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Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
A fascinating, insightful, and wonderfully written exploration of the document.
Like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, David Levy’s Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.
We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds—letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages—yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are being disturbed and transformed by new technologies and practices.
An expert on information and written forms, and a former researcher for the document pioneer Xerox, Levy masterfully navigates these concerns, offering reassurance while sharing his own excitement about many of the new kinds of emerging documents. He demonstrates how today’s technologies, particularly the personal computer and the World Wide Web, are having analogous effects to past inventions—such as paper, the printing press, writing implements, and typewriters—in shaping how we use documents and the forms those documents take. Scrolling Forward lets us see the continuity between the written forms of today and those of the past.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, David Levy’s Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.
We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds—letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages—yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are being disturbed and transformed by new technologies and practices.
An expert on information and written forms, and a former researcher for the document pioneer Xerox, Levy masterfully navigates these concerns, offering reassurance while sharing his own excitement about many of the new kinds of emerging documents. He demonstrates how today’s technologies, particularly the personal computer and the World Wide Web, are having analogous effects to past inventions—such as paper, the printing press, writing implements, and typewriters—in shaping how we use documents and the forms those documents take. Scrolling Forward lets us see the continuity between the written forms of today and those of the past.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
244 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 7, 2001
16 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 17, 2015
Un excellent ouvrage qui débute avec une simple facturette et qui se termine avec Borges. Une réflexion sur le document à l'heure du numérique. Mais aussi sur le Moi. Brillant.
March 6, 2011
In this age of evolving digital technologies, the elimination of physical documents for digital is becoming a more real possibility, dividing many people as to whether this revolution will be heralded as a wonderful saver of trees, time, and space, or if it sounds the death knell for literate society as we know it. In Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, David Levy uses his extensive backgrounds in computer science and calligraphy to shed some light on this cultural debate. However he does so in a way incredibly unconcerned with which side wins.
Perhaps this ambivalence as to whether digital or physical documents prevail has a lot to do with Levy’s background. The “Preface” and “Introduction” provide considerable insight into Levy’s background. He began as a computer scientist, but found himself increasingly disgusted with the lack of creativity in his field, and decided to start over at the other end of the technological spectrum studying calligraphy. Eventually he was able to find a way to mix the two, and he now works to make computers capable of continuing the literary tradition previously carried out primarily on pen and paper. For him there is no great debate, computers have simply become another tool for creating masterpieces of the written word.
Another surprising, and slightly frustrating, aspect of this book is its lack of a central thesis. Levy explains that this is “a love letter to documents” (p. xxiii), but gives little more explanation for the structure of his book. Looking at this book as a love letter, maybe we shouldn’t expect it to be precisely arranged or to have an articulate point aside from expressing the author’s feelings, but with the extensive research Levy clearly did for this book, it seems that he would have something more complex than “I love documents!” to say. Each chapter tackles a different side of documents, and explains it thoroughly, giving historical backgrounds and elucidating relationships between different document types that many of us were probably never aware of, let alone spent time thinking about. Scrolling Forward is full of so many pearls of wisdom, it seems like there should be some larger context for this information than simply a better understanding of documents.
On the other hand, I can think of no better resource for understanding the cultural debate surrounding the development of digital documents. Levy’s background in such disparate fields of documentation gives him authority on this issue that few can equal. Because he is a true lover of all documents he is able to tell us the advantages of all documents, but he understands his love well enough not to hide “The Dark Side of Documents” either, devoting a chapter to the documentation of bureaucracy, including a frustrating misunderstanding he had with the IRS because of a missing document.
Personal anecdotes like these are what endear Scrolling Forward to its readers. It may not be a dry, well organized, authoritative, academic resource on the history of documents, but instead of dry organization, we get personality and interesting anecdotes in a book that still manages to be an academic and authoritative source on the history and use of documents. While it may be unusual to read a scholarly work that is so personal (every chapter contains at least one personal reference), tying the work so closely to himself forces readers to see that the documents Levy refers to aren’t just literary masterpieces or immaculate medieval manuscripts, but the stuff of everyday life. The first example document he uses is his receipt from a local deli, an example he picks apart in great detail to show his readers just how much information is included in something we often throw away without a second glance. If he can show the value of a document we generally consider unimportant, then how much more valuable are documents that we do treasure? By impressing upon us the great value of documents, Levy convinces his readers to continue on and begin understanding that documents are all around us, and that it isn’t as simple as one type of document being good and another being bad, because they’re all interconnected.
