iTouch: Understanding the Role of Emotions in the Design and Reading of Digital Books.

摘要

In this dissertation, I discuss how digital books function as new kinds of reading experiences and I explore how a renewed understanding of the reader's emotional connection to the book can help develop more successful and compelling works of digital literature. I argue that the digital book, a category that encompasses both digitized editions of paper texts and complex book-applications, must be understood as a medium distinct from its paper predecessor not simply in terms of how it conveys information, but in how it engages its readers emotional responses. Digital books have their own affordances, design constraints, and material substrates that mark them as distinct from, albeit inextricably tied to, the codex. I show how those affordances, design choices, and materials impact the reader's emotional connection to the book in a way that differs substantially from the print novel. In doing so, I highlight the kinds of emotional connections that digital books excel in creating and argue for a future of digital books that focuses on expanding the playful interactivity and emphasis on readerly agency that is the hallmark of successful digital books.;My research focuses on the digital book as an object in use, one that engenders an emotional response through its form as well as through its content. Each chapter examines a different facet of the digital book, ranging from its paper antecedents to its interactive game-play. In each chapter, I use one focal text to discuss the ways in which that text has been iterated across multiple forms to delineate the role that medium, interface, and design play in the text's relationship with the reader. My first chapter begins long before the digital book with a history of the Babylonian Talmud that explains how the technologies of writing, print, and reproduction influenced the layout of the book. I show how the layout in turn dictates the way that readers read, respond to, and relate to it as a source of knowledge and as a ritual object. My second chapter takes up the Talmud again and looks at its transformation into multiple digital editions in order to address how the same text can evolve differently in the process of becoming a new book in a new medium. I discuss the implications of these different iterations and how they reflect different ideas of the digital book's effect on readers. In my third chapter, I switch to fiction and discuss Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an example of a text that uses traditional formal elements to engage the reader's emotions. I then read the screen-based adaptations of Frankenstein to show how digital books can engage readerly emotions through interactive choices within the narrative, rather that through narrative transport, the approach favored by the novel. In my final chapter, I look at how digital editions present manuscript facsimiles and I assess how successful they are at generating affective connections between the reader and the texts. Even reproductions are influenced by the interface that presents them and the reader's ability to feel and learn from the facsimile relies on the ability of the interface to invite the reader to engage with and relate to the digital object. Each chapter draws on the discoveries of the previous ones, and by the end of the fourth chapter, I present a blueprint of the successful digital book that depends on the book's willingness to grant agency to its readers and the reader's ability to manipulate the book in order to be moved in turn.