Our ebook has arrived!

Writing about Literature in the Digital Age is a free eBook by students at Brigham Young University who are pushing boundaries of traditional literary study to explore the benefits of digital tools in academic writing. This collaborative effort is a case study of how electronic text formats and blogging can be effectively used to explore literary works, develop one’s thinking publicly, and research socially. Students used literary works to read the emerging digital environment while simultaneously using new media to connect them with authentic issues and audiences beyond the classroom. As literacy and literature continue their rapid evolution, accounts like these from early explorers give teachers and students of literature fresh reference points for the literary-digital future.

During the webinar, we invite you to hear the authors discuss their work and the making of their eBook. You will be able to download your free copy of Writing About Literature in the Digital Age during or following the webinar launch on June 15th, 2011.

Contributors: Alymarie Rutter, Amy Whitaker, Annie Ostler, Ariel Letts, Ashley Lewis, Ashley Nelson, Ben Wagner, Bri Zabriskie, Carlie Wallentine, Derrick Clements, James Matthews, Matt Harrison, Nyssa Silvester, Rachael Schiel, Sam McGrath, Taylor Gilbert, and Gideon Burton.

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What it was like to be on "the design team"

Being on the design team was A LOT of work. I already had a base knowledge of working with the InDesign program, but I know that my team mate, Sam McGrath, spent a lot of time getting familiar with the program before we even started. InDesign was the program we used to compile the entire ebook, and I know that it's a great design program when you are completely familiar with it, but when you aren't, you confront of little quirks that sometimes turn into big frustrations.

Another program that was very helpful in our work was dropbox, which allowed us to compile all of the individual work that we were doing. I had never used it before, so I'm glad that I have come away with this familiarization of this online service.

To compile our book, we had to create a uniform style within InDesign to format all of the chapters. We had to create each chapter as a different file, because we didn't know the order of the chapters yet--this was kind of annoying considering we had to import paragraph and character styles for every new file. We also had to create our hyperlinks and what we hoped would have been an interactive table of contents. Unfortunately, this didn't happen because nothing we did would work the way we wanted to and we just didn't have enough time.

The hardest part about this process was that things that looked great on InDesign would for some reason look completely off in the epub format. This caused A LOT of grief. This is where a better knowledge and familiarization of InDesign would have been helpful. But I know that Sam shared a lot of tutorial videos that we would follow, and still not get the results we needed.

The moral of this story is that two weeks is not enough time at all to write, edit, compile, format, and publish a publication. It really taught us patience and skills in how to work effectively and skills on how not to throw the computer out the window after countless times of it not doing what we want.

I have to say that this experience wouldn't have been the same if I hadn't have had the chance to work with Sam and Ben Wagner. They were great to work with. They put in so much time into this project and they helped me learn so much.

I'm glad that I have come away with these skills now of working with InDesign and becoming more familiar with epub formatting. With the way things are going, it will definitely come in handy for the future. It also is rewarding to see your finished product. It also makes you feel giddy in a way to think that you have published something somewhere!

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What I have learned this term

The course outline we had for this class was to become more familiar with and appreciate the changing modes to reading literature and writing about it. This expected outcome was hard for me to see at first, because I was so used to the cookie cutter English major expectations. Starting a blog for a class to turn contribute our writing ideas was so new to me, and I enjoyed that aspect of the class.

As far as writing styles go, this class was surprising and sometimes confusing about what kind of writing styles were expected for this class. I was so used to an academic writing style, so being more free to bring in my personal voice and opinions was liberating. But then my professor told us that a lot of our blog posts were not academically-based enough. I loved putting together my chapter for our class ebook, which was to be personal and not restricted to any writing style. And then the requirement was given that we had to compose our chapter in a specific structure with a pull quote, sub-headings, and a "tweethis," which essentially made every person's chapter very uniform. So these kind of things confused me about the learning outcomes for this class.

I have come away from this class with a much greater appreciation for all the modes of online learning that there are. And I have come away with a greater perspective on the changing technology and how we can use it most effectively to help us in our acquisition of knowledge. I have especially enjoyed being involved with my classmates and getting to see their ideas and research along the way: it definitely gave me many new ideas to approaching research.

I plan on still trying to actively put out daily content on the web because I have learned more about the importance of a positive and active online presence. And I really hope that my classmates will do the same, because this has been a great class of students, with a lot of cool ideas and cool things to share.

