Digital Humanities at Geneseo

More and more information and literature is available to us through only few clicks or swipes thanks to resources such as the Digital Public Library of America  and Project Gutenberg, but today’s ever-evolving technology can also allow for censorship of these materials. Clean Reader  is a fairly new e-reader app that allows readers to censor swearwords and other offensive phrases from books purchased through the app’s online bookstore. A recent article from the Guardian goes into further depth about the app, created by the mother and father of a young student in Idaho.

While the app received positive feedback initially, as indicated in the initial article, the tide soon turned as authors began to notice that their work was being censored. Less than two weeks after the publication of this article, another was posted about the outcry from the censored authors. Fittingly, most of the protests came from Twitter and blogs, as has become the norm in today’s digital world.

Hate the book. Ignore the book. Burn the book. Tear up the book. Just don’t try to rewrite the book. #CleanReader

— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) March 25, 2015

My $.02 on #CleanReader… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, you couldn’t read my opinion, my words? Blame #CleanReader!

— Debra Kayn (@DebraKayn) March 25, 2015

#CleanReader would turn the act of “breastfeeding” into the far creepier-sounding “chestfeeding.” “FEED FROM MY CHEST, PROGENY.”

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) March 26, 2015

These very public objections have led the founders of Clean Reader to remove the books that belong to the Inktera and Smashwords bookselling systems, as well as those of several other authors, from their bookstore. The removal of these books has been seemingly swift and fairly painless. Author Joanne Harris, one of the app’s biggest opponents, considered this a win, telling the Guardian, ” It is a small victory for the world of dirt. And a wise move on their behalf. I think somebody would have proved how fundamentally illegal it is, and would have taken them to court … it’s interesting to see how pressure from the internet has done it, and how widespread support is for the integrity of books. A lot of people don’t want to see books tampered with.”

Authorial intention seems to be an underlying issue of the controversial Clean Reader app. Many of the supporters of the app don’t believe the author’s intentions are significant in reading a book, and feel that once a book is published, readers can do with it what they please, and this apparently includes changing words in the text. Most of the authors seem to align with Harris, whose opinion is clearly the opposite.  Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other forms of social media have made knowing an author’s intentions much easier than in the past. While we rely on Thoreau’s journals, correspondence, and revisions to attempt to understand his intent in writing Walden, many authors today will directly answer questions from their readers through various social media platforms. Whether or not this is a good thing is debatable, but in the case of Clean Reader, I feel it is a positive.

When you walk down the street what do you see? The sun shining through the leaves along the sidewalk, a hint of a breeze flutter through a woman’s hair, two friends reuniting after a long separation. Or are you even looking up at all? These days most of what I see when I am walking around is people disconnected from the world around them. Instead there are men and women walking around with their heads down and eyes staring into the florescent light of a cell phone screen. It’s a fact that technology has become a very strong presence in the world today and we have seen many great things come from it. Now if a kid is abducted the police can track him with the cell phone that is on him, or the fact that soldiers who come home from overseas with lost limbs have a chance or regaining what they lost. We can watch the sun rise on Mars and a woman who has been deaf her whole life can now hear her child’s voice for the first time. Technology is a beautiful thing, and we need it, but with something great there is always a limit, some act of self-control that is necessary.
Although there are great aspects of technology there are of course some disadvantages that accompany the perks of doing things electronically, the greatest disadvantage being the disconnection of people from the world around them. Technology has become such a large part of our world now that some people have chosen to live in a virtual world instead of try to connect with the real one. Instead of taking the time and energy to struggle through school people can get degrees even PhD’s online. Kids are spending hours playing video games with their friends instead of going outside and enjoying the fresh air. Technology is destroying human communication; people are slowly losing the urge and ability to speak to other people face to face instead of through a screen. Now this may make me sound like I was born in the 1920’s, preaching to little kids about how “back in my day” we couldn’t go online and use the land line at the same time, but after doing some research one would have to agree that there is a problem here, maybe not with all people but with a large part of the human population. In an article by Carolyn Gregoire for the Huffington Post, she writes about the decline in eye contact and how it is connected to the increase in digital use. “An adult makes eye contact between 30 and 60 percent of the time in a typical conversation” she writes “but emotional connection is built when eye contact is made during 60-70 percent of the conversation. In other words, the less eye contact, the less of a connection is made”.

How Technology Is Killing Eye Contact

Possibly the greatest improvement that we have experienced in our daily lives with technology is the different ways we can keep in touch. When we meet people we like or friends with whom we wish to stay in contact with or even those with whom we have lost contact, Facebook aids us in making sure we keep those people in our lives. Of course, there is such a thing as over doing something. “The Anti- Social Network” is a short film on YouTube that explores the idea of taking Facebook too far, and how it affects the way you connect with people in your life. There is a big difference between connecting with people on Facebook and spending your whole life telling those people what you are doing. We all have one of those friends who posts everything they are doing on Facebook every five minutes. There is something that can be said for maintaining some level of privacy.

