Between digital and physical: some thoughts on digital printmaking

Paper discussing how digital printmaking relates to traditional physical printmaking. The relationship between online image and the physical product and how they fundamentally differ. Paul Coldwell uses examples of his own work to explore these ideas

To Teach, Delight, and Inspire. Experiences with Kim Sowol’s Jindallaekkot (Azaleas) as a Printed Facsimile, Printed Scholarly Edition, Web-based Reading Text, and Virtual Reality Experience

Here we document how college students responded to a canonical book of Korean poems, Kim Sowol’s 1925 Jindallaekkot (Azaleas), presented in a variety of formats: as part of a 2014 printed facsimile, a 2007 printed scholarly edition, a reading text articulated as a web page on a tablet, and a radical refiguration as a virtual reality forest. We asked students to describe if they enjoyed and felt inspired by their encounters with Kim Sowol’s poetry in these different formats. We also asked if they felt their experiences were educational and if they engendered a desire to share Kim Sowol’s poetry with international peers. Student responses suggest that encounters with novel forms of canonical texts are enjoyable, inspiring, and created a desire to share them with international peers, especially if novel presentations are complemented by more familiar textual idioms, which students found the most educational

To Teach, Delight, and Inspire. Experiences with Kim Sowol’s Jindallaekkot (Azaleas) as a Printed Facsimile, Printed Scholarly Edition, Web-based Reading Text, and Virtual Reality Experience

Here we document how college students responded to a canonical book of Korean poems, Kim Sowol’s 1925 Jindallaekkot (Azaleas), presented in a variety of formats: as part of a 2014 printed facsimile, a 2007 printed scholarly edition, a reading text articulated as a web page on a tablet, and a radical refiguration as a virtual reality forest. We asked students to describe if they enjoyed and felt inspired by their encounters with Kim Sowol’s poetry in these different formats. We also asked if they felt their experiences were educational and if they engendered a desire to share Kim Sowol’s poetry with international peers. Student responses suggest that encounters with novel forms of canonical texts are enjoyable, inspiring, and create a desire to share them with international peers, especially if novel presentations are complemented by more familiar textual idioms, which students found the most educational

Scholarly reading (and writing) and the power of impact factors: a study of distributed cognition and intellectual habits

Using observational interviews and introducing theories of embodied and distributed cognition, this study examines the scholarly reading and the intellectual habits of a group of social scientists. All participants were working at universities in task environments dominated by digital artifacts and technologies. The study found a strong connection between scholarly reading and the scholars’ writing processes and a further coupling to their digital publishing activity. While examining the participants’ print and online reading, it turned out that their reading was so tightly coupled to their writing that this entanglement had to be at the core of the analysis. In the study, scholarly reading and writing are analyzed as cognitive processes that extend beyond the brain and body and comprise cognitive artifacts of texts and their material bearers, such as printouts, digital displays, computers, and the Internet. In the process of creating text—or reading and writing—brains, bodies, and artifacts are considered to be dynamically coupled in a distributed cognitive process. Based on interviews with a sample of academics, the study analyses how their scholarly reading relates to the other elements in such an extended process and how they utilize the affordances of cognitive digital artifacts in their creative and intellectual endeavors.Scholarly reading (and writing) and the power of impact factors: a study of distributed cognition and intellectual habitspublishedVersio

Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

Text Materialities, Affordances, and the Embodied Turn in the Study of Reading.

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming that–influenced by tacit knowledge and the task at hand–textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body (including brain), text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading.publishedVersio

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences

Little attention has been given to how digital technologies have impacted the comic medium. Despite the astronomical impact this shift has had on all sorts of traditional media, it is common to believe that digital comics are simply electronic versions of print comics, but the implementation of audio, animation, three-dimensional effects, and interactivity with other kinds of digital comics reveal that they are hardly so simple. Analyzing and classifying them is essential for English studies, comics studies, and even game studies. Digital comics are a hybridized medium that challenge the essence and existing definitions of comics with disparate instances and inclusions of multimedia and interactivity. Digital comics also complicate how the comic medium is remediated with three remediation types (retro remediation, stylistic remediation, and adaptation) that favor or balance out desires for immediacy and hypermediacy between old and new media. Digital comics can also converge with the logic and design of videogames in the digital space, presenting opportunities to question the nature of interactivity between comics and videogames and how these two mediums can be combined with “interactive, digital comics.” This paper creates a refined genre list for digital comics by separating them in terms of how much multimedia and/or interactivity they contain with an extensive analysis of nine digital comics. Their individual incorporations (or lack thereof) of multimedia and/or interactivity unveil innovative possibilities that the digital space affords for the comic medium with new methods of spatial, sequential, and temporal storytelling. In addition, this paper explores how digital comics are socially constructed and viewed as a genre by audiences with nine interviewees that glean further insight into the current perception and future potential of not only digital comics, but also the promising genre of interactive, digital comics

Review article: Ever decreasing circles

Review of P.J. ASHMORE, Calanais: survey and excavation 1979-88, and RICHARD BRADLEY & COURTNEY NIMURA (eds), The use and reuse of stone circles: fieldwork at five Scottish monuments and its implications

Reading Times: Exploring the temporalities of reading

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore various concepts of time and temporal dimensions in the context of everyday reading experiences. Design/methodology/approach The study uses theoretical bricolage that puts existing reading research into conversation with theories of time and temporalities. Findings Three registers of time in reading are put forward: (1) libraries and books as places that readers return to again and again over time, (2) temporalized reading bodies and (3) everyday reading as a temporalized practice. Research limitations/implications Using lenses of time and temporalities, everyday reading is shown to be central to ways of being in time. Subjective experiences of time in the context of reading expand the limited ways that time is presented in much Library and Information Science (LIS) reading research. Originality/value This paper offers a new conceptual framework for studies of reading and readers in LIS