 Hello. My name is Carl Blythe. I'm from the University of Texas at Austin. My digital poster is entitled Reads Well with Others, Understanding the Rise of Social Reading. And I'd like to begin by citing a well-known tipping point, and that is that the typical incoming freshman student at American University, universities and colleges, has read more digital text than they have read print text. This is a tipping point that is having large cognitive consequences and is really fueling than the great literacy debate. Many of us who teach in higher education know that there are those who think that digital, so-called digital literacy, is creating, as Mark Bauerline has called, the dumbest generation. It is undermining their ability to think, their ability to make an extended argument, their ability to understand a literary text. This book was published in 2009, and just a year later in 2010, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows appeared. Nicholas Carr is a journalist who focuses on technology, science and technology, and he wrote a very provocative piece in The Atlantic arguing about the effect, the consequences of the internet, and then he turned this into a much longer book. But it's more sober and more scientific than the first book, The Dumbest Generation, but it reaches pretty much the same conclusions. And what's really interesting is if you do a comparison of how they understand the print literacy versus digital literacy or print readers versus digital readers, the valence is pretty clear. Print is good, digital is bad. Print readers are intellectual, deep, calm, attentive, and thoughtful, and digital, they're anti-intellectual, shallow, hyperactive, distracted, and thoughtless. Of course, not everyone agrees. Clive Thompson, who is also a journalist, wrote a New York Times bestseller in 2013 called Smarter Than You Think, how technology is changing our minds for the better. But I don't really want to dwell on the great literacy debate per se. I would like to focus on this book and use this as my framework for discussing social reading. Catherine Hales, how we think, digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Catherine Hales is a digital humanist from Duke University, a professor in the Department of English at Duke, and a specialist in various forms of reading. And to sum up then her main argument, she claims that reading, however we conceptualize this, is then a set of media-specific practices. So today we don't talk about literacy, we talk about literacies and the plural, multiple literacies. And the idea, of course, then is reading is then these different sets of practices that change according to the different kinds of media that we interpret. Central to her thesis is the concept of technogenesis, the idea that humans and technology have co-evolved. So as humans create new cognitive tools, such as new forms of literacy, they in turn have an impact on our way of thinking, how we think. Hales talks about then three large types of reading. Close reading, which is well known to those of us in the humanities. The close reading typically of a literary text. Hyper reading, so all the bouncing around we do when we're clicking on the internet following different links. And machine reading, we're not reading at all, these are really the machines, the computer doing it for us, so a concordance program. Hales says that close reading correlates with deep attention, the cognitive mode traditionally associated with the humanities. That prefers a single information stream, focuses on a single cultural object for a relatively long time, and has a high tolerance for boredom. In contrast, hyper reading is a strategic response to an information-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 retention, a cognitive mode that has a low threshold for boredom, alternates flexibly between different information streams, and prefers a high level of stimulation. Finally, machine reading. Although machine reading may be used with a single text and reveal interesting patterns, its more customary use is in analyzing corpora that are much too vast to be read by a single person. In fact, most of these synonyms are the synonymous phrases for machine reading. Don't mention reading at all, it's information extraction or concordancing or pattern recognition or data mining. It sometimes is called distant reading in opposition to close reading. But Hale's main point, of course, is that digital practices are not simply replacing print practices. They're both here to stay because we still need to read print text, and we have media-specific practices to read those texts. So we need to build bridges. Quote, courses and curricula that recognize all three reading modalities, close, hyper, and machine, and prepare students to understand the limitations and affordances of each. The correlations suggest the need for pedagogical strategies that recognize the strengths and limitations of each cognitive mode by implication they underscore the necessity for building bridges between them. So I remember reading this in Hale's book and thinking that this was a very sober approach to understanding the place of digital reading, or digital literacy, and trying to figure out the relationship of digital and print literacies. And I wanted to cite then this definition of social reading by Joanna Lux. It appears in an OER, an Open Educational Resource published by Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. And there are a series of literacy activities in L2 French, it's for the beginning French students, and she uses then social reading throughout as a particular method. But she defines social reading as an internet-based activity in which a group of people collaboratively reads, annotates, and comments upon a shared text. Initially the practice was the outgrowth of technology for e-reading, a means to promote increased interest and engagement in L1 texts. So social reading in more language teaching parlance, one could say that it constitutes a during reading activity. The master metaphor then of social reading is really the text as a place to meet. And this is the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article that appeared in 2012. And this is an article about a professor who created a website where different readers could meet to read Thomas Moore's Utopia. This was a research project that he had going at the time. Here we have readups.com, which of course is a play on meetup.com, a site where different people can come together and meet, and sometimes meet offline. But here they form groups following each other on Twitter, and of course as they're reading their way through different books together. And of course this metaphor has moved into another space, that of the classroom, so turn any book or document into a digital classroom. At Coral at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning here at UT Austin, we've developed e-comma, which is another social space, or a space on the web for doing social reading. And it focuses on social annotation, that is marking a text up with a group of students. So here we have a layout in an early version of e-comma. It was actually developed in the Department of English by a literature professor who was interested in finding new ways to help his students read literary text. In other words, he wanted them to do a better job at close reading. And so here we have passages from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. And you see to the left you have the text, and then to the right of the text you have a word cloud. So let me just read the first stanza. 