I am of course guilty of all the things I discussed in this post. I myself friend people on Facebook and sometimes there is a lack of eye contact in my daily conversations. I check my phone to see if I have any new text messages, and when I’m feeling like a true techie I might even take a picture of my food if it looks really good. I am not trying to say that technology is the enemy and that the Terminator movies are based on the future of our world. What I am saying is yes, technology is amazing, but we all need to learn how to have it in our lives without letting it dominate our lives. Sometimes it’s good for us to just be able to sit and not do anything but think, or to have a conversation with the cute guy on the bus instead of texting about him to a friend. We all have a timer on how long we get to be on this planet, and when we are connecting ourselves to the wrong world we lose the precious time that we are given in the right world. So the next time you take your phone out to snap pictures of that beautiful sunset from the gazebo, or tweet about the cute girl you saw in the library, stop. Enjoy those last rays of sunshine before they disappear behind the mountains, ask that girl about the book about coffee she’s reading and ask her if she wants to grab a cup. Think of it this way. Life is a cup of tea and technology is the sugar. You want a cup of tea, not a cup of sugar. Let technology do what it was made for, that is to act as an aid throughout life, not a chauffeur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2V9-3ZwnIU

With all of our class discussions recently dealing with webpages, command line, and other advanced features like those, I could not help but think of the movie The Social Network that shows us how Facebook was created.

It is very interesting to think about the fact that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was in college. Originally only a Harvard networking site, it quickly expanded to other campuses, it gained immense popularity quickly. From there any user with an email address could register for Facebook. It then began to spread worldwide.

Something that started out as a small university social networking site is now one of the most popular sites used by people all over the world.

Keeping that in mind, it is very interesting to think about just how much coding and webpage knowledge went into making such a popular social networking site. People are always frequenting Facebook in their spare time, checking their notifications and seeing what their friends are up to.

People frequent Facebook so often in our society today that it caused a writer from the New Yorker to write an article arguing that Facebook is making us unhappy. I will admit, if I have free time I find myself checking Facebook. More than I may like to admit.

Whether you have positive or negative things to say about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created an immensely  popular social networking site with his webpage and other computer skills. After being enlightened on some of these skills and their uses by practicing with some of them in class, I can definitely gather it was an extensive process he went through to make Facebook as the movie the Social Network shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2DbqtpDno

source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia

“You kids don’t know how to have real conversations anymore”, “You spend so much time playing on that cell phone of yours”, “You aren’t going to know how to express yourself in the real world after all that texting.” These are things that I’m sure almost all of us have heard at some point, whether it be from our parents, grandparents, teachers, or maybe even that annoying aunt; but regardless of whoever had said it, there is a good chance that they were most likely a great deal older, having grown up in a generation that was not as heavily reliant on technology as ours is today. Now, it is very easy to just brush off these comments, as most kids our age, and teens especially, clearly know everything. And of course, what would these older folks know? They didn’t have technology like this. They’re obviously just stating that we’re wrong because our lifestyle varies so much from what theirs once was.

Here’s a crazy idea…maybe their criticism actually isn’t completely wrong this time, maybe we are in fact lacking in the social skills that they had when they were our age. Yeah so maybe you would rather sit on the couch at a family gathering and text your friends about how bored you are, or it could be less nerve-wracking for you to text your crush rather than asking them on a date. But  if you really think about these things, they’re kind of sad because you are potentially allowing yourself to miss out on so many little things, like the joy of laughing with your friends instead of typing “LOL” while you actually maintain a straight face. Even though these things may make me sound like a grandma, I would like to point our that there are plenty of studies that prove that this concept is actually true.

One study in particular held by UCLA included sixth graders whom were separated from their devices and had no choice but to interact with each other during a week of summer camp. These children were occupied with other social activities; they had no choice but to interact with one another. Meanwhile, the control group whom did not have their devices taken away maintained their usual interactions with social media. The end result proved that the children who did not have any contact with their technological devices showed an increased understanding and capability of identifying emotions; the control group essentially remained the same. Yes it’s true that these are only children, but these children are at at point in their lives where that are capable of understanding complex human reactions. Similar studies on adults proved to have similar results as well.

Maybe parents should monitor their children’s access to social media more so to avoid these situations? Unfortunately there are a lot of difficulties regarding this possible solution. Today’s society is so heavily reliant on technology that, even if the child’s technology use is limited at home, their education will now heavily rely on it as well. Today’s children are learning how to do essentially everything with technology. Yet, this is not necessarily a bad thing either, because by the time these kids are our age, they’re going to appear as if they’re miniature Einstein’s. in our eyes when we are no longer up to date with all the modern technology. This is very important because at the rate the world is going at, we are probably going to have hover cars in the near future.

