#1
Hayles, Katherine N. 2012. Chapter 3 in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, pp. 55 -79.
http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/lib/oculyork/reader.action?docID=10547388
Close Reading (page 58)
Close Reading: Involves detailed and precise attention to rhetoric, style, language choice though a word-by-word analysis of a text’s linguistic techniques
- It is a form of conscious reading, therefore, your brain has higher comprehension levels
- Necessary to decipher key meaning of a print text
- Close reading is widely applicable and really valuable to students, however, most students today find it to be a challenging form or reading and express that it is a not worthwhile
Zone of Proximal Development: if the distance is too big between what someone wants an individual to learn and where instruction begins, the teaching will not be effective
- Ex: trying to explain Hamlet to a child
Hyper Reading (page 77)
Hyper Reading: Reader-directed, screen-based, computer-assisted reading
- Using Google searching, filtering words, skimming, hyperlinks, etc.
- Stimulates different brain functions than print reading
- Necessary in digital environments
- F Pattern Reading is how we read on websites
Juxtaposing: Several windows open allowing the reader to read across several texts and scanning
Advantages of Hyper Reading: See range of possibilities, move rapidly among and between different kinds of texts, see how relevant the text is for you, etc.
Challenges of Hyper Reading: Constant state of distraction, desire to skim everything, won’t pay close attention to anything for too long, etc.
Comprehension Levels: Reading on the Web vs. Reading Print (64)
Web Reading
- Small distractions on the web (like hypertext), increase the cognitive load on working memory
- Thereby, reduce the amount of new material it can hold
Print, Linear Reading:
- Cognitive load is at a minimum
- Eye movements are more routine (how to read and in what order)
- Transfer to long term memory happens more efficiently; especially when readers reread passages and pause to reflect on them as they go along
Machine Reading (page 78-79)
Machine Reading: Automatic, unsupervised understanding of text.
- This form has just recently become available to us given advancement in technology.
- Context poor in relation to the other two forms of reading.
- A form of “non-conscious” reading.
- Uses frequencies to identify patterns, but it is the person that needs to connect those patterns to the meaning.
- Wordle and Voyant are forms of machine reading.
Advantage: Allows you to see recurring words and frequency of words in order to get a gist of the author’s main points.
Challenge: Unable to view and comprehend full context of the words and meanings behind the authors view without reading where in the passage the words are being used.
#2
Landow, Georg. (1991) "Hypertext and Critical Theory" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 2-12
https://moodle.yorku.ca/moodle/pluginfile.php/1152793/mod_resource/content/1/Hypertext%20and%20Critical%20Theory.pdf
- Hyper textual Derrida, definition, Page 98: Digitalized text
- Hypertext and Critical Theory (parallel and explanations), Page 99 2nd Paragraph:
- Text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality
- Link, node, network, web, path
- Hypertext, definition, Page 100 (Theodor H. Nelson), 2nd Paragraph:
- Form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, mode of publication
- Nonsequential writing; allows reader to choose
- Hypermedia, explanation, Page 100:
- extends notion of text in hypertext to include visual information, sound, animation, and other forms of data
- 101: blurs boundary between text and reader
- Hypertext, explanation, page 104, 4th paragraph, Derrida
- "Metatext", "docuverse", collage or montage
- Hypertext, explantation, page 104, 3rd paragraph, Joyce’s Ulyses example
- Full hypertext system, explanation, Page 102
- Hypertext systems, explanation, page 106
- Extant hypertext systems, explanation, page 103
- Intertextuality, definition, (Thais Morgan), page 104-105:
- "Structural analysis of texts in relation to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture"
- Multivocality , explanation, page 105:
- "Constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousness as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other" Bakhtin
- Polyphonic literacy present in Dostoevskian novel, hypertextual fiction
- De-centering, explanation, 105-106:
- Linked texts have no primary axis of organization (105)
- Up to the reader (105)
- Biblical typology, explanation, page 106
- Example
- Networked reality came before computing technology
- 17th & 19th centuries; types and shadows of Christ and his dispensation