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The digital age kind of depresses me

I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks as we have been discussing literature and writing in the digital age, and today we talked about it more in my Print Publishing class today and it made me kind of sad.

Remember the movie "You've Got Mail"? I love that movie. And as I watched it a few weeks ago, it made me sad to see the irony of it. Tom Hanks puts Meg Ryan's adorable neighborhood bookstore out of business with his book superstore a la Borders, but they still find love in the end. If they were to make a sequel to the movie it would now involve Hanks's huge bookstore declaring bankruptcy because of the "big bad" Amazon and the eReader revolution (and hopefully they still love each other).

I love the new technologies of today. Call me a traitor to the good old fashioned bookstore, but I love Amazon, I own a Kindle, and I love the modern resources there are to writing about literature like blogs and on-line forums. But I just wish that it were possible for me to still enjoy these things without Borders or Barnes and Noble to have to close stores or declare bankruptcy.

We talked about the future of print publishing today in my class, and it gave me a little hope for publishing. My favorite point of my Professor: novels still have a chance in print publishing because when you go to the beach and want your cheap reads to enjoy, are you going to take your fancy ipad and get sand all over it? I don't think so! What about giving books as gifts? Will people rather get a book electronically? That's an interesting thing to think about as well.

So I guess that we will just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I plan on going to Borders this week to purchase my beach read novels this week for my honeymoon (!!), and maybe buy another kindle book to read on the airplane over there. So it's win win, I guess.

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My chapter, bio, photo, and "Tweethis" statement

Here's my bio photo:

My chapter can be found here.

My tweetable statement: Modern writers are connecting with readers through modern means of communication: essentially creating a living, working, and involved relationship.

character count: 148. it's good?

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Mastering the Art of Class Project Combining

As a graduating senior, I have learned how valuable it is to connect your classes to create content for your class projects and assignments. I'm not talking about using the exact same paper for two different classes. Not exactly. What I'm talking about is using different aspects of your research or learnings in one class and using them in your other class projects.

This term, I was especially successful at doing this and it has really helped me connect my classes and get the most out of all of them.

So, for eng 295, we had to choose a personal work of literature. I am also enrolled in eng 495 right now which is all about Toni Morrison. That's why I chose Song of Solomon as my novel (luckily, I really like Toni Morrison, so it's been a win win).

Because of the different types of research I have been doing for this class, like using non-conventional secondary sources like blogs and on-line forums, I plan on writing my final paper for 495 about Morrison's readers coming together and connecting through these different modes. This will also include a more in-depth analysis of Morrison's literature, but I am excited to do this critical analysis using these new, non-conventional sources. I'm excited because I really think it will make my paper unique.

And last but not least, I am also enrolled in my capstone class for my editing minor, which involves the final project being a completed published book containing my edited manuscripts, cover design, page designs, etc. The idea is to keep this physical copy of the book and show it to employers as part of my portfolio. I plan on doing this, but what I am really excited about doing is taking my book and converting it into an ebook format, like I am doing right now for our class ebook. I think that this will be even better to show employers or refer them to look at, rather than having them quickly flip through my physical copy. That's what I hope for, anyway!

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Possible Chapter Images

Morrison discussing Song of Solomon on Oprah:

Image from Academy of Achievement: http://www.achievement.org/achievers/win0/large/win0-023.jpg

The "in-your-face" painting of Morrison:

Image url: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3hpcfcAM41qc53v4o1_500.jpg

Or, the interactive, public speaker Morrison:

Image url: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Toni_Morrison_2008-2.jpg/240px-Toni_Morrison_2008-2.jpg

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Final Draft

Bringing the Author to Life in the Digital Age

How involved does a writer get in his or her reader’s lives? How involved do the readers get in the writer’s life? If we had thought about this question 100 years ago, or even 50, we would probably say that there is very little involvement between the two. Literary theorist Roland Barthes certainly thinks so. In fact, Barthes’ theories about an author who is essentially “dead”—meaning that the novel and its creator have nothing to do with each other—may seem logical in a non-technological world. But in today’s modern society and digital culture, we see a drastic change in the author/reader relationship. Modern writers are connecting with readers through modern means of communication: essentially creating a living, working, and involved relationship.

Roland Barthes expressed that "‘to give a text an Author’ and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it ‘is to impose a limit on that text’" (Death of the Author, par. 4). I can see that he has a point, but modern writers, an example being Toni Morrison, are showing that this is not the case. On the contrary, they are showing that the author should be there for their readers in order to expound on themes and issues that may be hard to understand, and ultimately help the reader personally connect to the work of literature.

