OCT 1 - CLOSE, HYPER, MACHINE READING

#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 2^nd 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), 2^nd 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, 4^th paragraph, Derrida
• "Metatext", "docuverse", collage or montage
• Hypertext, explantation, page 104, 3^rd 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

SEP 24 - TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Hayles, Katherine. 2012. “Chapters 1 & 2” in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-54.

http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/lib/oculyork/reader.action?docID=10547388

CHAPTER ONE

• Important question: How we think?

• Way we are thinking is co-evolved with technology
• Technology has changed our way of thinking
• Human growth is in correlation to technological growth
• More advanced we are in technology (in information gathering/learning), more adaptive our minds will work to adjust to the pace

• Technogenesis: the co-relation of human and technological advancement

• Technogenesis connected to the way we think
• We adjust behaviours to adjust to the pace of technology
• Definition: “Another way is through that concept of technogenesis, the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together.” (page 10)
• Into Contemporary Times (Baldwin effect): “He suggested that when a genetic mutation occurs, its spread through a population is accelerated when the species reengineers its environment in ways that make the mutation more adaptive.” (page 10)

• Emergence of Digital Humanities: Page 24

"“Digital Humanities” was meant to signal that the field had emerged from the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavor with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations."

• First-wave Digital Humanities: Page 25-26 

• Mimics print
• Textuality was primary
• Sound was secondary
• "Quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays"

• Second wave of DH: Page 26

• Qualitative, interpretive, experiental, emotive, generative
• "Digital toolkits"
• Methodological strengths:
• Attention to complexity
• Medium specificity
• Historical context
• Analytical depth
• Critique and interpretation

• Speculative computing: Page 26

• Opposing DH
• “Attempts to open the field of discourse to its infinite and peculiar richness as deformative interpretation. How different is it from digital humanities? As different as night from day, text from work, and the force of controlling reason from the pleasures of delightenment” Johanna Drucker

• Scale Matters (important issue in effecting transformation): Page 27

• "Digitized texts that can be searched, analyzed, and correlated by machine algorithms number in the hundreds of thousands (now, with Google Books, a million and more), limited only by ever-increasing processor speed and memory storage."
• Can process tons of information in a second

CHAPTER TWO

• Effects of digital humanities: Introduces machine reading and hyper reading (forms of reading)

• Machine Reading: Computer takes out visible patterns, human reading interprets (29)

• Assimilation and distinction (valuable towards digital humanities strategies): Page 46

• Assimilation: extends existing scholarship into the digital realm
• Offers more affordances than print for access, queries, and dissemination
• Often adopts an attitude of reassurance rather than confrontation
• Electronic editions of print texts
• Distinction:
• Emphasizes new methodologies
• New kinds of research questions
• Emergence of entirely new fields
• Digital fiction and poetry

• Collaboration (shift from cooperation to collaboration): Page 34

• Collaboration is a rule than an exception

• "Digital forensics": Page 32

"The idea is to bring to digital media the same materialist emphasis of bibliographic study, using microscopic (and occasionally even nanoscale) examination of digital objects and codes to understand their histories, contexts, and transmission pathways."

• Database: Page 38

• Specified in categories and modifying them as the work proceeds
• Effect: Liberate contradictory and refractory threads in the material
• Requires more patience because it's not linear
• Flexible structure can be implemented into different communities

Technological determinism page 3

• Taking one technological aspect and making it the cause of something

• Says that the problem is the technology

• Reduction of an affect to one cause—that being that technology is the cause

Word Cloud Exercise:

• So what? Pattern recognition, stuff you wouldn’t realize
• Word cloud, frequency of words, understand contours of body of knowledge
• Textual analysis, how does it change, how do you deal with text?

Lecture

• Digital Divide: People with and without technological knowledge
• Technological imaginations: new technological innovations
• Co-evolution of humans and technologies

SEP 17 - DEFINITIONS & DEBATES

Burdick, Anne, et al. 2012. “Humanities to Digital Humanities” in Digital_Humanities, MIT Press, pp. 1-26.

https://moodle.yorku.ca/moodle/pluginfile.php/1112102/mod_resource/content/4/Digital%20Humanities_Drucker_Open_Access_Edition.pdf

KEYWORDS

1) First Wave of Digital Humanities 1940's late 1980's (page 8)
•Opened up archive  databases to a wider audience
•Created a greater level of media fluidity by developing machine readable records and file formats
•In the 1980’s changed from traditional methods of editing and analysis to an automated digital format


2) Second Wave of Humanities 1990's + (page 9)
•Incorporating digital media specifically in the learning environment
•“Students are making things as they study and perform research generating not just text but images, interactions, cross media corpora, software and platforms”
•Problem: multum in parvo – the inability to use language effectively
•Problem #2: digital divide

3) Computational Layer (page 16)
•Part of a structure at several levels that relies on principles that are at odds with humanistic methods (a step by step process that challenges humanistic thought)
•Relies on encoding and structuring of information (disambiguation)
•It is difficult to embody humanistic approaches of ambiguity, interpretation, contingency, and positionality within computational methods as they are so precise.

4) Processing Layer (page 17)
•Takes advantage of automation but subject to limitations of computational capacity
•Was initially task-based (basic functions): sorting, searching, calculating, and matching
•Developed into interpretive process that allows manipulation and to further creative process

5) Curation (page 17-18)
•The selection and organization of materials
•It is an interpretative framework, argument or an exhibit.
•It brings humanistic values and qualities into play.

6) Analysis (page 18)
•Processing of text or data
•Conjugated visualization (ex. Business Graphics/ Mapping)
•Gives analysis of complex social, cultural and historical dynamics

7) Editing (page 18)
•Is the creative, imaginative activity of making
•Revitalizes long-standing traditions of humanistic work and allow humanists to re-approach these traditions in innovative ways with new research questions and tools.
•Design is form of editing; it is how an argument takes shape and is given form      
    •Resource: the Web

8) Modelling (page 18-19)
•Highlights the notion of content models- shapes of argument expressed in information structures and their design
•More the process than the final product
•There are certain assumptions built in – play around with the assumptions