Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What's up, doc? Information scientist David M. Levy wants us to look at the documents that fill our lives, and his book Scrolling Forward is a thoughtful reflection on their near-omnipresence. Levy has the perfect résumé for this job--after getting his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, he took off for England to pursue the study of calligraphy and bookbinding. His love of books shows in his writing, which is rich with references and anecdotes from Walt Whitman to Woody Allen.

Drawing on examples as disparate as grocery store receipts, greeting cards, identity papers, and (of course) e-mail, Levy finds the common threads binding them together and explores how and why we use them in daily life. He looks at digitization closely, considering how speed, ease of editing, and potentially perfect copying changes our traditional considerations of documentation. Though he insists that he's looking at the present, not speculating about the future, it's hard to see how to avoid looking ahead after reading Scrolling Forward. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Levy's book may not give documents the same cachet that Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World gave to maps, but readers will never look at a deli receipt in the same way after finishing this gripping discussion of written forms. With digital media acquiring an increasingly important place in communicating news and ideas, Levy looks at what the continuing transition from print to digital means at both practical and symbolic levels. The Internet and other electronic publishing platforms now deliver information faster than at any time in history, but tend to lose the depth of the printed page, Levy argues. And while there are good reasons to receive certain types of information quickly, there are also good reasons to read an entire printed book at one's own pace. Levy, who has a Ph.D. in computer science as well as a degree in calligraphy and bookbinding, maintains that one isn't necessarily a Luddite because he or she still prefers to read information on the printed page. To help support his position, Levy devotes one chapter to explaining why he prefers reading Leaves of Grass between covers to reading it on an e-book. Still, digital delivery of information has its merits, and striking the right balance between print and digital works is something that needs to be worked out in the years ahead. Although Levy does not come to any striking conclusions, his assessment of how documents work and what they say about our culture and values is a worthy one.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559706481
• ISBN-13: 978-1559706483
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #610,956 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, well-written and on point, May 24, 2002

By	Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (Menlo Park, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (Hardcover)

...Our complicated relationship with documents--everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias--is the subject of David Levy's "Scrolling Forward."

Levy, a doctoral computer scientist and calligrapher, is well placed to compare the old and new. His book is organized around broad subjects--reading, writing and the like--but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the "this reminds me of that" principle, than according to something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.

The fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes toward digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia--George P. Landow's "Hypertext" and Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space"--declared that, thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed and linear thinking was passe.

They were widely praised within academic circles and provoked defenders such as Sven Birkerts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.

First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: We might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, "Scrolling Forward" begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but with a deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out to draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies.

"Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." It takes a village to make a document.

Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, Web browsers gave readers direct access to digital works. This last and most-publicized step was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole print versus digital debate seems irrelevant.

The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing.

Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations ... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letter forms on a piece of vellum." This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It is to say, however, that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: They have to be created in the social world and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy wants us to recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good--the way we read, organize our thoughts and create order in our intellectual worlds.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Reading, March 14, 2002

By	Carl Lagoze (Ithaca, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (Hardcover)

This is an important book for everyone involved in the so-called "digital revolution" (which probably means all of us). David Levy tells us that as we look forward we must also pay close attention to the past. We must understand the meaning of documents independent of their fixity (or lack thereof) in the bits flowing across networks or ink on paper. Each chapter provides a thoroughly unique approach to helping you understand the cultural wrappings and the hidden implications of changes in the vehicle for fixity. The chapter about a deli receipt is especially magnificent! Read this book and think deeply about it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars has retained its value over the years, June 19, 2006

By	Jonathan Betz-Zall "Book Bopper" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Three years after publication, the march of technology has not made this book obsolete. Levy correctly identified the sore spots that technological change has rubbed on our sense of civilized society, and pointed out to what degree the problems were realized 100 years ago. Previous reviewers complained about pointlessness, but I appreciate Levy's many small points as well as his few large ones. However, I wouldn't buy a copy; this is the kind of book that public libraries are good for.