Readers, readers, writers and engineers

Extended review of books <i>Knowledge, Power and Learning</i> and <i>Learning, Space and Identity</i>, both ed. Carrie Paechter et al., Paul Chapman Publishing (2001). ISBNs 0-769-6937-3 and 0-7619-6939-X

Skim reading: an adaptive strategy for reading on the web

It has been suggested that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that if readers skim read they reduce their comprehension of what they have read. There have been a number of studies exploring skim reading, but relatively little exists on the skim reading of hypertext and Webpages. In the experiment documented here, we utilised eye tracking methodology to explore how readers skim read hypertext and how hyperlinks affect reading behaviour. The results show that the readers read faster when they were skim reading and comprehension was reduced. However, the presence of hyperlinks seemed to assist the readers in picking out important information when skim reading. We suggest that readers engage in an adaptive information foraging strategy where they attempt to minimise comprehension loss while maintaining a high reading speed. Readers use hyperlinks as markers to suggest important information and use them to read through the text in an efficient and effective way. This suggests that skim reading may not be as damaging to comprehension when reading hypertext, but it does mean that the words we choose to hyperlink become very important to comprehension for those skim reading text on the Web

Hello, Readers!

My name is Alexa Schreier and I am serving as the Barbara Holley Intern for the next year (through Academic Year 2015/2016)! As the Holley Intern I will be moving around between the four main departments at Musselman Library, which includes Special Collections & Archives, Tech Services, User Services, and Research and Instruction. [excerpt

On the writing, reading and publishing of digital stories

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study set up to investigate and map the landscape of digital writing today. A holistic perspective has been adopted involving writers, readers and publishers alike. Design/methodology/approach – The research uses a qualitative approach and combines interviews and direct observations. In in-depth interviews 13 participants (four writers, four publishers, three readers and two on-line readers) were questioned for their opinions on issues related to writing, publishing and reading digital fiction. The three readers were also observed while interacting, for the first time, with three digital stories. Findings – Results show that the area is still unsettled though much excitement surrounds experimentations and freedom of publishing online. Readers seem uneasy with the role of co-creators that writers want to assign them and prefer linear stories to more deconstructed ones. Writers like to experiment and combine multiple media and readers like to interact with multimedia stories; this seems to open interesting perspectives over interactive narrative. Publishers are not yet involved in digital writing and this is seen simultaneously as a blessing (unfiltering of innovative ideas) and a curse (lack of economical support, lack of quality selection). Despite disagreement and ambiguity all interviewees agree that digital fiction will come, likely prompted by new reading technology. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to understand the phenomena of digital writing taking into consideration the perspectives of writers, readers and publishers simultaneously and comparing their different views

E-book readers in higher education

Ebook readers have received a mixed press, with some hailing them as the future of reading and others believing that they will never be popular. The study outlined here aims to understand the attitudes of, and issues of importance to, lecturers in UK academia, with a view to improving the design of ebook readers for education in the future. An evaluation of five portable devices is presented, in which lecturers were given the opportunity to read an ebook and provide feedback via a questionnaire. Results are compared with concerns arising from other experiments in the same field, and recommendations are made for successful ebook design

Fair use markets: on weighing potential license fees

Justice Breyer began his classic article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, with a line from Lord Macaulay, that copyright is \u27a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.\u27 Our society and its law values both writers and readers; the law cannot favor one side too much without losing some of the benefits the other side could have contributed. Make reading expensive and it will decrease, and readers might substitute less socially productive behaviors to take its place

A comparison of the reading miscues of older struggling readers with younger but typically developing readers : are they different? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education (Inclusive Education) at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Do struggling readers rely too much on context cues or not enough? This is a long-standing debate. The present study revisited this debate by comparing the oral reading miscues of 39 children aged 8-10 who were matched for reading age (8 years) and divided into three groups: younger typical readers (YT, n = 13), older struggling decoders with average or better listening comprehension who fitted the dyslexia profile (OSD, n = 13), and older struggling readers with mixed difficulties (OMD, n = 13). Miscues were compared using three taxonomies based on miscue analysis procedures that analysed miscues in terms of surface structure and deep grammatical structure. Multivariate analyses were conducted for the miscue data to find between-group differences. The study found that the miscues of the three groups of readers did not differ in graphemic or phonemic similarity but the OSD and OMD groups made proportionately more miscues that were not semantically or syntactically acceptable than did the YT group. At deep structure level the YT group made proportionately more miscues at phrase level than did the OSD and OMD groups. The OSD and OMD groups made proportionately more miscues that were real word substitutes than did the YT group, e.g., read “skates” as “snakes”. The YT and OMD groups made proportionately more miscues that were likely to be nonwords than did the OSD group, e.g., read “parcel” as “parl”. The study contributes to the literature by providing insights into how struggling readers process print in comparison with their typically developing peers – insights which can be translated into more effective differentiation and instruction. The findings suggest that, compared with younger typically achieving readers, struggling readers could make better use of context cues; that those in the dyslexia category could make better use of graphemic cues. The pedagogical implications are that teachers could work to help struggling readers use these cues more effectively, by combining phonics instruction with book reading; for example rather than make a global guess at an unknown word, readers could look carefully at graphemic information then use context to support those cues

Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media

Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93% accuracy in detecting and 89% accuracy in blocking clickbaits.Comment: 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM

Book Review: Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography - Representing Canadian History through Graphic Art

This paper explores how graphic art, specifically in the comic-strip form, can represent events of the past and engage readers in historical narratives. Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography tells history in a unique way by depicting heightened moments of drama in Riel’s life during the Red River Rebellion. Through vivid illustrations, Brown involves readers in the imaginative process and helps readers uncover Riel’s character and the choices he made during the series of events before his hanging for high treason in 1885. This paper contains original interpretations of Brown’s comic-strip biography, coupled with scholars’ opinions and critical analysis of Brown’s work. Brown’s comic-strip biography reveals how images in graphic novels can uniquely represent historical events and engage readers in historical narratives. The potential of graphic art at successfully representing the imagined communities of Canada should not be underestimated