Reading on Screen: The New Media Sphere. By Christian Vandendorpe

This essay sets out its stall to give a brief summary of the main points of the development of reading and writing. The development of the codex, or book form of writing, along with the development of a miniature writing form and the development of spaces between words all helped reading and writing come to the fore. Of course the printing press really helped the book take off and allowed page numbers, paragraphs and form to mould a book into what we know it as today....good luck to anybody trying to read a book with no spaces between words or no paragraphs between ideas. With the development of mass production of many diverse ideas in book form, Vandendorpe tells how people decided to browse numerous books rather than focus on one, in a way mirroring todays actions on the internet.

Our author continues to detail the development of reading and how the computer and the internet has made it so easy to pluck information from anywhere around the world with the click of a mouse and read it off our screens. There are three types of internet on-screen reading according to sources consulted by Vandendorpe; Grazing, Browsing and Hunting. Browsing being prominent with online newspapers and magazines and hunting being linked to search engines. The author briefly explores the most suitable font for screen and pages alike, citing many of the same reasons for the chosen fonts in each case.

We also see how the computer programmes for production of text and the internets digitization of books, is like the past, moving away from scroll format and into a two dimensional version of the codex to allow the reader or typer a better overview and control on their flow of writing.

Hypertext, Vandendorpe explains, allows the reader of a screen to have an ever evolving book at our fingertips when reading on the world wide web. The hypertext allows us to shift from idea to idea as the codex did at first. The hypertext however allows us to shift from book to book, an impossibility in the primitive centuries unless one had access to a vast library and a vast amount of time. The hypertext is apparently detrimental to the eye in terms of reading as it is designed to flow effortlessly along a page until a border tells it to stop. This would signal the death of the column only for the limitations of a computer screen force it to form in an orderly and neat manner that is easy on the readers eye.

In the end, Vandendorpe gives a rather philosophical and idealist view on the future development of writing and reading, citing that maybe the changes seen in the last three centuries could well be the benchmark for the range of development in the next few years of the text as we know it.

Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice. By Aimeee Morrison

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-1&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-6-1&brand=9781405148641_brand

Ms Morrison decides in her introduction to in a way hype up internet blogging, throwing numerous impressive statistics at us readers on the rise of the blog and its importance as a way of the public to vent their indispensible thoughts upon the world. She claims that blogging has become a form of "citizen journalism", a place where the public can foster their "personnel expression".
As Morrison proceeds in her piece, she again waxes lyrical on the blog and blogosphere for its interactability and its self-referentialism. She continues to give excellent examples of the usefullness of blogging for expressing thoughts and sharing ideas through hypertext links and simple social networking blogs such as facebook and myspace.
Morrison moves her essay quickly along into discussing the technologies behind blogging and brings terms like HTML, CMS and RSS into the equation; terms that simply confuse the regular internet user, like myself, who is happy with seeing the image on the screen and not really caring what makes it this way.
Next to fall under the gaze of Morrison are the different genres that blogging takes up. The author tells us of online diaries, personal journals and edublogs to name but a few. I feel that Morrison explains the genres and different aspects that blogging allows very well in this section of her essay. Morrison also offers us ways to navigate the blogosphere by presenting search engines such as googles blogsearch tool, which personally I found very useful and the blogcarnival website.
The issue of anonymity is also brought forward by Morrison as she tells us that even if the blogger tries to hide his or her identity through by what she calls "security by obscurity", that bloggers true identity will inevitably be figured out. She highlights the point that academics writing on blogs or discussion forums also face the same issues and maybe in a way this helps to keep the information they provide clean, pure and referenced. Morrison uses this link to drag the issue of blogging in academics into the equation and puts forward its advantages, such as discussion and interaction between academics that is usually available for all simpletons like us social bloggers to attain.
Overall, in my humble opinion, Morrison displays a willingness to encourage and promote blogging for all the article's readers, wheter they be academics or students, politicians or voters or any other form of living being with access to the internet and a computer.