Contexts For Electronic Book Research 1: Audience
Perspectives on audience and the electronic book derive from a number of disciplines, and debates around reading in hypermedia environments often become mired in philosophical disagreements among these disciplines regarding what constitutes a satisfactory reading experience — or, put another way, what constitutes a usable text. For instance, early empirical research on reading hypertext from the perspective of interface design and software engineering tended to concern itself with delineating best practices to prevent reader disorientation and cognitive overload in complex, highly networked, multimedia environments. Navigational supports such as site overviews, as well as hierarchical structures, were promoted as a means to improved usability (Foss, 1989; Leventhal, Teasley, Instone, Rohlman, and Farhat, 1993; Astleitner and Leutner, 1995; Kim, H., & Hirtle, S. C., 1995; Rouet and Levonen, 1996).
A sustained conversation between the fields of scholarly editing and empirical reader studies is long overdue, especially since scholarly editing inevitably involves a process of modelling the types of readers of an edition, and the types of reading experiences they will have with various kinds of edited text and annotations. The reader studies component of our project is in part concerned with how scholars come to trust or distrust digital resources - a question of major and perhaps unexpected importance to digital scholarly editors (Best, 2004), just as the socially constructed trustworthiness of print has been an important research question for scholars in book history (Johns, 1998). Nevertheless, the reader in much editorial theory often remains an abstract and even mystified figure, even though readers' habits are often invoked to justify certain ways of presenting the text. Decisions such as modernizing spelling versus retaining the original orthography, conflating texts into a single ideal form versus presenting multiple versions, providing one kind of annotation but not another, and silently emending an apparent error versus leaving the text unchanged all serve to configure the relationship between reader, editor, and text (see the articles in Best 1998, esp. those by Werstine, Anne Lancashire, Ian Lancashire, and Siemens). Reader studies provides a formal vocabulary to describe these relationships, an important task for textual scholars given the capability of digital editions to reach new audiences, and given the need for digital scholarly editors to engage with interface design and usability.
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