Scrolling Forward is great for anyone feeling beaten down by the hectic pace of modern life as Levy’s story about documents includes his own warning against such a life style and how he’s learned to stay away from it. When he decided to step back from the super-charged lifestyle of a computer scientist he relocated to the slower, more methodical world of calligraphy. After making the return to computers, though, he claims to have still maintained a rather sedate pace of life. This is where Levy’s only complaint against technology comes in, and it is that technology simply for the sake of technology rather than for a practical purpose or that controls us rather than us controlling it does nothing to help our society and could pull it apart. He proves the positive of this point throughout the book giving examples of how technology properly harnessed actually benefits our culture (for example, when email allows distant relatives to stay in touch).
Levy’s generally favorable attitude toward technology can be seen as beneficial for libraries looking to solidify their role as a digital document repository. His warnings about the proper use of these technologies can also be seen as arguments for skilled professionals (librarians) to help people use them effectively. Because of the almost memoir style of Scrolling Forward, it may not directly give librarians the ammunition they need to justify their roles in the changing technological climate, but reading through Levy’s arguments certainly put us in the right mind set.
Perhaps this ambivalence as to whether digital or physical documents prevail has a lot to do with Levy’s background. The “Preface” and “Introduction” provide considerable insight into Levy’s background. He began as a computer scientist, but found himself increasingly disgusted with the lack of creativity in his field, and decided to start over at the other end of the technological spectrum studying calligraphy. Eventually he was able to find a way to mix the two, and he now works to make computers capable of continuing the literary tradition previously carried out primarily on pen and paper. For him there is no great debate, computers have simply become another tool for creating masterpieces of the written word.
Another surprising, and slightly frustrating, aspect of this book is its lack of a central thesis. Levy explains that this is “a love letter to documents” (p. xxiii), but gives little more explanation for the structure of his book. Looking at this book as a love letter, maybe we shouldn’t expect it to be precisely arranged or to have an articulate point aside from expressing the author’s feelings, but with the extensive research Levy clearly did for this book, it seems that he would have something more complex than “I love documents!” to say. Each chapter tackles a different side of documents, and explains it thoroughly, giving historical backgrounds and elucidating relationships between different document types that many of us were probably never aware of, let alone spent time thinking about. Scrolling Forward is full of so many pearls of wisdom, it seems like there should be some larger context for this information than simply a better understanding of documents.
On the other hand, I can think of no better resource for understanding the cultural debate surrounding the development of digital documents. Levy’s background in such disparate fields of documentation gives him authority on this issue that few can equal. Because he is a true lover of all documents he is able to tell us the advantages of all documents, but he understands his love well enough not to hide “The Dark Side of Documents” either, devoting a chapter to the documentation of bureaucracy, including a frustrating misunderstanding he had with the IRS because of a missing document.
Personal anecdotes like these are what endear Scrolling Forward to its readers. It may not be a dry, well organized, authoritative, academic resource on the history of documents, but instead of dry organization, we get personality and interesting anecdotes in a book that still manages to be an academic and authoritative source on the history and use of documents. While it may be unusual to read a scholarly work that is so personal (every chapter contains at least one personal reference), tying the work so closely to himself forces readers to see that the documents Levy refers to aren’t just literary masterpieces or immaculate medieval manuscripts, but the stuff of everyday life. The first example document he uses is his receipt from a local deli, an example he picks apart in great detail to show his readers just how much information is included in something we often throw away without a second glance. If he can show the value of a document we generally consider unimportant, then how much more valuable are documents that we do treasure? By impressing upon us the great value of documents, Levy convinces his readers to continue on and begin understanding that documents are all around us, and that it isn’t as simple as one type of document being good and another being bad, because they’re all interconnected.
