Editing Research/new digital reading experiences (section)

=== CONTENT ===

The first choice we had to make was regarding the text we will work with. The publishing world has multiple types of content – from fictional novels to poems, culinary and scientific, academic, religious, historical and more. Even though we see relevancies for all types of publications, there will be difference in the digital needs for each type of content. We therefore decided to choose a text that will answer the following requirements:

1. ''Written in short pieces''. Even though we think digital reading could be applied on longer texts as well, we found shorter texts easier for the first prototype. We also referred to research<sup>3</sup> regarding the attention span of young adults, indicating that people read shorter texts.

2. ''Non-linear''. Designing for mobile phones, we wanted to examine the possibility to reconstruct the text and navigate though it differently than in a physically bound object.

3. ''Added value.'' What can we ''do'' with the text? We wanted to create an immediate interaction with the text, to make it clearly different than the passive reading in print.

Our choice fell on the book “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius.<br>
[[File:Meditations.jpg|250px]] https://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html]
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This nearly 2,000-year-old text continues to resonate with young adults due to its personal tone and its exploration of how to understand the world. It is structured in paragraphs and follows only the order of Aurelius’ thoughts. However, the old language and historically specific meanings can be challenging to understand and are sometimes misinterpreted. We therefore chose to focus the interaction for this text on defining difficult words and providing accurate, modern meanings.


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