A Companion to the History of the Book (83 page)

Other publishers recognized the importance of the web by publishing books about it: Nicholas Negroponte’s
Being Digital: The Road Map for Survival on the Information Superhighway
(1995) was typical of the genre. Sales of academic books continued to decline as libraries diverted more of their funds toward buying journals and other electronic resources. Some publishers hoped that electronic publishing would save the academic monograph but, unlike the journal which has been fully embraced in its electronic format, take-up of electronic editions of current books has not been sufficient to make the electronic book or “e-book” viable. But publishers used the new technology to extend the life of print editions by storing texts electronically and producing print copies on demand or in very small editions.

In the late 1990s, several new companies began to offer textbooks and academic books online. The investment made by them was huge in relation to the typical investment made by the established library publishers. NetLibrary and Questia Media Inc. each had funding of $100 million. Their plan was to convert books licensed from publishers into XML format and sell electronic access to these books to libraries. But restrictions on access designed to pacify nervous publishers, and a tendency for publishers to hold back their best titles, compromised the model, and in the case of NetLibrary the business failed. In late 2001, NetLibrary filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 and was bought by OCLC for $2 million. Questia still sells to libraries but has reduced the size of its operation.

Ebrary, founded in 2001 by Chris Warnock, the son of the founder of Adobe, and backed by several large publishers, offered electronic versions of books in PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format). Ebrary was first aimed at individual users who would pay only for the pages they downloaded or printed, but it then offered libraries the entire collection of books on an annual subscription allowing simultaneous use by more than one reader, an important selling point for libraries. Safari Techbooks On-line, a partnership between O’Reilly & Associates, Pearson, and Books24x7, all based in Boston, have been more successful book aggregators by being more focused. Safari puts IT books online and enables them to be searched and downloaded by IT and programming professionals. Books24x7 offers electronic versions of business and technology books which can be searched and downloaded and which are aimed at business professionals.

While the new aggregators tried to break into the library field, librarians continued to buy electronic editions of old books from traditional library publishers like ProQuest and Thomson Gale, the very same books that they already had on microfilm, in reprint, and, in the largest libraries, in original editions. The 125,000 English books printed before 1700 that University Microfilms had begun to microfilm in 1937 were offered as
Early English Books On-line (EEBO)
by ProQuest. Thomson Gale published electronic editions of the majority of books printed in the eighteenth century.

Neither ProQuest nor Thomson Gale followed Chadwyck-Healey by offering SGML-coded, fully searchable, electronic editions produced by manual keying. This was considered to be too expensive for the academic library market. Their electronic editions are made by scanning microfilm, but early print cannot be satisfactorily searched by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software so the main advantages over the microfilm edition are the convenience of having text delivered to computer screens. ProQuest, the University of Michigan, and Oxford University then set up the Text Creation Partnership in 1999 to address the limitations of only having scanned images. Now over 15,000 books have been converted directly from the scanned images into SGML-coded, fully searchable, electronic texts; the goal is a total of 25,000 texts to be made available to libraries who have already bought EEBO and who then make a substantial financial contribution to the partnership. This partnership model is proving to be popular with libraries and publishers. Oxford University and the University of Michigan have created a new partnership with Readex to convert 6,000 texts from the 40,000 texts in the Evans Early American Imprints collection, and in a separate partnership Thomson Gale is converting 10,000 texts from the 150,000 texts in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

But all these initiatives have been overshadowed by Google’s announcement in December 2004 that, in partnership with some of the great research libraries (including Oxford, Harvard, and New York Public Library), it would underwrite the cost of scanning millions of books. Out-of-copyright books will be available in their entirety for free on the web through the Google site. Excerpts or “snippets” of in-copyright books are available to searchers in response to a search – only a few lines of text containing the searched-for term is displayed, even though the entire text has been scanned. It is this comprehensive copying of in-copyright books without permission that has incurred the wrath of publishers, who see it as a direct infringement of their rights, and in 2005 law suits were started against Google. Google has countered that it already scans the entire contents of websites in order to provide its much-admired search service and that the scanning of books to provide a comprehensive in-depth search capability is no different. The logic of Google’s position seems unassailable. Specialized books sell in small numbers and sit on library shelves underused because the information in them is relatively inaccessible compared to what we are now used to on the web. An initiative on this scale to provide in-depth access to the world’s books (albeit mainly in English) must be welcomed, but runs directly counter to the legal rights of authors and publishers which are carried over from another age.

