[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, June 30, 2010

[Jill O'Neill]

NFAIS Enotes, June 30, 2010

Written and compiled by Jill O'Neill

 

Immersive or Interstitial Reading


The Wall Street Journal is supportive of mainstream authors marketing their
latest titles. Early in June, it invited an essay from Nicholas Carr whose
most recent work is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
and another from Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and
Generosity in a Connected Age.  The two essays take opposing stands on the
issue of whether the Internet is making us dumber (Carr's position) or
smarter (Shirky's). Actually, neither essay actually responds to the
question. Rather, each author wends his way around to making a different
point. Carr believes that the ubiquity of Web access on mobile devices
distracts us from the focused attention and thought required in serious
reading whereas Shirky writes that the Web has restored acts of "reading and
writing as central activities in our culture."

Carr:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098.ht
ml

Shirky:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.ht
ml 

 

Of course, such debates don't properly differentiate between the varying
approaches to reading that different work tasks require. Current thinking
suggests that these approaches break into four (somewhat permeable)
categories - (1) immersive (2) extractive or strategic (3) pedagogical and
(4) interstitial. That last may be unfamiliar, but it pertains to the short
spurts of reading managed in the small chunks of time available to us in
between larger obligations (see Arthur Atwell's 2009 posting on the New
Cereal Box Moment at
http://arthurattwell.com/technology/49-interstitial-reading-the-new-cereal-b
ox-moment. Atwell credits Joseph Esposito (current CEO of Giantchair.com)
with the concept. See
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/12/interstitial-publishing.html). 

 

Esposito actually hones in on an important aspect of the issue troubling
Carr, ".interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention
span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to
this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of
each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text,
but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies."
Esposito's idea is that literary forms will gradually be adapted to fit our
current lifestyles and needs while Carr's concern is that if we wire our
brains too much for this style of reading, whether on the Web (replete with
hyperlinks, another distraction in Carr's view) or on mobile devices, then
those brains will be less capable of immersive or contemplative reading of
longer and more complex arguments and narratives. 

 

Part of what readers may be doing in that brief span of time noted by
Esposito is something called document or information triage, a concept that
has been floating around in research circles for a few years. As one
scholarly paper I read noted, this is something that "has traditionally been
the province of analysts, professional researchers and reference
librarians," but our awareness of the practice is spreading with the rise in
popularity of mobile devices and access to digital content. It's the mental
process that we go through when skimming or reading a document in order to
evaluate its value or relevance to our interest (see Soonil Bae, Patterns of
Reading and Organizing Information in Document Triage, at
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/asist-reading-triage.pdf).

 

Researcher Cathy C. Marshall of Microsoft (and a co-author of the above
referenced paper on document triage) examines those acts that make up the
research process -- reading, annotation, writing, and personal information
management and storage (See
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/cathymar/).  In 2002, Marshall
produced a paper for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
(JCDL 2002) that examined reading on small form factor devices, specifically
on the technology of the time -- the Palm Pilot and the HP Jornada Pocket
PC. She noted behaviors by students in how they read and how they fit the
activity into their lives: "[the student] does not read linearly; she looks
for paratextual cues (like chapter headings) and uses these in combination
with a search facility. Second, when she is engaged with the text in a more
linear fashion, she is moving both forward and backward, alternating between
skimming and focused reading,.Most importantly she evaluates how much time
she has, and what ground she can possibly cover in this time." The use of
the device for purposes of reading was tied to contextual task, content
structure, navigational options, and time constraints (see Reading in the
Small: A study of reading on small form factor devices

Catherine C. Marshall, Christine Ruotolo at
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72887/p67-marshall.pdf).

 

Many of us do not realize how much of this interstitial reading occupies our
day. We don't think of checking email on a corporate Blackberry or glancing
at a Twitter stream as "reading," but that is because, as Marshall also
notes, reading is not a stand-alone activity but a hybrid one, accomplished
in a larger ecosystem of documents, technologies, and reading-related
activities. Reading is essentially an invisible practice (Is that woman with
the Blackberry really reading her email or is she assessing its priority on
the To-Do list?). 

 

It is possible that the volume of what the user population reads has
actually increased based on the volume of tightly condensed content that
gets poured into different environments. 

