What’s Next for Text?
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Librarians and educators have an interest in reading, of course, but when was the last time you considered the role of vision in interpreting text or what we can learn from ancient Mayan writing? Those were among the topics covered at the June 9–12 Future of Reading symposium at the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, which Christopher Harris, technology columnist, attended. While, he says, the event may not have resolved the print-versus-digital issue, it tackled reading from angles not usually considered in schools and libraries, such as typography. The general consensus among the many designers in attendance: while the iPad is an incredible leap forward for digital reading, Apple made rather bad font choices for its iBooks. In another session, Johanna Drucker from the UCLA Department of Information Studies addressed the challenge of reading online text, a fragmented experience broken by hyperlinks, with multimedia elements forcing the reader to shift from passive watching of an embedded video to manipulating an interactive graphic. Immediately following, Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (pictured) showed off the magazine’s new iPad app, which gleefully mixes modalities and frame jumps on every page, according to Harris.
