Last year, my colleague Eric Morgan and I made a web-application called theCatholic Youth Literature Project.  It was designed as a classroom tool to offer students opportunities for close- and distant-reading of 19th-century texts and possibilities for the class as a whole to contribute to notions of Catholic identity by sharing interpretations of these texts.

Now that I am teaching both literature and composition at SUNY Canton.  I would like to adapt the project to expand to meet broader instructional needs for myself and others, forking the current code.

I propose to create an implementation toolkit for social reading.  I’d personally like to create a toolkit for academic libraries, but that’s open to the participants – we can make the toolkit as general or as specific as we need to serve the entire group’s interests.  There are many directions in which this could go, depending on interest.

What does the toolkit look like?  Whatever we want.  If we create one for an academic library, things we might want to include are:  educational objectives and standards, outreach/marketing, resources for software, resources for content, identification of potential collaborators in the academic community, etc.  Non-library students and faculty would be fantastic contributors and collaborators for this type of toolkit.

A projector/desktop set-up would be helpful for this make session, but not required.

I’d like to lead a conversation about the affordances of social reading environments and their implications for readers’ perception of texts, their authors, and their co-readers.  My interest in these questions draws from my research in computer-supported cooperative learning and from studying the relationships between readers, writers, and the texts they work with in online creative writing workshops. In my work, I have conceptualized the interface elements through which information about user activities are transmitted as “interaction traces”: the spectrum of comments, ratings, “likes”, timestamps, views, and other usage statistics that accumulate around texts on the web. While my research has focused primarily on user-authored texts, I believe that opening the same questions to the greater world of social reading in all its forms (and all the constituencies to whom it is relevant) will provide the opportunity for a lively and fruitful session.

Some questions to consider:

• What is suggested to readers by the information provided on other users’ activities within a reading environment?
• How do different representations of readers’ activities affect other readers’ perceptions of a text?
• What potential interface elements support interaction and sociability among readers?
• How do the public and private realms of reading and annotation collide with or obscure social reading activities?
• How do readers intentionally and unintentionally project their social selves in these environments?
• How do the tools of social reading respond to the expectations and different roles of co-readers (reviewer/editor/student/etc.)?
• Are there physical/print-based analogues to the approaches and tools developed for online social reading?
• What are the implications of differences among readers, settings, and disciplines with regard to the environments, tools, and texts we choose?

I am certain that those who have worked or taught in environments supporting the different modes of social reading and writing will have many opinions to share and additional questions to pose.  The goal of this session is to map out some of these questions and to articulate, consider, and challenge feature sets for social reading environments. Participants will leave the session with a shared vocabulary for the different elements and phenomena of interaction in social reading and a heightened sensitivity to potential triumphs and problems they might encounter in social reading environments.

Though not absolutely necessary, I would like to have a projector and screen set-up for this session in order to demonstrate and show examples. A whiteboard or flip chart would be helpful for listing and visualizing examples.