Imagining a History for the Future of the Book (London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship)

No form of human knowledge passes into a new medium unchanged. Digital
technology is fundamentally altering the way we relate to writing,
reading, and the human record itself. The pace of that change has
created a gap between core cultural and social practices that depend on
stable reading and writing environments, and the new kinds of digital
artifacts - electronic books, being just one type of many - that must
sustain those practices into the future. This paper will discuss work
toward bridging this gap by theorizing the transmission of culture in
pre- and post-electronic media, by documenting the facets of how people
experience information as readers and writers, by designing new kinds of
interfaces and artifacts that afford readers new abilities and by
sharing those designs in online prototypes that implement new knowledge
environments for researchers and the public.

At a time when the human record is entering the electronic medium in a
world connected by the Internet, this research concern is important to
all facets of society. It was addressed initially by consultations held
under the title “Implementing the New Knowledge Machine: Human Computer
Interaction and the Electronic Book”; these consultations drew together
researchers and representative stake-holding research partners
comprising interdisciplinary expertise from over 90 fields and
sub-fields ranging from philosophy and cultural studies to visual
communication design and robotics. They concluded that chief among the
reasons for the limitations currently found in electronic books and
documents is the fact that they are still predominantly modelled on
print-based textual forms, with research and development of such digital
materials chiefly focusing on mimicking the look and feel of print - an
approach founded importing critical and textual models from print
without understanding them fully. Hence, such work fails to capitalize
on the technical possibilities of cybernetic simulation (following
McGann 2001). To achieve all the benefits of computation in these
digital artifacts, our work suggested that research in this area must
begin with a re-conception of core critical and textual models from the
following perspectives: [1] the evolution of reading and writing
technologies from antiquity to the present; [2] the mechanics and
pragmatics associated with written forms of knowledge; [3] strategies of
reading and organization within those forms; and [4] the computational
possibilities latent in written forms and manifest in emerging technology.

The paper will discuss this project, and the work that has emanated from
it since our establishment as a developmental cluster. This paper
represents the work of a research team consisting of some 35 researchers
from Canada, the USA, and the UK, across 20 institutions, working with
21 research partners ranging from scholarly groups and academic
publishers to libraries and software/hardware manufacturers; the
theoretical and conceptual foundations of this work were laid in 2005,
and a 7-year funded work-cycle began in 2009.

Ray Siemens (web.uvic.ca/~siemens/) is Canada Research Chair in
Humanities Computing and Professor of English at the University of
Victoria with appointment also in Computer Science. The editor of
several Renaissance texts, Siemens is also the founding editor of the
electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies; he has
authored numerous articles on the intersection of literary studies and
computational methods and is the co-editor of several book collections
on humanities computing topics, among them Blackwell's Companion to
Digital Humanities (with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth) and
Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Susan Schreibman ). He is
director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (www.dhsi.org) and
the INKE project.

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