In this episode Lars speaks with Adrian Johns, who is a history professor at the University of Chicago. He recently published the book The Science of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2023), in which he writes about the history of the science of reading since the early psychology experiments in the late nineteenth century measuring eye movements, to large sociological studies of reading, libraries and readability in the 1930s, the reading wars in the 1950s, psycholinguistics and phonics, current debates about reading, and much more.
We talk about early psychological research, psychophysics, the German pioneer Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), research on reading, Edmund Burke Huey (1870-1913), early research on eye tracking during reading, the readability of a text, the reading wars, phonics, the National Defense Education Act (1958), different ways of understanding reading comprehension, how we use the data from standardized tests, the importance of background knowledge for reading comprehension, the different ways we read different texts in different contexts, reading the Bible, as well as British pirate radio in the fifties and sixties.
Adrian Johns’ books:
The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023)
Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010)
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009)
The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998)
Books mentioned:
Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955)
Jeanne Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967)
Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908)
Kirsten Macfarlane, Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy (2021)
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)
Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap (2019)
See also Wexler’s review article of Adrian Johns’ book, which we address towards the end of the episode:
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Our logo is by Sveinung Sudbø, see his works on originalkopi.com
The music is by Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, see the facebook page Nygrenda Vev og Dur for more info.
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Thank you for listening. You can contact us on our facebook page or by email: larsogpaal@gmail.com
There is no better way for the podcast to gain new interested listener than by you sharing it with friends, so if you find what we do interesting and useful, please consider doing just that. The podcast is still most in Norwegian, but we have a lot of episodes coming out in English.
Our blogs:
https://paljabekk.com/
https://larssandaker.blogspot.com/
Alt godt, hilsen Lars og Pål
In this episode Lars is speaking with Neil Cohn, whose research focuses on how we understand comics and other visual narratives. We discuss how researching our understanding of visual narratives can show us more about how we process information, update our situation models (explained in the episode), and what neuroscience can learn from the study of comics. Are comics from different cultures written in different visual languages, and what does that mean? Neil also discusses what he calls the Sequential Image Transparency Assumption, the common assumption that we all naturally understand and can interpret sequences of images. As it turns out, it’s not that simple…
Neil’s three comic recommendations:
Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes
Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo
Larry Marder’s Beanworld
Neil Cohn is an associate professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands
https://www.visuallanguagelab.com/neilcohn
Books mentioned:
Neil Cohn. (2020). Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension. Bloomsbury Academic.
— (2013). The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. Bloomsbury.
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Our logo is by Sveinung Sudbø, see his works on originalkopi.com
The music is by Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, see the facebook page Nygrenda Vev og Dur for more info.
Photo of Neil Cohn by Dan Christensen
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Thank you for listening. You can contact us on our facebook page or by email: larsogpaal@gmail.com
There is no better way for the podcast to gain new interested listener than by you sharing it with friends, so if you find what we do interesting and useful, please consider doing just that. The podcast is still most in Norwegian, but we have a lot of episodes coming out in English.
Our blogs:
https://paljabekk.com/
https://larssandaker.blogspot.com/
Alt godt, hilsen Lars og Pål