Technology is moving too fast to even make an attempt at avoiding using it. It’s literally everywhere. But knowing the possible strains it may cause on our social skills is very important. As long as we are aware of such issues I think that we could easily make time to not use technology for a little bit, maybe even do something crazy like have a small gathering with our friends as opposed to just texting in the group chat. Now that you’re done reading this I think you maybe turn off your computer, go outside, and take up a new hobby to try and make some new friends! (and try not to tweet about it)

Digital tools, as we’ve been learning, are a valuable asset when it comes to studying the humanities. With this in mind, I wondered, what other unexpected areas are similarly touched by technology? As it turns out, there’s a concentrated effort to transform the government – in all its massive, extensive, and inefficient glory – with open-source programs and teams of everyday coders. Code for America, founded in 2009, is a nonprofit organization that seeks to change the government with the use of technology.

This organization focuses on working with local governments. It enlists technologically-apt “fellows” to work in partnership with various local government for a year, in an effort to improve health, economic development, and safety & justice. In addition, they sponsor volunteer brigades, a network of interested government workers, and a few other groups in order to make the government more technologically-minded.

In this TED Talk video, Jennifer Pahlka talks about the vision Code for America has for government and citizenship. She makes it clear that embracing open source technology and creating apps that encourage people to take on more civic responsibilities can have a huge impact on the relationship between government and citizens.

While I was browsing through some of the applications Code for America has created, I found a few great examples of the different ways in which technology can impact us. For instance, take the “Public Art Finder” app, which is currently available in five U.S. cities. It allows users to find and learn about public art using a map interface, thus supporting local art and bringing interested citizens to it. I also looked at Boston’s “DiscoverBPS” app, which offers parents information on the admittance requirements, data, and test scores of area schools they might consider for their children.

What really stood out to me was how open all of these resources are. While I don’t know nearly enough about technology to understand how these apps work and how they can be spread, it is clear that this organization provides anyone looking at these programs with their codebases and instructions (albeit complicated ones) on how to employ them in your area. All of the information is accessible and open, serving as an example of the kind of change that can be made with the use of digital tools.

What exactly qualifies as literature? A century ago, the answer to that question was pretty straightforward: novels, plays, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction – basically any form of creative writing. Nowadays, many people (including myself) would argue that that list should be expanded to contain more modern forms such as movies, television, comics, and even video games, but humanity as a whole has yet to come to a consensus on whether or not these media belong in the same category as the works of history’s most revered writers. But the controversy doesn’t stop there; the line between what is and is not literature has recently become even more distorted with the advent of a new art form: the visual novel.

If you’ve never heard of visual novels, don’t worry; you’re not totally out of the loop. Right now, visual novels are not very well-known in the English speaking world due to the vast majority being produced in Japan, although in the past few years, more and more have been getting English localizations through the gaming website Steam, and others have fan translations that can be easily downloaded. What exactly is a visual novel, you ask? It’s a type of game, usually released for computers, but often available for platforms like Playstation and Xbox systems and mobile devices as well. The game tells a story, usually from the first person point of view, through text providing the narration and dialogue (which is often voiced), as images of the scenery and characters (generally in an anime art style) are shown on the screen and background music plays. Here’s a sample of what a visual novel might look like:

While some visual novels have linear storylines, most play similarly to a Choose Your Own Adventure book; the player, taking on the role of the protagonist, makes decisions which affect the ending of the story. These visual novels are intended to be played multiple times so the player can see each possible ending. This is what it looks like in Key Visual Arts’ “Rewrite” when the protagonist is asked whether he would rather change the world or himself:

Some visual novels focus almost entirely on the story and are really not much like video games at all, whereas others include gameplay elements as well. For example, my personal favorite visual novel, Key Visual Arts’ “Little Busters!”, is about a high school baseball team, and it includes a minigame in which the player can practice batting:

And then there are more traditional video games which include visual novel content as a secondary aspect of the experience, like KLab’s “Love Live! School Idol Festival,” which is primarily a rhythm game, but allows the player to unlock new chapters of a story upon completing gameplay-related goals.

So are visual novels literature, or is it misleading for them to even be called novels? It’s really a matter of personal opinion, but I think there’s something to be said for the fact that many visual novels evoke emotional responses in their players just as intense as the ones felt by the readers of traditional novels. Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it can’t hurt to try one out if you have some spare time.

In English 340 we, collectively, have talked and written quite extensively on the topic of ebooks and digital literature in general. I would like to continue that conversation, but extend it to something we haven’t really discussed— what online literature means for the future of book publishing.

 I am a big fan of noted YA author and videoblogger John Green. More than five years ago, Green wrote an “Internet-based, multimedia book” entitled This is Not Tom, and then wrote an article in the School Library Journal reflecting on this experience. (This article was written in 2010 and its main audience is school librarians, but it’s definitely worth a read.)

