What makes reading liquid?
Electricity
The Pixel
The Hyperlink
LIQUID READING
The Liquid Reader and Liquid Reading
WHAT IS A LIQUID READER PROJECT?
This project challenges the one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ - typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students. It engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ - a customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.
Take a look at the current incarnation of the Liquid Reader and find out more about the project by clicking on this link:
http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/Technology-and-Cultural-Form%3A-A-Liquid-Reader
WHAT IS LIQUID READING?
As well as using the Liquid Reader on the course, we have been exploring, conceptually and visually, the idea that reading itself has become 'liquid' in the age of digital flows, online newspapers, and e-readers such as Kindle or iPad. However, given that the oldest surviving Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, carries over 24,000 corrections, perhaps the book as the quintessential subject and object of reading has always been unstable? In other words, isn't reading always already and inevitably liquid?
Developed with a nod to André Kertész, the Liquid Reading series of images presented in this blog attempts to capture this inherent liquidity of the printed word, in both its paper and digitised forms. The images have been taken with a variety of different media - DSLRs, mobile phone still cameras, video cameras, using a variety of approaches - sociological, ethnographic, conceptual, poetic.
This is still very much work in progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment