The Transliteracies group conducts research in the technological, social, and cultural practices of online reading. The investigation into new digital practices involves individual, organisational literacy and semi-"literate" machines.

"The idea is to exploit cross-disciplinary expertise to approach online reading from multiple angles simultaneously, rather than just as an engineering problem, just as a hermeneutical problem, or just as a social problem. "

" Networked, digital environments also make more important the social, collective experience of reading (as instanced by Web blogs or the Google search-engine technology that filters hits according to popularity or relevance in a community of referring Web pages, each of which is in effect a "reading" of the referred page). Finally, the new online reading complements the emerging technologies that increasingly allow computers to read/write autonomously to each other across platforms and applications-as in the XML-based technologies that underlie the new online text archives, "Web services," and RSS newsreaders."

A (free) conference will take place in June. Seed-questions are being spread to discuss issues at the virtual round-table before the conference.