The conversation surrounding ebooks/ereaders right now tends to take the shape of an argument as to whether physical paper books or online books are better or more comfortable to read or more conducive to learning, etc. Green argues, and I am inclined to agree, that we are asking the wrong questions. The physical medium of literature is of relatively little importance. Of more immediate concern is what digital literature means for the distribution and publication of future books.

Here is basically how book publishing works right now: Publishers receive millions of manuscripts a year, they agree to publish a tiny fraction of said manuscripts, the authors then spend a lot of time revising the manuscripts with professional editors so that the books are as good as they can be, and they are published and sent to bookstores.

Here is how book publishing could work in the future: Bookstores, which are already in decline, won’t exist. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart will sell only a limited selection of the best selling books. The rest of authors hoping to see their books in print will self-publish and try to sell their books online. These books won’t go through publishers so will be unedited and unmediated. Green compares this world of publishing to YouTube: “Millions of books get a few readers, and a few books get a million readers.”

The biggest problem with the latter model is that with only a few books going through publishers, the quality of books will be lesser and the market will be so crowded that it will be near impossible for readers to find what they want to read. Even the books that are sold in Wal-Mart will appeal to the lowest common denominator for lack of a better term, and some may actually start out as self-published (and unedited) ebooks that are then picked up by a major publisher, a la Fifty Shades of Grey. (Think of all the awful books that will be published and turned into awful movies.)

This all sounds very alarming, but it is a debatable topic. Maybe it would be a good thing if traditional publishing were to die out. It might give languishing authors a better chance to find readers. Maybe with our ever-increasing technology, we’ll find a way to make sure books published online are polished to be the best reading experience they can be, and that the best ebooks rise to fame while the worst fall to obscurity.

I don’t know how the future of book publishing will turn out. The digital age might have a lot of exciting innovation in store. It will change the way we read, but exactly how remains to be seen. Maybe every novel we read in the future will be a multi-media experience. But first and foremost, I believe, we need to make sure that future generations will have good books to read, and that future good books will find broad readerships. Green writes, “We must preserve that magical moment when the space between you and me evaporates, and we are all of us making a story real together. Bells and whistles are all fine and good, but the writer must not leave the story behind, and the reader must not be allowed to abandon her responsibility as cocreator: she, and she alone, can make a story real.”

Here is another article that quickly sums up some of the issues I discussed: http://outthinkgroup.com/the-10-awful-truths-about-book-publishing

Considering this is a class focused largely around the use of the computer and all it has to offer, one thing i thought would be important to discuss is the enormous debate surrounding one of the most significant uses for a computer: The Internet.

With the almost exponential growth of social media, search engines, multi-media sites, and the internet in general, there has been a lot of debate recently on whether Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be able to offer different rates to customers based on their internet-based content or service type.

Under this mentality, ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon would be able to charge their customers different amounts based on the websites they used and how they used them. This tiered internet model would resemble the current cable model, in which a user is charged extra to access certain content like Showtime or HBO. For example, a user who uses the internet for only one purpose, such as researching information on Google, would be charged for less internet speed than a person who used it for several purposes, such as researching and high speed media streaming sites. This would consequently carve the internet into a tiered information highway.

A large contributing factor to this change in mindset, is the growing number of cord cutters, or people who no longer subscribe to cable and instead get their entertainment from streaming websites such as Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube.

When one downloads media from a site such as Hulu, the information arrives in packets, delivered by your ISP. Under the net neutrality concept, all of those packets need to be delivered at the same time, at the same speed. If there was no such thing as net neutrality, Hulu would be able to pay your ISP a certain amount to make sure their packets got delivered more efficiently.

This is significant because it gives your Internet Service Provider an inordinate amount of power over what you are going to consume. Media columnist David Carr is quoted in the New York Times stating, “Who gets to go fast, and who gets to go slow … If my message comes to you really slowly, and another person’s message comes quickly and directly, who is going to be heard?”  And the implications of that run much deeper than just streaming movies from Netflix.

ISPs would be able to slow down your connection to websites that they disagreed with politically, as well as slow down a competitors’ content. This would consequently eliminate the open internet and it’s historical advocacy for free speech.

I feel that this ability to go out into the open internet and be able to research and experience every single thing the internet has to offer ties in closely with Thoreau’s ideology of being an “adventurous student” and focusing on experiential learning. When one goes out into the open internet, they are able to exercise their freedom of speech and right to public knowledge. When one’s options are limited or confined by something, it limits the amount of meaningful experiences they can have, perspectives they can gain and thus their overall knowledge on a topic. This limiting of options is something that i think Thoreau would advise against. While he does have his own elitist views and confines freedoms in his own way, he does believe that being engulfed in an environment without any filters, and with only your experiences is the best way to grow, learn, and truly expand your mind.