Week 1: Introduction

Hi all! As part of the ever elusive Culture and Technology concentration and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, I can’t tell you enough how excited I am for this course. In coming to the iSchool I hoped that through these two programs of study I would be able to take my background in English Literature and Book and Media Studies and study how texts, in all their various forms, reflect the society in which they are produced, specifically in times of great technological or social change. I am also particularly interested in the materiality of texts, how new technologies shape the reading experience (in addition to how authors can manipulate these forms to affect reader interpretation), and how we can use this knowledge in the digital remediation process.

So far I have had the opportunity to write two research papers on the digital remediation of works by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, which I have thoroughly enjoyed. This past semester I also had the opportunity to work with Colin Furness in a reading course focused on designing for narrative reading on screen. Working with Prof. Furness has taught me that it’s really important to go outside of your comfort zone (which for me is literary theory, media studies and textual scholarship) in order to approach a topic of interest from a new perspective. Approaching digital texts and on screen reading through the lens of both cognitive psychology and human computer interaction has helped me to bridge my more theoretical knowledge of digital texts with a practical/empirical understanding of how we read, interact with, and comprehend texts both on and off screen. I am really looking forward to expanding on my understanding of the ecology of digital texts in the upcoming weeks and can’t wait to see what’s ahead!