Hayles 2012: Difference between revisions
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== How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine == | == How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine == | ||
:"The crucial questions are these: how to convert the increased digital reading into increased reading ability, and how to make effective bridges between digital reading and the literacy traditionally associated with print." (56) | |||
:"What evidence indicates that these web-specific effects are making distraction a contemporary cultural condition? Several studies have shown that, contrary to the claims of early hypertext enthusiasts such as George Landow, hyperlinks tend to degrade comprehension rather than enhance it." (63) | |||
:"The small distractions involved with hypertext and web reading -- clicking on links, navigating a page, scrolling down or up, and so on -- increase the cognitive load on working memory and thereby reduce the amount of new material it can hold. With linear reading, by contrast, the cognitive load is at a minimum, precisely because eye movements are more routine and fewer decisions need to be made about how to read the material and in what order. Hence the transfer to long-term memory happens more efficiently, especially when readers reread passages and pause to reflect on them as they go along." (64) | |||
:"Putting human reading in a leak-proof container and isolating machine reading in another makes it difficult to see these interactions and understand their complex synergies. Given these considerations, saying that computers cannot read is from my point of view merely species chauvinism." (72) | |||
:"The more the emphasis falls on pattern (as in machine reading), the more likely it is that context must be supplied from outside (by a human interpreter) to connect pattern with meaning; the more the emphasis falls on meaning (as in close reading), the more pattern assumes a subordinate role. In general, the different distributions among apttern, meaning, and context provide ways to think about interrelations among close, hyper, and machine reading." (74) | |||
== Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities and Contemporary Technogenesis == | |||
Bergson, distinction between temporality as a process and as measured | |||
:"Its contributions to the history of philosophy notwithstanding, the distinction has a serious disadvantage: although objects, like living beings, exist within duration, there remains a qualitative distinction between the human capacity to grasp duration and the relations of objects to it. Indeed, there can be no account of how duration is experienced by objects, for lacking intuition, they may manifest duration but not experience it. What would it mean to talk baout an object's experience of time, and what implications would flow from this view of objecthood?" (86) | |||
:"I will discuss the view that technical objects embody complex temporalities enfolding past into present, present into future. An essential component of this approach is a shift from seeing technical objects as static entities to conceptualizing them as temporary coalescences in fields of conflicting and cooperating forces." (86) | |||
== Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human == | |||
:"With the advent of telegraphy, messages and bodies traveled at unprecedented speeds by wire and rail. This regime of speed, crucial to telegraphy's reconfiguration of cultural, social, and economic environments, led to troubled minglings of bodies and messages, as if messages could become bodies and bodies messages. At the same time, telegraphy was extraordinarily vulnerable to the resistant materialities of physically embodied communication, with constant breakdown of instruments and transmission lines and persistent human error. In this sense telegraphy was prologue to the ideological and material struggle between dematerialized information and resistant bodies characteristic of the globalization era" (124) | |||
:"Time and space were not, common wisdom to the contrary, annihilated by the telegraph, but they were reconfigured. The reconfiguration had the effect of entangling monopoly capitalism with the new technology so that it was no longer possible for capital to operate without the telegraph or its successors; nor was it possible, after about 1866, to think about the telegraph without thinking about monopoly capital." (126) | |||
:"Subject to a complex transmission chain and multiple encodings/decodings, telegraph language began to function as a nexus in which technological, social, and economic forces converged, interpenetrating the native expression of thought to create a discourse that always had multiple authors, even if originally written by a single person." (130) | |||
:"code books, by using certain phrases and not others, not only disciplined language use but also subtly guided it along paths the compilers judged efficacious. In addition to inscribing messages likely to be sent, the code books reveal ways of thinkinig that tended to propagate through predetermined words and phrases, a phenomenon explored in more depth below." (132) | |||
:"The progression from natural language to artificial code groups, from code words drawn from the compiler's memory associations to codes algorithmically constructed, traces a path in which code that draws directly on the lifeworld of ordinary experience gives way to code calculated procedurally." (142) | |||
Teletype, ASCII -- 146 | |||
:"Although military forces could not prevent their telegraph lines from being tapped, the code books, as print artifacts, could be protected and kept secure. The problem of communicating over distances while ensuring that only the intended recipients would have access to the messages was solved through the coupline of code and language." (155) | |||
