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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up (re)thinking of political co-existence.

The relational arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by children challenges the social practice of adults chaperoning children through public streets by inviting children to curate and lead unknown adults on walks of local neighbourhoods. This paper focusses on sensory ethnographic research of one encounter of a child-curated walk when this project took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The experience is relayed through multilayered sensorial storytelling inter-woven with diffractive analysis informed from a post-humanist agential realist position (Barad, 2007, 2012).

Perceptions, knowings, imaginings, memories and connections are read as explanations of intra-actions in the child-led walk to produce new meaning in the phenomena of political co-existence. Emergent, embodied, sensorial listening produces new awareness and understandings of intra-acting beings in an urban space regardless of age or form.

Application of ethical ontological epistemological practice through emergent, embodied, sensorial listening to others opens affectual ethical ways of being and knowing for justice-to-come in political co-existence.

The concept of child-led walks is innovative as a political act by shifting from vertical adult-child relations to horizontal relations. Post-humanist agential realism is a new and emerging theory that offers possibilities to reconceptualise co-existence with others in public spaces.

Attentive to task-related information is the prerequisite for task completion. Comparing the cognition between attentive readers (AR) and inattentive readers (IAR) is of great value for improving reading services which has seldom been studied. To explore their cognitive differences, this study investigates the effectiveness, efficiency and cognitive resource allocation strategy by eye-tracking technology.

A controlled user study of two types of task, fact-finding (FF) and content understanding (CU) tasks was conducted to collect data including answer for task, fixation duration (FD), fixation count (FC), fixation duration proportion (FDP), and fixation count proportion (FCP). 24 participants were placed into AR or IAR group according to their fixation duration on paragraphs related to task.

Two types of cognitive resource allocation strategies, question-oriented (QO) and navigation-assistant (NA) were identified according to the differences in FDP and FCP. In FF task, although QO strategy was applied by the two groups, AR group was significantly more effective and efficient. In CU task, although the two groups were similar in effectiveness and efficiency, AR group promoted their strategies to NA while IAR group sticked to applying QO strategy. Furthermore, an interesting phenomenon “win by uncertainty”, which implies IAR group may get correct answer through uncertain means, such as clue, domain knowledge or guess, rather than task-related information, was observed.

This study takes a deep insight into cognition from the prospect of attentive and inattentive to task-related information. Identifying indicators about cognition helps to distinguish attentive and inattentive readers in various tasks automatically. The cognitive resource allocation strategy applied by readers sheds new light on reading skill training. A typical reading phenomenon “win by uncertainty” was found and defined. Understanding the phenomenon is of great value for satisfying reader information need and enhancing their deep learning.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the difference between experts and novices when reading with navigational table of contents (N-TOC). Experts refer to readers with high level of domain knowledge; novices refer to readers with low level of domain knowledge.

The authors performed a controlled experiment of three reading tasks (including fact finding task, partial understanding task, and full-text understanding task) on an N-TOC system for 35 post-graduates of Wuhan University who have rich experience in reading with N-TOC. Participants’ domain knowledge was measured by pre-experiment questionnaires; reading performance data including score, time, navigation use, and evaluation of N-TOC were collected.

The results showed that there was significant difference in neither navigation use nor participants’ evaluation, but domain experts performed significantly better in both score and time of all tasks than domain novices, which revealed an “illusion of control” phenomenon that rich experience in reading with N-TOC enabled domain novices to achieve the same performance as domain experts. In addition, this research found that N-TOC was not suitable for domain novices to solve full-text understanding task because of “cognitive overload” phenomenon.

This study makes a good contribution to the literature on the effect of domain knowledge on reading performance during N-TOC reading and how to provide better digital reading service in the field of library science and information science.

