A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.

via Between Page and Screen

As e-readers continue to gain market share within the publishing industry and the “future of the book” remains a much bandied about phrase among publishers, writers, agents, booksellers and readers, “Between Page and Screen” has embraced the what-ifs and used them to achieve their true potential, an astoundingly realized book that shuns either/or designations. It champions both the book’s esteemed history by valuing ink printed on the page and also celebrates the potential of digital technologies that are resulting in all of us, no matter our preferences, having to change how we read.

via Between Page and Screen

“Between Page and Screen” is an entirely new reading experience, and no matter if you favor codex books or e-readers, reading this book makes you acutely aware of the act of reading it. Properly situating the book in front of your computer’s webcam takes a bit of practice but once you get the hang of it the pun-rich missives between P and S are unleashed. Certain entries initially show up on the screen as if you are reading them in a mirror, and it takes some maneuvering to arrive at that aha moment when you realize you just need to turn the page around to invert the text. Soon enough, the reading experience pulls you in like any other. Word-play animations splice up the word “hear” into “he” and “ear.” The letters between P and S speak to the project’s larger themes, making assertions like “page don’t cage me in” and “a screen is a shield, but also a veil,” asking questions like “What are boundaries anyway?”

Clearly, for the authors, boundaries are little more than challenges, which they have met head on, daunted not in the least, creating a reading experience unlike any other. Innovators like Borsuk and Bouse prove that the future of the book should be something we all consider with optimism provided we think beyond current expectations and strive to build new ones.

The authors were kind enough to answer the following questions via email.

via Siglio Press

How did the project take shape? Did the two of you set out to make the book as it exists or did it grow out of various other projects and interests?

We did set out to make the book as it exists. The content and the construction arose together out of our conversations about augmented reality (AR) and the way it puts text between the page and screen. In thinking about the relationship this sets up between print and digital objects, we got the idea for an artist’s book that explores that between space. We had been talking about collaborating on a project for some time, but we didn’t want the digital aspect, which is Brad’s specialty, to seem simply “added on” to the poems, which are Amaranth’s specialty. We wanted there to be a reason to use new media, and AR provided us the perfect marriage of print and digital that wouldn’t privilege one over the other, and that would highlight the importance of the reader in activating any book’s text.

What do you mean in saying that augmented reality “puts text between the page and screen”?

We mean that the text is not available on one or the other platform, but in the between space opened up by the reader who has access to both. On its own, the book provides only minimalist grid shapes and the screen provides only the reader/viewer’s image. But when the two are paired, the text appears – and it’s at that very juncture where the reader’s image and the book object meet that the words arise.

Had you already written the exchanges between P and S?

Once we had the idea for an exploration of the relationship between page and screen, the “relationship” began to take shape in relation to a number of literary forebears that use the conceit of letters, from Ovid to “Griffin and Sabine.” Amaranth then started to write the letters P and S trade back and forth.

Is this project a natural evolution in your background as a poet and book artist, Amaranth, or is it a result of feeling unfulfilled by traditional codex books as they exist in today’s screen-based culture?

I see it as a natural evolution. I’m not dissatisfied with codex books at all – I think there are certain things they do incredibly well, and other things that e-books and electronic literature works do well. I am, however, interested in our changing relationship with book objects and the way the shape of the book is changing in response to the proliferation of screen-based reading devices. For me, the most important thing is that the book has some reason for the form it takes. “Between Page and Screen” simply wouldn’t be the same book if the poems were printed on the page or at a website. It needs the “between” in order to make sense. I don’t think all books need to go that route, and I’m ready to turn to whichever apparatus best helps me tell the story I want to tell or explore the themes I want to explore.

via Between Page and Screen

More and more I’m convinced that the essence of a story is indifferent to technological developments. What changes is how the story is told or delivered, enhanced or altered by cultural shifts, from how the oral tradition faded away with scrolls and the printing press, etc. What would you say to that?

If you mean that the hallmarks of engaging writing remain largely unchanged despite technological shifts, I would say there’s some truth in that. But I do believe that the experience of reading a story changes with the medium through which we receive it. “Between Page and Screen” wouldn’t be or do exactly the same thing if the poems were printed in a book. Primacy would be given to the page.

I do think that where poetry is concerned technological shifts can have a dramatic effect on the shape and content of the work (the impact of the typewriter on the “look” of 20th-century poetry is well-established, for example). And ideological shifts in what writers want to do with poetry influence its shape as well. I don’t know that there’s a single “essence” of poetry that remains unchanged over time, unless we talk about it as an engagement with language. But there are so many different kinds of poetry that it becomes difficult to generalize, I think.