:"Code books had their part to play in these sweeping changes, for they affected assumptions about how language operated in conjunction with code. They were part of a historical shift from inscription practices in which words flowed from hand onto paper, seeming to embody the writer's voice, to a technocrataic regime in which encoding, transmission, and decoding procedures intervened between a writer's thoughts and the receiver's understanding of those thoughts. AS we have seen, the changes brought about by telegraphy anticipated and partly facilitated the contemporary situation in which all kinds of communications are mediated by intelligent machines. The technogenetic cycles explored in this chapter demonstrate how the connections between bodies and technics accelerated and catalyzed changed in conscious and unconscious assumptions about the place of the human in relation to language and code." (157) | |||
:"A revolution in language practice, with important theoretical implications, occurred when the conception changed from thinking about encoding/decoding as moving across the printed page to thinking of it as moving up or down between different layers of codes and languages." (160) | |||
Andrew, Hallner, ''The Scientific Dial Primer'' -- concentric rings for generating code words | |||
:"In linking natural language with codes that became increasingly machine-centric, telegraph code books initiated the struggle to define the place of the human in relation to digital technologies, an agon that remains crucial to the humanities today." (170) | |||
== Narrative and Database: Spatial History and the Limits of Symbiosis == |
Revision as of 01:56, 18 April 2014
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
How We Think
- "Needed are approaches that can locate digital work within print traditions, and print traditions within digital media, without obscuring or failing to account for the differences between them. One such approach is advocated here: it goes by the name of Comparative Media Studies." (7)
Traditional English curriculum "focuses on content rather than problems, assuming that students will somehow make the leap from classroom exercises to real-world complexities by themselves." need a problem-based approach (9)
- "the Digital Humanities are not a monolithic field but rather a collection of dynamic evolving practices, with internal disputes, an emerging set of theoretical concerns interwoven with diverse practices, and contextual solutions so specific institutional configurations." (10)
- "A Comparative Media Studies perspective can result in courses and curricula that recognize all three reading modalities -- close, hyper-, and machine -- and prepare students to understand the limitations and affordances of each." (11)
- "When humanities scholars turn to digital media, they confront technologies that operate on vastly different time scales, and in significantly different cognitive modes, than human understanding. Grasping the complex ways in which the time scales of human cognition interact with those of intelligent machines requires a theoretical framework in which objects are seen not as static entities that, once created, remain the same throughout time but rather are understood as constantly changing assemblages in which inequalities and inefficiencies in their operations drive them toward breakdown, disruption, innovation, and change." (13)
- "Materiality, like the object itself, is not a pre-given entity but rather a dynamic process that changes as the focus of attention shifts." (14)
- "Comparative Media Studies, with its foregrounding of media technologies in comparative contexts, provides theoretical, conceptual, and practical frameworks for critically assessing technogenetic changes and devising strategies to help guide them in socially constructive ways." (14)
The Digital Humanities: Engaging the Issues
- "The point, to my mind, is not that it is better (or worse) but rather that it is different, and the differences can leverage traditional assumptions so they become visible and hence available for rethinking and reconceptualizing." (24)
First wave -- Unsworth and big data; quantitative
Second wave -- Schnapp and Presner's Manifesto
- "Digital networks influence print books, and print traditions inform the ways in which the materiality of digital objects is understood and theorized. Thus two dynamics are at work: one in which the DH are moving forward to open up new areas of exploration, and another in which they are engaged in a recursive feedback loop with the Traditional Humanities." (32)
- "Conceptualization is intimately tied in with implementation, design decisions often have theoretical consequences, algorithms embody reasoning, and navigation carries interpretive weight, so the humanities scholar, graphic designer, and programmer work best when they are in continuous and respectful communication with one another." (35)
strategies for DH: assimilation and distinction
- "Assimilation extends existing scholarship into the digital realm; it offers more affordances than print for access, queries, and dissemination; it often adopts and attitude of reassurance rather than confrontation. Distinction, by contrast, emphasies new methodologies, new kinds of research questions, and the emergence of entirely new fields." (46)
How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine
- "The crucial questions are these: how to convert the increased digital reading into increased reading ability, and how to make effective bridges between digital reading and the literacy traditionally associated with print." (56)
- "What evidence indicates that these web-specific effects are making distraction a contemporary cultural condition? Several studies have shown that, contrary to the claims of early hypertext enthusiasts such as George Landow, hyperlinks tend to degrade comprehension rather than enhance it." (63)
- "The small distractions involved with hypertext and web reading -- clicking on links, navigating a page, scrolling down or up, and so on -- increase the cognitive load on working memory and thereby reduce the amount of new material it can hold. With linear reading, by contrast, the cognitive load is at a minimum, precisely because eye movements are more routine and fewer decisions need to be made about how to read the material and in what order. Hence the transfer to long-term memory happens more efficiently, especially when readers reread passages and pause to reflect on them as they go along." (64)
