This text is the english version, slightly modified, of a text published in the book "Nouveaux médias, nouveaux langages, nouvelles écritures", with the title "Idée du lecteur" (Idea of the reader). Also published on my french blog. Here is the first part: "Digital reading ". Second part is "Right of the reader" and will be published later.
" I have no doctrine on reading, and I do not even know if having a doctrine on reading is necessary. "
This Barthes ( 1 ) quotation should allow to moderate hastes to enlist him in the service of the superiority of the readers. But one may also read it as a simple observation: in 69, the reading semiology did not exist for Barthes.
One considers usually that the literary theory of the reading, as a formalized theory, "scientist" or universitarian, has been developed by the school of Constance and the déconstruction. Rezeptionstheorie of Constance is translated in English by " reader response theory ".
A comparable movement has been operated by the historians (Darnton, Chartier, Cavallo, Petrucci …) raising in a sense from the book history to that of reading.
Roger Chartier comments so on Michel de Certeau: " So the task of the historian is to reconstruct the variations which differentiate the " legible spaces " - i.e. texts in their discursive and material forms - and those that govern the circumstances of their " effectuation " - i.e. readings, understood as concrete practices and procedures of interpretation. " (2)
To understand the reader is not only concretize the protagonist of the reading operations by sociological data, but, more especially, understand, at the same moment, how a group may be established as a readers community through texts, techniques, methods, manners and rules and how an individual stands himself out by his own readings.
But if the theoretical dignity of reading considerably progressed for thirty years, reader himself little has taken little benefit from this ascent.
As theories of the text, reception and déconstruction well establish, in a different way, approaches of the text organized around the reading. More punctually, they become approaches of reading organized around the reader; for example: Iser in " The act of reading ", Harold Bloom in " A map of misreading ".
What they are not: approaches of the reader organized around the reading.
Basically, what we do not find in the reading theory, and notably in the literary theory of the reading, is a conception of the reading as " technique of the self " in Foucault's sense.
Contemporary theory turned away from the ancient tradition which envisaged reading as "art", as a method, not only to reach the text and contribute to its meaning, but also to perfect the culture of the reader, as culture of self.
. 1. Digital reading
Digital reading is mostly approached from the hypertext and from its nearness, supposed or real, with literary theories. I approach this debate somewhere else. Here question is handled differently, from an inquiry on the digital reading, as cultural technology, and on what it reveals of the reading generally, and the reader himself.
To read with a computer
Hypertextual devices are known to facilitate multiplicity of reading paths and, more generally, to favor freedom of the reader.
Jay Davis Bolter, one of the founders of the literary hypertext, moved closer the hypertext and " reader response theory ", whereas Landow spoke about convergence, and a " shock of recognition " between déconstruction and hypertext.
However these various hypertextual devices are, first of all, means of writing and publication. It is very explicitly the case for Xanadu, of Ted Nelson, conceived as a big deposit of texts. It is true also for Bolter's " Story space ", which is a software of multimedia writing, or for Tim Berners-Lee's Web, as system of publication.
It is indisputable that the hypertext facilitated, and almost established the empirical situation of digital reading.
But the common presupposition of these systems is the idea that the author device can foresee and is enough to organize the future readings.
Approach is obviously more coarse with software packages spread on the market which propose a "reader" version which is anything more that a version simplified of the author one. Since Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, in 1976 , first word processor for PC, things little evolved: word processors are not reader oriented.
There is one software which is explicitly a reading software: the browser. "Browser" is a better term than the french "navigateur" which -to be a classical metaphor- is quite obscur for most users. But browsers are mostly information display software, and the true reading devices are weak and superficial.
It does not stay less than digital text, in general, has strongly contributed to identify, analyze, formalize, represent, in brief, to make exist, under a technical shape, generic features of the reading activity.
The web establishes the operative plan of digital reading. It makes digital reading exist in a sense independently and in spite of the weak development of the specific features of reading.
So well, an inquiry on the digital reading does not have to demonstrate any more its existence.
But it has to explain rather the operability than the feature, and rather the practices than the uses.
If some historic marks are reminded here, it is not in the concern of an explanation, even elementary, of the evolution of reading, but rather to take out of the rhetoric of an encounter between the two devices of the printed book and digital text.
