I photograph pages and add them to Flickr. I really like this, actually, but it’s only suitable for some quotes. Most stuff doesn’t make it there, but it’s a surprisingly frictionless process from iPhone to the web.

I keep what I now realise is a commonplace book. A constant stream of notebooks—except most of my own notes go straight onto a keyboard these days (and thence to an SVN repository, but that’s a different article), so the books are where everyone else’s notes go: notes on talks, and pages copied out of books. A lot of these. This is how I think.

Both of these activities enable, as they do for me, blogging all dog-eared pages (hat-tip to Mike), which feels like a new thing. Public commonplace books.

Working on a recent project, we came up with an inevitably incomplete typology of bookmarks, not including the progress mark, which goes something like this: Pointer: a bookmark with no additional content. Underlining. A bare quote. Note: a bookmark with some additional content. Marginalia. Adding something to the text, alongside it. Reference: a bookmark with a link to some other content. Adding something to the text, pointing elsewhere.

Once books are annotated online: the dog-ears go; they’re only intended temporarily. They leave a mark, but I unfold them once they’re cited.

I’d later type those up, so more recently I’ve tried typing notes directly into my iPhone (in Simplenote) while reading. It’s more efficient but turns the whole thing into much more of a chore — one too many devices, and the extra screen feels more disassociated from the book. Writing on the post-its was no quicker, but seemed more part of the flow of reading.

Another voice in the dog-earing chorus here. Lately I’ve been leaving them folded even after their initial use; it makes returning to the books/pages later quite enjoyable (like Tom, I don’t underline and instead search for the dog-ear trigger anew).

I write page numbers on a blank page at the end of the book, and if necessary (usually for dense, small-type academic writing) make a small dot in the margin to indicate the relevant bit. I’m not a quotation hoarder (or sharer). If I’m not actually using a bit of text directly in something I’m writing, I’m usually content to the let it remain marked in the book.

One factor to consider is the move from private marginalia and bookmarking to published glosses, when the marginalia takes on textual authority of its own. And one shouldn’t forget the role of printed sigla in books, of which the best example is the pointing finger found in early editions of the King James Bible, which, by the way, do not indicate important passages, but, rather, passages about which the translators had disagreements.

This was the moment of the blog and we wondered what would happen if we applied the concept of "reader comments" to essays and books. Our first attempt, McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, turned out to be a remarkably lucky choice. The book's structure -- numbered paragraphs rather than numbered pages -- required my colleagues to come up with an innovative design allowing readers to make comments at the level of the paragraph rather than the page. Their solution to what at the time seemed like a simple graphical UI problem, was to put the comments to the right of each of Wark's paragraphs rather than follow the standard practice of placing them underneath the author's text.

We started to talk about "a book as a place" where people congregate to hash out their thoughts and ideas.

After editing an extensive research initiative, horizontal archive structure and oral history about Team 10, Max Risselada introduces his recent editorial work Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology. The book is not only a memorial to the Smithsons' detailed life and practice; nor is it just a conceptual discussion on the form, building and genre of modernist architecture. Rather, it goes much deeper: in aggregating a dense collection of opinion articles, analyses and memories, the book builds a strong case that a new climate of architectural discourse — and a new understanding of the history of architectural theory — is in demand. This critical anthology invites us to feel the "intimacy" of the Smithsons as architects.

There’s a lot of technology in the book. It’s not the tools of technology, it’s the feelings of technology. I try to describe the feelings you get when you video chat, or the feelings you get from farming a job out to a thousand computers. That all came from my work at Twitter.

One of the things I’m trying get across is that books are just as much technology as your iPhone. When books were new, the scene felt just as chaotic and confusing as what’s happening in San Francisco right now.

The vision of the Internet as a vast digital wasteland isn’t correct. Everything is awesome and we have more stuff to read than we ever have in history. I think part of the answer comes with devices and interfaces: we need to create more devices without distractions, like Kindles.

I realized that for me, the iPhone had gone beyond just being a habit. I decided that with the job I have now, which is a full-time writer, it’s actually more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes than it is for me to e-mail or read all my tweets.

For starters, we do not need every story from a publication. We only need stories that we will enjoy reading or need to know because of the information in them is really important. This paves way for a possibility of using interests, and preferred publications as a means to recommend and figure out what articles you might enjoy from other sources.

Good, relevant content should find the reader instead of the reader having to search the content universe. A lot of this we already do unconsciously with a source focused consumption approach, by skimming or dismissing a story even before we finish reading the title. Surely this is the first thing that a truly digital content consumption medium needs to address. If we are still skimming every story from each source we might be interested in, then what did we gain over the analog way of consumption?