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 tims run softly till I end my song. A beautiful poem. In this social space you do two things. You tag and you comment. In other words, you run your cursor over a piece of text to highlight that text and then you tag it. That is, you write a short description or a label, usually just a word. Or you can write a comment, which is a more fully developed observation about that piece of the content. So here we have a student who's doing a close reading of the word meaning sink. Sinking refers to negative things happening. If something is sinking, it's going down. It can also sometimes symbolize defeat. And then Allison responds, I agree. The harder one tries to get out of sinking sand, the further they sink. Kind of the same idea. So they're looking at word meanings. They're also looking at metaphors, which is a typical thing. Something typically that you do in close reading. Looking at different kinds of tropes. And here they're looking at the metaphor of the river's tent is broken. And look at all these different people who are writing in with their definitions or their understandings of this particular metaphor. But in close reading, it takes on this social aspect. And here I'd like to cite the work of John DuBois, who is a functional linguist who writes about stance taking as a triangle. A person in sociocultural field evaluates something. And that of course then has implications or consequences for their relationship to the other people that they're in contact with. So for example, here Allison comments on evaluates the word brown. Brown is a dull color, very boring and uneventful, there to describe life in the wasteland. And Travis responds, I don't think brown means uneventful. It seems as though there's a lot happening here. So one opinion of course puts that person in a stance, makes them take a stand and then has a social consequence. Somebody doesn't agree with them. But not only do they disagree or agree with each other's interpretations, they also evaluate then the reader. So here Javier has highlighted a large stretch in blue here and then writes a lot about it. And Kevin comes back and says, I like the way you do such fast knowledge. I bet Wikipedia is how you find all the work you do. So in other words, Kevin is making a comment, not so much about the comment itself that was made, but rather about the reader about where this person finds his or her opinions. So you can also think of e-comma in terms of hyper-reading. It starts to look like what hyper-reading is all about as defined by Catherine Hale. So for example, here's somebody who's highlighted from the wasteland, the word Le Mans. Le Mans is French for Lake Geneva and an archaic word for mistress. Now obviously they didn't know this, but they were using online translators and Google searches to find this information. The main point here is that in hyper-reading, you don't stay just with the text, you go off the text, you're jumping all around. So Google searches is typical of a hyper-reading. Here somebody shares a lot of information, as you can see. And then Kevin, again Kevin says, hmm, where did you Google that? And then the other person says, yes, I think some of the comments should be cited. So they're very aware that the cohort that the group here are using many different kinds of tools to find out these information. They're very aware that they are actually doing hyper-reading. Another way to think about this in e-comma is that, and here's the newer interface that we're now using. Again, you have the text on the left of Jabberwocky, and then the various highlighted pieces of text on the right here. And this person has highlighted the word Borogoves in the third line. All mims were the Borogoves, and it shows up then on the right. And they've simply added a link because they've gone and found a link that's for some reason must be relevant. If you click on the link, it takes you to Muppet Wiki. Did you know that there was a site called Muppet Wiki? The Muppets did actually a video version of Jabberwocky, and this is an image of two Borogoves. Another way to think about hyper-reading is in terms of glossing. And glosses here do not have to be linguistic signs per se. They can be multimodal. They can be images or videos. And of course, if they are linguistic signs, they can be multilingual. So here, again, with Jabberwocky at the bottom of the text in line 22, come to my arms, my beamish boy. And Hans up here highlights beamish and asks the group, is this positive or negative adjective? What does this mean? Somebody reprised with Hebrew, and the next person reprised with Japanese, and then somebody reprised with a video, and so forth. You can also think of Ikama, again, this space for social reading, as adopting certain kinds of machine reading practices. And here we have the word cloud, and somebody has clicked on, students clicked on three words, and you can see them then highlighted in the text. So here they're looking at variation to find out whether this is the same word or three variant spellings of the same word, or maybe three different words. So essentially pattern matching. Another form then of machine reading comes from heat maps. And just like in a word cloud where you have the larger words or the more frequent words in the text, here the words, the brighter the heat map, the part that glows more has been annotated more heavily by the group. So this is the last stanza of the poem Liberté by Elouard, who is a French poet during the 40s, a Surrealist poet, and he's writing this poem, and this is the line that caught the attention of most of the students. So quickly, what are the affordances of social reading? Well, you can visualize group of behavior to grasp the concept of interpretive communities using heat maps, as I just mentioned. You can also create the zone of proximal distance for less autonomous readers. People who have trouble reading the text by themselves can do it with the group. You can, of course, lighten the cognitive load by distributing the task. I actually overheard some students say, you take the nouns, I'll take the verbs. You can free the text from the linearity of print. So they can start at the end instead of at the beginning. Now, this may or may not be a good thing, depending on how you conceptualize literacy and your goals for teaching a particular text. You can mediate the reading tasks with all kinds of cognitive tools, as I mentioned, Google Earth, Wikipedia, Flickr, and so forth. You can create folksonomies, and you can mix reading strategies, as Catherine Hales has said that we should be doing, to have them reflect then on the limitations and affordances of different kinds of strategies. And finally, as a teacher, you can integrate pre-reading, post-reading, with during reading, or reading reading activities. And I'd like to end then with this book, Proust and the Squid, The Story and the Science of the Reading Brain. Mary Ann Wolfe, who is a neuroscientist, ends the book with this particular quote. The question that emerges, therefore, is this. What would be lost to us if we replaced the skills honed by the reading brain with those now being formed in our new generation of digital natives who sit and read transfix before a screen? I would like to reframe this in terms of this particular quotation, in terms of social reading, because this book was published in 2007, and in 2014, I think times have changed because of the rise of social reading. Today, I think that this is the question. What would be gained if we bridged 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? If you'd like to learn more about social reading, please visit us at e-comma.coral.utexas.edu. Thank you.