Interface Critique 5: Conversing the Book

A good interface isn’t supposed to get in the way of what it conveys. Paradoxically, that’s precisely what books and interfaces do by transforming, translating, converting, and representing. The contributers to the special issue Conversing the Book engage with questions of digitality, literature, legibility, and literacy, contesting along the way any concept of the interface as a mere threshold to a dematerialized data-world. Drawing on interdisciplinary research they raise questions like how the materiality of the digital can be identified, how it mediates the relation to research objects, what forms of agency the interface has and in what way we need to reconsider the performativity of the digital when we conceive of it in material terms.