reading

Silent Conversation tells classic stories, poems and haiku in an interactive way, inspired by Walter Savage Landor's motto What is reading but silent conversation?. They are presented as levels where the player controls a small line (similar to a text prompt) to go through the winding words.

We would need a system that enables people to:

• Publish a list of books they would be willing to discuss with other people to the open web. Antilibraries – collections of books you haven't read yet but would like to read – are particularly well suited to this proposition.
• See which books people in their social network want to discuss, and/or subscribe to other people's lists
• Be notified when 4+ people in their network have the same book on their discussion list – possibly via an email thread?
• Coordinate and schedule a time to read and discuss the book with that group.

It is my opinion that if a book’s contents can be adequately “summed up,” so that you really don’t miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.

Highlighter is a personal knowledge bank and collaborative learning network designed to feed your curiosity and help you examine new ideas.

A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.

I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.”

Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

Show image 0 Show image 1

Generally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:

1. Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
2. Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
3. The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.

The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.

...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.

One of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?

Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.

A meta note, inspired both by Proust and by this book about Proust: after reading a book, when you're making notes, don't refer to the book; just write down the most interesting things that come to mind. This is a better way of digging out what actually struck you about the book; as soon as you have the book to reference, you will start looking up the bits you "should" write about, and end up aiming at comprehensiveness rather than interestingness. Your actual criterion should be whatever interested you. Later, you can fill in quotations & references.

Show image 0 Show image 1 Show image 2

A book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.

Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.

Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.