The Interactive Author

Toni Morrison was already a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner when her novel Song of Solomon was chosen as a selection in Oprah’s Book Club, the national book club of the daytime talk show host, Oprah Winfrey. Morrison had already established her artistic value as a postmodern author when she became a part of one of the most dramatic examples of postmodernism’s union of canonicity and commercialism. With Morrison’s involvement in Oprah’s Book Club, we see not only an integration of Morrison’s academic audience and her popular audience, but also an integration of her black audience and her white audience. Just as she defies literary norms in the plot and character development of her novels, she also defies the tradition of the ways an author must behave—particularly African American women writers.

What we see in Morrison is a new kind of relationship between the author and reader. Morrison may be criticized for becoming involved in a daytime book club to promote her novels because up until then, writers usually took on the role of being secluded from the readers, or as Barthes coined, being “dead” and leaving the text to speak for itself. Morrison sought to make a different move from this expectation. She makes a particular effort to connect with both high and popular cultures. She has remarked that “I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, like jazz” (Young pg. 187). She did this with her novel Song of Solomon both on and off of her television appearances on Oprah.

I think of a powerful scene in Song of Solomon, where the protagonist Milkman’s aunt, Pilate, a powerful and wonderful character, is about to die. Typical to a Morrison novel, Milkman says goodbye to Pilate through a song: “’Sing,’ she said. ‘Sing a little somethin for me.’ Milkman knew no songs…but he couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. ‘Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Cotton balls to choke me/ Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Buckra’s arms to yoke me’” (Morrison pg. 336).

The Reader’s Response

Morrison talks about her interaction as an author with her reader regarding this emotional scene in the novel: “A woman once got very angry with me because Pilate died. I told her that first, it was of no value to have Guitar kill someone nobody cared anything about. If that had been the case it would not show us how violent violence is. Some character that we care about had to be killed to demonstrate that” (An Interview pg. 420). Morrison tries to show us this in the scene following Pilate’s death: “Now he [Milkman] knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. ‘There must be another one like you,’ he whispered to her. ‘There’s got to be at least one more woman like you’”(Morrison pg. 336).

What helps readers connect with the issues surrounding sorrow and death is her application of these themes from her real life. One such reader is Trudy Hamilton, a photographer and blogger. In a post about one of Morrison’s appearances on the Oprah show and her comments about death, Hamilton remarks, “the fact that Toni is so emotionally evolved to fully acknowledge sadness truly moves me. Here's the thing...nothing she said in [her] statement is "negative." The fact that she acknowledged what the pain feels like and realizes that this narrative is a part of her life story and in no way devalues her life or even her ability to do her work moved me to tears” (Hamilton par. 4).

What Morrison does, and what Trudy Hamilton is doing is using the digital media to reach a greater understanding and emotional connection to the literature and the author/reader relationship. Morrison is just one example of an author where readers all over the world are actively participating in blogs, forums, and other social media where they can discuss important plots or themes of her literature. We also see a growing popularity for authors to create blogs themselves and involve their readers in the writing process. One such writer wrote about this author/reader relationship on her blog: “thanks to technology, suddenly you can read your favorite author’s blog and leave comments on it or send her messages on Twitter and get replies. It’s amazing.” But there is something else that this author considers:

and yet it’s still such a unique relationship. One of my author friends once told me how inadequate she feels at book signings because readers already feel like they know her through her books and it’s almost like they want something intangible — some taste of what they found in the book and want to rediscover by meeting her. It’s sort of crazy and sort of awkward and sort of understandable, all at the same time (Mantyla par. 6)

The Digital Age Relationship

One web site acknowledged that this changing relationship is a job in and of itself, not like the author/relationship from years before. Pat Ferrara wrote: “An author’s website and blog have become full-time projects in and of themselves. While they may not be as entertaining as their next series installment, they put the time and effort to connect with you during the wait, take advantage of it” (Ferrara par. 5). While there are pros and cons to such an involved relationship between the author and the reader, I feel like the pros win out. Just as Ferrara points out, the modes that we have now in the digital age to connect with the author, and ultimately the work that they create, is a unique opportunity for us as readers.

