15-20 Minute Paper
Biographies
Elliott Hauser
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Elliott Hauser is a PhD student in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. He is also the founder of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Digital Scholarship working group, co- founder of the Semaphore Working Group on New Media and Technology, and the recent recipient of a prestigious five-year Royster Fellowship.
John D. Martin III
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
John is a PhD student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and fellow on the ELIME-21 project. His research interests include digital humanities in the Muslim world, mapping Islamic intellectual history, medieval Islamic theology and mysticism.
Abstract
Technological change often follows observable patterns, and close inspection of the hisotry of technology can inform our understanding of what its future holds. If we equate digital tablet computers such as the iPad to cuneiform tablets in technological terms, what is the digital analog to the paper codex? What futures await us when these new technologies arrive? The results of this thought experiment have important suggestions for the ways creation and consumption of culture via digital media might evolve.
As an exercise, we imagine and present illustrations of a codex similar in form to current books (i.e. a collection of thin, flexible pages, hard[er] cover and spine, and light weight), but with every surface a dynamic touchscreen. Further, we imagine the interactions possible with a large bookshelf of such devices. We highlight the effects that these two innovations, the digital codex and the digital bookshelf, could have on the way we interact with textual (and visual, more broadly) content.
We conclude by discussing how technological history can inform the design of digital technologies. Current interest and attention to ‘remix’ culture might more accurately be described as a pervasive human response to encountering culture within a mutable medium.