HT’24 keynote speakers: Shafquat Towheed

“What is the Future of Reading?” Answers to this pivotal question will be delivered during the keynote speech by Professor Shafquat Towheed from The Open University in the UK at this year’s ACM Hypertext conference in Poznań, Poland. The speaker will argue that asking about the future of reading has never been more pressing, as we are living through one of the greatest periods of change in human history. With an unfolding digital revolution, exponential increases in data, global mass engagement with multiple digital platforms and media, and more readable text for both humans and machines, this issue takes on new urgency.

In the past, research in the history of reading, Dr. Towheed argues, has uncovered the diversity of individual and collective reading practices. It has demonstrated the myriad ways people make meaning from texts and has shown the interdependent relationship between technological innovation and how people read. The invention of the codex did not eradicate the scroll but rather supplemented it in various ways. Similarly, the rise of new media in both print and digital formats has expanded the world of reading rather than contracting it. The smartphone has not killed off the printed book but instead exists in a sometimes adversarial, sometimes co-dependent relationship with it.

At the same time, our keynote speaker suggests that the rise of AI presents massive challenges for human interactions with text. If AI means machines are doing the reading, is the future entirely machine-readable? Is human interaction with texts endangered or even irrelevant in the future?

Shafquat Towheed is a Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Research for the School of Arts and Humanities at The Open University, UK. He also directs the History of Books and Reading research group and serves as Impact Lead for English. He has published extensively on the history and practice of reading. As the UK Principal Investigator for the European READ-IT project (2018–22), he worked with colleagues in Digital Humanities to pioneer the use of digital tools (including a chatbot) to encourage members of the public to reflect on their reading. He is currently working on an Open Societal Challenge on engaging readers, co-editing (with Sally Blackburn-Daniels) a volume on Vernon Lee and the Future of Intelligence, and thinking about what the future of reading (informed by what we know from the past) might look like.

The keynote, “What is the Future of Reading?” will start at 10 AM on Thursday, September 12, at Collegium Minus of Adam Mickiewicz University. See the detailed program for more information.