 Last night when we were eating we were we had our own kind of convivial moment all of the presenters I think I asked Who here is a digital humanist and we all kind of looked down at her plate at that point Because we come from we come into this large tent of digital humanities from different. I guess backgrounds and Of course some of us have already said in graduate school when we were starting out digital humanities wasn't yet a thing It wasn't a term So I come to digital humanities. I don't self-identify as a little digital humanist I'm more comfortable identifying myself as an applied linguist somebody who is interested in Solving let's say language problems. There are a lot of language problems. That's the applied part of it usually through kinds of them that the category is given to me by the field of linguistics and And so what I want to do today is talk about is Tom said digital social reading and I'll be pointing out kind of there are a lot of people who have helped me come into this field have drawn me in I see Sam Baker in the back and actually Matthew who are part of this story I've also noted that a lot of our speakers is an amazing amount of intertextuality isn't there We didn't plan all of this all these but I hope that there will be some of the resonances with what I have to say with Previous speakers So I found this if you type if you do a Google search and you're like your presenter And you're trying to find interesting images for your talk All right, and you type in social reading. Do you know what you get? You get a lot of pictures of classrooms actually you get a teacher reading to students and many of us were of course socialized in our own literacy By probably like reading groups remember the reading groups and some people were bluebirds and some people read and so forth. All right So that's a social reading. This is also I think anywhere where you have people reading to each other or reading together can be construed as somehow a social activity This is of course I know many of us where we were read to his children So this is of course a sibling reading to her brother, but it's not the old-fashioned text It's reading something online. So that's really what I'm talking about today So online reading is changing our understanding of what it means to read by blurring the line between private Interpretation and public discussion the history of marginalia provides a very good illustration During the 18th century people routinely marked up books or novels to give us personalized gifts This practice was intended to give the reader the sense of socializing with another person during the private act of reading Um, this is a picture of Sam Anderson. He is a Anybody know Sam Anderson? He writes for the New York Times a book critic What I really want is someone rolling around in the text and Sam Anderson wrote this article in 2011 and He's called today's use of digital marginalia a natural bridge between the reader's private and public worlds Likening the practice of digital marginalia to Twitter Anderson envisions the day or envisioned in 2011 the day when readers will Instantaneously share their thoughts with each other about whatever they're reading and he says and I quote I've long been frustrated with the distance between criticism and reading itself Most critical energy is expended in big-picture work situating text and history talking about broad themes all of which is useful but hardly touches the excitement of actual reading and Process of discovery that happens in time moment by moment Line by line what I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I guess with me. I Want noticing I want in short marginalia Everywhere all the time Now that may not be what you want I'm not sure exactly what I want, but that was what he was saying. That's what he wanted well Anderson's wish has come true because people are using Twitter for exactly that and here is an example Website which facilitates these discussions readups.com in which you can of course we could be doing this today We could be having a handle and you could all be tweeting about my talk right here So live tweeting live tweeting reading war in peace because I'm not going to read war in peace by myself I need some help And so that's the idea Another space like I think for social reading that also has made Anderson's dream come true is genius comm How many people have seen genius just know okay, well good I'm going to bring a really great website to some people to do your attention Genius comm started just a couple of years ago And within the hip-hop community people who were talking about the lyrics of hip-hop songs They wanted to know exactly what they meant And so they started putting the lyrics online and annotating them and talking to each other about the meaning So you see here on the interface we it says lyrics because it was centrally about lyrics And then it started in hip-hop Okay, but there are other versions other kinds of other forms of music that have lyrics So it moved from hip-hop hip-hop to Pop music to classical and on and on and on finally to opera And then people said well, you know with why stop at lyrics. What about literary texts? So then the literary a community joined We now have news we can annotate news we can annotate See me cinema so different kinds of multimedia texts And all again all of these different communities forming around different kinds of texts to annotate them and have a discussion That's so that's a another idea of collaborative annotation that I'll be touching on So here's really what I want to talk about today I'll start off with the problem It's always good because I said my orientation is I like to solve problems and one of the problems I think that people are talking about today is the deteriorating reading skills and this is kind of the um The polemical debate with the old fart professors our students just can't read as well as they used to read All right, and I have also said that so I'm sure we're all we're all old