Hayles 2012

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)