Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gen Zers And Millennials Are Still Big Fans Of Books – Even If They Don’T Call Themselves ‘Readers’, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Identifying with an activity is different from actually doing it. For example, 49% of Americans play video games, but only 10% identify as gamers. According to a recent survey we conducted, there’s also a small gap between reading activity and identity for younger readers: 61% of Generation Z and millennials have read a print book, e-book or audiobook in the past 12 months, but only 57% identify as readers.

And yet there was a puzzling aspect of our results: The 43% of Gen Z and millennials who didn’t identify as readers actually said they read more print books per month …

Gen Z And Millennials Have An Unlikely Love Affair With Their Local Libraries, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

A phone fixation may seem at odds with an attraction to books. But the latter may offer a much-needed reprieve from the former. In our recent study of American Gen Z and millennials, we discovered that 92% of them check social media daily; 25% of them check multiple times per hour. Yet in that same nationally representative study, we also found that Gen Z and millennials are still visiting libraries at a healthy clip, with 54% of Gen Zers and millennials trekking to their local library in 2022. Our findings reinforce 2017 data from the Pew Research Center, which showed …

Digital Public Library Ecosystem 2023, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Digital Public Library Ecosystem is the network of digital book collection and circulation specifically through public libraries. Digital book collection and circulation have never been more important than they are today. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans has read an ebook in the last 12 months. Audiobook listening is also high; nearly 1 in 4 Americans has listened to an audiobook in that same time period. Libraries are one way in which readers gain access to ebooks and audiobooks. Despite this, a holistic view of the digital library ecosystem is largely opaque. Three factors contribute to current confusion about the …

Gen Z And Millennials How They Use Public Libraries And Identify Through Media Use, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Gen Z and millennials have some surprising attitudes and behaviors regarding media consumption and library use. 54% of Gen Z and millennials visited a physical library within a twelve-month period. Libraries attract even Gen Z and millennials who don’t identify as readers. This report examines Gen Z and millennials' book-related behaviors (such as borrowing, buying, downloading and socializing) and and how media use shapes Gen Z and millennials' identity claims as Readers, Gamers, Fans and Writers. The report is intended for specialists such as librarians and book publishers, and broad public audiences.

The Many Moving Parts Behind Brandon Sanderson’S Record-Breaking Kickstarter Campaign, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The creation and fulfillment of Sanderson’s Kickstarter relies on a crack team managing massive amounts of data as well as all aspects of production. Sanderson had been running a multi-million-dollar, mid-sized publishing company well before his March 1, 2022 Kickstarter shot north of $28 million in two weeks, making it the biggest campaign—for now—in Kickstarter history.

Publishing In The Pacific Northwest, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda, Nathalie Op De Beeck

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Overview of how 11 Pacific Northwest booksellers survived Covid, and continue to thrive after pandemic lockdowns have lifted. After many consumers shifted to online book buying, what techniques are these book stores using to attract and keep customers?

Book Readers Who Are Buccaneers And Buyers, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens, Chris Kenneally

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

These readers buy, subscribe to, and borrow books at higher rates than the general population. They engage at higher rates in fan fiction and discover new authors across multiple media, including streaming movies and television. These readers are also pirates.

Immersive Media and Books 2020 is the first study to capture data expressly about how people engage with books, video games, film, and TV. The final report focuses sharply on reader behavior across a wide range of demographic groups, based on surveys conducted before and during the pandemic.

Co-authors Dr. Rachel Noorda and Dr. Kathi Inman Berens probe especially for …

Ooligan Press: Building And Sustaining A Feminist Digital Humanities Lab At A R-2, Kathi Inman Berens, Abbey Gaterud, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

How can practitioners outside of R-1s afford to build a DH lab? How to connect a lab’s output to the communities it serves? This essay is a case study of Ooligan Press, a student-run trade press housed within a R-2, teaching-intensive university. Two elements make Ooligan Press distinctive as a DH lab. First, Ooligan is a not-for-profit business folded into a Master’s program in Book Publishing. Profits from sale of Ooligan Press books sustain the lab, which would collapse if its books were steadily unprofitable. Second, the essay uses the DH feminism “M.E.A.L.S.” framework to explain how Ooligan's horizontal management …

Is Digital Humanities Adjuncting Infrastructurally Significant?, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay examines the infrastructural causes of digital humanities adjunct invisibility and proposes two remedies: to motivate DH adjunct self-identification by convening DH adjunct-specific prizes and bursaries; and what I call "microbenefactions": small actions by senior faculty that extend opportunities to adjuncts that cost little effort and can give adjuncts access to payment, prize-worthy work opportunities, or other benefits. The unspoken assumption is that DH skills are so much in demand that people with these skills are protected from adjuncting. As I interviewed seven DH adjuncts, their heterogeneous responses to standard questions reminded me that happy families are all alike; …