In contrast to the nervous hostility of publishers, libraries have warmly welcomed Google’s initiative because through it libraries achieve two longed-for goals. They become publishers at no cost and risk to themselves by carrying out both the selection of titles and the scanning, and the out-of-copyright scanned books are free to all. Previously, conversion into a new format put out-of-copyright books back into the ownership of the publisher/converter who could then charge what the market would bear. In the 1980s, libraries had tried to wrest the initiative from publishers by undertaking the microfilming of large numbers of older books for preservation purposes, funded by organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. But, because there were usually only one or two copies of each microfilm, the millions of books that were filmed remained relatively inaccessible. Since the Google announcement, the rival search service Yahoo! has announced a book digitization project with partners such as the University of California, the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and the UK National Archives, together with commercial partners that include Adobe and Hewlett Packard. The Library of Congress has also announced plans to create a World Digital Library and has already received a donation of $3 million from Google. Other initiatives have been announced by Microsoft and AOL and, with a combined market capitalization of half a trillion dollars, the impact of these commercial companies on how we access and use textual information and images will be profound.

Libraries too have been changed. Visitors to the British Library look through monumental glass walls at the red and gold bindings of the King’s Library unaware that this part of the library was originally designed to house the catalogue. The OPAC, first envisaged in the 1960s but only completed in the late 1980s, enabled the architect to think again and use the space to display the most magnificent of the library’s founding collections.
⁶

Bush’s vision of organized and accessible scientific literature has already been achieved by the wide adoption of the electronic journal article accessed by electronic search tools. But the idea of the “e-book,” a single book only published in electronic media, is misconceived because it regards the electronic version as only a replica of the printed book. Web 2.0, which is the new iteration of the web, envisages constantly developing services rather than individual products. Publications are not static but constantly evolve. Information not only flows from the publisher to the user but from user to user and from user to publisher. Wikipedia (
www.wikipedia.org
), the people’s encyclopedia (created by web users with very little editorial intervention), now exceeds
Encyclopedia Britannica
in size, and publishers such as the Alexander Street Press are now creating Wiki-based services covering specialized subjects such as “Women and Social Movements” in which the content is under the control of academic editors. RSS feeds and push technologies, a part of Web 2.0, enable users to see when new items are posted or even to see when someone has linked to a site. Other sites like Flickr (
www.flickr.com
) hold millions of photographs provided by the public. The speed with which such huge databases can be searched and brought to the reader’s screen is what sets apart electronic media. We quickly take for granted such speed and convenience and will always demand more. This demand drives the progress of electronic media, a progress that has already had a greater influence on the ways in which we access text and images than we have yet begun to realize.

Notes

1
By Aaron D. Wyner (1939–97), the editor of Shannon’s collected papers.

2
Quoted by John Naughton in
The Observer,
London, February 25, 2001.

3
“Microfilm” includes the other formats micro-cards and microfiche. The generic term is microform.

4
Interview with Alan Buckingham, Managing Director, Dorling Kindersley Multimedia/ Interactive Learning 1991–8, June 2004.

5
Commission of the European Communities DG XIII/E (1993)
New Opportunities for Publishers in the Information Services Market,
E5.

6
Address by Colin St. John Wilson, architect of the British Library, at the 23rd Congress of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, London, September 22, 2003.

References and Further Reading

Allison, Anne Marie and Allan, Ann (1979)
0CLC: A National Library Network.
Short Hills: Enslow.

Berners-Lee, Tim (1999)
Weaving the Web.
San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Ekman, Richard and Quandt, Richard E. (1999)
Technology and Scholarly Communication.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kenna, Stephanie and Ross, Seamus (1995)
Networking in the Humanities.
London: Bowker Saur.

King, G. W., Edmundson, Harold P., Flood, Merrill M., et al. (1963)
Automation and the Library of Congress.
Washington: Library of Congress.

Lambert, Steve and Ropiequet, Suzanne (1986)
CD-ROM: The New Papyrus.
Redmond: Microsoft.

