User-friendly devices and device-friendly users

This 2000 sketch from the Norwegian television program Øystein og jeg has been a classic since it was posted on YouTube. One reason we (including medievalists) like it is, probably, that it reminds us that information and communication technologies we take for granted today – such as the codex – were once ‘new media’. In other words, reading a book is not learned naturally, like learning language; people have to be trained to use technology.

Users and readers

Johannes Sambucus, Emblemata (1564), p. 62. Image: Glasgow University Library.

The language we use to describe how we interact with various forms of information technology betrays the distinctions we make between these forms. To a print publisher, I am a reader; to a software company, I am a user. That is, we read books, but we use digital devices. This distinction, however, depends both on a very narrow sense of read and a somewhat artificial distinction between reading and use, and should be challenged.

Why the Digital needs the Humanities

University of Saskatchewan MS Ege 15 (verso): the Beauvais Missal

To my knowledge, I have made people cry only twice by talking about medieval studies. (I am not counting students upset about their grades, which is a different story, or colleagues losing their minds with boredom at the back of the room during conferences.) Both times, I was speaking about the University of Saskatchewan’s box of medieval manuscript leaves from the Ege collection, and trying to explain why we should still be interested in pages ripped out of books made hundreds of years ago, even if most people can no longer read them and they are no longer used for the purposes for which they were intended. The first talk was to a mixed group of academics, students, and members of the general public, at the University of Saskatchewan in 2005; the second was to an audience of art librarians and archivists at a conference in Banff, Alberta, in 2006. Both times, people came up to me afterwards and confessed that they had been moved to tears – not by my eloquence, alas, but rather by the very idea that human skill and dedication could produce objects (that is, medieval liturgical and biblical manuscripts) of such beauty and meaning, even when most modern readers could not really comprehend the full scope of their meaning.

Public text and ubiquitous literacy

Image: Yin Liu (Wisconsin, USA, 2013)

Up until a couple of centuries ago, a sign like this (which happens to proclaim the availability of cheese, and more generic food, in rural Wisconsin), would have been not only unlikely but also mostly pointless. For there would be no sense in putting up the word ‘CHEESE’ by the side of the road, visible to all, if very few people could read it.

One of the most deeply influential social transformations of the 19th century, especially in the West, was the creation of literate societies – that is, societies in which a majority of people could be expected to read and write, and therefore in which public textuality could be functional and ubiquitous. If you are reading this, chances are almost certain that you live in a world of text, and that you perform countless acts of reading every day, not just because you want to but because you are required to do so to function in a literate society. Every time you buy a package of food, or travel down a road, or surf the Web, you are expected to read. The technology of writing has become so powerful and foundational that we find it very difficult to imagine a world without writing, or a world in which writing plays a very small and specialised role.

Calculation to communication

Image: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

Do you remember when mobile phones were actually used as telephones? That is, people put them next to their heads and used them to talk to other people at a distance. But now, of course, your mobile phone (unless you have a very very cheap model) does a lot of other things as well. Phones are used as cameras, maps, notebooks, recipe collections, timekeeping devices, compasses, flashlights, mirrors, radios and audio players, reading platforms, organisers, entertainment centres, tourist guides . . . At some point, a significant transition took place when a tool designed for one use (real-time voice transmission over distance) acquired other uses. These shifts in technology use can be deeply transformative, not only affecting the physical design of the technology so used but also the social practices related to that technology. However, shifts in technology use are often overlooked when we focus simply on ‘inventions’ – the physical devices themselves – without considering what people actually do with them.

A note on religious engagement with texts

At the Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing conference at the University of Saskatchewan, Paul Eggert began by saying an edition is a transaction between the editor and the reader.  Wendy Phillips-Rodriguez's talk entitled “Social, Digital, Codicological Editing?” discussed how sometimes that transaction can involve the highly specific needs of a group of readers.  The Digital Shikshapatri is an edition of an Indian religious text, and is accessed at the Bodleian Library most often by people who use the text to aid in worship. To accommodate this type of reader, the digital edition has some unique features: readings of the text by Yogi Charan Das, and audio files to accompany each page.  It was also mentioned that this method of display acknowledges the belief that the spoken word realizes the true power of language in a way that text does not.

This type of engagement with text is a common context for medieval manuscripts, and some designs show a great amount of care for the reader experience.  Daniel Connolly discusses the itinerary to Jerusalem in Matthew Paris’ Chronica Majora, which is a large mapped sequence, as an "Imagined Pilgrimage" for clerical readers who were unable to leave their monastery due to religious vows they had taken.  The Chronica Majora uses sophisticated indexing techniques to take the reader quickly from the written text to illustrations of various cities and scenes in the margins, which often take up most of the page.  The sign “φ” is used, and when the connected text or image is oriented sideways, the sign is also rotated to give a visual cue for the reader, suggesting the proper orientation.  Other times, the paraph mark is repeated beside an image, suggesting that an image corresponds to each section of text.  These indexing structures support a quick transition between text and visual content that helps maintain an immersive imagined experience.

 When I first came across the Chronica Majora, I couldn’t help thinking about another imagined pilgrimage I had recently come across, the video game Journey by thatgamecompany. It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve played, with an amazing soundtrack and not a word of written or spoken text.  In this virtual Hajj, a succession of trials brings the character closer to the mountain’s peak.  Though the game is likely not intended primarily for a religious audience, the experience is highly meditative and serene.  I won’t force this comparison, but I would like to suggest that this type of religious engagement and imagined or virtual experience can be an important part of the creation of text designed to facilitate meaningful interactions with the reader.

Ben Neudorf

Connolly, Daniel K. “Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris.” The Art Bulletin 81.4 (1999): 598–622.

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ca. 1250, vol. 1, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 26.

Phillips-Rodriguez, Wendy. "Social, Digital, Codicological Editing?" SDSE Conference. U of Saskatchewan. 11 July 2013. Address.