It’s so exciting that an author is no longer “dead” to us as the readers. I think I can speak for many when I say that I love the background on the artist in helping me connect to a work of art. Forums, blogs, and on-line discussions all help readers connect on a new level to a piece of writing. For me as a researcher and web browser, I love being able to access a blog like Trudy Hamilton’s, where I can get other readers perspective and insight about an author or a work of literature. Whether it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner like Toni Morrison, or a beginning writer, the life of the author and his or her active contributions to a work of literature is what is perhaps to be most celebrated in this digital age.

Works Cited

“An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay Contemporary Literature. Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1983), pp. 413-429 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208128

Ferrara, Pat. “Book Buzz: The Author Reader Relationship.” 7 July 2008. Web source: Mania. http://www.mania.com/book-buzz-authorreader-relationship_article_58890.html

Hamilton, Trudy. “What Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison Reminded Me About Photography.” 14 May 2011. Web source: Tru Shots Photgraphy Blog: http://blog.trushots.com/2011/05/what-nobel-prize-winning-author-toni.html

Mantyla, Nikki. “The Author Reader Relationship.” 14 April 2010. Web source: All About the Words Blog. http://nikkimantyla.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/the-author–reader-relationship/

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. First Vintage International Edition, New York. 2004

“The Death of the Author.” 6 May 2011. Web source: Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

Young, John. “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences.”African American Review Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 181-204. Published by: Indiana State University Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903252

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On my way to a final draft. Thoughts?

How involved does a writer get in his or her reader’s lives? How involved do the readers get in the writer’s life? If we had thought about this question 100 years ago, or even 50, we would probably say that there is very little involvement between the two. Literary theorist Roland Barthes certainly thinks so as well. In fact, Barthes’ theories about an author who is essentially “dead”—meaning that the novel and its creator have nothing to do with each other—may seem logical in a non-technological world. But in today’s modern society and digital culture, we see a drastic change in the author/reader relationship. Modern writers are connecting with readers through modern means of communication: essentially creating a living, working, and involved relationship.

Roland Barthes expressed that "to give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." He has a point, but modern writers like Toni Morrison are showing that this is not the case. On the contrary, the author should be there for the reader to expound on themes and issues that may be hard to understand, and ultimately help the reader personally connect to the work of literature.

Toni Morrison was already a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner when her novel Song of Solomon was chosen as a selection in Oprah’s Book Club, the national book club of the daytime talk show host, Oprah Winfrey. She had already established her artistic value as a postmodern author when she became apart of one of the most dramatic examples of postmodernism’s union of canonicity and commercialism. With Morrison’s involvement in Oprah’s Book Club, we see not only an integration of Morrison’s academic audience and her popular audience, but also an integration of her black audience and her white audience. Just as she defies literary norms in the plot and character development of her novels, she also defies the tradition of the ways an author must behave—particularly African American women writers.

What we see in Morrison is a new kind of relationship between the author and reader. Morrison may be criticized for becoming involved in a daytime book club to promote her novels because up until then, writers usually took on the role of being secluded from the readers, or as Barthes coined, being “dead” and leaving the text to speak for itself. Once again, Morrison sought to make a different move from this expectation. She makes a particular effort to connect with both high and popular cultures. She has remarked that “I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, like jazz” (Young pg. 187). She did this with her novel Song of Solomon both on and off of her television appearances on Oprah.

Morrison herself in an interview describes this interaction between author and reader where she spoke about a critical scene in the novel: “A woman once got very angry with me because Pilate died. I told her that first, it was of no value to have Guitar kill someone nobody cared anything about. If that had been the case it would not show us how violent violence is. Some character that we care about had to be killed to demonstrate that” (Contemporary Literature pg. 420). What helps readers connect with the issues surrounding sorrow and death is her application of these themes from her real life. One such reader is Trudy Hamilton, a photographer and blogger. In a post about one of Morrison’s appearances and comments about death on the Oprah Show, Hamilton remarks, “the fact that Toni is so emotionally evolved to fully acknowledge sadness truly moves me. Here's the thing...nothing she said in [her] statement is "negative." The fact that she acknowledged what the pain feels like and realizes that this narrative is a part of her life story and in no way devalues her life or even her ability to do her work moved me to tears” (TruShots Photography Blog).

