Reflections on ‘What is a text?’ and ‘Digital Creativity’
As I type this Storm Barra is whipping through the field outside. Plath’s Black Rook in Rainy Weather comes to mind, and I see in her poem an analogy with teaching. I love teaching, but real moments of delight are as rare as Plath’s ‘long wait for the angel’, yet when they do occur, they too ‘leap incandescent’. I had such a moment recently with my LC2 English class in reading ‘The Cove’, by Ron Rash. About twenty pages or so from the end, I noticed that something was happening – at lunch break the conversation ceased to be about the rivalry between local football teams and ‘Squid Game’, and began to be about the book, what might happen, who was to blame, whether the characters might deserve their fates. This grew into a class debate with students on one side saying it was ‘his’ fault – he was an interloper, he should leave, while others claimed ‘she’ was both insipid and ‘stalkery’ and that the ‘he’ in question was a victim of ‘that syndrome where people love their kidnappers? Munchausen’s?’ Syndrome confusions aside, the debate was heated, there were raised voices and some sulking – and I was thrilled. Even more so when one of the boys finished the book and pronounced ‘That was some good book though!’ to which the unfortunate reply was ‘Yeah but most books are boring – they just take too long.’ There we were, back to the challenge of selling ‘olde worlde’ entertainment to the digital generation. And sell we must because not all young people know what we know – that an hour spent in a good book is more relaxing and rewarding than many hours spent down the rabbit hole that is Instagram. Even as I typed that last sentence, I’m aware that many young people today wouldn’t even recognise it as a reference! This all begs the question of why – why has reading for pleasure become an achievement instead of a hobby? Or is the better question actually HOW? How do we now rethink what reading is in the digital age, and how do we reframe our approaches accordingly?
In considering her memories of books, Sue Thomas wrote ‘As for my own experience, I’m casting my mind back to childhood and thinking about my favourite positions and places to read,’ (Thomas, 2014), where Andrew Prescott in his article stated ‘Many of my most vivid memories are associated with reading, from my mother teaching me to read before I went to school, to my father taking me as a child to the children’s library on Saturday morning’ (Prescott, 2015). It would seem then that in many cases, people’s love of reading comes from positive associations they make as children. This perhaps speaks to why young people today ‘read’ differently, and don’t always associate reading with relaxation. Where we amused ourselves with books and had plenty of unscheduled alone time, today’s teenagers had electronic toys and a timetable of playdates and activities, leaving little time for the kind of boredom that fosters the imagination (Bell, 2011) (Mann and Cadman, 2014). What is interesting too is that at least some of today’s teenagers began their reading experiences where we have ended up – reading online and digitally. I know this because my own non-reading almost-teen learned to read using an online programme through which children progressed interactively, reading aloud or having the app read for them, at the end of which a quiz checked for understanding and moved them to the next level of proficiency. So far so good – at six years old children were au fait with technology and being tricked into reading. So why hasn’t that translated into a generation of teens with kindles in their pockets instead of smart phones? Because at the end of each level children received rewards such as technology, furniture, or costumes for their imaginary reading world and characters. The motivation to read became extrinsic and reading for pleasure – for those of us old enough to know – offers rewards that are intrinsic. The gamification of reading at such an early age, while practical and effective from a teaching and learning perspective, has perhaps contributed to the change in how young readers expect to interact with, and feel about the reading process. Not alone this but studies have indicated that learning is not always enhanced through reading in an interactive manner, and that novelty aside, enjoyment of the narrative is greater when reading a linear text (Hayles, 2010).