 

I referenced two book titles in the opening sentences of this piece.
Recognizing that finding the time to read book-length treatments of a topic
may be an issue for NFAIS members, I also included links to two shorter
pieces that encapsulate the primary arguments found in those books. I might
further have condensed those URLs (using Bitly, see: http://bit.ly/) and
incorporated references to the content into a Tweet dispersed to 300
followers. Alternatively, I might have embedded video from YouTube or
created a link to dynamically search for similar content. These are forms
that readily fit into the context of these shorter reading experiences.
Efficiency is a watchword here. By presenting ideas in both short and long
form, through text as well as via the aural/visual delivery of video, the
points being made by those authors are not just disseminated more broadly -
they are also being presented to the user in a range of options that allows
the user to fit content ingestion into existing contextual and time
constraints. 

 

During lunch recently, Maureen Kelly of Content Kinetics challenged me to
describe for her what a 21st century abstracting and indexing service would
look like. I didn't get very far in my imagining but, were I sitting down to
my kitchen table to develop such a service, I would design something that
would incorporate the following:  

 

 

 

A Twitter-like element (condensed textual item information, speedily
processed)

                A Bitly-like element                       (condensed
identifier, access)

                An #ask4stuff-like element         (condensed bibliography,
search/context)

 

I would combine human-readable content for rapid processing and
decision-making with machine readable content to facilitate navigation to
the item and ensure the additional option of implicit search in order
maximize the potential reach of the user in getting to the useful
information (thereby reinventing the bibliographic citation). Speaking more
seriously, such a construct would readily fit into Marshall's structure for
reading on mobile devices: contextual task, content structure, navigational
options, and time constraints.

 

If you don't recognize the #ask4stuff element, it's a nifty bit of software
engineering from OCLC, introduced at the American Library Association this
year (see Mike Teet's blog entry at:
http://community.oclc.org/cooperative/2010/06/sometimes-the-internet-is-just
-not-big-enough-for-me.html). Not being technical, I truly cannot explain
how it works, but the use of the hashtag in a tweet with accompanying query
terms such as "Lucy Maud Montgomery" or "poliomyelitis causes" launches a
search in WorldCat. The system then returns a different tweet (within a
matter of seconds) to the user with a link. Clicking on the link vaults the
user out of Twitter to a set of WorldCat results. The OCLC intent was to
bring the library into the user's immediate environment, heightening the
library's visibility, but my satisfaction with the thing was due to its
convenience and usefulness. It was time-efficient without being overly fussy
as to query terms or search structure. I tweet this
(http://twitter.com/jillmwo/status/18359512306) and get back this
(http://twitter.com/Ask4Stuff/status/18359513003). 

 

Does it replace my older methodology of using a published bibliography to
gather names of researchers working in this field? Not perfectly - there
were duplicate hits and some irrelevancies due to the ambiguity of the word
triage, but the idea behind #ask4stuff is sound. The service is accessible
on a wildly popular platform, one oriented towards brevity and immediacy.
The user isn't even necessarily thinking of the interaction with #ask4stuff
as searching. Their next step will be some level of assessment or evaluation
of the results' relevancy. 

 

When I access Twitter over my morning toast and coffee to see what headlines
and topics are currently engaging my network there, I scan individual tweets
for intelligence and/or interest and then star (bookmark) the tweet for
access later in my office. (I'm unlikely to scan a PDF or even a news
article on the screen real estate available to me on an iTouch.) In the
office, those items I've bookmarked are evaluated on a larger monitor by
clicking through on any tweet-incorporated links; if the piece looks like a
closer read might be required to fully grasp an author's idea or argument,
it can then be printed for more concentrated review during my 20-minute
train trip home. Such a hybrid process is information triage in June 2010.  

 

In Marshall's 1997 paper, Spatial Hypertext and the Practice of Information
Triage, she makes the statement that "Information triage implies changes in
reading and attention. Tools to support information triage may change the
nature of reading even more, by making quick, partial interpretation of
content possible and multiple readings the order of the day." Subsequent
work by researchers both in the UK and in the US suggest that interface
design and document structure are key in supporting the level of analysis
and evaluation key to effective triage. Should you be curious, two such
papers are (1) Loizides, F. "An Empirical Study of User Navigation During
Document Triage," Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 13th
European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital
Libraries, Springer, and (2) Bae, S., "Supporting Document Triage via
Annotation-based Visualizations," Proceedings of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, Volume 45, Issue 1, Wiley Interscience.
Full text for the latter may be accessed at
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~shipman/papers/asist-2008.pdf.

 

The fourth of Ranganathan's five laws is that libraries should save the time
of the reader. It's not about whether the content is presented in a book,
article, video, abstract or bibliographic citation. Nor is it about whether
the reader is using a tethered or untethered computing device. We are
perhaps prone to forget that (except, of course, for purposes of writing
marketing blurbs). It's not just about discovery or aiding current
awareness; information services should also have as a primary focus saving
the user's time - not only in gathering, but also in assessing material.  

