As I’ve been thinking through the role of spatial literacies in the classroom, I’ve also been thinking about the interrelation of space and time within the texts we read.

A clear example of this is below. No, it’s not down there at the bottom of the screen and, likely, you didn’t look to your toes to see if I had miraculously transferred an example asynchronously to your current time and location. Instead, the word “below”, as typically used in texts, is a spatial marker that is used to signal time. When a writer talks about something that will be discussed later, she or he will likely say something parenthetically like, “(see below)”. When we see this phrase (or its less frequent sibling, “above”), we do not frantically scan the page in a Waldo-like search for this illusive information skulking above the bottom margin of a page. Often, we wait patiently and read on. As skilled readers we know that the below is found more in time than in place when reading a text.

We are so sure, in fact, that we will find “below” later on in a text, that the phrase often acts as a misnomer. Let’s say that you are reading “see below” and it appears at the bottom of a page. Clearly, there are no longer any lines of the text that can go below the appearing phrase. In fact, as you continue to read, you find that the referenced “below” actually appears later on much higher up on another page. Below can be above.*

When we write about below we actually write about later on. We foreshadow in text through place.

What I’m curious about (and painfully–American-ly–ignorant of) is if similar mixtures of spatial and time-based phrases are mixed in other languages. Do French or Japanese or Portuguese or Arabic academic texts have the equivalent of “see below” in their rhetoric? Or is this downward quest solely American? A literary Manifest Destiny?

So all of this can seem like another one of those quirky things about language that people just kinda point out (“a pineapple is neither pine nor apple, discuss”). However, I’d argue that this rooting of time and place within a text is counter to the possibilities of digital production.

When we type in Word or in the body of a new email message, our cursor is programmed to wrap text after a predisposed length not because it has to, but because that’s what paper and books have conditioned us to expect. When I simulate turning the page in my ebook, it’s not because the screen has run out of space but because, as someone who has come of age reading and producing on physical products with tools that make prominent use of my horrible handwritten scrawl, I expect my computer and phone and kindle and iPad to look and function like a book.

Our students today and the students coming after them do not have to cater to these same predispositions. For them, “see below” could just as easily be “see over there to the left” or “see on this link” or “see by floating your cursor over a word and an image will appear.” It doesn’t even have to be “see.” When we want to relate ideas that are to follow, digital technology allows us to disrupt within a text. There is nothing but our own imagination to stop an audio file or an embedded video or an interactive game or feature I’m unable to imagine to appear as a way to explain an idea or enrich a text.

As I typed that last sentence (on an application on my iPad), a thin line bisected my prose. The line told me I was now typing on a new page and was now writing further below. The spatial privilege we place on production and consumption of text is one that entire industries hinge upon. The constant updates about the book world’s uncomfortable crawl into eBook ubiquity, software giants, the size, shape, and functionality of printers in our households, and cultural semiotics of paper and what reading “looks like” as we teach it to young people suggest that “see below” isn’t likely to lose its meaning anytime soon. However, as we add to other ways to signal time in text than simply through textual geography, it is necessary for us to point young people to new ways of producing text that isn’t necessarily 8.5″x11″1-inchmargins12pointfontdoublespacedtimesnewroman.

*The footnote or endnote, however, stay rooted firmly in place and are easily found piling up and wandering sequentially at the bottom of a page or document (they are the true “below”).