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.

In the final paragraph of his essay From Reading to Social Computing, Alan Liu asks,

[W]hat is the differentia specifica of literary social computing? That is, how does engagement with literature or literary communities inflect, extend, or criticize the culturally dominant tools and practices of vernacular social computing?

I would like to turn this question on its head to ask, How might reading in a social-computing environment inflect, extend, or criticize culturally dominant tools and practices for engagement with literature and literary communities?

But I would like to take the discussion a step further, giving it a practical turn: If a platform for social reading is to perform these functions – inflecting, extending, criticizing – what features must it possess? And how might we build them?

For example:

• Small-group discussion – in the classroom, in self-organized readings clubs – is a culturally dominant tool for engagement with literature. Social reading platforms such as CommentPress and Digress.it already operate at some level as implicit critiques of this tool by enabling and encouraging conversations that are broader and more inclusive. But can they also be made to operate so as to extend and inflect what is valuable about small-scale conversation? After all, small-scale conversation is not merely an artifact of technological limitations but a way of focusing discussion among particular people or for particular purposes. There are things we’d like to say to the world about a text, but there are also things we’d like to say to just these people, even if we don’t mind letting the world listen in.
• Speaking to questions. The conference session is a dominant tool for engagement with texts that is often question-centric rather than text-centric. Can we build an online social reading platform that combines – at multiple scales – engagement around a text and engagement around questions?
• Speaking on occasions. The conference itself, or in book form the festschrift, is a way of organizing textual engagement around a particular occasion. The always-on nature of social engagement on the web usefully breaks the occasion model, allowing us to converse whenever we please, but it thereby loses some of the focus that occasions (like particular questions) can provide. Is there a way for social reading platforms to allow both occasion-less and occasion-focused conversation to co-exist? To re-purpose the former (occasionally) for the latter?

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.