This writing is performed with and about disappointment in moments of failed research and teaching. The bulk of this chapter was written some years ago and describes, reflects on, and analyzes a self-study inquiry about the phenomenon of pedagogical reading. Having returned to and studied this earlier work, I offer a posthuman postscript that rereads the initial inquiry primarily through the work of Deleuze. Rereading intimate scholarship through a post-human lens decenters the self as knower, writer, and teacher, making possible otherwise ways of imagining reading, writing, and studying together. In my case, posthumanism provides tools for rereading two concepts offered for understanding teaching literature, naked and belated pedagogy. While these concepts were somewhat productive in helping me understand what I was experiencing as a researcher and writer, they reproduce and justify traditional, text-centered teacher identities and practices. They are a product of and themselves reproduce what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) called “arborescent” thinking. Ultimately, naked and belated pedagogies reinforce traditional curriculum practices, sidestep students’ lives, and position the teacher as final authority in matters of curriculum control and interpretation. Disappointment includes those affections and emotions that arise through a posthuman rereading of the research scene – including what I, the researcher and teacher, failed to do, say, think, and teach.

Digital distraction is a common phenomenon in e-reading contexts, and it is worth exploring in depth from the perspectives of information (digital content), users (readers) and technology (digital reading medium). Since screen reading has close links with multitasking and potential distraction, any investigation of reading in the digital environment must factor in this reality. This paper aims to investigate the extent and effects of digital distraction while reading on screens. Special emphases go to exploring multitasking while reading.

Survey and analysis methods are employed.

The extent of digital distraction among college students it found is alarming. All the top four sources of distraction are communication-based activities. Female students tend to concentrate more than males when they read on screens. An overwhelming majority of participants choose to read in print to reduce distractions and to concentrate effectively. Screen reading is inherently distracting, primarily due to multitasking. It appears that repeated multitasking during academic endeavors carries substantial costs.

Implications of digital distraction are discussed, and directions of future research are suggested.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the stereotype of the librarian and to point to the fact that changing the public view of the librarian requires more than just talking about it. Librarians themselves need to take action. A way to change the image of the librarian could be a new form for reading groups: digital reading groups initiated by libraries.

This article presents a Danish project concerning digital reading groups and the experiences made so far by the involved groups e.g. librarians and readers. The article introduces a historical view on the stereotyped librarian and uses a case study to illustrate the situation today.

The historical conditions that constitute the Danish librarian stereotype show a discrepancy between the role and function of the modern librarian and the way the librarian is seen in a wider public. The applied case study, concerning digital reading groups, shows that digital reading groups work both as a way for the librarian to communicate with the reader in a more dialogical fashion, as a way for the public library to test new promotion tools which point in direction of Web 2.0 and as a more flexible promotion offer to the busy reader. Consequently, the digital reading groups offer a model that can bridge the gap between the librarian stereotype, the librarian and the library user.

This article is based on experiences made in connection with a Danish literature promotion project where digital reading groups are launched for the first time. It shows how public libraries can use literature promotion on the internet, not only to reach new users, but also to change the librarian stereotype and upgrade the librarians in direction of Librarian 2.0.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between public libraries, literature festivals (litfests) and reading habits in Chennai and Bangalore to understand publishing, reading and the role of public libraries to improve reading and learning among public.

A field visit to select book fairs and litfests in Chennai and Bangalore was undertaken in 2015 and 2016 to collect data. A predesigned questionnaire was used for data collection at the festivals to establish the correlation among the libraries, bookshops, book fairs and litfests. A sample of n = 445 responses were received.

The findings suggest that 47 per cent of the respondents do not have any kind of library membership, and most (n = 154) of the respondents say they own an electronic device for reading. In total, 25 per cent say reading books is one of the top leisure activities, and distance (31.7 per cent) hinders people from visiting libraries for reading. Eighty per cent agree that visiting litfests influences and improves reading habits. Further, 48.4 per cent read books several times a week, and 46.7 per cent read 5-20 books in any given year. In total, 84 per cent agree that there is a significant link between a family’s reading habits and a child’s future attitude toward reading. Also, 74 per cent agree that people who buy books from bookshops also borrow books from libraries and vice versa and endorse the fact that there is a strong relationship between book buyers and library visitors.