Miller, W. and Gratch, B. (1989) “Making Connections: Computerized Reference Services and People.”
Library Trends,
37 (4): 387–401.

Negroponte, Nicholas (1995)
Being Digital.
New York: Knopf

Nelson, Ted Holm (1981)
Literary Machines.
Swarthmore, PA: Ted Holm Nelson.

Power, Eugene B. with Anderson, Robert (1990)
Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power.
Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International.

Sigel, Efrem, Schubin, Mark, Merrill, Paul F., et al. (198O)
Video Discs: The Technology, the Applications, and the Future.
White Plains: Knowledge Industry.

Summit, Roger (2002) “Reflections on the Beginning of Dialog.”
Chronolog Newsletter,
Thomson Dialog, June.

Tenopir, Carol (1986) “Infotrac: A Laser Disc System.”
Library Journal,
September 1: 168–9.

Thompson, John B. (2005)
Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States.
Cambridge: Polity.

Veaner, Allen B. (1976)
Studies in Micropublishing 1853–1976: Documentary Sources.
Westport: Microform Review.

PART IV

Issues

34

New Histories of Literacy

Patricia Crain

The Trouble with “Literacy”

Everybody knows what literacy is. It is what digital media puts at risk and what “at-risk” students are not getting enough of. It is an object and a source of editorial polemic, political showboating, NGO imperatives, and bookish nostalgia. As a term of art, however, identifying an area of study, “literacy” possesses the vices of both its capacious abstraction and its apparent common-sense utility. Its bureaucratic aura aligns it with policy and the aggregate rather than with practice and the individual. No one says “I love my literacy,” but lots of people love (or hate or are otherwise disaffected by or excluded from) reading and writing. And it is reading and writing that constitute literacy: the practices and processes, implications and consequences, origins and aims, poetics and politics, of reading and writing. Yet if reading and writing are its most obvious components, “literacy” and related terms nonetheless always stand for something beyond these practices. One might say, in fact, that “literacy” expresses everything that is left out when one speaks solely of reading and writing. If the excess that “literacy” captures might variously be identified as, among other things, ideology, culture, identity, power, pleasure, aspiration, and historical context, it is then small wonder that scholars struggle to define this thorny and unsatisfactory term.

Part of the problem is that “literacy” entered the English language precisely in order to augment mere reading and writing, to layer these practices with additional significance. (Other European languages, which registered a similar shift, tended to base their neologisms on the root “alphabet”; Baumann 1986: 17.) “Literacy” (from Latin
littera,
letter) comes into currency around 1883, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
that monument to the Western ideal of literacy (whose first installment, not coincidentally, came out the following year). Here, “literacy” originates “as an antithesis to
illiteracy”
and signifies “[t]he quality or state of being literate; knowledge of letters; condition in respect to education,
esp.
ability to read and write.” A noun of quality, state, or condition, “literacy” thus establishes the end to which the verbs “read” and “write” supply the means. In the transition to a substantive, what had been practices became hypostatized, and process gave way to product. Raymond Williams suggests that the word “was invented to express the
achievement
and
possession
of what were increasingly seen as general and necessary skills” (my emphasis; Williams 1985: 188). The literate had always represented a restricted class (of medieval European clergy or fifth-century bc Athenian gentry or seventeenth-century New Spanish
letrados,
for example), whose “possession” of literacy was assumed, if its “achievement” was the object of technical manuals and physical disciplines. A sense of distinction, of a distancing from vernacular spoken language as well as from everyday reading and writing, has always clung to “literate.” The ancient
litteratus
often meant cultured, and the medieval
littera-tus
usually meant educated in Latin. Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
(1755) offers “literate” and “lettered” as synonyms meaning “educated to learning,” while “illiterate” is “unlettered, untaught.” Newly required by late nineteenth-century Americans and Western Europeans, literacy was ever more widely available and widely promoted. “Literacy” hints, if guardedly, at democratic access.

