>If you remember my post on readers and new media from a couple weeks ago, I mentioned this article on an author (Jurgen Neffe) who took advantage of the e-reader format to create circular texts, or ones without a beginning or end. A quick internet search on the author revealed this article entitled “The disembodied book,” which is a pretty thorough discussion of the author’s views on the future of the book and authorship, and the future of reading. He is optimistic about the possibility of more authors being recognized and readers interacting with texts in new ways, although he frames this within the downfall of the print book. I’m one of those folks that feels like we don’t have to choose: I have a Kindle e-reader but still read paper texts as well. However, he doesn’t associate the reduction of print books to their complete elimination, which is an argument I feel has been made far too many times (insert frantic ‘print is dying! We will never read printed books again!’ comments here). Continue reading “>Circular Texts, both Digital and Tangible”
>Email and "Oral History" Interviews
>I recently submitted an article entitled “E-mail as a Medium for ‘Oral History:’ A Personal Account” (it’s under review at the moment). Basically I conducted a personal history interview using e-mail, and I wanted to compare that experience with that of recording an oral history interview in the traditional way. One thing that really excited me is that these interviews are already digitized (although obviously there isn’t a digital audio component), which could save libraries money on creating digital copies of interviews (a theory that only works, of course, if a lot of interviews are done this way and then gifted to libraries. Otherwise the effect would be negligible).
Julia C. Skinner 