farts at this point The reason of course is digital literacy is replacing real literacy And then I want to pivot a little bit and borrow from a digital humanist somebody who self identifies as a digital humanist kathryn hails who English professor at duke university and she type talks about types of close reading hyper reading and distant reading as Cognitive responses to different environments media environments So a voice of reason I think in the polemical debate And then I'd like to talk also about this notion of bridging than the digital literacy and and print literacy with this concept of social reading Give you two case studies Very different, uh, joanna is a senior lecturer of french at cornell university using uh Using e-com of the software that we have been developing here at the university of texas And joanna uses it with the first semester foreign language course a french course and then shantel warner a professor at University of arizona in german shantel uses used it, uh with a graduate course in second language acquisition. So very different context And then finally i've heard the word mentioned by several of the other speakers today The keyword affordance. So we have a tool. What can you do with this? And that's really one of the things i'm primarily interested in is you give a tool to teachers or to students And they're trying to figure out what to do just as we had a really great presentation, right of uh Bellina saino that it was a great They they they are in an environment. They're trying to figure out. What can I do with this? Okay, so and then if we have time I really want to get to the demo because this is all just a pretext to tell you that uh e comma now exists As a plugin for canvas and for your other lms. It's really easy. We'll show you how we how we can do it So uh technology here we come Okay, so let me start off with then the debate the dumbest generation by mark bower line 2009 um So this is really about disgruntled professors complaining about their students who just can't read literary text and who can't follow Then extended arguments They don't read print. They have short attention spans. What's really interesting here is after the colon here The title is how the digital age stupefies young americans and jeopardizes our future This guy can't find anything good about the digital era as far as literacy goes as the way he defines literacy And he cites in this book a lot of evidence that um, there have been declining skills in reading, of course Based on standardized tests of of reading um, and that again is in 2009 2010 Just a short year later Nicholas Carr who's a science writer science journalist wrote um, I would say a more reasoned book about this issue which is called uh, what the internet is doing to our brains Much of this, um, he goes over the the research in neuroscience And says what your brain is like on print and what your brain is like on digital But when you read the two and I read the two kind of back to back what struck me was while their tone was quite different Um, evaluatively they're very similar. They use the same kinds of adjectives to describe the print So students on print intellectual deep calm attentive thoughtful Digital it's just the polar opposite to anti-intellectual shallow hyperactive distracted thoughtless In fact, that's the name of the book the shallows obviously not everybody agrees uh in 2013 Clive Thompson, uh wrote a book and clive is the head Um technology writer for the new york times smarter than you think I think the brilliant the book is about himself. He's smarter than you um, he So how technology is changing our mind our minds for the better and actually The middle chapter in the book is all about tools to extend our ability to read and make meaning in texts So let me sum up this great literacy debate with this image here Um, I think they're tall everybody's talking about reading, but they're talking about very different things when they use the word reading So this captures it. In fact, the headline actually says online. Are you really reading? What do we mean by reading? So let me stop for just a minute here and as I said, I was googling images for this talk If you type in reading and do a google image search You will get a human But different kinds of humans read different kinds of things So we find overwhelmingly if I saw a book in the picture, I would find a woman women read books And interestingly historically the woman was reading a piece of literature Right and it was a very strong correlation. Go ahead. I you can try it after this talk and see if I'm right Um men read many different kinds of things. They read newspapers. We find here They read sacred texts. They had scrolls. They had things not really quite the book Uh, and then if I found a younger person, they were reading a kindle Uh, they were reading something off their laptop and so forth but the main point for my talk is um, look at what dad is doing and mom is doing so dad is reading the newspaper Mom is reading her novel presumably the book or it could be something else. I don't know But the point is they're in their own World, right? That's what we like to do those of us who've been socialized in literacy I don't necessarily want a whole lot of other You know people in in in in my reading space Um, and certainly they're in their own private world. So they've internalized literacy. It's a private activity But who knows what the kids are doing. They're probably connected to somebody else as they're reading. This is where I um Turn to kathryn hails as I said a digital humanist from duke university And this book came out in 2012 terrific book really interesting book about reading and reading what it means to read today And hails argument is this the age of print is passing and the assumptions presuppositions and practices associated with it Are now becoming visible as media specific practices rather than the largely invisible status quo Um a corollary to this is also that we co-evolve as humans with