Research
After the Book, a project on orality, literacy, and AI. Plus the systems research I've done on journalism and democracy.
After the Book
Parents worry that kids don’t read books anymore, and that AI will be the final nail in the coffin for the book. I think that worry rests on a false picture of the past. Deep reading has always belonged to a small group, which Coleridge called the clerisy. Most people in every literate society have learned how to read and write, but many never study works of literature, advanced mathematics or science unless they went to college. A majority learn what they know by talking and listening.
What has changed is the amount of text that we encounter every day. Writing was scarce at first, then the printing press made it abundant, and the web made more than anyone could read. Now AI writes faster than people can read, and we ask AI to read for us. The machines are becoming a new clerisy, and the rest of us are left taking answers from a reader we don’t know how to check.
After the Book traces that history from the first scribal schools to the present, and will look at how future generations of readers and writers will take us forward. It will be published online and will feature audio, video and interactive figures alongside the prose.
I publish working notes at postliterate.org.
AI interfaces and the unrepresentable
The book grew out of a research statement I wrote in 2024. Its argument: chat interfaces return us to something like Walter Ong’s “secondary orality.” But instead of broadcast media talking to millions at once, there are now millions of separate one-to-one conversations, each adapting to the person on the other end and drawing on a huge body of writing.
The statement also looks at what can’t be captured in training data: tacit and physical knowledge, emotional intelligence, cultural context, and the significance of things that didn’t happen. Systems of notation have always had blind spots. Western musical notation couldn’t write down the blue note, and for years blues was denied serious analysis because of it. I want to know what else falls outside the record, and what it means that AI systems are built only from what’s inside it.
Journalism, systems, and democracy
With Heather Chaplin, I’ve spent years mapping why local news is collapsing and what that does to democracy.
- Crisis of the Free Press: A System Map, from the Wicked Problem Task Force, 2016–24.
- Journalism Ecosystem Model, an agent-based simulation of how news deserts form, built with Francis Tseng in 2020.