 

Nicholas Carr wrote a fantastic article for The Atlantic in 2008 when he
gave us Is Google Making Us Stupid. Was his decision to further explore his
argument in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains necessary
to move the discussion forward? How has he saved the time of the user? Or to
pose the question differently, which would you as a busy professional be apt
to read first?

 

When Publishers Weekly covered the annual meeting of the Association of
American University Presses in Denver in June, there was terrific uproar at
a panel on demand-driven library acquisition. "Yankee Book Peddler's Kim
Anderson drew gasps from attendees when he stated that the University of
Kansas now drops a new title from its catalog if it isn't requested within
the first six months. "What?" an audience member exclaimed, "when journal
reviews don't appear for three years?" (see
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/trade-shows-events
/article/43600-facing-the-facts-university-presses-in-the-digital-age.html])
. Meaning no disrespect to any particular discipline or community, does a
review emerging three years after the fact seem like it would be saving any
user's time? 

 

As a side note, you might want to make time to read the text of Joseph
Esposito's plenary address at that same AAUP meeting regarding Stage Five
Book Publishing and where libraries fit in that environment (see
http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/2010/esposito.html. His slides
are available at
http://www.slideshare.net/aaupny/stage-five-presentation-working-copy.) 

 

Philip E. Bourne of the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical
Sciences contributed an article to PLoS Computational Biology entitled "What
Do I Want from the Publisher of the Future?" In it, he asked, "if we move
away from the traditional PDF to something more dynamic that integrates
data, rich media, and that includes interactive access, what do I as a
scientist want from publishers at that point?" He points out that "the final
published work does not map well to the workflow of the scientific endeavor
used to create it." Bourne's ideas about publishers' assuming responsibility
for capturing his total workflow are somewhat vague, but he recognizes quite
clearly that the presentation and scope of content need to be altered to
satisfy his needs. The elements of context, content structure, and
navigation as they currently exist (print or platform) aren't adequately
easing the time constraints that hamper his investigations (see
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000787).

 

In June, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published
a report "Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in
2025" by David J. Staley and Kara J. Malenfont. The report was intended to
be an aid in strategic planning for academic librarians seeking to
underscore the library's value to parent institutions. It was interesting to
read the 26 different scenarios offered and which outcomes the library
community seemed to think most likely. I will draw your attention to just
two of them. One of them was the need to provide a form of "third space," a
location where students could separate from the noise and distraction
represented by 24/7 access through mobile devices in order to bring to bear
the mental concentration necessary to immersive reading and study. The
second scenario of interest mirrored Nicholas Carr's concern, "With our
brains no longer making neural pathways to understand written language, we
sharpen other skills like sensing and intuition to understand how to relate
to others and share ideas." (Download the ACRL report from
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/value/futures2025.pdf). 

 

To me those two scenarios are tied. If information is presented in more
readily consumable forms (video, audio, text, etc.) that are easier for
users to absorb and use, then finding the zone of quiet in which to follow a
concentrated process of thought may be as simple as finding an empty room
and an adequately comfortable chair. The function a library serves in that
scenario becomes very different. Interstitial forms of reading will likely
seem more natural and useful to some research professionals, while the kind
of immersive reading that Nicholas Carr values (and which others may find to
be cognitively burdensome) will be left to those for whom that form of
intake is most conducive. For the information community, the question should
never have been whether the Internet was making us smarter or dumber; the
question is how the Internet should best be leveraged in order to save the
time of the reader while giving them the information that they need!

 

Mark Your Calendars:  August 4, 2010:  NFAIS Webinar on Google Wave - An
Innovative Collaborative Workflow Tool.  For more information go to:
http://www.nfais.org/page/276-google-wave-webinar

 

2010 SPONSORS

Accessible Archives, Inc.

American Psychological Association/PsycINFO

The British Library

CAS

Copyright Clearance Center

CrossRef

Data Conversion Laboratory

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)

Getty Research Institute

H. W. Wilson

Information Today, Inc.

Office of Scientific & Technical Information, DOE

Philosopher's Information Center

ProQuest

Really Strategies, Inc.

Temis, Inc.

Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science

Thomson Reuters IP Solutions

Unlimited Priorities Corporation

 

 

 

 

***************************

 

 

 

 

Jill O'Neill

Director, Planning & Communication

NFAIS

(v) 215-893-1561

(email) jilloneill at nfais.org

 

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