Scrolling Forward is great for anyone feeling beaten down by the hectic pace of modern life as Levy’s story about documents includes his own warning against such a life style and how he’s learned to stay away from it. When he decided to step back from the super-charged lifestyle of a computer scientist he relocated to the slower, more methodical world of calligraphy. After making the return to computers, though, he claims to have still maintained a rather sedate pace of life. This is where Levy’s only complaint against technology comes in, and it is that technology simply for the sake of technology rather than for a practical purpose or that controls us rather than us controlling it does nothing to help our society and could pull it apart. He proves the positive of this point throughout the book giving examples of how technology properly harnessed actually benefits our culture (for example, when email allows distant relatives to stay in touch).
Levy’s generally favorable attitude toward technology can be seen as beneficial for libraries looking to solidify their role as a digital document repository. His warnings about the proper use of these technologies can also be seen as arguments for skilled professionals (librarians) to help people use them effectively. Because of the almost memoir style of Scrolling Forward, it may not directly give librarians the ammunition they need to justify their roles in the changing technological climate, but reading through Levy’s arguments certainly put us in the right mind set.
January 18, 2013
I wish I liked this better. I wish I'd read it a decade ago, when it was new... Levy covers a huge amount of ground that is very near and dear to my own life and work; he is a computer scientist and typographer/calligrapher, he comes out of Xerox PARC in the 70s and 80s; he is concerned with the evolving definition of the Document in the digital age.
But I found this book long-winded, self-absorbed, and ultimately without much of a point. He does some yeoman duty in laying out a structural definition of what a document is, and covers a fair amount of intellectual history along the way, but the book ultimately becomes an open question about humanity's varied and historic search for foundations, and the role of books and documents in that. The last few chapters are a bit of a wander in the desert on this topic, with little to deliver.
If this book were shorter, I would have liked it better. If this book were the same length (or leven longer) and more scholarly, I think I would have liked it better. But it's strikes a disappointing balance between layman-readable and substantive.
But I found this book long-winded, self-absorbed, and ultimately without much of a point. He does some yeoman duty in laying out a structural definition of what a document is, and covers a fair amount of intellectual history along the way, but the book ultimately becomes an open question about humanity's varied and historic search for foundations, and the role of books and documents in that. The last few chapters are a bit of a wander in the desert on this topic, with little to deliver.
If this book were shorter, I would have liked it better. If this book were the same length (or leven longer) and more scholarly, I think I would have liked it better. But it's strikes a disappointing balance between layman-readable and substantive.
December 24, 2015
Link+ due 4/13
An interesting exploration of what documents are in the early days of ebooks and the world wide web. Sadly it's rather out of date in places.
An interesting exploration of what documents are in the early days of ebooks and the world wide web. Sadly it's rather out of date in places.
July 14, 2018
As a brief, well organized, poetic introduction to a (post?)structural notion of document, this is a great start! Even though this book is more than a decade old, it still holds up.
I had some qualms with the fact that the book centers very strongly around historic discourse and academic work related to the document and doesn't consider where the author's definitions might lead one to see a document being in more extreme cases. For example, the notion of document is very centered around being a product of a human, and necessarily a product that is a part of individual's consciousness, or is at least a part of an understood and intentionally designed process as a norm. I specifically see this as a limitation. In fact, the first chapter called "Meditation on a Receipt" could be replaced with a new first chapter or perhaps it could be followed by another called, "Meditation on a Meme" and discuss how norms could emerge through subconscious mimicry, and that would have reframed several later chapters.
Likewise, I had trouble with accepting the idea that only people create documents. If one is a scientist, specifically in a positivist or post-positivist tradition, one might argue that nature has its own documents. Or within a Spinozian or Deleuzian tradition that often action itself is experiencing the world in order to create communication or a language with nature, which thereby IS, by Levy's definition, nature speaking through its systematic existence. If that is true, then nature contains documents, that admittedly are still understood through human translation, but are not themselves grounded on any closed group of individuals' cognition. Rather it is grounded on the common affects created by that non-human body.
I had some qualms with the fact that the book centers very strongly around historic discourse and academic work related to the document and doesn't consider where the author's definitions might lead one to see a document being in more extreme cases. For example, the notion of document is very centered around being a product of a human, and necessarily a product that is a part of individual's consciousness, or is at least a part of an understood and intentionally designed process as a norm. I specifically see this as a limitation. In fact, the first chapter called "Meditation on a Receipt" could be replaced with a new first chapter or perhaps it could be followed by another called, "Meditation on a Meme" and discuss how norms could emerge through subconscious mimicry, and that would have reframed several later chapters.