A system that allows for highlighting of passages or curate content around themes is valuable only when you see the possibilities that these tools empower.

For the first time the marginalia has the chance to be an equal partner of the content.

Later in the first section of his book, Bayard also talks about the notion of an inner library, a subset of the collective library. These are those particular books which orient individual readers to books in general and to other people. An inner library includes those books which have made a deep impression on the reader and those which are most useful and used.

Pulse matched up its most-used topics — technology and politics — with WSJ strengths, says Dmitry Shevelenko, head of monetization for Pulse, and more topical WSJ packages will follow. Some of those 99-cent-plus buyers will upgrade to a full Journal subscription, currently going for $260 a year. When they do it, Pulse will get a one-time commission. The Journal deal is a model for Pulse: “You can imagine a catalog of premium sources,” he says.

They’re what we mitigate and ward against every day of the week, from the micro- to the macro-scale. We pay protective attention to individual books and manuscripts—whose continued existence is ensured through careful conservation and restorative work in preservation laboratories. We pay protective attention to our charges at the collections level, where we cultivate and nurture whole sets of like and disparate objects through principles of coherence. For some collections, we strive toward well-researched, acquisitive completeness. In other areas of the library, collections are gardens that grow hearty as we sow and weed—and the challenge is less to the physical well-being of the material we steward, than to our capacity to provide access to hybrid print-and-digital collections of modern scholarship: that is, secondary articles and monographs. This capacity often comes down to our ability and our willingness to afford the monopolistic prices set on these resources—and to speak up for ourselves and understand the agency (and sometimes the complicity) of libraries in this moment of great transition. It is a moment Jerome McGann has called the shutting down of our “operating system” of print-based scholarly communication.

McGann writes, in the most recent issue of Profession, that “book culture will not go extinct: human memory is too closely bound to it. But no one any longer thinks that scholarship, our ongoing research and professional communication, can be organized and sustained through print resources.” What’s the place, then, of book culture in a world so differently-organized? If you don’t have an answer for that, who will?

The protective attention that we, who care about the physical forms of the book, pay to individual objects and to carefully curated groups of objects must extend to our digitization practices. Just as we maintain climate-controlled stacks for our precious physical collections, we create dark archives for their digital counterparts—rarely-opened repositories geared toward long-term safe-keeping.

In contrast to physical documents and artifacts, where the best-preserved specimens are the ones that time and good housekeeping forgot, the more a digital object is handled and manipulated and shared and even kicked around, the longer it will endure. The harder they work, the longer they last. Poor Richard’s Almanack lends us a metaphor to write in indelible ink. When it comes to persistent access to digital collections, “Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.”

You can think of distant reading as the near-opposite of close reading, or attention to one text at a time—although it’s important to note that it often serves as a lens through which we can identify objects that merit close and individual attention. Still, in mass digitization (whether or not the work is conducted by an advertising corporation like Google), the intellectual content of a collection more or less completely trumps its materiality and any attempt to capture that materiality with precision or (dare I say) love.

We make things because that’s how we understand. We make things because that’s how we pass them on, and because everything we have was passed on to us as a made object. We make things in digital humanities because that’s how we interpret and conserve our inheritance. Because that’s how we can make it all anew.

Languages like those mentioned above reward study because they represent the place where aesthetics touches computation—in CSound, for instance, there is a score file and an orchestra file; the orchestra contains a set of instruments, which are made up of oscillators, sound samples, and all manner of other time-bounded constructs: signals, lines, and waves. The score file is a collection of beats and variables that are fed to the instruments. There is a great deal to learn from such a language; it represents a very focused attempt to identify a creative grammar that is constrained by three things: (1) the computer's power to effectively manipulate only certain kinds of data; (2) the language-developers' biases and understanding of their chosen discipline, and (3) the willingness of regular programmers to work within the limits of (1) and (2). What I'm suggesting is not that everyone learn these languages, but that if, like me, you were interested in understanding what computers can do with media, and the cultural factors that go into building tools that create media on computers, these languages are fascinating objects to study.

Re-reading the above, I am left with a question: if there are languages for defining instruments and oscillators, lines and splines, and even languages like TeX for implementing the ideas of typography, why is there no consistent system for web publishing that is widely accepted?

Web sites are not any more complicated to produce than books—and in fact are much less complicated in many ways—but the book production process is codified and clearly established; there are norms, a clear division of labor, and an understanding of what comes next at each point.