In setting out to create “Between Page and Screen” were you aware of early experiments in electronic/digital books and their presentation, like Robert Coover’s Cave and Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book?

Very much so! Amaranth is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization, and has been studying new media writing since she was in graduate school at USC (coincidentally, that’s where she learned of Stein’s work with if:Book). Her dissertation on poets’ use of writing technologies that allow for a distributed idea of authorship spanned from modernism to contemporary digital poetry, and she has studied and written on interactive text works from early hypertexts, to Flash animations, to crowd-sourced poems.

Amaranth, in your dissertation what sorts of “writing technologies” are you referring to in terms of modernist poets? I’m imagining Pound in his cage in Italy, watching birds and scrawling Chinese characters in the dirt with eucalyptus nibs. Is that what you mean, or is it more about carbon copies and linotype?

My dissertation primarily concerned Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars’s use of the typewriter (he had lost a hand in the First World War and it facilitated his writing greatly, but also served as a kind of muse and musical instrument) and American poet H.D.’s use of projective mediumship (the figure of the medium who can project images out of her body and into the room around her recurs in her WWII writings). I connect these poets to contemporary writers for whom technology offers access to a world of language outside the poet and a kind of collaborator in putting words on the page (both writers suggest that the words are being channeled through them thanks to the machine). Pound was highly skeptical of what H.D. was doing in the war years, especially her spiritualism.

via Siglio Press

What books, films and/or artworks do you count among your favorite in terms of helping to inspire “Between Page and Screen?”

Dieter Roth’s artist’s books, particularly his die-cut books, were definitely an influence on the shape of the book and the cover. The poems were heavily influenced by concrete poetry, particularly the work of Emmett Williams (whose “Sweethearts” is one of Amaranth’s favorite books), Mary Ellen Solt and Decio Pignatari, among others. In the electronic literature world, Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” is also an inspiration. The epistles themselves are influenced by and draw heavily upon the “American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Word Roots.” I’m sure there are more that we’re forgetting!

Would you expand a bit on how the Indo-European word roots play into the letters?

The letters are full of puns, homophones and word play using words that share the Indo-European roots of “page” and “screen.”

Page comes from the roots pag- and pak-, which means to fasten or join together. It gives us words about connection, like “pact,” “peace,” “appease,” “pacify,” “pawl,” “pole” and “peasant.” The Latin root of page, pagina, means trellis (so at its heart, the page is metaphorically a trellis to which lines of writing are affixed).

Screen’s root (s)ker-, means to shine, and it develops from a form that means to cut (the metonymic connection is that many cutting implements have a sheen). That root gives us words about protection and defense like “scabbard,” “shield,” “skirmish,” “shear,” “score,” “carnage,” “carrion” and even “charcuterie” (from the Latin root caro, for flesh).

While the two different roots, one peaceful, the other militaristic conjure up two different personalities, there are points of connection between them “Screen” gives us a few connecting words, too: “share” and the other “sheer,” as in translucent, also “incarnate.” Peace loving “page” gives us the violent “fang,” “impale” and “impact.”

The poems play with those etymologies, giving the two bits of banter about their romantic compatibility.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

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Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).

As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.

If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.

In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare) is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum). If you’ve ever turned on the option that lets you see other readers’ highlights in a Kindle book, you’ll find that they almost always underline similar mottos, such as this line from Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.”

The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?

Others (including, recently, the novelist Philip Roth) reject fiction entirely and turn to history or narrative nonfiction, explaining that, at the very least, they can be sure they’re “learning something” from what they read. Learning can certainly be fun, but the implication is that acquiring facts about, say, the life of Cleopatra, has more value than following the story of an imaginary person like Elizabeth Bennet. The Precious Time thus passed away has something to show for itself, and the American mania for self-improvement has been appeased. Never mind that most of us will find little practical use for information on quantum mechanics, the military stratagems of World War II or the private lives of British aristocrats.

Ultimately, all of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success (two classic Puritan preoccupations). For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit. Like any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Further reading

Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols on their twins’ third-grade reading test for the New York Times SchoolBook blog

Philip Roth says he’s stopped reading fiction

Can a task this ineffable be automated? Many seem to think so. For years, Amazon and other e-booksellers have offered their customers suggestions based on the purchases of other customers who bought the same books. But you don’t necessarily read every book you buy from an online retailer (some are gifts) and you probably don’t like every book you read, either. For that matter, the books you like best you may have bought elsewhere, or borrowed from a friend.

The latest and most ambitious attempt to automate book recommendations is the website BookLamp.org, launched last week. It’s the public point of interaction with something called the Book Genome Project, an effort to “identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book using computational tools.” BookLamp’s oft-cited model is Pandora.com, a music-discovery service that allows users to create and listen to playlists based on a single song, artist or genre. Founder Aaron Stanton also cites OKTrends, a blog that crunches and analyzes data extracted from the OKCupid dating website, as an inspiration.

