bookrevs 196 College & Research Libraries broaden the mind, but it also may con­ fuse, even frighten, and reinforce tenden­ cies to withdraw. Management of the emerging information glut becomes the important issue. O’Donnell has kind words for librarians, and he sees oppor­ tunities for them to take the lead by ex­ tending their profession’s experience and expertise in evaluating, filtering, and de­ scribing information resources into cyberspace. Librarians are the intelligent software needed to organize electronic information resources, but they will face significant challenges in maintaining ac­ cess to, and preserving resources in, elec­ tronic formats. Higher education, too, has a significant contribution to make in preparing people for life in a world of electronic text. How­ ever, this will require a reordering of pri­ orities and practices as well as significant changes in the way we teach. The elec­ tronic resources already at hand provide an unprecedented opportunity to empha­ size the learning process by having stu­ dents participate in the ongoing work of scholarship. In cooperation with each other and with their professors, students can engage interactively with textual re­ sources in projects that will make them active participants in broadening and deepening our collective knowledge. Such experience in the classroom can give students a better preparation for life after graduation than do conventional peda­ gogical practices. O’Donnell points out that improve­ ments and innovations in technology ini­ tially tend to be perceived simply as bet­ ter ways to do familiar tasks. Over time, their cumulative effects, which cannot be foreseen, much less controlled, create new and different environments to which in­ dividuals and societies must adapt. In Avatars, O’Donnell has chosen to speak to the positive potential consequences of electronic texts even as he acknowledges that there are other, less desirable possi­ bilities. As individuals, we may hope for the best while fearing something worse and, bearing in mind Cassiordorus who puts in a final appearance at the conclu- March 1999 sion of Avatars, do the best we can to re­ spond constructively.—Chris Africa, Uni­ versity of Iowa. Qualitative Research. Eds. Gillian M. McCombs and Theresa M. Maylone. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Infor­ mation Science, Library Trends 46, no. 4 (spring 1998): 597–789. $18.50 (ISSN 0024-2594). Despite, or perhaps because of, the im­ portance of a largely quantitative infor­ mation science in the recent history of li­ brarianship, efforts to introduce us to, and school us in, qualitative research are now much more common than they once were. Wisely steering clear of the more general epistemological issues in the philosophy of the social sciences (not because these are unimportant but, rather, because their importance demands separate and full treatment elsewhere), this collection of ten contributions nonetheless manages to cover a sizable range of methodological and theoretical issues. That in itself makes it worth reading. For example, Horn economically de­ scribes a set of four general theoretical ori­ entations that tends to frame much, if not all, of qualitative research: symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, herme­ neutics, and critical studies (the bibliog­ raphy provides many places to continue for those who are interested). Gary P. Radford addresses the positivist bias of information science with useful discus­ sions of recent French social theory. Day discusses organizational change from the standpoint of discourse analysis and ex­ pansive ideology-critique. And Liebscher rounds out the more theoretical end by recognizing (as much of the better work in the social sciences shows) that quanti­ tative and qualitative methods need not be mutually exclusive and should be cre­ atively played off one another. For those entrenched in the positivist camp who are unconvinced by the general arguments set forth in favor of qualitative research, Liebscher ’s discussion of triangulation should be especially relevant. They ought Book Reviews 197 to be reassured to learn, if they do not al­ ready know, that the attempt to tackle the more interesting empirical questions is leading an increasing number of research­ ers to select methods from both para­ digms. The remainder of the papers, with one exception, presents results of empirical research in library and information use. McCombs applies the ethnographic ap­ proach of cultural anthropology to an aca­ demic computing center so as to better appreciate the contrast between the cul­ tures of computing and librarianship. Resurrecting an older theme in studies of reference work, Marie L. Radford pre­ sents data from a naturalistic study show­ ing how nonverbal cues from library workers influence users’ decisions to seek help (eye contact seems to be the most notable of these). Borrowing from cogni­ tive anthropology, Smith and Yachnes discover and describe the kinds of men­ tal scripts followed by users of electronic texts. And Pendleton and Chatman study the use and exchange of information en­ tirely outside the formal contexts of li­ brary use, in what the authors call “small world perspectives.” The final paper (Wallace and Van Fleet) is somewhat out­ side this general scope and deals with the reception of qualitative research from the standpoint of the editorial traditions of professional journals. Even though this collection is largely coherent and the contributions explore various inflections of a central topic, it is still rather hard to evaluate. Perhaps this is because the very idea of qualitative re­ search harbors a demanding diversity of viewpoints, styles, and methods; quanti­ tative research, by contrast, seems to seek (though it may not always achieve) uni­ versality or even uniformity of purpose and outlook. This raises the question, how is it possible to manage all this diversity? In her introduction, Maylone claims that an underlying common framework unites these viewpoints—the “emphasis on context.” This is true when we oppose qualitative to quantitative; and it seems to fit reasonably well when we are look­ ing