the actual technology that we make So we we invent tools. They help us do something, but then they come back and they change the way we think hails outlines three different kinds of reading Close reading which is really quintessential for digital humanities or humanities, right? teaching people how to read of a literary text and To slow down the process and to think about meaning Hyper reading as we would just heard about so making connections from the text going off the text us to another text And then finally what we can call machine reading or also known as distant reading now, right? Not close. It's somehow very different than that. So you're not even reading the text at all The machine is reading it for you But what I found interesting about hails uh discussion about these different The tone was not political. She actually takes a cognitive approach So what is it about these three different kinds of reading in terms of cognition? So she describes close reading this way close reading correlates with deep attention the cognitive mode traditionally associated with the humanities That prefers prefers a single information stream focuses on a single cultural object for a relatively long time And has a high tolerance for boredom Um, I don't know how again thinking in terms of how we've been socialized But I'm socialized to such an extent in the print And the print era that I will read a book and I will doggedly finish the book even though I hate the books I'm I'm 200 pages into the book and I've got to finish it So I have a high tolerance for literary or literacy boredom Because of my training in print hyper reading then she describes this way hyper reading is a strategic response to an Intensive environment aiming to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information So that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read Hyper reading correlates with hyper attention a cognitive mode that has a low threshold for boredom Alternates flexibly between different information streams and prefers a high level of Stimulation so that starts to look like some of our students right? Okay, but again in terms of evaluation the way she was framing it was quite different She's approaching it in terms of this is a really intelligent response to the environment Finally machine reading Although machine reading may be used with a single text and reveal interesting patterns It's more customary uses in analyzing corpora too vast to be read by a single person And so there are many synonyms for this so information extraction concordancing pattern recognition data mining distant reading following Franco Moretti's work So another very important point of hails is okay We have these different kinds of readings today and they are real and they exist and they Have good cognitive reasons for these different kinds of of styles of reading She said we've also then entered this tipping point And she cited lots of evidence for this that Students today all read this quote courses in curricula recognize all three reading modalities close hyper and machine Read a reading and prepare students to understand the limitations and affordances of each that's what we should be doing Right now at higher education Because we've already hit the tipping point most of the students coming in to duke university This again is 2012 so it's already passed Have had more experience reading digital text than print text That was her claim this correlation then suggests the need for pedagogical strategies that recognize the strengths and the limitations Of each cognitive mode by implication they underscore the necessity for building bridges between them Okay, let's turn then to social reading. What is that? And this is a nice definition from Joanna looks actually, uh, I cited her she's the senior lecturer at friendship Cornell Who is playing around with this idea of social reading and she defines it this way an internet based activity in which a group of people Collaboratively reads annotates and comments upon a shared text And this is why I cited her because then she turns and talks about it more pedagogical parlance One could say that it constitutes a during reading activity Which I thought was great. So we're used to talking about pre reading and post reading But suddenly we just give them the text and we say go read Okay, so this is focused on the actual act of reading itself So during reading or just reading reading Now it's a little bit more complicated than social reading actually comes in different forms when you start to think about it You can read the same text at the same time with a group of people I think most of the time that's what people mean by social reading Uh, or you can read the same text at different times. So an asynchronous give give your class A text and then as a homework assignment and they're all then writing their commentary around that Or of course you can have a group of people reading different texts, but we're following them kind of reading So we're aggregating in some way their reading activity Okay, let me give you a couple of examples because since we started this at coral And even the genesis of e-commerce started before A couple years previous to that and I'll get to the story there There has been an explosion of annotation software. This has really taken off So here's an example of reading the same text at the same time. This is something called classroom salon Which is a tool that was developed at Carnegie Mellon It's an environment where you can set it up as a classroom and then people are talking and annotating the text at the same time It works also not and when I say text it could be multimedia so you can annotate a video for example Reading the same text at different times. So there are now lots of different sites that have started That are like virtual book clubs basically People who as I mentioned want to read a classic, but they they need a little bit of help in doing that So it's the same idea of you you've signed up for a gem membership