So, what can be done to foster the kind of engagement, love of reading, and creativity for its own sake, that seems to have been lost, and what role does Digital Humanities have to play in all of this? When Prescott mapped his own journey to the digital side, he described the incremental steps on his way, from the proliferation of online journal articles to the necessary move to reading on an iPad due to a bad back, to the revelation that whole novels could be read on the phone on the way to work. It was a progression, and one he approached with caution. In fact, Prescott’s 2018 article argues ‘The Case for Slow Digitization’, of scholarly texts and artefacts, warning that the desire to digitise and democratize, can neglect to take into consideration the layers and complexities of the often old, often priceless texts being digitized. Hayles in her article states the facts starkly that ‘young people in particular, are doing more screen reading of digital materials than ever before’ and ‘reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools’ (Hayles, 2010 p62). These young people she warns who ‘vote with their feet in college, are marching in another direction—the digital direction’ (ibid.). She continues that the onus is now on educators to meet students at their point of entry into reading and use this as the basis for scaffolding what follows. She cites John Guillory in suggesting there is ‘a dichotomy’ between what we consider to be academic close reading and the type of F shaped skimming that occurs when we read digital texts. Digital humanities somewhat lacks therefore ‘what might be called close reading 2.0, or a method of micro-analysis in the era of big humanities.’ (Lui, 2012 p26).
If reading online and interacting with digital texts differs so fundamentally from reading books, then the answer must be to engage young people in the process of creativity, and in fostering a love of literature as a living, changing and accessible artform. Studies have demonstrated that today’s students expect to access texts digitally – looking up a digital version even when the textbook is available (Kermanshachi, 2018) – and Lui in many ways has forged a path for others to follow, in merging the study of literature and technology, in a way that combines the expectations of students with innovation. Taking his lead from such projects as the William Blake Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive and the Women Writers Project – which he described as being ‘like the Tardis in the BBC’s Doctor Who television series: they were larger on the inside than they seemed on the outside,’ (Lui, 2012 p18) – he pioneered the creation of digital artefacts in his own Literature+ course, where his students explored how literature could be reimagined and transformed into multimodal digital creations. Some of the most interesting pieces here were “Romeo and Juliet: A Facebook Tragedy”, which aimed to adapt the play and make it accessible to the Facebook generation at the time; the Textones Project, which assigned musical notes to parts of speech in sonnets, thus creating a sound poem, as with Sonnet 116; and The Alice Project which incorporated a close reading version of the text with audio and a quite unsettling film montage (not easily playable on the latest version of Windows, this responds better to VLC media player).
Hogwarts, Narnia, Middle Earth, The Capitol, Dracula’s Castle. What do all of these have in common? They are iconic settings created in some of classical and modern literature’s finest works – yes; but they are also worlds in Minecraft – fantasy places brought to life through technology and gaming. Andrew Prescott began his article by reminding us to consider the importance of time and place to the reading experience. Those who read for pleasure have their chair, their corner – their preferred reading spot – and the positive associations and benefits of finding this spot go beyond reading itself. For the younger generation, those who have grown up playing, socialising, and learning in the online world, perhaps the digital arena is their preferred place, the area where they are most likely to relax, read, create, and bring to life digitally the realms of imagination, reimagining time, place and even how we read in the digital era.
Bibliography
Hayles, N.K. (2010) ‘How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine’, ADE Bulletin, pp. 62–79.
Liu, A. (2012) ‘The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11(1–2), pp. 8–41
Lui, A. Literature+ | Currents in Electronic Literacy (2008). Available at: https://currents.dwrl.utexas.edu/2008/literature-plus.html (Accessed: 7 December 2021).
Mann, S. and Cadman, R. (2014) ‘Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?’, Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), pp. 165–173. .
Prescott, A. and Hughes, L. (2018) ‘Why Do We Digitize? The Case for Slow Digitization’, Available at: Archive Journal – Archives and Special Collections in Higher Education (Accessed: 6 December 2021)
Prescott, A. ‘Acts of Reading, Redux. Contribution to a panel at a British… (2015) Digital Riffs Medium, Available at: https://medium.com/digital-riffs/acts-of-reading-redux-dbaac3744f2 (Accessed: 6 December 2021).
TEDx Talks (2011) The value of boredom | Genevieve Bell | TEDxSydney. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_YUElM2EQ (Accessed: 7 December 2021).
