Jon Bruner of Forbes, in collaboration with Hilary Mason and Anna Smith of Bitly, maps the most popular news source by state.

Bitly's dataset, wrangled by data scientists Hilary Mason and Anna Smith, consists of every click on every Bitly link on the Web. Bitly makes its data available publicly—just add '+' to the end of any Bitly link to see how many clicks it’s gotten. For Bitly’s collaboration with Forbes, Smith and Mason looked for news sources and individual articles that were unusually popular in certain states compared to national averages. The interactive map starts by showing which news source dominates in each state by this measure: the Washington Post in Virginia and Maryland, the Chicago Tribune in Illinois, and so on.

You can also select news sources to their click distributions across the country.

I like how The Onion leads in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, although I'd be interested to know what other news sources the states read. A color scale might be informative, too.

Rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. It was apropos that Alan Jacobs‘s wonderful book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was published in 2011.

Indeed, the relationship between reading and distraction was one of the things that caught my eye reading Daniel Kahneman‘s essential Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman speaks of two systems in the mind—he eschews “intuition” and “reason” for the more neutral “System 1″ and “System 2″—with the first making quick, unconscious assessments and the second engaging in much more studious, and laborious, calculations. Since our minds (like our bodies) are naturally lazy, we prefer to stick with System 1′s judgments as much as possible, unless jarred out of it into the grumpier System 2.

In the fifth chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman addresses the act of reading, and the impulse—even in what is normally thought of as the most cerebral of human acts—to fall back on System 1, to associate the ease of reading with the truth of what is read:

How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.

Thus the context writing exists in and other aspects unrelated to the actual content are critical to the reception that writing receives. In addition to studies on the effects of different fonts on credibility, Kahneman also cites experiments that show the importance of the quality of paper (for printed materials), of the contrast between a font and its background, and of the presence of distractions that reduce the cognitive ease of reading. In short, environments that make it easy to read also make it easy to believe what is being read. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this mixture of context and content is that is it extremely difficult for you to separate the two.

So legibility and the absence of distractions are not just design niceties; when a reader chooses to move an article into an app like Instapaper, they are strongly increasing the odds that they will like what they read and agree with it. And since readers often make that relocation at the recommendation of a trusted source, the written work is additionally “framed” as worthy even before the act of reading has begun.

Commercial publishers may not like the use of Instapaper or Readability, which strip the distractions otherwise known as ads from a cluttered website to focus solely on the text at hand, but they are an unalloyed good for writers.

In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
Download the .mp3

I’m in the midst of reading Dominick LaCapra’s History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, as I revise my essay on David Foster Wallace, Infinite Summer, and networked reading, and have been finding a lot there that’s helping me complicate some of my claims about identification and empathy. But I just stumbled across this in a footnote on complexity, and (as I’m also in the midst of reading The Pale King) it made my head explode a little:

I have in mind the complexity of a significant novel or a philosophical or historical text rather than, say, income tax forms, although the latter in their complexity certainly call for critical analysis.

(2)  Today, at Michael Chorost's reading from World Wide Mind, one of my students asked him to autograph his book----on her Kindle.  

In 21st century Literacies, that's how we roll!

read more

Ray, Julie Meloni, and Melanie Chernyk were in the Hague to organize the INKE conference, titled “Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age.” You can find more information about this conference here: http://etcl.uvic.ca/2010/10/19/conference-research-foundations-for-understanding-books-and-reading-in-the-digital-age/.

We are very grateful to all of the wonderful participants, and to our kind hosts at the Netherlands National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek; website: http://www.kb.nl/) and LIBER (website: http://www.libereurope.eu/). We had a wonderful time and can’t wait to go back!

While there, Ray delivered the opening remarks (”Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Textual Methodologies and Exemplars”).

Julie delivered two talks, titled “INKE Information Management Report on Foundations for Future Group Work” and “Intersections and Interactions:The Shifting Notion of INKE Information Management in an Open Access World.“

Other links mentioned in the podcast:
Wikipedia’s Public Policy Initiative
National Digital Library proposal in The Chronicle
National Digital Library proposal in Libraryjournal.com
Patron driven acquisition in The Chronicle
Amazon.com’s ebook lending program

Running time: 52:13
Download the .mp3

Ray visited Dr. Meagan Timney’s HUMA 150 class today, to participate in a symposium called “The Future of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities & Computing Research at UVic.” Ray delivered a talk titled “A New Look for the Book? Rethinking our Approach to Electronic Reading.” The class website is available here: http://mdouglas.etcl.uvic.ca/huma150/.

Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Textual Methodologies and Exemplars
15 December 2010
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), The Hague
in conjunction with the conference Text & Literacy (16-17 December)

See full program, below.

Digital technology is fundamentally altering the way we relate to writing, reading, and the human record itself. The pace of that change has created a gap between core social/cultural practices that depend on stable reading and writing environments and the new kinds of digital artefacts—electronic books being just one type of many—that must sustain those practices now and into the future.