As Raymond Williams points out in
Keywords
(1985), language does not merely reflect “the processes of society and history.” Rather, “important social and historical processes occur
within
language” and, furthermore, “[e]arlier and later senses coexist, or become actual alternatives in which problems of contemporary belief and affiliation are contested” (Williams 1985: 22). “Literacy” consolidates a range of reading and writing practices under one term, capturing in that gesture a moment in the history of Western and specifically US bureaucracy and educational theory. Jenny Cook-Gumperz nicely sums up the problem:

the shift from the eighteenth century onwards has not been from total illiteracy to literacy, but from a hard-to-estimate multiplicity of literacies,
& pluralistic
idea about literacy as a composite of different skills related to reading and writing for many different purposes and sections of a society’s population, to a twentieth-century notion of a single, standardised
schooled literacy,
(emphasis in original; Cook-Gumperz 1986: 22)

The
OED
cites as the first usage of “literacy” a squib from the 1883
Journal of Education
(under its earlier name, the
New England Journal of Education):
“Massachusetts is the first state in the Union in literacy in its native population.” The original passage goes on to say: “and the nineteenth only from its Irish and French-Canadian illiteracy” (Editorial 1883: 54). This brief editorial item blames a blow to Massachusetts’s long and proudly held educational primacy on new immigrants. The prophetic ring of this first citing, prefiguring twentieth- and twenty-first-century anxieties over education and immigration, suggests that the mentalities and institutions which gave birth to “literacy” still, to a large extent, maintain.

In seeking a usable definition, scholars struggle with the inheritance of “literacy,” not only as an elusive term but as one expressive of many of the factors that enabled the word to secure its status as a galvanizing cultural concept. These might include, among other things, nativism, sexism, competition among languages and dialects, challenges from other communications media, racial and class hierarchies, shifting locations of cultural production, and so on. Scholars, educators, and policy-makers have responded variously over the years to this intractable complexity. Some throw up their hands: as one scholar puts it, “the stunning fact is that we do not fully know what literacy is” (Szwed in Cushman et al. 2001: 423). Others have offered technical, local, or, in some other fashion, restricted definitions. The social historian Lawrence Stone, for example, in a foundational article (discussed further below), defines literacy as:

the capacity to sign one’s name, which for periods before the nineteenth century is nearly all we now know or indeed are ever likely to know in the future. We do not know now, and may never know, the precise relationship between the capacity to sign one’s name -”alphabetism” might be a better word for it - and true literacy, that is the ability to use the written word as a means of communication. (Stone 1969: 98)

At the other end of the spectrum, the US government’s National Center for Education Statistics defines literacy in broad, aspirational terms as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” In a similar vein, and in an effort shared by most scholars to situate literacy in social networks, the historian of education Sylvia Harrop reads literacy as “an indicator not only of the educational and cultural interests, but also of the general well-being of a community” (Harrop 1983: 52). In what he characterizes as a “radical critique of the term literacy and its popular uses,” Robert Pattison defines literacy as “foremost consciousness of the problems posed by language, and secondarily skill in the technologies, such as rhetoric and writing, by which this consciousness is expressed” (Pattison 1982: vii, vi). Most recently, David Vincent calls it “a tool for enabling individuals and social groups to extend their understanding of themselves and their world, and amongst the objects of comprehension is that of literacy itself” (Vincent 2000: 24).

Such definitions betray a self-conscious and self-reflexive strain, as if to say that literacy describes the mode of communication that broods about itself. Wary of these difficulties, the historian Harvey Graff, who has undertaken the most sustained and searching critique of traditional literacy scholarship, acknowledges that the “very notion of literacy is problematic” (Graff 1987: 373), and suggests that it

represents a range of abilities or skills that may or may not lead to a distinctive personal, social-psychological condition or orientation. Its meaning is established only in precise historical contexts; it is not universally given or proscribed. It need not connote dimensions of the liberal, the polished, or the literary, and may not even contrast strongly with illiteracy. (Graff 1987: 374)

In a similar vein, the education historian E. Jennifer Monaghan writes that “something that schoolteachers have known all along has belatedly been recognized, that there is no strict demarcation between literacy and illiteracy” (Monaghan 2005: 3). Like Graff, Monaghan and other scholars seek to escape the binary opposition of the term’s origins. Others find literacy’s monolithic and hegemonic qualities inescapable and identify them as essential to its meaning. The literary scholar John Guillory, for instance, defines literacy “as
the systematic regulation of reading and writing,
a complex social phenomenon corresponding to the following set of questions: Who reads? What do they read? How do they read? In what social and institutional circumstances? Who writes? In what social and institutional contexts? For whom?” (emphasis in original; Guillory 1993: 18). Though some of its practitioners would quibble with Guillory’s core definition, with its emphasis on discipline and social control, recent histories of literacy address the questions he raises and other similar questions, drawing upon a broad and varied archive. Before surveying some of these, it may be helpful briefly to sketch a genealogy of the field.

