, in blue Bic ink and a neat hand, her mother’s name: Augusta King.