Stanton and company (students at the University of Idaho when the project began in 2003 and  academics from several institutions still figure among their researchers and programmers) have fed the text of some 10,000 books into a custom-built software program. The program then identified certain recurring elements and clusters of elements. The designers in turn trained it to recognize those elements and determine how much of each one can be found in a given book.

If this sounds confusing, it is, a bit. On the phone, Stanton explained to me that he and his confederates feel that more traditional labels applied to books — the genre classifications imposed by publishers and the categories of the Library of Congress’ cataloging system — are inadequate. BookLamp can not only provide a precise accounting of such literary qualities as “dialog,” “density,” “description” and “motion,” it can also measure how much of the book involves “Sea Voyages” or “Pregnancy/ Motherhood/ Infant Care” or, for that matter, “Rocky & Dry Terrain/ Canyons.” These metrics are included with 132 other “thematic ingredients” under a broad category the project’s designers call “StoryDNA.”

Such elements “aren’t necessarily what the book’s about, but they’re present,” Stanton told me. He added that although he would never say that Stephen King’s “The Stand” is about “Vehicles/ Rural Travel/ Country Roads,” nevertheless “you couldn’t tell the story of ‘The Stand’ without referring to those things.”

How prevalent such elements are influences a reader’s experience. “A book with 10 percent vampires is a very different book than a book with 80 percent vampires,” Stanton observed. BookLamp searches its database for titles with similar levels. (The idea that a book could be 10 percent or 80 percent vampires was difficult to wrap my mind around until I recalled the way a friend would complain whenever an episode of “Buffy the Vampire” suffered from “not enough vampires.”)

To use a familiar book as an example, Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes up in the BookLamp database with high quantities of “Newspaper Reporting/ Journalism” and “Criminal Investigation/ Detective Work.” Very true. But why does it also show significant levels of “Extended Family/ Cousins & Relatives” and the rather cryptic metric “Scheduling/ Elements of Time”?

“We make no claims to rightness,” Stanton said, explaining that BookLamp is very much a work in progress and that one of the project’s first priorities is to build a much larger database of analyzed books. (This will require the assistance of publishers.) “There are times when the system comes back with something I’d never thought it was capable of” — such as identifying the works of Stephen King as being very similar to the works of Richard Bachman, a King pseudonym — “and then there are times when I’m looking at it and thinking this suggestion doesn’t make much sense.”

Why not rely on the far more sophisticated if also unfathomable judgment of actual human beings, the same intuitive power that enabled John Warner to change a stranger’s life by suggesting “Gravity’s Rainbow”? Even the mechanized, crowd-sourced versions of such recommendations — whether provided by Amazon or such social networking sites as GoodReads and LibraryThing — have aided readers.

But, as Stanton points out, social networks can only tell you about books that other readers themselves already know about and have taken the trouble to read and review. They’re heavily weighted toward books that are well-known and successful, as well as toward more recent titles. “Right now,” Stanton says, “the world is not good at finding midlist or old books or books by first-time authors — a huge portion of the pyramid of books out there.” The Book Genome Project doesn’t care about a book’s critical reputation or sales history; all it wants to do is tally up exactly how much “Docks & Warehouses” or “Explicit Descriptions of Physical Intimacy” can be found between its covers. (Or both — paging Edmund White!)

While some of the recommendations I elicited from BookLamp made sense (people who like Dickens do tend to like Wilkie Collins, too), others left me perplexed. Plugging in one of my favorite titles from last year, Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” — a satire set in New York City in the near future about the doomed affair between a middle-aged Russian immigrant and a much-younger Korean-American woman and ranking high in “Partying/ Deviance” (Shteyngart would be so proud!) — I got back Robert Silverberg’s “The Book of Skulls” — apparently a thriller about four college buddies seeking an immortality-conferring tome guarded by a “mystical brotherhood” in the Arizona desert. Huh? (To be fair, Lara Vapnyar’s “Memoirs of a Muse,” just a little further down the list, is a perfect fit.)

Mostly, though, I appreciate how BookLamp persuades me to look at the books I like in a different light. Ask me why I love Haruki Murakami’s fiction, and I probably wouldn’t begin by praising his depictions of “Suburban Living/ Neighborhoods,” but come to think of it, that’s one of the aspects of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” I remember most vividly and with particular pleasure. I don’t recall an abundance of “Fashion/ Clothing/ Accessories” in the same book, but the next time I reread it, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled.

Further reading:

The fine art of recommending books by Laura Miller

Salon’s review of Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”

Salon’s review of Haruki Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”