(Division)
To read a text, good way is division. It is, for example , the point of view of Hugo of Saint-Victor, author of the Didascalicon, at the beginning of XII-th century. Division consists in splitting up reading in briever units of text. It is a way of reading; it is reading itself. It precedes the exercise of memory, the copy in the heart, the recording of the text.
We tend to see a big difference between fragmentation in the writing and in the reading. Nevertheless, the divisio at Hugues did not allow only to record the text due to the brevity. Disjunction of the speech was also an instrument of composition by preparing the assembling of fragments of different origin.
Marking
To mark a text is to associate it signs of division. The reader clarifies what seems the normal organization of the text, for example by creating with letters, or figures, logical parts not identified by the author; either he creates its own division, by selecting considerable passages, or by indicating, with differentiated signs, the type of reading or preliminary treatment to reading.
Marking is essentially a collective practice, and conventional one.
It was the case for the establishment of texts, in the Library of Alexandria or at the Irish monks inventors - renovators of the punctuation.
In these two cases, - is it about the hyphen marking defective passages, or punctuation marks, or whites - we are well in front of marks which do not aim at anything else that to prepare reading, directly or indirectly.
These marks have a double function. As marks, they select, identify, share, in brief divide the text; as specific marks, they indicate a particular type of treatment or reading.
The conversion of writing marks in reading marks carries normalization. However, one does not have to either overestimate the normalization of the writing marks, or underestimate that of the reading marks. The marking of reading is not in its entirety normalized but even the most individual, in its contents or symbolism, is fundamentally conventional.
Digital marking
Digital marking has a big importance as marking of writing and publishing.
It consists of the insertion of anchors corresponding to the various units of the text and allowing the exchange of files and their treatment by various software packages. These operations of marking or anchoring are known by the public through languages as SGML, HTML, and the protocols like Text Encoding Initiative.
Devices of reading marking appear on text processings, or readers as Acrobat reader. In fact, most of the features of marking - writing can be used in reading by using the plasticity of the digital text: games on characters, whites, underlinings. These possibilities are used, for example , in the case of second reading works, or secretariat.
But the most significant is the device of marking on the navigators: bookmarks.
First operation which bookmarks or favourites allow is well that of division, or analysis. It chants or follows on a first spot reading which allows to select and to reserve sites.
An interpretation of this function could be recording the sites which the Internet user frequents regularly. Another approach sees in this location and reserve the preparation of following operations of treatment and reading of the selected texts: copy, recording, assembling, edition on paper.
However individual location, either on the model of a regular frequence, or rather on that of an " act of reading " does not summarize all the opérability of the bookmarks which fundamentally is collective.
One must not confuse, at this moment, " private " and " strictly individual ". Certainly the textual object "site" participates to the public space; it is a true object of public communication. In contrast, marks recorded by the reader for his future usage are part of the space deprived and held in the perspective of a private activity: a reading to come. But these marks as prototype, or scaffold of the future readings, are shared by the reader with the other readers.
Here it is necessary to distrust metaphors. Digital reading is a particular sort of reading text, as the reading of printed book. It is frequently convenient to argue "as if" the digital reader read a book. But digital reading creates really a new technical and cultural object: the tracks of location become a list of links, another type of text.
What characterizes this text is not the fact that the production is normalized; we saw it is generally the case of reading marks; it is the extériority to the reader and to the web-text , its separation, its different character. This new text produced by the reader, in the reading act, is reusable, proposed to the re-use, and at the same moment individual and collective.
It is not a question of widening the marking of digital reading, which is only the first degree of digital reading, and the first element of a reader in community, beyond his domain of appropriate opérability. But I wanted to insist on this movement which the technique establishes: as in the passage, on the occasion of a sequence of operations, another object occurs which recomposes potentially the individual / collective nature of the practice of reading.
Copy
After the division and due to it, copy plays a central role in the practices of reading in different historic forms.
As Mary Carruthers has showed, readers of the Middle Age copy texts in their memory. Writers were far from indicating systematically their quotations, considering the fragments which they retained as a genuine part of their memory.
