Transliteracy - Reading in the Digital Age

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age
The Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre 
Newsletter Issue 9 - November 2005

Sue Thomas,

Professor of New Media, De Montfort University

‘Transliteracies’ Conference

University of California at Santa Barbara

June 7– 8, 2005

. . . this new literacy is not about reading fixed type, but about reading on fluid and varied platforms – blogs, email, hypertext and, soon, digital paper and all kinds of mobile media in buildings, vehicles, and supermarket aisles. Although text still dominates at the moment, it is possible that it might come to be superseded by image, audio, or even ideogram as the medium of choice.

Hence ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across media.

The first hurdle of ‘traditional reading’ by making it very clear that reading in any medium has never been simple or transparent.

In the medieval period ‘good reading’ was collective and public, and silent reading often provoked suspicion, but as reading became more professionalized certain practices which once were common came to be frowned upon – pointing at the page as one reads, reading aloud, annotating margins, or permitting one’s lips to move during reading. Nevertheless, as Leah Price noted, reading has always disrupted the linear via ‘mining’ practices of tables of contents, indexes, and concordances.

Awareness of transliteracy reminds us that fixed-type print is a very new and possibly short-lived phenomenon within the long and diverse history of communication platforms.

According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'illiterate' dates back only to 1556, around 100 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press. Prior to this period more people could read than could write, but many more could do neither. Since the 16th century an increasing number have become fully literate, but today transliteracy is becoming more desirable than print-based literacy.

[citation needed]

The term "transliteracy" was coined by Alan Liu, a professor in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research on the subject is being carried out across University of California campuses.

Trend Transliteracy: A Trend of Amplified Organization
KnowledgeWorks Foundation: 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning

Effective communication depends on the ability to read, write, and interact across multiple media and social platforms:
Podcasts
Digital video
Virtual Worlds
Microblogs
Wikis
Social Networking
Tagging
-provided by transliteracy.com

Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger have now established The Transliteracy Research Group which launched October 13, 2009.

Since transliteracy research began at DMU in 2005 under the umbrella of PART (Production & Research in Transliteracy), group members have produced a significant range of projects, events, presentations and publications, stimulating an informal research network around the theory and practice of transliteracy.

Transliteracy and Libraries video . . . saw it on a Jeff Scott (Deputy Director of the Tulare County Library) tweet.