1st Edition
The Digital Reading Condition
This volume offers a critical overview of digital reading practices and scholarly efforts to analyze and understand reading in the mediatized landscape. Building on research about digital reading, born-digital literature, and digital audiobooks, The Digital Reading Condition explores reading as part of a broader cultural shift encompassing many forms of media and genres.
Bringing together research from media and literary studies, digital humanities, scholarship on reading and learning, as well as sensory studies and research on multimodal and multisensory media reception, the authors address and challenge print-biased conceptions of reading that are still prevalent in research, whether the reading medium is print or digital. They argue that the act of reading itself is changing, and rather than rejecting digital media as unsuitable for sustained or focused reading practices, they argue that the complex media landscape challenges us to rethink how to define reading as a mediated practice.
Presenting a truly interdisciplinary perspective on digital reading practices, this volume will appeal to scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, new media and technology, literature, digital humanities, literacy studies, composition, and rhetoric.
List of Contributors
Introduction
Maria Engberg, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
Section I: Historical and Sociocultural Perspectives on Reading
Introduction to Section I
1. Reading and Materiality: Conditions of Digital Reading
Maria Engberg
2. History of Media Cultures from the Perspective of Multisensory Reading
Iben Have
3. The Condition of Reading in a Digital Media Culture
Jay David Bolter
4. Reading Toward Multiliteracies: Understanding Reading Comprehension and Reading Experience
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Iben Have
Section II: Multisensory Reading
Introduction to Section II
5. Reading and the Senses: Cultural and Technological Perspectives
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Maria Engberg
6. Reading a Literary App for Children
Ayoe Quist Henkel
7. Trends in Immersive Journalism
Iben Have and Maria Engberg
8. Multisensory Reading of Digital Audiobooks
Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
9. How to Read a Network, or the Internet as Unfinished Demo
Lori Emerson
Section III: Reading Engagement: Aspects of Digital Reading
Introduction to Section III
10. Deep, Focused, and Critical Reading Between Media
Maria Engberg and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
11. Reading Digital Interfaces and Audiobooks: Media-Specific and Multisensory Aspects of Immersion
Ayoe Quist Henkel and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
12. Motivations for Audiobook Reading in Modern Everyday Lives
Iben Have
Section IV: Young Readers Between Media
Introduction to Section IV
13. Digital Reading in Education: A Situated Disciplinary Literacies Perspective
Nikolaj Elf
14. Different Modes of Reading: Eighth-Grade Students’ Interaction with a Digital Narrative
Signe Hjort Nielsen and Ayoe Quist Henkel
15. Transmedial Reading
Susana Tosca
16. Readers Between Media: Sixth-Grade Students Tuning in to Literature in Different Formats
Ayoe Quist Henkel
Section V: Aesthetics and Digital Reading
Introduction to Section V
17. Situated Reading
Maria Engberg and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
18. Reading: Atmosphere, Ambience, and Attunement
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
19. Resonance and the Digital Conditions of Reading
Lutz Koepnick
Conclusion: The Digital Reading Condition
Maria Engberg, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
Biography
Maria Engberg is Associate Professor at Malmö University, Sweden, and an Affiliate Researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, U.S.A. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Uppsala University, Sweden.
Iben Have is Associate Professor in Media Studies in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Aarhus University.
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Culture in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Culture from Aarhus University.