What Morrison does, and what Trudy Hamilton is doing is using the digital media to reach a greater understanding and emotional connection to the literature and the author/reader relationship. Morrison is just one example of an author where readers all over the world are actively participating in blogs, forums, and other social media where they can discuss important plots or themes of her literature. We also see a growing popularity for authors to create blogs themselves and involve their readers in the writing process. One such writer wrote about this author/reader relationship on her blog: “thanks to technology, suddenly you can read your favorite author’s blog and leave comments on it or send her messages on Twitter and get replies. It’s amazing.” But there is something else that this author considers:

and yet it’s still such a unique relationship. One of my author friends once told me how inadequate she feels at book signings because readers already feel like they know her through her books and it’s almost like they want something intangible — some taste of what they found in the book and want to rediscover by meeting her. It’s sort of crazy and sort of awkward and sort of understandable, all at the same time (All About the Words Blog)

One web-site acknowledged that this changing relationship is a job in and of itself, not like the author/relationship from years before. Pat Ferrara wrote: “An author’s website and blog have become full-time projects in and of themselves. While they may not be as entertaining as their next series installment, they put the time and effort to connect with you during the wait, take advantage of it” (Mania Blog). While there are pros and cons to such an involved relationship between the author and the reader, I feel like the pros win out. Just as Ferrara points out, the modes that we have now in the digital age to connect with the author, and ultimately the work that they create, is a unique opportunity for us.

It’s exciting that an author is no longer “dead” to us as the readers. Forums, blogs, on-line discussions all help readers connect on a new level to a piece of writing. Whether it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner like Toni Morrison, or a beginning writer, the life of the author and his or her active contributions to a work of literature is what is perhaps to be most celebrated in this digital age.

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Working title: Bringing the Author to Life in the Digital Age

Excuse the choppiness: this outline is a draft of how I want my chapter to develop, point by point.

Intro: literary theories of Roland Barthes who "killed the author"--meaning that all that is important is the text and no supplemental information about the author or from the author is necessary. Through developing technology and social media, this is not the case any more. Authors are using digital means to connect with their readers. The author/reader relationship is completely changing in the digital age.

Toni Morrison began reaching out to her readers through technology in the mid 1990s--mostly through television (the Oprah show). Her book Song of Solomon was one of the book selections for Oprah's Book Club. She made appearances on the show and led discussions to help readers find the deeper themes and meanings in the book.

Use research, like what she said on her tv appearances, quotes from interviews that analyzed aspects of Song of Solomon--material that helps the reader analyze the novel and apply for themselves, which is what Morrison wants.
Also use blogs, forums, and twitter posts to show reader responses to Morrison's public involvement with her readers.

In part Morrison's writings and interviews are to accomplish what her female black predecessors like Zora Neale Hurston could not do: be completely free to publish and say what she wants. But what Morrison started to do is what hundreds of authors are doing now in the digital age through modern technology and social media.

Use my research (seen on my Diigo bookmarks) of blogs about modern author/reader relationships, and presentations about authors connecting to readers even before publishing.

There are pros and cons, but ultimately in this digital age, it's new and exciting how no longer is the author dead to the reader: they can become an integral part in the readers love and understanding of the literature.

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Using InDesign to create an Ebook

Ok, so I played around with InDesign to see how to create an ebook format. It was actually pretty easy. Rather than exporting the document to be a pdf file which most people usually do, all you do is export it as an epub format. I assume then, that that's how we can upload it to the place of our choice, but that's still what I'm not sure about.

So for our ebook, I think that what would be easiest would be to compile all of our chapters into a word document or google document. We can then place that text into the InDesign document and design it there, which should be way easier. Then, like Nyssa said, we can designate the chapter breaks in InDesign before we export it as an epub format.

Should be pretty easy, I hope!

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The Tower of eBabel

I have realized as I have researched ebooks the last couple of days, that I really don't know that much about ebooks! I mean, I own a Kindle, but like I said earlier, all I do to get books on that is click a button.

So, to find out more about the different types of ebooks, I went to the ultimate source: wikipedia. What would I do without it? It was helpful to me to read about the different formats, especially in considering which format I feel would be best for our class project in creating an ebook.

Here is a page that was helpful to me. And after learning more about creating an ebook, I think that for our class, the html route would be best, considering that we are really trying to reach a lot of people. Html format allows people to access it from any web browser which is nice, considering not everyone has a kindle, or a nook, or an ipad, etc.

But then I found this helpful site about ebook conversions to different formats, much like how there are programs that convert different music formats. So, even if we go with another route, there is a way for someone to convert our ebook into another format.

The other thing I found in my internet research is the element of all the different ebook publishers. This site is an example. So that's another thing that I hope we will discuss today in class: which route we will take in creating our own ebook.

I still am a little bit hazy about all this ebook business, so I look forward to learning more today and seeing what my class mates found.

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