But you're really not going to use it and so you need a buddy. You need somebody else to help you along All right, and finally reading different text This is an interesting website called ponder and what I particularly like about this Is their logo p and then after that think then share As opposed to the internet activity of share share share share share Just stop and think ponder just a bit before you share And this works on what they call deconstructing the reading response by giving them You can annotate a text, but you choose your annotations. So it has what they call micro responses to a text So Down here. I question the relevance. I detect artifice. I'm intrigued etc or Devices for persuasion. Oh slippery slope. That's an appeal to a ferris and so forth. So they give them Essentially these prefabricated responses to text and what you can do then quickly With this particular on this particular website and set it up as a classroom And it's free for educators You can follow people as they're reading maybe in the new york times some people like to read editorials Some people like to read different things you can follow what they're reading But you can also see what kinds of reactions they have to text. So going back to read a response theory You can kind of aggregate their response Okay, so another point then is there are many different kinds of tools now being used for what's called social reading And on our website at coral It's just type in e comma and you come to the website We want to show then how these different tools How these different tools differ And as you notice, of course e comma, which is our tool that i'll be talking about in just a moment is free But not all of them are free. Some of them Maybe come bundled with another document that you have to purchase as like a textbook Since we are making products The whole point of coral is to create oer open educational resources We make sure that all of our materials are open. They carry open copyright Are actually open source. This was uh, it's an open source product So all that all that to say that there are lots of new tools out there for annotation, but they are quite different They do different things The master metaphor I think in reading around social Reading has been the the the text as a space a space for socializing And this was an article I came across in the Chronicle of Higher Education This is a professor a digital humanist at NYU And um, he created the uh, thomas morse utopia and he wanted the uh, put it online He didn't create it. He put it online He had his students then create this commentary What actually was interesting for me was just the serendipity of as I was reading this Article this popped up. All right, the new library And so again the the library is the old space where you go to the text here We are all we we we meet together in virtual space to talk around the text. So the text is a space And of course the text is a space not just for socializing, but also for learning. So subtext is This works on iPads So proprietary software, but it's a digital classroom. The space becomes a digital classroom This of course is what I'll be talking about and that this is e comma a collaborative for collaborative reading I published a a chapter in a book actually edited by Lawrence Williams back there On the book was about digital digital literacies in foreign languages Foreign languages and I told a little bit of the chronology of e comma Which started with sam baker Uh professor of english here at at ut who applied for a national It's a startup grant one national endowment for the humanity startup grant Uh with a group of a small group of collaborators graduate students including matthew russell So this is kind of this is nice And travis brown They were developing this tool and I actually saw sam was giving a presentation And I went to because they had just built this great tool and he was talking about it And he was talking about the idea of close reading of literary texts. That's what humanists do And I but he was of course talking about it in terms of the Uh, I guess you were talking about a freshman english classroom And I kept thinking to myself everything we do in foreign languages is close reading to the point where we look up words We have to parse the sentence. We're who's doing what to whom it's all close reading Uh, and so I became very interested in this tool Uh long story short, uh when when we got the grant to develop coral Uh natalie steinfeld. So all things technology. That's what that natalie's doing She's a web designer graphic artist for coral She started to reprogram Uh e comma in drupal, which is an open content management system. We wanted to make this as open to the public as possible And today I'm really happy because it now is working. It's a plug-in for I think the kind of killer app now It's gonna it's a it's a plug-in for canvas or for blackboard. It's really easy to use finally So the main idea here is to start with students own digital practices as a natural part for training them in other kinds of literacy instruction In other words, that's that was really what kathryn hails point was You start with students you start where they are instead of wishing that they were something that they're not like go Of that nostalgia And just teach the student in front of you. So what can they do? Well, they have all these these Uh these new talents in digital literacy Let's build a bridge then to the things that we want to teach them about print literary texts And I bumped into sam a couple days ago and he said he was coming. I kind of changed my slides quickly And I to take advantage of of this opportunity I knew he would be in the and so this is exactly what I saw him do I went and and visited a couple of his classes And he was at the time talking about the wasteland by ts leot So let me just read this gives you their original layout So here we have the text on the left And then we have a word cloud And you see here in the the little the box the