"Songs of Innocence and of Experience:" Amateur Users and Digital Texts

Abstract

Digital texts promise to allow learning beyond that possible with traditional resources. Purpose-built digital texts are crafted for specific research purposes, with developer-users and devoted academics comprising their primary, "scholar" audience. A secondary, "amateur" audience of learners with less digital text experience also relies on theses purpose-built resources. Does the promise of new learning from digital texts extend beyond scholars to amateurs, or does the design of purpose-built digital texts, by focusing on more experienced users with direct lines of communication to digital text developers, prevent this extension of benefits? This study gauged one subgroup of amateur users' perceptions of the value of digital texts in terms of answering self-generated research queries. The participants, graduate students from the University of Michigan's information master's program, worked with a digital text and completed a survey assessing their experience of digital text features and perception of their learning success. An analysis of the survey data produces an introductory understanding of amateur users' perceptions of their digital text use, their design needs, and their success or failure at learning through digital texts. The narrative responses suggest that while the idea of new learning from digital texts is foreign to the amateur audience, their assessment of digital text features was not particularly marked by their amateur status. This result suggests that designing purpose-built digital texts to serve both digital text scholars as well as some amateur subgroups is a reasonable task.