From XIII-th century access to the texts is frequently mediatized by the usage of anthologies and summaries. Sometimes to read becomes to copy the copy.
Next to the return to the text, the Renaissance sees the success of the collections of common places. These works were at the same moment books of quotations and pads of reading. Erasme who published one is also the author of " De duplici copia verborum and rerum " that one translates by " The double abundance of words and ideas".
The digital copy is everywhere: it is, under the shape of the technical copies, one of the means of communication of computerized data. It is extremely powerful and extremely well-to-do, when the primary text is already under digital shape.
The first users of text processing had been struck by this extraordinary ease of digital copy and its effects on writing: proliferation of intermediate versions, possibility of modulating presentations.
Within the framework of the digital reading, copy is the condition of the various following treatments.
It is necessary as well to improve the material legibility of the text, to cut it again and, generally, to play on the physical unity, to prepare it for the following operations of reading. The digital copy produces a sort of " publishing for reading ". It is also the frequent occasion of an operation of communication. An important empirical aspect is the following one: it is on the occasion of copy operations that the basic user discovers the characteristics of digital materiality, notably through formats.
Prospecting and simulation
Prospecting is the investigation of the text by means of treatments, at least partially automated, of logico-linguistic order. The use of a search engine or a translation software are simple examples of prospecting.
The important point here it is the notion of a logico-linguistic treatment. This operation is conceivable only according to a preliminary knowledge integrated into the device of prospecting.
One can distinguish two principles in the machine of prospecting: the representation of a "point of view" of reading under the shape of data processing; and adoption of this point of view as reference position.
Point of view is inevitably normalized and this normalization integrates notorious distorsions inherent to the prospecting software.
The reader is going to settle his glasses, to adopt not only the knowledge which organizes automated treatment, but also the attitude, the position which corresponds to this knowledge. Prospecting is a simulation.
The automatic treatments are frequently criticized, for their ineffectiveness, or, on the contrary, their over-determination. It seems rather that prospecting, more than quite other operation of digital reading, reveals that the technique is collective, that procedure belongs to such group, such school, such time. Here the question of the good reading is not only: is it necessary to read in this manner? But also: do I want to read in this manners, that is: as these other readers?
( My library)
There is the public library; it is an institution. And there is my library, a private affair, a rather silent object.
Obviously, few persons have the disposal, today , of a library room.
The concrete personal library is rather a piece of furniture; it is a part of personal properties as the books which it contains. It is current however that the readers, as owners of library, underestimate their good, preferring to speak about "books" or about " my books", rather than about " my library ". This auto-depreciation seems me rather significant: they do not think that their collection of books is in accordance at the idea of the library, that it is for them, as private persons, the equivalent of the collection of books called library for the public person.
The one who does not call library its books, does he consider himself as a reader at home?
The personal library - my library is an individual, rather permanent corpus of read and read again texts; it is the figure of a memory which is not totally exteriorized, knowledge of texts and consciousness of reader; it is finally a personal order, through the classification, the network of texts: my idea, my imaginary of the library.
As such, it is the instrument and the sign of a life which makes a certain place for disinterested study.
But the simple kitchen library, with its "books", its photocopies, index cards and books of recipe, shows also, as the intellectual library, its order of reading.
Network of texts, network of readings
To this order of reading expressed by the library, corresponds the internal order of the reader, the reading - structuralization.
What is reading - structuralization ? Nothing more that memory.
It is necessary to envisage it in a very general way: the reader wants to keep a track of his readings. Naturally, these readings, their tracks, the manners to keep them are strongly variable. In spite of their differences, the old traditions of the arts of memory studied by Yates and Rossi, then by Carruthers, have this in common: a shared method, that is normalized and taught, and an idiosyncratic, highly individual appropriation. For example, it will be necessary to resort to one of the " loci caduci " but everybody will be able to choose its own: such street, such palace, such monument.
This sharing is questioned with the industrialization of the memory. Risk appears - and this risk is turned out in the case of the audivisual - that the memory - machine, instead of being a prosthesis become the control mechanism which imposes its logic, contents and shape of structuralization, to the disarmed reader.
It seems me correct to present such a reading without memory as a softened shape of analphabetism.