blue and the red So the the blue are going to be comments and the red are going to be tags and I'll explain that just a minute But that was the interface So let me read the first stand to hear the river's tent is broken the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet bank The wind crosses the brown land unheard The nymphs are departed sweet hems run softly till I end my song Remember there's only two things to do in this program you tag or you comment You drag your cursor over a piece of text and then you tag it or you comment about it And a tag usually is a single word a comment is a little bit more developed Not too developed because nobody wants to read a paragraph. I just want to read a Sentence or two what I became interested in is when do students do close reading what we conceptualize the close reading in this environment When do they do hyper reading and when might they do This new thing called machine reading What I witnessed in sam's English, you know freshman English Classes is that yes, they do a lot of close reading they discuss a lot word meaning basically so here um, we have somebody who Has underlined the word sink And he says sinking refers to negative things happening if something is sinking It is going down and can also sometimes symbolize defeat And because this is social people respond to each other agreed the harder one tries to get out of sinking sand The further they sink kind of the same idea So the whole point of social reading is that you get into uh back and forth between each other Not you're just reading the text you're reading each other reading the text So they talk about lexical meaning they talk obviously about metaphors So uh here Somebody says the river's tent is broken. They've highlighted that part of the text and right The river seems to be mentioned because the river is supposed to flow yet It is broken meaning that the flow of the land in place could be broken something is not right And I won't read through all of the different responses, but they're all different interpretations of this possible metaphor Somebody says, uh, I like in the middle there. I think the river's tent is the cover of trees and vegetation overhanging the river itself One thing they do um in close reading of course is to take a stand. They evaluate the text So brown is a dull color very boring and uneventful there to describe life and travis writes I don't think brown means uneventful. It seems that there's a lot happening here So they disagree And finally What's interesting is there as I mentioned, they're not only evaluating the text, but they're evaluating each other and this is where it becomes tricky, let's just say so Javier writes he has then highlighted the entire stanza And he writes the city has been deserted for some time and no human activities can be observed in town Which is conveyed in these lines the river bears no empty bottles sandwich papers silk handkerchief, etc Even the bank executives have left for good leaving no addresses yet the departure was not by choice for the majority It was against their will and kevin writes. I like the way you deduce such vast knowledge I bet wikipedia is how you find all the work you do Okay Right they get snarky with each other they call each other out. They think this is not quite quite honest of you Is this actually your interpretation or somebody else's because if it's somebody else's then you better cite it I was really impressed by that Okay, so that's kind of the close Reading activity that I saw very much present in the social space Now hyper reading was also very very apparent So when our students are reading online in ikama, they're using all kinds of different tools So here somebody writes brian writes Le Mans is french for lake geneva in an archaic word for mistress And of course, so where is he getting that from so he of course is using online translators Are are they have all kinds of what I was really amazed by was how Mediated the whole activity was with the all kinds of different tools and they're using different tools So if they're using a bilingual dictionary, it's the one that they know how to use not necessarily anybody else Um google searches they'll type in a word And so here the title is the wasteland and the fire sermon have to do with setting in in the story Elliott uses words such as dead earth and bear trees and blah blah blah and again kevin writes Where'd you google that? Yes, I think some of the comments should be cited. So again, they are already aware that everybody is using all these different tools It's just part of reading online now This is now our new updated version and uh, it works in and drupal So we still have the text to the left and then you can see over here These different icons. This is a tag Uh, and these are comments. So we have six people have made tags and we have 44 comments This is a cloud. So you can take all their comments and we turn them into a word cloud We also have then a cloud here. This is this this does a word cloud of the text itself. So this is jabberwocky and by lewis carol And I was doing a kind of a I'm showing a group of foreign language people So all different languages in the room And I thought well, maybe Use jabberwocky that can at least Simulate to a certain extent what it's like to be reading in a foreign language because you're really trying to Create meaning with others So somebody highlights borogos while memsie were the borogos And what they do is they put in a link here because they're going out searching the web for what is a borogo And of course I had no idea but there's something called mucket wiki an Entire wiki devoted to the muppets Um, which is terrific because every single referent in this poem has a visualization on it So annotations of course as they're going off. That's another important point annotations are not just Text to text but text to other forms of media and this is really important obviously for foreign languages in the foreign language context so um Again, I was doing