Reading Digitally

My most recent experience in a Faculty of Humanities has been teaching Introductory Creative Writing. In such a class, there are typically students who state that they had never written a poem or a story or a creative essay or a play before. This means that one of the first discussions we often have is about those ‘things’ (a poem or a story), what they might look like, and how a student might identify or study them before writing a creative 'thing' themselves; of course, the trick to this lesson is that a piece of creative writing is not the kind of object that can be noticed, identified, and claimed: "there. That's a poem. That's it." As simple as, that's an apple. It is only after comparing bpNichol to Don McKay that a student realizes the multiplicity, mutability, and malleability of ‘creative objects’—and that that’s half the fun of it.

That is, this is what used to be at the root of teaching creative writing. But now, standing on the curb of the digital future, the questions I am most often asked are different. They are far less interested in content, and even form, then the devices on which and with which we read and write; they want to know if they’re already writers because they have blogs, Facebook pages, and their own websites. The ‘objects’ that pepper the periphery of a student’s frame of reference are not books or individual pieces of writing, but digital devices and virtual platforms. Twitter was recently conceptualized for me by a professor at the University of Calgary, Susan Bennett, as, “like slyly passing a note in class.” In this sense, a student’s most persistent and prominent form of communication on a university campus is not necessarily out loud in the classroom, or one on one with a professor, but is the nudge, the reference, the allusion that requires minimal vocabulary, a knowledge of what symbols can stand for emotions, and a palm-size object that can be concealed below a desk or textbook.

The way a student participates and is present in a classroom today has thus changed significantly; of course, the way that students write and participate is going to change if the way we read has changed, on screens, or pads, or on Kindle. How, in this context, do we change the way that not only literature, but literature that is lengthy, and dense, and perhaps even not immediately accessible, is taught? It likely means taking back the whole notion of criticism, introducing our students to concepts such as slow reading and slow media, I think of Greg Garrard’s definition of slow reading: “like slow food, [it] is about savouring rather than gobbling” (please see his article in Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=412075, and posted under Reading Digitally on Zotero). Perhaps even a discussion of what we lose when we comment or respond anonymously, instead of taking responsibility for our authorship, for our own inventions, could be useful.

As a publisher (I work for Freehand Books, a small literary imprint of Broadview Press), I feel it’s my responsibility to engage in eBook production with thought to how those eBooks will be received by readers, as well as potentially adopted by courses and scholars. As a small press we are limited in some ways—we only publish 4-6 books a year—but we take our mandate, to publish books of literary integrity, by only Canadian authors, with exception design and production, very seriously. As we move forward with eBooks, we are involving a designer to see if some of the aspects that are currently lost in the translation from print to ePub—such as maintaining a designer’s carefully determined typeface—can be maintained. As well, if we are going to digitize the printed text, rather than a simple facsimile how can we augment the book? Add multimedia, hyperlinks, audio, video, and entice the reader to further engage with a book? With an eBook, the page doesn’t seem flat; if the reader interacts with it, it very well may respond. Publishers are also beginning to recognize the necessity of developing metadata, tagging the details of books with ONIX feeds, in order for the books to be available through online retailers but also, increasingly, websites that enable scholars to search for or archive or catalogue their own books (please see links for BookNet, Canadian Bookshelf, and LibraryThing on Zotero under Digital Archiving). These resources extend the opportunities that a scholar has to engage with a book, and seem in line with encouraging students to read more and in depth rather than skimming just because the mediums or search engines themselves are fast and efficient.