Page 109 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

other and the comparison of their strengths and weaknesses, reading from print and reading digitally display similar behaviours in some aspects and ultimately have the same purpose. In both cases readers seek to enjoy a story, take delight in words and images; they search for the information they need to compile an academic or professional report, solve a practical problem, learn about or understand something, or under- stand themselves.
We read for very different reasons and seek the answers to a broad range of questions in reading. We turn to a certain type of work depending
on our purpose, be it a dictionary, a manual, a novel or a book of poems. Each of these works requires a particular reading strategy, a specific search, linear reading, diagonal skimming or in-depth reading. The choice of medium is also relevant in some cases and one format will
offer greater advantages compared to others.
In other cases, they can both meet the desired aim and our choice will be marked by personal preferences or circumstances. It is therefore appropriate to shun the maxims which claim that paper works or digital works are always best for everything and for everyone.
The interplay of differences
The presence of interfaces is an initial, sub- stantial difference. Digital reading requires electronic devices and reading applications that enable readers to access the content in books. There is a broad variety of devices, from specific readers to computers, tablets and smartphones, and the range of applications is equally broad: eBook readers, eBooks, Kindle, Kobo, Numilog and Wattpad, to name only a few of the most significant. And, in relation to interfaces, reading is also flexible in that the synchronisation of several devices, live-streamed reading, shared reading and social reading are possible. The choice of interface is important since, as an entry point for content, it conditions the means of accessing it, its layout and the form it takes;
it offers different models and possibilities of interacting with the works.
Interconnected codes are another of the aspects that characterise digital works. In them the written text enjoys the same importance
as other codes like sound and stills or moving images. In print works too, the text can establish varied and intense dialogues with the images, and in certain types such as albums, comics and graphic novels it loses its supremacy, ceding importance to the graphic elements. But in the case of digital works, this hybridisation intensi- fies so that the images are not simply viewed but can be modified in size and enlarged to enable the reader to appreciate the details, and they furthermore offer various interactive options. The effect is to bring together and integrate previously scattered content in which “texts, still images, visual or audio time data [...] share the same digital code”,9 as Manovich puts it, speaking from the perspective of computing.
Folded text and hypertext, interconnected- ness and openness are key and distinguishing elements of digital reading. As Pierre Lévy states, “The text folds, folds again, divides, and adheres to itself in bits and pieces; it mutates into hypertexts and these hypertexts connect to one another to form the indefinitely open and mobile hypertextual plane of the Web.”10 The possibilities of browsing internally among a work’s content through the links provided by hypertext marked a revolutionary contribution and a significant change in ways of reading; the rupture of linearity and the interconnection
of content reinforce the coherence of a work above and beyond the dangers of fragmented reading to which it alerts. Furthermore, texts
are enriched by references to other types of complementary content, sound registers, videos or animations that hypermedia links provide. But these folds boost their scope by interconnecting some works with others, through means ranging from the constant availability of ancillary access to a language dictionary to find out the meaning of a term or the equivalent term in another
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Readers in the digital age