How We Think

How We Think

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-06-05

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0226321401

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How we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis -- First interlude: practices and processes in digital media -- The digital humanities: engaging the issues -- How we read: close, hyper, machine -- Second interlude: the complexities of contemporary technogenesis -- Tech-toc: complex temporalities and contemporary technogenesis -- Technogenesis in action: telegraph code books and the place of the human -- Third interlude: narrative and database: digital media as forms -- Narrative and database: spatial history and the limits of symbiosis -- Transcendent data and transmedia narrative: Steven Hall's The raw shark texts -- Mapping time, charting data: the spatial aesthetic of Mark Z. Danielewski's Only revolutions.


How We Think

How We Think

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-04-11

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0226321371

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“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. Hayles examines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or “hyper reading,” and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions—Steve Tomasula’s electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.


Unthought

Unthought

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-05

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 022644788X

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N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.


The Cosmic Web

The Cosmic Web

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1501722972

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No detailed description available for "The Cosmic Web".


Chaos Bound

Chaos Bound

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1501722964

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Hayles’s point is that the almost simultaneous appearance of interest in complex systems across many disciplines―physics, mathematics, biology, information theory, literature, literary theory―signals a profound paradigm and epistemological shift. She calls the new paradigm ‘orderly disorder.’ This is a timely, informative, and enormously thought-provoking book. — Nancy Craig Simmons ― American Literature N. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary literature and critical theory and the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. She examines structures and themes of disorder in The Education of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and works by Stanislaw Lem. Hayles shows how the writings of poststructuralist theorists including Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Serres, and de Man incorporate central features of chaos theory.


Reading Project

Reading Project

Author: Jessica Pressman

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2015-06

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1609383451

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"A collaborative critical analysis of a work of digital literature, this book models how scholars can and need to weave together multiple methodologies from the digital humanities in order to effectively analyze born-digital electronic literature"--


Digital Modernism

Digital Modernism

Author: Jessica Pressman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-01-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0199937095

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While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, Digital Modernism provides an alternative genealogy. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter to demonstrate how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history.


The Marvelous Clouds

The Marvelous Clouds

Author: John Durham Peters

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-06-19

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 022625397X

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“An ambitious re-writing—a re-synthesis, even—of concepts of media and culture . . . It is nothing less than an attempt at a history of Being.” —Los Angeles Review of Books When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence—from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google—The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us.


Internet Literature in China

Internet Literature in China

Author: Michel Hockx

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-02-10

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0231538537

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Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.


Digital_Humanities

Digital_Humanities

Author: Anne Burdick

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-12

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 026252886X

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A visionary report on the revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century. Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry—including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation—to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.