I think part of the problem is that the Web folks are still riding high on the new economy hubris, believing that they have some special genius, some deep wisdom that transcends every thought process that came before, that they are the fulfillment of the Macluhanist prophecy. Except there are an awful lot of amazingly smart people who never gave a fuck about Cascading Style Sheets, working for non-profits, selling things, building things.

What is a web page? Where does it begin and end? Is such a concept useful, or should we see the web page as a single view of a much larger database of interlinked documents?

So I'm up late wondering if it's possible to create a CSound or Processing for the web. Something that understands links and the very specific needs of designers, information architects, and readers/users of a site, and something that is not bound by competing traditions from interface design, publishing, journalism, and typography. Something that would allow us to see the web as a unified space, rather than as a set of design interfaces (CSS), transformation languages (XSLT), data structure addressing mechanisms (DOM, XPath), interface specifiers (JavaScript), and markup approaches (XHTML).

Both approaches try to do roughly the same thing. But I'd argue that what makes REST a success and Web services less of a success is that REST is truly grounded in the Web. It kept what worked and then made it more elegant: easier to understand in a formal way, easier to teach. Elegance is not just some sort of prissy foolishness; it's a way to describe ideas and solutions that have staying power, that appeal to something outside of the moment, that can contribute to a discipline and be built upon, rather than simply being applied to the problem at hand and forgotten. REST has these qualities: it made what was there better.

I care about all this because, you know, it can be beautiful. It isn't, right now. After countless hours setting up databases, tweaking CSS, and defining schemas, learning RDF so that I can borrow ideas from it, and thinking about what a link actually is, I can say with confidence that the web is not beautiful. In terms of the maturity of a technology, which can be measured as being a technology's ability to reflect the actual skills and awareness of the individuals it seeks to serve, the web is about equivalent to a IBM PC Jr. The equivalent in interface abstraction of a windowing interface has not yet come to this space.

Maybe this is the question: if we can say that a web site is a form, then maybe we can create a language like Processing to help people build web sites; instead of new standards you could have libraries that would plug into your development framework, like TeX does. That would beat the 30-some standards that we juggle now, all of which overlap terribly.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

So although it sounds counterintuitive, featuring something on your front page is only one way - and not always the most effective - to boost traffic and get your content in front of the right people.

There are really two parallel histories. What’s interesting to me is how in the twentieth century those two histories have separated. More and more we have specialists who look at the history of the alphabet within the origins of writing systems in the ancient Middle East and in that place between the Egyptian and ancient Sumerian cultures. Those are extremely specialized scholars and archeologists. But, more and more we’ve lost the other history, which is the history of ideas about the alphabet. We tend, in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, to bracket out the idea that letters have a magical power or a mystical power. I think that’s a mistake, because I think it’s exactly at the intersection of these two things that the alphabet functions most effectively.

What data I’ve seen makes a strong case that social isolation is increased by factors like suburbanization, long-commutes, long work hours, decline of community and civic institutions, etc—not online sociality.

Cyberasociality is the inability or unwillingness of some people to relate toothers via social media as they do when physically-present.

Just like we convert text (visual) into language in our head (which is all oral in the brain), we need to convert mediated-interaction to that visceral kind of sociality in our brain. And not everyone can do this equally well. And people who are cyberasocial are driving this discussion.

It’s simply not that the young are cybersocial and the old are not. It’s that different people are differently cybersocial. And for those who are cyberasocial, trying to describe online social interaction as “real” is like trying to describe colors on a oil-painting to someone who is color-blind indoors-and then to claim that there is a connection between the colors on the palette to colors of a sunny day.

Whatever causes dyslexia, it would not have been detectable in a pre-literate population as among such people, words are always and only just sounds. In fact, linguists often caution against our tendency to equate words with letters and remind us that language is primarily aural and the transition to visual language is a late development. (Ong, 2004). Dyslexia emerges as a disadvantage only as a society incorporates the ease of use of the written word into the expected competencies into its portfolio, similarly, the increasing incorporation of online-sociality may expose a segment of the population that is similarly disadvantaged from being able to use these technologies as effectively as others.

Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they're votes. You're voting on interestingness within a particular text. There's a feeling that this is valuable data.

And sometimes it's almost more irritation than stimulation. It's an itch. So it's like, great, now we're bored and we're itchy. Really, the opposite of boredom isn't stimulation, but deep engagement: full brain, full body, full whatever. That's what we get from books, movies, video games. (Maybe tap essays, too?) And of course we can get it from non-digital things, like cooking or playing or just wandering around and watching the world outside. When in doubt, drop your phone in a drawer and take a walk.