Litfests are booming to promote literature in India. There is a lot to be done to promote public libraries as a public good for people in India as a third space for reading, inclusion and diversity. Innovations in social media and networks, information and communication technologies and internet give an opportunity to the library sector to tap the litfest phenomenon to celebrate reading to reach a large section of the society.

This is a unique exploration to connect the stakeholders – policy makers, publishers and libraries – associated with reading, as studies of this nature are rarely reported in India, when print and digital publishing is flourishing.

School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public pedagogy.

The inquiry process involved poetic inquiry to produce an affective poetic witness statement to an event of school climate strikes, and then a performative enactment of diffractive reading using the poem created. The diffractive reading is used to conceptualise school climate strikes as public pedagogy and move towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy. Diffused throughout is the question of where the more-than-human fits in public pedagogy and youth climate justice activism.

School climate strikes are dynamic and differently acting (diffracting) public pedagogies that work by open spaces of appearance that enable capacities for collective action in heterogeneous political spaces. Consideration of entanglements and intra-actions between learner, place, knowledge and climate change are productive in understanding how phenomena work as public pedagogy.

This inquiry extends on important considerations in both climate change education and public pedagogy scholarship. It diffuses consideration of the more-than-human throughout the inquiry and enacts a move beyond the humanist limits of existing public pedagogy scholarship by introducing climate intra-action, heterogeneous political spaces and non-conforming learning to an understanding of activist public pedagogies and the educative agent.

This study aims to attempt to understand the reading habits and attitudes of the Bachelor of IT students and the Bachelor of Arts students from the International Islamic University Malaysia. The study also aims to explore these differences in terms of gender.

The study used a survey approach in collecting the data. The population of the study was the undergraduate students from two academic faculties at the university. The faculties were Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology (KICT) (IT‐based) and Kuliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Science (KIRKH) (arts‐based). Based on the 400 sample drawn, 127 responses were received from the survey.

The study finds that the web site is seen as an increasingly important reading source. Significant differences exist between academic programs and types of reading materials and reading resources particularly use the web sites. Some differences in reading habits and attitudes were also observed between male and female participants.

Limitations in this study are related to the small sample size, the inclusion of only two academic faculties, and the limited amount of variables studied.

In general, the findings of the study should assist the University authority, especially the library and the computing department, to look into service matters pertaining to accommodating the reading as well as the studying habits of the student.

The pattern of reading, as is known from the past, may not be the same as reading as it is known today or in the future. Research in reading habits needs to be further updated by including current advancement in ICT, where the technology has enabled reading to be more timely and somewhat non‐linear by using devices such as computers, PDAs and wireless phones without the presence of any printed document.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on information sharing by drawing on the reader-response theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt. To this end, information sharing is approached by examining how bloggers communicate their reading experiences of fiction and non-fiction books.

The conceptual framework is based on the differentiation between efferent and aesthetic reading stances specified by Rosenblatt. The efferent stance directs attention to what is to be extracted from reading for instrumental purposes such as task performance. The aesthetic stance focuses on what is being lived through during the reading event. Rosenblatt’s framework was elaborated by specifying eight categories of efferent reading and six categories of aesthetic reading. The ways in which bloggers communicate their responses to such readings were examined by scrutinising a sample of 300 posts from two book blogs.

The bloggers mainly articulated responses to efferent reading by sharing information about the content of the reviewed books, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Responses to aesthetic reading were mainly articulated by describing how the bloggers experienced the narrative, what kind immersive experiences they had and what kind of emotions were felt during the reading process.

As the study is explorative in nature and focusses on a sample of blog posts, the findings cannot be generalised to depict how people share their responses to efferent and aesthetic reading in social media forums.

The paper pioneers by examining the potential of Rosenblatt’s theory in the study of sharing information about reading experiences in book blogs. The findings demonstrate that the categories of efferent and aesthetic reading can be elaborated further for the needs of information behaviour research.