A Short History of the History of Literacy

Theories of education and of reading and writing have an ancient provenance and might be said to begin the history of literacy. Plato’s
Phaedrus,
in which Socrates (whose own opus was, of course, strictly oral) critiques writing as a threat to memory and as a weak imitation of true knowledge, might be considered the
locus classicus
of the “consequences of literacy” genre. Modern histories of education have often been, of necessity, interested in literacy, from Werner Jaeger’s monumental history of Greek education,
Paideia
(1939–44) and the literary historian T. W Baldwin’s
William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke
(1944) to Lawrence Cremin’s three-volume history of American education (1970–88). Writing either before or against the grain of the mid-twentieth-century New Critical concentration on the literary artifact, a number of literary scholars were interested in historical and contemporary readers, and in the sociology of readership. Working during the post-World War II expansion of British higher education, literary and social historians of the left found common ground, often through their transformative work in adult education, especially in and around the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham (1964). The title, much of the spirit, and some of the methods
of The Uses of Literacy
(1957) – a participant-observer analysis of contemporary popular culture by CCCS founding director Richard Hoggart - echoes through literacy studies decades later, while social historians trace their lineage to E. P. Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class
(1963).

The history of literacy proper begins with two foundational articles. Social anthropologist Jack Goody and literary historian Ian Watt’s “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) was published in an essay collection in 1968. The following year, social historian Lawrence Stone’s “Literacy and Education in England 1640–1900” appeared. Goody and Watt posited (rather notoriously) what has become known as the “great divide” theory of literacy and orality. Using fifth-century bc Athenian culture as their laboratory, they argued that the introduction of writing allowed a widely literate urban society to create the conditions for key features of Western culture to emerge: among these were a shift from a mythic to an historical sense of time, an awareness of a difference between past and present, and a sense of the individual’s alienation from tradition. Though they claimed to be rejecting a “dichotomy based upon the assumption of radical differences between the mental attributes of literate and non-literate peoples,” they posited that “pre-literate” cultures were “homeostatic” and emphasized that “there may still exist general differences between literate and non-literate societies” (Goody and Watt 1968: 44). Despite their disclaimers, Goody and Watt attributed to literacy an array of social and cultural as well as cognitive and psychological phenomena. More recent research has called into question the extent of early Greek literacy (Harris 1989). Some scholars see Goody and Watt’s determinism as part of a “literacy myth” (Ruth Finnegan in Keller-Cohen 1994; see also Graff 1987). Many now detect presentism, Western chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and “missionary” condescension in this work; Goody himself has substantially revised his own position over the years. Anthropologist Walter Mignolo has concluded that recent “ethnographic works done on the genres of speech in non-Western communities have shown that orality is an equivalent to, rather than an outdated precursor of, literacy” (Mignolo 1995: 213). Discredited in some quarters though it may be, the orality–literacy divide and its technological determinism remain influential, particularly through the works of classicist Walter Ong and media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Lawrence Stone established some of the methodologies and asked some of the questions that have since characterized the field by categorizing levels and causes of literacy and offering demographic evidence of its spread between the English Civil War and 1900. Stone presented a largely, though not exclusively, statistical response in the first such regional analysis of literacy, concluding that “the conquest of illiteracy took place in three main stages, one fairly active and one very active phase being separated by over a century of relatively slow growth. The whole process took about four hundred years, starting at the top of the social pyramid and working downwards” (Stone 1969: 125). This “conquest” meant that in England about 40 percent of men were literate by 1675, a percentage that increased slowly until 1780 and rapidly thereafter, with two-thirds of the men and half of the women literate by 1840. After 1840, according to Stone, “the growth of elementary education in Victorian England was so rapid that it took only another fifty years virtually to wipe out illiteracy altogether, both for men and for women” (Stone 1969: 119).