a jabberwocky at a different conference, but people So here Come to my arms my bimish boy This is uh han says is this positive or negative And then somebody writes at a different han's writes in I gave them about four names You could either be han's or pie or whatever Um, and they were just trying to say does it work in arabic? Does it work in hebrou? But it also works in video So that's an important point. So not only is it multilingual, but it's also Multimodal crossing that's hyper media. They're constantly going out of the text to then bring back information in different ways I was really interested in the kind of lack of use actually of this one machine reading tool Which is the word cloud, which is pretty basic. Most students know what a word cloud is They know they quickly look at it. They realize it's the it tells you information about the frequency lexical You can see how frequent the word is the more frequent it is the bigger it is right in the cloud I started thinking of um activities to promote the use of machine tools And this was an activity I actually did in a graduate course Focused on linguistic variation. So I gave them this text Uh This is not french This is creole french or louisiana creole And first of all, it's not a written language. So the people who are writing Creole french are usually literate in english and and uh, uh in french So that means that they're borrowing. They're making it up So what I had them do is look for variation Orthographic variation and think about how that orthographic variation may have all kinds of different reasons. What's going on? So it's nice. You can click on the word and of course it highlights it in the text and you quickly see then that here mo mo Then mo with the apostrophe or with the accents. Are they are they the same? What is this different? What what is going on here and ask them to hypothesize? So that was my effort of trying to get them to use this one feature of our software that they weren't using very often It also another form of machine reading is a heat map. So as There's a lot of activity going on in people A whole class is marking up a text parts of the text you can see quickly at a glance This is the last line of the poem liberte by edouard Um And the last stanza is and by the power of a word and the whole word he's leading up to is the word liberty liberte So this was heavily everybody in the class had something to say about that last stanza Let me get to my two case studies. How are people using this? um, joanna a lower division The the director of lower division french at cornell Adopted e comma and she was really interested in um In trying to she had been reading the mla report 2007 which talks about translingual trans cultural competence This notion of movement between languages And she said so she was she devised activities that explicitly invoked this kind of notion of moving between languages so She wanted them to think deeply about what it means to translate and she then um She was using materials that we'd started at the university of texas for our french program constantly anti-actif And she said i like them, but yes Um, they're not enough literary readings for me. I really want to supplement this with literary readings. I said fine. Go ahead Go to town. It's an open educational resource. So you can supplement it She turned out to go well beyond what I thought our textbook was really all about and I said we need to um Package this as its own oer Uh, which we call the detail don cotidia the literary in the everyday And we're doing it now. It's kind of grown into a project. So there are other people who are developing literacy activities are along Along these lines, but anyhow if you're interested in that you can go to our website And it's called the literary in the everyday, but this is what she did She gave them a friend. I'm just giving you a small sample of the text um, she Chose um some short prose poems this uh, danie la ferrière is a Haitian poet And what's interesting here is that he uh moved from Haiti to Montreal Huge change And he chronicles. That's why it's called a conic. He chronicles every single day Something that he sees that just is startling to him And what's interesting though is that the language is fairly simple So she thought that it would be actually doable for first year French students So we have a couple in train de s'embrasser à l'aéroport un baiser interminable La file est en mini jupe rouge So a couple who are embracing in the airport And this a means a kiss And interminable and terminable The girl is in a red mini skirt Okay, so this um a student wrote and remember the activity she told the students that they could she wanted them to explicitly comment on In English on the text To provoke a kind of this meta awareness about Moving between the two frames and moving between one language and what are the problematics of that? So the student highlighted and terminable And writes we're limited here by our ability to work with the word in French while not knowing exactly how it Translates in English Does and tell me not have the same exact meaning in French as it does in English if so then and busy and tell me now But here is a negative connotation a kiss that's unbearably almost annoyingly long and dragged out If in French and tell me now that may also translate to other less loaded words such as perhaps endless endless love Then connotation changes perhaps the author isn't put off by the extravagance of the kiss Okay, so The whole point is and this is a very important point to drill home at the very beginning in foreign languages Cognates are not always your friends. Okay, they're false friends as we say But that's just a representation of using the tool to raise their awareness about the problematics of meaning Sometimes you lose something sometimes you gain something Another very different use of eekama was by shantel warner Chantel so the three of us are now working on the the project as I said the literary in every day, but Chantel