- "Putting human reading in a leak-proof container and isolating machine reading in another makes it difficult to see these interactions and understand their complex synergies. Given these considerations, saying that computers cannot read is from my point of view merely species chauvinism." (72)
- "The more the emphasis falls on pattern (as in machine reading), the more likely it is that context must be supplied from outside (by a human interpreter) to connect pattern with meaning; the more the emphasis falls on meaning (as in close reading), the more pattern assumes a subordinate role. In general, the different distributions among apttern, meaning, and context provide ways to think about interrelations among close, hyper, and machine reading." (74)
Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities and Contemporary Technogenesis
Bergson, distinction between temporality as a process and as measured
- "Its contributions to the history of philosophy notwithstanding, the distinction has a serious disadvantage: although objects, like living beings, exist within duration, there remains a qualitative distinction between the human capacity to grasp duration and the relations of objects to it. Indeed, there can be no account of how duration is experienced by objects, for lacking intuition, they may manifest duration but not experience it. What would it mean to talk baout an object's experience of time, and what implications would flow from this view of objecthood?" (86)
- "I will discuss the view that technical objects embody complex temporalities enfolding past into present, present into future. An essential component of this approach is a shift from seeing technical objects as static entities to conceptualizing them as temporary coalescences in fields of conflicting and cooperating forces." (86)
Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human
- "With the advent of telegraphy, messages and bodies traveled at unprecedented speeds by wire and rail. This regime of speed, crucial to telegraphy's reconfiguration of cultural, social, and economic environments, led to troubled minglings of bodies and messages, as if messages could become bodies and bodies messages. At the same time, telegraphy was extraordinarily vulnerable to the resistant materialities of physically embodied communication, with constant breakdown of instruments and transmission lines and persistent human error. In this sense telegraphy was prologue to the ideological and material struggle between dematerialized information and resistant bodies characteristic of the globalization era" (124)
- "Time and space were not, common wisdom to the contrary, annihilated by the telegraph, but they were reconfigured. The reconfiguration had the effect of entangling monopoly capitalism with the new technology so that it was no longer possible for capital to operate without the telegraph or its successors; nor was it possible, after about 1866, to think about the telegraph without thinking about monopoly capital." (126)
- "Subject to a complex transmission chain and multiple encodings/decodings, telegraph language began to function as a nexus in which technological, social, and economic forces converged, interpenetrating the native expression of thought to create a discourse that always had multiple authors, even if originally written by a single person." (130)
- "code books, by using certain phrases and not others, not only disciplined language use but also subtly guided it along paths the compilers judged efficacious. In addition to inscribing messages likely to be sent, the code books reveal ways of thinkinig that tended to propagate through predetermined words and phrases, a phenomenon explored in more depth below." (132)
- "The progression from natural language to artificial code groups, from code words drawn from the compiler's memory associations to codes algorithmically constructed, traces a path in which code that draws directly on the lifeworld of ordinary experience gives way to code calculated procedurally." (142)
Teletype, ASCII -- 146
- "Although military forces could not prevent their telegraph lines from being tapped, the code books, as print artifacts, could be protected and kept secure. The problem of communicating over distances while ensuring that only the intended recipients would have access to the messages was solved through the coupline of code and language." (155)
- "Code books had their part to play in these sweeping changes, for they affected assumptions about how language operated in conjunction with code. They were part of a historical shift from inscription practices in which words flowed from hand onto paper, seeming to embody the writer's voice, to a technocrataic regime in which encoding, transmission, and decoding procedures intervened between a writer's thoughts and the receiver's understanding of those thoughts. AS we have seen, the changes brought about by telegraphy anticipated and partly facilitated the contemporary situation in which all kinds of communications are mediated by intelligent machines. The technogenetic cycles explored in this chapter demonstrate how the connections between bodies and technics accelerated and catalyzed changed in conscious and unconscious assumptions about the place of the human in relation to language and code." (157)
- "A revolution in language practice, with important theoretical implications, occurred when the conception changed from thinking about encoding/decoding as moving across the printed page to thinking of it as moving up or down between different layers of codes and languages." (160)
Andrew, Hallner, The Scientific Dial Primer -- concentric rings for generating code words
- "In linking natural language with codes that became increasingly machine-centric, telegraph code books initiated the struggle to define the place of the human in relation to digital technologies, an agon that remains crucial to the humanities today." (170)