[LINK] Can we find the book online?

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where 
Professor Alan Liu, UCSB, is speaking on "This is not a book: Long forms 
of attention in the digital age". He commented that the lectern provided 
in the ANU seminar room was designed for paper, not for his laptop and 
mouse, which tend to slide off (perhaps he needs a tablet computer). 
Open Journal Systems was mentioned as one of the lively formats which 
while mimicking traditional book publishing are much more lively.

Professor Liu mentioned "Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 
140-character novels" by the Guardian, which includes a "book" of 140 
characters by Ian Rankin and smallplaces by Nick Belardes, with a book 
as Tweets.

Professor Liu then discussed several projects to use a computer to 
analysis the documents which a group of people read. One example was 
"Making Visible the Invisible" (2005-2014) which displays on a screen at 
the Seattle Central Library what is borrowed from the collection. 
Professor Liu mentioned the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE) 
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This harvests books from 
online sources and creates Facebook-like pages for the authors (Facebook 
for the dead). Then the historical authors are linked to living authors. 
He in effect suggested that this collection of information is the book.

In my view Professor Liu missed the point that electronic documents, 
plus on-line forums are not emulating just books, but the process of 
scholarly dialogue. This then resembled a symposium, where scholars 
present their work and then discuss it. Books, e and paper, are just 
part of this.

Professor Liu is the author of  "The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and 
the Culture of Information", which is a book. ;-)

More at: 
http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2013/07/death-of-book-in-digital-age.html


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/