Is It the Format or the Information
Here’s a nice, sensitive topic that has nothing to do with politics. What’s important: the format or the information? What’s key about a book? Is it that it is an object created out of paper or a similar substance with a binding and leaves that contains information? Is it the book as an object that’s important? Or is it the information that’s contained within the book that’s important? If a book is digitized, how important is the format change? If I listen to an audio book, does it count the same as reading a book?
I’ve had a few different discussions with people in the last few days about this. What do you think?
December 24th, 2003 at 3:31 pm
It’s not clear to me that the distinction between format and information is so discrete. A format establishes a frame of reference for information; to extract information from an item you have to start from the format and see how that format has been elaborated. The adoption of the format makes it easy to elaborate on meaningful details that distinguish items within a class of meaningful things, rather than to laboriously explain each one within a wider frame of reference.
Of course, in this very abstracted sense, formats layer upon formats in every part of conscious experience. We are always setting up expectations and gauging what happens in reference to those expectations. Therefore I think you can only ask whether a format is important in reference to the situations where it is used. An electronic format incomparably better for finding something you know to exist in a given text. A paper book is incomparably better for reading straight-through and usually better for skimming in order to find a general idea. This is because in the first case, we expect a specific phrase and the cognitive task is to discern that phrase among a stream of others– a laborious effort best left to a computer. In the latter cases, the cognitive task is to navigate back and forth through pages full of symbols in order to absorb the meaning of those symbols. Computers currently can’t help us do this any more efficiently, and as any reader knows it’s much easier to flip through a paper book and catch the important points.
December 26th, 2003 at 10:13 am
Interesting points. In some ways, a computer is better at processing text than a person because a computer can locate keywords much quicker through a “find” feature. When I use a certain news database, I often use a “keyword in context feature” to skim articles–something I can’t do quickly on my own. But I also know from personal experience and scholarly studies that people read faster when something is on paper than when something is on a computer screen, not including keystrokes, mouse clicks, page loading, and
other tasks that interfere with someone’s ability to read quickly in an electronic environment.
Skimming with an audio tape is much more difficult unless you have the right equipment.
December 26th, 2003 at 3:35 pm
The book is NOT a format, it is an OBJECT. The format is a paginated codex, as opposed to scroll. The book-as-object is simply a variation among variations, one which utilizes a set of structural elements that set it apart from these other variations.
You also need to consider the variability of the reading experience: what is the nature of the material being read (i.e., dense, closely argued intellectual content or fluff fiction), the reader’s intent in reading said content, the social setting in which the reading occurs, even the cultural context for the reading.
In my experiences with digitizing books, photographs, manuscripts, and text, among the first questions asked is “what is the salient aspect of the object being digitized: is it the literal presentation (page images, whether of books, photos or manuscripts) or the intellectual content (often OCR’d text) that will be the most useful digital surrogate for the end user?” In some cases the OBJECT is as important or more so…but that path leads to iconography. The importance of the format change? Heh, the very first question I ask is WHY do you want this “thing” (since I work with a mulitiplicity of genere and formats) digitized…our usual song is preservation through enhanced access and limited physical handling.