“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding The E-Lit Garden, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Berens asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature, like earlier avant gardes, began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization, but are not the same thing; and why decolonization efforts are urgent in …

“Keep Portland Weird”? Carnivalesque Elements In The Rebranding Of The Portland Book Festival, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portland Book Festival, originally known as “Wordstock,” is the main annual literary event in Portland, Oregon. It is also an increasingly prominent literary festival in the United States. The branding shift from “Wordstock” to “Portland Book Festival” in 2018 unearths key tensions, hierarchies, subversions, and cultural changes in the communicative and social functions of the Festival. The essay identifies transactional and transformative aspects of the Festival. Bank of America’s festival-naming “title” sponsorship, the partnership of cultural heritage organizations, and Portland place branding offer transactional stability for the Festival, where parties give and get in kind. The Festival’s temporary affective …

Twenty-First Century Book Studies: The State Of The Discipline, Rachel Noorda, Stevie Marsden

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the 25th annual Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference in 2017, held at the University of Victoria, Canada, Stevie Marsden and Rachel Noorda moderated a workshop on the topic of “The Twenty-First Century Book.” Six scholars (Beth Driscoll, Per Henningsgaard, Simone Murray, DeNel Rehberg-Sedo, Simon Rowberry and Claire Squires), whose research is predominantly positioned within the twenty-first century, were invited to discuss the challenges and opportunities for studying the twenty-first century book. The 2017 SHARP conference, “Technologies of the Book”, seemed the perfect setting to hold this workshop. Not only did the conference theme …

Third Generation Electronic Literature And Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance In The Materials, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

What is the role of hand-crafted literary interfaces in a world of memes and bots? Kathi Inman Berens examines five recent books that address literary interfaces and applies pressure to the definition of "third generation electronic literature," exploring the role of code and intention in e-lit authorship.

Dh Adjuncts: Social Justice And Care, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

It is not a question of whether or not adjuncts teach DH, but whether adjuncts’ DH pedagogy is infrastructurally visible. As digital humanities migrates from R-1s to small liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive universities, community colleges, and precariously-funded local private institutions, DH is apt to be taught by adjunct faculty. Adjuncts comprise the majority of the non-tenure track humanities professoriate in the United States; 75.5% of humanities faculty are tenure-ineligible. DH is taught and learned by the most vulnerable people in higher education. A DH ethic of care should explicitly facilitate access and equity for them.

This essay examines strategies …

Instapoetry Matters, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Why do fans of Instapoetry buy printed versions of exactly the same poems they can get in the Instagram app for free? Why buy what they already have?

The answer to this question wends through immigration offices and CreateSpace automated book publishing software, through an ocean of likes, reposts, hashtags and comments, and plants a flag onto bestseller lists with such unambiguous force that almost half (47 percent) of poetry books sold in the United States in 2017 were written by Instapoets. Here’s the same awesome metric in different terms: twelve of 2017’s top twenty bestselling poetry books -- 60% …

Surface Reading The Upside Down Chandelier: Interface “Mastery” And Feminism, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay compares the literary interfaces of one artwork, The Upside Down Chandelier [UDC], in two settings: a large-scale installation taking up a gallery room, and in a browser window. UDC is a generative, multimedia artwork authored in Flash by four women electronic literature artists using four spoken languages. It uses the same code base for both settings. The installation’s embodied and site-specific context at the gallery created multiple vantages from which to “read” the work’s design and purpose. In browser, UDC’s words are the only point of access. The reader’s urge to decode the words in …

Live/Archive: Occupy Mla, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Stories set in Twitter and other social media platforms are live, improvisational and subject to decay as the hashtag organizing the conversation loses currency once the happening or "netprov" is over. This case study of Occupy MLA examines the real-world consequences of a netprov that invited participation from real-world participants using their personal Twitter handles by "catfishing": in this case, posing as adjuncts who gave voice to very real working conditions.

Judy Malloy's Seat At The (Database) Table: A Feminist Reception History Of Early Hypertext Literature, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Robert Coover anointed Michael Joyce the ‘granddaddy’ of hypertext literature in a 1992 New York Times article, it could scarcely have been imagined that this pronouncement would come to define the origin of electronic literature. This short article examines the human and machinic operations obscuring Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, a hypertext that predates afternoon. Malloy's reputation was stunted because Uncle Roger was algorithmically invisible, a factor that became increasingly important as the Web's commercial capacities matured. afternoon's endurance can be traced to its ISBN, which made afternoon easy for readers to find and united disparate stewards in preserving access …