books

In the United States, a student in the 20th percentile reads books for 0.7 minutes per day, while a student in the 98th percentile reads 65 minutes per day (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998). For the last four years, with 300 children from Title 1 schools and the Boys & Girls Club, we researched how to create digital texts that better cognitively engage struggling readers using psychophysiological sensors, eye tracking, and co-creation. This research led to the creation of Wonder Stories. Wonder Stories’ texts motivate students to critically think by immersing students in frequent, story-based questions. As a response to children’s low motivations during COVID19, we added a social competition to Wonder Stories – answering questions correctly gave points in a trivia-like game. When struggling readers were given Wonder Stories, students mentally showed up: their participation increased, readers were more cognitively engaged with the material, and students were critically thinking about the text more often. This study suggests that interactive, question-based reading shows great promise to increasing children’s participation and engagement in middle-grade reading.

(Source: The work's own abstract)

"What is a book?" This is the question the text starts of with and the question the text circles around, exploring the material basis of reading and writing. Parallel to the theoretical examination and anecdotal reference to the history of the written word, the author positions a post-apocalyptic fiction about the last reader.

Scott Rettberg presents his forthcoming monograph Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018), Joseph Tabbi introduces the collection The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018). Eric Rasmussen moderates a discussion of the two books and the field of electronic literature. Part of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base symposium at the University of Bergen, April 27, 2018.

“The Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit includes objects and artifacts, books, computers and software, posters and ephemera documenting the rise of the field of electronic literature over the past four decades. Electronic literature includes literary works that take advantage of the context of the computer and the contemporary networked environment. This broad category of digital work includes genres such as hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, computer art installations with literary aspects, interactive fiction, novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs, poems and stories that are generated by computers, network-based collaborative writing projects, and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. The field is essentially focused on potentially transformative uses of the computer to develop new literary genres, and the experiments that contemporary writers and artists are conducting within the new communications paradigm.

(Source: Introduction to the exhbition catalogue)

A discussion of the film, The Matrix in the context of the future of books, the aestheticization of coding, and the insistence of the analog.  Appears online in CTheory and in Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader. 

Coover's "The End of Books" essay in the New York Times significantly introduced hypertext fiction to a wider literary audience. The essay describes that ways that hypertext poses challenges for writers and readers accustomed to coventional narrative forms, including assumptions about linearity, closure, and the division of agency between the writer and reader.