at symbolic interactionism or herme­ neutics, two of Horn’s four frameworks. But with phenomenology, the picture is otherwise, for here subjectivity (or inten­ tionality perhaps) is more fundamental than context; indeed, the contexts of ex­ perience are understood in phenomeno­ logical terms as constitutive achievements of consciousness. And with critical stud­ ies, a rather broad category that may need greater refinement, the common denomi­ nator seems to be power, not context. In Foucault, to take one example, there is a strong sense that the power distributed unevenly throughout various contexts of discourse tends to break up contexts epi­ sodically and reorganize them along dif­ ferent lines. Aside from these conceptual issues, there is one other problem that, though certainly not fatal, makes overall assess­ ment difficult. Although the papers are all relatively interesting on their own and are worth reading, they are not all clearly related to the four paradigms set out in Horn’s lead essay. The papers by Gary Radford and Day, for example, exemplify aspects of critical studies; in the essays by McCombs, Marie Radford, Smith and Yachnes, and Pendleton and Chatman, on the other hand, there is a common reli­ ance on ethnography. How are they re­ lated to symbolic interactionism, phe­ nomenology, or hermeneutics? Thus, al­ though these papers present interesting qualitative findings, their theoretical sig­ nificance remains somewhat unclear. Al­ ternatively, perhaps Horn’s essay places too much emphasis on general philo­ sophical perspectives and not enough on the relation between ethnography and so­ cial theory in the emerging qualitative paradigm. Either way, the effect is one of imbalance. These observations suggest areas in which more work might be done and cer­ tainly do not detract from the consider­ able interest of the volume. Mark Tyler Day’s essay, for instance, is heavily theo­ retical, and yet he also provides an ex­ ample of how specialized software that has been used in theory-testing also can 198 College & Research Libraries be used to generate theory from digitized text collections by permitting the analy­ sis and interpretation of texts along the­ matic lines. This kind of research has been done, of course, for decades with much expenditure of time and effort, but Day’s examples show a new approach that au­ tomates some of the work and presum­ ably frees the researcher for more analy­ sis and interpretation. One cannot help but wonder if something like this has ap­ plications in areas such as citation and citation context analysis, which hitherto have been served mostly by quantitative methods. If so, one could study citations as discursive practices, just as one stud­ ies the larger texts and contexts in which they are embedded. Examples such as these show that this volume has the po­ tential to stimulate some very promising research indeed.—Michael F. Winter, Uni­ versity of California-Davis. Travis, Molly Abel. Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Il­ linois Univ. Pr., 1998. 173p. $39.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0-8093-2146-7). LC 97­ 10063. Reading Cultures explores the expectations that readers bring to books and the ways that critics, scholars, teachers, and the texts themselves work to “construct” readers in different times and places. It analyzes reactions to and interactions with different kinds of literary works. The particular contribution that Molly Abel Travis (associate professor of English at Tulane University) hopes to bring to the field of reader response theory is to ex­ amine reading communities or cultures as defined by race, gender, class, and age. To oversimplify a bit, she wants to syn­ thesize the rhetorical study of texts and readers with newer concerns of feminism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, queer studies, and so on. No small task. The implied reader of this book about readers is an English professor or gradu­ ate student. Because I am neither, I found the book heavy going. It would be easy to declare it unreadable: laden with ref- March 1999 erences to other people’s theories (no doubt the residue of a dissertation) and brimming with the specialized vocabu­ lary of critical theory (“metaplagiarism” was a new term for me). But this would be cowardly. As others have argued, lit­ erary studies—like all academic disci­ plines—is entitled to its own jargon, theory, and intellectual rigor. So I will soldier on and try to translate the main points of the book into ordinary English. Travis works her way through the twentieth century in five chapters, each a foray into a different field of readerly complexity. “Two Cultures of Reading in the Modernist Period” begins with an analysis of “the cultural effort invested in rendering Joyce’s Ulysses readable.” The author makes excellent use of pri­ mary sources and quotations to tell this essentially comic tale. Readers were per­ plexed and angered by Ulysses. Perhaps many still are. Joyce knowingly dis­ mantled and parodied all the comfortable conventions of nineteenth-century narra­ tive, refusing to compromise for readability’s sake. Promoters of high art labored to persuade the American public of the novel’s order, harmony, and mas­ tery. Travis reproduces a two-page spread that appeared in the Saturday Review of Lit­ erature in 1934 entitled “How to Enjoy James Joyce’s Great Novel Ulysses,” with a plan of Dublin, list of characters, and detailed synopsis. The chapter continues with some rather desultory discussion of Virginia Woolf’s terror of a devouring middlebrow culture, touching on such institutions as the Book of the Month Club, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Review itself. The next two chapters deal respec­ tively with gender and racial differences in texts, readers, and interpretation. “Sex­ ing the Text: Postmodern Reading, Femi­ nist Theory, and Ironic Agency” compares works by Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino (who implicitly assume a mas­ culine reader) with works by the avant­ garde feminist writers Kathy Acker (a punk writer) and Angela Carter (“who wants her readers to engage interactively