Likewise, I had trouble with accepting the idea that only people create documents. If one is a scientist, specifically in a positivist or post-positivist tradition, one might argue that nature has its own documents. Or within a Spinozian or Deleuzian tradition that often action itself is experiencing the world in order to create communication or a language with nature, which thereby IS, by Levy's definition, nature speaking through its systematic existence. If that is true, then nature contains documents, that admittedly are still understood through human translation, but are not themselves grounded on any closed group of individuals' cognition. Rather it is grounded on the common affects created by that non-human body.
November 8, 2021
This book evokes what I am now calling Cearley's Laws on Technology Publishing, in the sense of Murphy's Law and in this case more like Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time available to complete it):
1) In any book on technology, older a the book is, the less value the Chapters have.
2) The value of that book's Introduction is inversely proportional to the value of the Chapters.
In the intro to this book, Levy gets at why he felt a book like this was necessary, the thoughts behind documentation, behind digital documentation, behind what it means to communicate. The rest of the book is mired in anecdotal meanderings that have very little to do with current technology, even at the time the book was written.
It's an alright book, one that was clearly written by someone who learned academic writing. But there's not much there there.
1) In any book on technology, older a the book is, the less value the Chapters have.
2) The value of that book's Introduction is inversely proportional to the value of the Chapters.
In the intro to this book, Levy gets at why he felt a book like this was necessary, the thoughts behind documentation, behind digital documentation, behind what it means to communicate. The rest of the book is mired in anecdotal meanderings that have very little to do with current technology, even at the time the book was written.
It's an alright book, one that was clearly written by someone who learned academic writing. But there's not much there there.
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May 2, 2022Given to Alissa
July 16, 2022
This book had no right to be so profound.
December 22, 2023
would be awesome if i could read
February 22, 2016
This is well-researched and readable. Even though it's now 15 years old, it doesn't feel dated. And it brings together many topics I'm interested in: book history, reading practices, information science, bureaucratization, literary history, and bibliography. My only quibble, I guess, is that I've encountered all of these subjects before, and this book didn't really add anything new for me. I preferred reading another book in a similar vein, James Gleick's The Information. But for others less familiar with the topics covered, it would be a great overview.
December 15, 2014
The first and last chapters are truely inspired, while the rest of the book swoons over the history of documents. I found most of it to be uninteresting. There's a technological and cultural shift occuring to documents right now, and this book is too outdated to shed any real light on it.
It looks like David Levy has actually updated this book in 2014, maybe the newer version will contain more interesting insights.
It looks like David Levy has actually updated this book in 2014, maybe the newer version will contain more interesting insights.
January 26, 2008
The author, a former researcher/engineer for Xerox Parc, is obsessed with documents. To the point of an exisistential crisis about what all of these black dots on white pages mean, and what they tell us. He's definitely a little crazy, and that's what makes the book fun.
June 28, 2010
David is an amazing person, and I loved his book. In some ways it was as if he read my mind with regard to some of the issues and challenges that he identified that arise in the information age. It was nice to have something to read (and someone to talk to) with which I could empathize.
July 29, 2010
Levy shows how documents are witnesses and that hype about the internet is misplaced religious longing. I enjoyed his insights and his reminder that we should be much more concerened with how we live than with what technology we are using.
September 30, 2011
An entertaining and quick read about documents, how pervasive they are, and what we can do about them these days. Surprisingly not dated, even though it's 10 years old. A little hard to tell what to do with the info in this book, but it's probably good to have read it.
June 27, 2010
The history in the book still holds up, but the discussions on the new technology make the book out-of-date. The last few chapters seem tacked on and didn't feel connected to other chapters.
January 11, 2010
Excellent look at what a document is, and how computer does - and does not - change the nature of the document.
May 22, 2011
A beautiful meditation on the importance of documents in our lives.
December 30, 2014
Thoughtful reflections in what documents area how we use them, and so on.
November 20, 2013
An awesome book about multimodal texts and analyzing everyday texts. An easy read about some complex material. Great.
December 16, 2014
Read 25 Sep-24 Nov 2009. Pretty good but read at work during breaks so the author’s point was kind of too spread out for me. Instead, I recommend Avatars of the Word.
March 2, 2016
Accessible, relatable, and very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews