Week 9: Ebooks, Digital Communities and the Future of Research

This week's entry is going to be kind of short because I'm still putting ideas together and I generally keep my cards close to my chest when it comes to works in progress. One of the most memorable ideas from the term for me (which I've probably already written about here) is one of the first articles we read, Kirschenbaum and Werner's "Digital Scholarship and Digital studies: the State of the Discipline". Specifically, I keep thinking back on the section where they enumerate all the ways  that scholars of the future can write about Jonathan Franzen through all the digital content related to Freedom and its release (Amazon rankings, customer reviews, ebook extras and features).

The idea for my final essay is to try to examine the changes, challenges and opportunities afforded to literature and humanities researchers through the development of digital resources such as ebooks. I've been trying to find articles on pros and cons of studying ebooks, for example the messiness that can occur in citations when different ereaders list pages differently (though this is probably also aggravated by readers being able to change text font and size). I also want to look at the ways that online reading communities, such as Goodreads, can be a resource to researchers in addition to reviews published by magazines and newspapers.

www.goodreads.com

I think this website is a super interesting primary source because it allows researchers to know exactly how books were received by the public upon release. I've also been reading about how this type of platform has a huge impact on how people read, its influence becoming much greater than store displays or the kind of recommendation algorithm that amazon uses (which is probably why Amazon now owns Goodreads). I was also thinking about how reading communities or even online self-publishers could become new areas of study for digital humanists or literary scholars because books and articles about these phenomena are starting to emerge. As you can see, the topic hasn't been narrowed down (or researched) enough yet but this is what I'm thinking about now.