A media studies colleague of mine from Middlebury College, Jason Mittell wrote a kind review of my last book, Unit Operations. As Jason points out, it’s less a formal review than a reaction to a percieved flaw, focused through the lens on the future of academic scholarship.
The flaw in question is essentially this: in attempting to connect a wide variety of aspects of human culture under the abstract logic of “unit operations” (configurative systems of discrete, interlocking units of meaning), the book risks alienating readers who don’t come to it with knowledge of enough of these domains already. As a way of coarsely organizing these domains, Jason suggests that the book’s contents divide roughly into three areas: criticism, theory, and philosophy. Here’s what he says next.
For me, the criticism and theory portions of the book were wonderful – smart insightful readings and engaged commentary on theoretical debates that move ideas forward without being either overly polemical or timidly pluralist. However, the philosophical moments were mostly lost on me, primarily discussing thinkers that I’ve either never read, havenâ??t thought much about since graduate school, or know just enough about to know that Iâ??m not terribly interested in their work. This is an issue – the ideal reader for the work needs to be conversant with such a broad range of critical, theoretical, and philosophical models as to be almost uniquely limited to its author, the only person I know who is probably familiar with everything referenced in the book.
From here, Jason wonders if it might be possible to imagine a form for a book that could, in his words, “adjust to a readerâ??s desired degree of difficulty.” Mittell isn’t suggesting that we skip the hard parts, rather that we might “level up” through a variety of paths, perhaps ones the author didn’t anticipate.
When I wrote the book, I was very concerned about providing adequate hooks for humanists and technologists — the two main, if broad, areas I hoped to bring together — to access each other’s domains. But as Jason notes, a whole mess of other fields get ink, including psychoanalysis, complex network theory, institutional education, object technology, and so forth. If we imagine the content domain of the book as a graph in which each domain that might be a “comfort zone” for a particular reader is a node, then the number of edges — the direct pathways between any one domain and any other — would be considerably larger. And as Kristina Busse notes in a comment on Jason’s post, hypertext is not a sufficiently procedural solution to the problem.
I recently met up with Justin Hall at the Games, Learning and Society conference in Madison. Justin graduated this from the USC Interactive Media MFA program, where he completed a thesis on “passively multiplayer games”, or PMOGs. PMOGs use passive and ambient data that people leave as a part of ordinary daily life as the basis of “quests.” Right now, Justin’s main implementation of the idea comes in the form of groups of web pages, which players can group and tag as quests.
The principle might be something akin to what Jason is looking for. In his talk at GLS, Justin told us that several teachers have started using PMOG as a way to assign homework. “Passive” is more of a pique than a design feature, since players end up rather actively surfing these sites. Perhaps a better way to understand this activity is as curation, the creation of little tiny exhibits out of chunks of the web.
The problem, of course, is that PMOG only works with digitized web-based content. Books are physical artifacts. I suppose one could create a web page for each “mission” in a reading of a book like Unit Operations, but at that point, it might be easier just to write a list of pages to read for different routes through the text. Some might propose that book digitizing or eBooks could help solve this problem, but I’ll admit that I’m still very much a fan of the bound book. I like carrying books around with me, touching them, writing in them — especially books that I find challenging or might want to come back to, as Jason hopefully felt with Unit Operations.
Jason also wonders about new modes of writing and distributing books (or book-like artifacts) that would allow more random-access use. I’ll admit that I’m one of those increasingly rare skeptics concerned about outsourcing book archival to non-evil corporations. Siva Vaidhyanthan’s book-in-progress, The Googlization of Everything, which he will compose at Institute for the Future of the Book, will take this issue up more directly. Jason reflects briefly on problems of scholarly credibility, but I’m more worried about usability. The projects hosted at IFBook are, for me at least, largely unsuccessful. I found myself unable to read the online “1.0” version of McKenzie Wark’s interesting book Gamer Theory; I had to wait for the bound book version. HASTAC’s Future of Learning Institutions and Mitchell Stephens’ The Holy of Holies are more traditionally organized, but they don’t do much more than allow readers to make paragraph-level comments. It seems to me that IFBook is more about the authoring of books than the use of books. The user-contributed comments that seem to be required fare on IFBook can likewise be a curse as much as a blessing.
No matter, they are not what Jason has in mind. He’s imagining something more procedural, a book that reveals its secrets slowly and individually to each reader, not one that readers can simply annotate. The question I have is, should the future of knowledge be one of comfort and ease of use? We can get only the websites, only the music, only the news that pleases us… should the same be true for scholarship?
Television scholar though he may be, Jason is not just suggesting a new kind of skimming, a paper equivalent of the DVR, so he can skip through the ads, or the boring parts, or the places where the writer’s intentions don’t match the reader’s interests. He’s looking for something more subtle.
When I first considered Jason’s proposal, part of me wanted to suggest a process-intensive reading solution. Some smart agent could analyze and interpret different readings of a work like Unit Operations, drawing either on the dogears and other traces left by expert readers, or from computational analysis of concepts and terms in the text itself. Such a system might be able to assemble numerous versions of a text given multiple source domain expertises and desired areas of inquiry.
Unit Operations argues that many cultural forms, not just computer software, can be understood as configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning. The more I thought about the idea of a new form for a book to convey this argument, the more an analog solution, a paper and ink solution, seems more appropriate. It keeps all the positive associations and material benefits of the print medium, while addressing the need for a more configurative text.
What I have in mind is not much different from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a configurative sonnet of 1014 possible configurations. Queneau’s composition is a bit too configurative for my purposes, but the principle is instructive. What if we could take core principles of an argument like the one I make in Unit Operations and offer different sets of examples to go along with it?
One way to do this is literally in the same style as Cent mille milliards de poèmes, i.e. a cleverly bound flip-book in two parts, one with highly conceptual, theoretical matter and the other with examples from a specific domain. Perhaps one could even juxtapose multiple examples in this bottom half. It would be something of a cross between Cent mille milliards de poèmes and Derrida’s Glas (I also think of Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First Person, but the secondary thread was devoted to responses rather than clarifications, and it was fixed in print).
Other options present themselves. Lately, I’ve become much more interested in essays and aphoristic writing than in longform argument. There is a terrific Marshall McLuhan collection that Nick Montfort recently introduced me to, called Unbound. “The essay is for exploring; the book, for explaining” says the book’s description. It’s a collection of twenty McLuhan’s essays, each in its own pamphlet-bound booklet, but all tucked together into a box that holds all the booklets together as a book. I can imagine a version of a book like Unit Operations that took place in multiple, short volumes like this. But a book of essays (or a box of them, as in the case of Unbound) couldn’t just split its argument across multiple booklets, one chapter per binding. Each booklet would have to represent a different conceptual moment in the broader argument.
One could even repeat the core argument, perhaps verbatim, at the start of each volume. Or if not verbatim, with only small alterations each time to drive the same points home in slightly different ways. Not only would this allow the reader to triangulate the argument from a variety of perspectives, but also it would allow easier entry into new topic domains from more comfortable ones. It’s an approach reminiscent of the “leveling up” experience of Jason’s original suggestion. Multiple booklets or volumes might not even be necessary; one could simply restart each “chapter” (we’d need a new name) with a similar introduction, leading into a new example. This kind of repetitive ratcheting up reminds me of Jim Gee’s discussions of performance before competence as a good learning principle in videogames.
If I had it to do over again, I doubt I’d write Unit Operations in this fashion. But I’ve since considered how I might follow-up on the book with a set of essays or articles that might demonstrate the concept of unit analysis across a wide variety of content domains. Perhaps when I do that, I’ll consider this method, or something like it.