But web is not an audivisual device. Hypertextual reading does not suppose a reader controlled by the technical device, but, at first, readers, groups of readers, and even groups of groups of readers proposing, through the structuralization of their readings, entries and paths on the network.
With Web, the activity of structuralization - dynamic production of structures - operates itself in a collective way.
The key point is the généricity and the rustic character of the hypertext link " to make everything ", useful at the same moment in writing and reading structuralization, as product of research engines and as "handmade" operation on the personal sites.
Structuralization opens us to a conception of web as a network of readings. One defines usually web as a network of texts - what is not wrong. We have also to define it as a network of readings.
Seen as operation of memory, every peculiar reading on the Web supposes and leans on the other readers, on the readers collectives. And one of the most peculiar developments - we are in the question of right- is although through the rings, tools of participative writing, wiki, blogs, the users can influence search engines, gates, and others established medias.
To publish the readings
Annotating is the most significant function of the " active reading " which characterizes intellectual work: it consists in reporting on a text, or in the margin of a text, or outside but about a text, a remark or a comment. Under the most simple form, the note tends to confuse with the marking; for example, underlining an important sentence is rather close to copy out it on a card or an exercise book. But unmistakably the note aims at the comment, at the writing.
The operations of memory, that Middle Age called " to read in the heart ", are strengthened, and possibly organized with annotating.
On the web, the reading - annotating is met under multiple forms: personal pages, forums, lists, blogs, wiki.
There is here a double transformation.
On one hand, these comments are not purely individual. Annotating function strengthens the implementation already evoked of the network of reading, through the critical collective of the readers.
On the other hand, basically, they renew by democratizing it a practice reserved for a minority of intellectuals, literary or scientific critics: the publication of reading.
Web has recorded a fundamental modification in the reading practice and technology. While annotating (including digital annotating on the personal computer) was the type of the thorough work, characteristic of the intellectual office, giving place only in precise but rare literary situations (diaries, critical articles) to a passage to publication, web has made of the publication of readings one of its favourite genres.
It is necessary to look at this genre at work in a very general way, notably in blogs (personal annotations with comments or not; books column, that is "readings" often proposed by the software) and lists or forums.
But it is present also in a more explicit way in certain projects.
To take very different examples: " hypernietzche " is a (remarkable) project of readers - researchers' network of archives; " zazieweb " is a site around the idea of readers' community of literature; " wikipedia " is readers' encyclopedia contributeurs of which does not claim an authority, but a common, collective and opened method of reading.
Collective reading
Obviously computer and network did not create collective reading, no more than they have created multi-séquentiality, fragmentary writing, network of texts, in brief all which forms the hypertext.
The same naming of lectio covered in the Middle Age silent reading, murmuring reading, " ruminatio ", and reading at a loud voice, interpreted. Lesson was anything else that a leaded collective reading.
In the study of Habermas on the public space in the XVIII ème century, it is very interesting to find all the elements which give evidence of the importance of public and collective readings, in cafes, of clubs, around newspapers, for the formation of public opinion.
The Enlightment public is not the individual exercising magnificently his reason to build up by himself a point of view on or from his reading. Of this situation, Kant has given an analysis become classic.
It is interesting to note that it will arouse also a very strong denunciation of the " fury to read ", or " epidemic of reading ". Not only the bad texts were denounced, that is novels, but also bad kind readings, what certain historians analyze as an effect of the passage to the "extensive" reading.
However if information technologies do not create collective reading they have at least given it a new dimension.
And this, for a long time, because it is necessary to back up to the prologue of the hypertext, long before Ted Nelson or Tim Berners-Lee. Memex, Vannevar Bush's device, was well an individual project. But on the other hand, Douglas Engelbart's hypertextual software resulted very exactly from necessities of collective writing and reading of the programmers.
Retroversion for the reading of the anchors of marking and structuralization, simulation and comparison of various versions, simultaneous integration of notes, a big part of today available technical means were already there.
Web on its side works as network of texts as far as it proposes a network of readings.
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(1) "Sur le lecteur" in "Le bruissement de la langue. Essais Critiques. IV. Ed du Seuil, p 37.
(2) "L'ordre des livres", Ed Alinea, p 14.
Continuation: Idea of the reader. 2. The right of the reader