This one-day gathering explores research foundations pertinent to understanding those new practices and emerging media, specifically focusing on work in textual method, in itself and via exemplar, leading toward [1] theorizing the transmission of culture in pre- and post-electronic media, [2] documenting the facets of how people experience information as readers and writers, [3] designing new kinds of interfaces and artifacts that afford new reading abilities, [4] conceptualizing the issues necessary to provide information to these new reading and communicative environments, and [5] reflection on interdisciplinary team research strategies pertinent to work in the area.

The gathering is offered in conjunction with the Text & Literacy conference (16-17 December) and is sponsored by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands), the Book and Digital Media Studies department of Leiden University, and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments research group.

Program:

Opening (8.30-8.45 am)

• Ray Siemens (U Victoria), and the INKE Research Group: Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age

Panel 1 (8.45-10.15 am): Brent Nelson, Chair

• Peter Boot (Huygens Instituut): Literary evaluation in online communities of writers and readers
• Claire Warwick and Kathryn Piquette (UCL Centre for Digital Humanities), and the INKE Research Group: Reading in the wild: User Centred research on physical and digital reading in everyday life
• Joost Kircz (U Applied Sciences, Amsterdam): E-gadget or E-reader?
• Richard Cunningham (Acadia U), Jon Bath, Alan Galey, Brent Nelson, Paul Werstine, Ray Siemens, and the INKE Research Group: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: Studying Architectures of the Book to Develop New Knowledge Environments

Panel  2 (10.30-11.45 am): Stan Ruecker, Chair

• Sonia Howell (NUI Maynooth): “No Text is Ever One Thing”: Utilizing Digital Technology in Literary Research
• Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Instituut): Elaborate: a Tool for Online Collaborative Text Transcription, Annotation, and Publication
• Julie Meloni (ETCL, U Victoria), Ray Siemens, Jennifer Ross, and the INKE Research Group: Foundations for INKE Information Management

Panel  3 (1.00-2.15 pm): Julie Meloni, Chair

• Claire Clivaz (U Lausanne): Homer and the New Testament as “Multi-Texts” in the Digital Era?
• Brent Nelson (U Saskatchewan), Jon Bath, and the INKE Research Group: Old Ways for Linking Texts in the Digital Reading Environment: the case of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible
• Sharon Webb (NUI, Maynooth): “Reconfiguring narrative” with digital tools

Panel  4 (2.30-3.45 pm): Richard Cunningham, Chair

• Janneke Adema (Coventry U): On Open Books and Fluid Humanities
• Sheila Petty (U Regina),  Luigi Benedicenti,  Christian Riegel, Katherine Robinson:  New Theories and Methods for Screen-Centred Interfaces: a Pilot Study
• Alejandro Giacometti (U Alberta), Stan Ruecker, Carlos Fiorentino, and the INKE Research Group:  Showcase Browsing with Texttiles 2.0 and BubbleLines

Panel  5 (4.00-5.15 pm): Claire Warwick, Chair

• Julie Meloni (ETCL, U Victoria): Intersections and Interactions: The Shifting Notion of Information Management in an Open Access World
• Geoffrey Rockwell (U Alberta), Daniel Sondheim, Mihaela Illovan, Milena Radzikowska, Stan Ruecker, Kamal Ranaweera, and the INKE Research Group: Interfacing the Collection
• Lynne Siemens (U Victoria) and the INKE Research Group: Understanding Long Term Collaboration: Reflections on Year 1 and Before

Closing Remarks (5.15-5.45 pm)

• Adriaan van der Weel (Leiden U)

The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, has a good article in today’s Financial Times about the stages in life when different professions are most productive. For example, I did a quick Google/calculation: the average median age of a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry is 55; in the literature and peace prizes, it’s 64. (Sorry, not going to do the full test for statistical difference today). This distinction makes some sense, as the great discoveries in the two scientific subjects are marked by innovation (something that may become replaced by habit with age) and excellence in literature and statesmanship benefits from vast amounts of experience.

But, in keeping with our recent discussions about reform in academia, perhaps the bigger question is whether or not we should be actively targeting funding to match these periods of productivity? A quote from the FT article:

Two of my favourite writers, Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, are worried about this – but from different perspectives. Gladwell, a Galenson fan, worries that our obsession with youthful genius will cause us to reject future late bloomers.

Lehrer has the opposite concern: that funding goes to scientists past their prime. He says the US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been funding ever-older scientists. Thirty years ago, researchers in their early thirties used to receive 10 per cent of NIH grants; by 2006 the figure had fallen to 1 per cent.

From my experience in the UK, I think both groups have good, but different, funding opportunities. Established researchers are well-versed in applying for traditional call-based research grants, whereas young researchers are catered for by a number of fellowship schemes. I haven’t seen much evidence of disciplinary-based bias and to be honest, I think anti-discrimination laws would make it difficult to explicitly exclude a group of talented researchers just because they’ve reached an arbitrary age barrier. Think of Andrew Wiles, who found a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem but just over the Fields Medal’s age limit of 40.

Ultimately the top performers in these disciplines are so unique that it doesn’t make sense to design generalized development or funding programmes for the rest of us. However we can at least take comfort that our best days may be ahead of us!