was teaching a graduate course at the time um and In sla in second language learning called narrative the Narrativity and I've taken this From our website where we actually have Joanna and chantel recount their case studies of how they use this But so she writes I used eekama in a graduate level seminar titled literacy through language Literacy through literature The course explores the role that literary text and aesthetic reading play in the development of second language literacies Literacy is used here both in the traditional sense of reading of the reading of a printed text And in the wider sense of multiliteracies which include social and cultural literacies as well as new media literacies One of the readings for the course was a chapter from narratologist ryan's book narrative as virtual reality On immersivity and interactivity as two modes of reading narrative texts At the end of this chapter ryan introduces an example from the book if on a winter's night a traveler by italic Corino, so I see guy rafa nodding his head. Yes, I know that I decided to use eekama to allow students to consider ryan's distinction between immersive and interactive reading And to examine what kinds of pedagogical interventions might encourage one or the other mode of engagement So what she basically did was she there's a point at which In the text as he's telling the story He turns to the reader the narrator turns to the reader. It's very startling If any of you have watched the house of cards, right? No, you haven't watched house of cards So okay, so francis underwood who's played by kevin space. He turns to you You're watching and he addresses you directly the first time it happened. It's quite startling now. I've gotten used to it, right? But anyhow, that's there was a moment in the text and she wanted to be there right then To follow their reactions. She was using eekama for that To creating a social space to catch their readers To really to kind of talk about There the phenomenology of what it feels like to be reading in that moment. So really read a response And again, I'm collecting case studies. So if those of you who are using eekama, you can go right here This is our website and take a look Let me quickly end by talking a little bit about the affordances of social reading of what I'm seeing then people thinking they can do with eekama social readers can Visualize group behavior to grasp the concept of interpretive communities. I've used this before I've given the same poem to different groups of readers and then said look at I've done this with my students And then turn around and give it to let's say native speakers And the students are watching the annotations and thinking oh, they're going to turn left No, they turned right. Well, this is a kind of activity that they I've never really been able to do before so the notion of interpretive community We can see the activity. It leads a it leaves a trace Creates what I'm calling a zpd. So this is of course from by Gatsby This notion of what you can do by yourself versus what you can do with a more talented other a more of the expert So it creates this space where you can do things that you couldn't do by yourself But you have other people to help you It of course lightens the cognitive load because you can distribute the task So it's kind of a great example of distributed cognition You know, I've seen people the students actually before they do a task in class We'll talk about how they're going to divide and conquer the text This is actually an important point too. I never really thought about this as a teacher when you give a Text to to your class you assume that they're all going to read it in the same way No, so that was really what's interesting is how they actually Talk out their interpretation of their strategies before they read the book the text It frees the text of from the linearity of print This of course may not be a great thing. It really depends on what you want to do But there's because they're in a hyper act a hypermedia text space. They jump all around And finally As I mentioned, it's the task of reading is mediated by all kinds of digital tools The whole main point here is I'm trying to get across is to try to figure out the right mix of close hyper and machine reading These different kinds of strategies what works for which text it's complicated Let me end by citing another book the proust and the squid The story and science of the reading brain So proust is to represent of course the incarnation of the humanist the story of reading Proust himself, of course wrote a lot about reading and writing so he Not just write literary texts, but he actually talked about reading literary texts And the squid comes from Mary Ann Wolfe the author is a Neuroscientist she's interested in the reading brain And she she looks at different kinds of Organisms in their brain activity. So that's the idea of the squid So she writes at the very end of her book which again came out in 2007 Which now is a long time ago And so that means the manuscript was like 2005 it's published a couple years later And the tipping point that Catherine hails talks about hasn't had has not yet hit But she's seeing this change in her students So she writes the question that emerges Therefore is this what would be lost to us if we replace the skills Hone by the reading brain with those now being formed in our new generation of digital natives who sit and read With others before a screen I'd like to update her Final quote and maybe just paraphrase this and say that I think the question should be what could we Could be gained if we bridge the skills honed by the print reading brain with those now being formed In our new generation of digital natives who sit and read with others before a screen Again in my google search of images. This was actually my favorite example of Social reading it's not digital social reading, but it's the coolest technology of the 1960s or perhaps 50s I don't know 3d comic books, but that's pretty cool