The rise of the use of computational methods in both the study and production of
literature poses questions about how to best read works of electronic literature
which engage a wider sphere of human context beyond the literary text itself.
Taking a cue from modes of distant reading that have taken
advantage of computational methods in order to pursue empirical and
sociologically-influenced readings of traditional textual corpora, the liminal
case of ambient literature is examined. As a form of
electronic literature developed out of the field of ubiquitous computing,
ambient literature presents a literature which is intimately connected to the
situation of the reader, offering a text whose meaning is both variable and
specific to the conditions of its engagement. Having confronted analogous issues
in other domains, traditions of research in human-computer interaction offer
methodological insight into how such works might be read. Developing an account
of how literary texts may be read from a distance through user studies, an
ethnomethodological analysis of the experience of these hybrid works of
electronic literature is advanced. By drawing connections between literary
studies and human-computer interaction, new methods which focus on the analysis
of the experience of multiple readers as they encounter works of electronic
literature establish opportunities for future research into the contextual,
embodied, and computational nature of literature today.
By drawing connections between literary studies and human-computer interaction,
new methods which focus on the analysis of the experience of multiple readers as
they encounter works of electronic literature establish opportunities for future
research into the contextual, embodied, and computational nature of literature
today.
Andrew Piper starts a recent article on the computational modeling of plots in modern
novels by wondering aloud,
What would it mean for a novel to turn us as we turn its
pages? How are we not simply moved, but transformed — turned around —
through the novel’s combination of gestural and affective
structures?
. In wondering this, he is pre-figuring his own argument linking the
development of new computational methods for literary analysis to new forms of
literary understanding, that the possibilities offered by computerization toward the
re-imagination of the shape of literary works might influence our appreciation of
what literature is. What I want to do in this article is to radicalize Piper’s
assertion that
technology impacts argument not solely through the new
truths it produces, but also in the ways it changes our affective
attachments to the texts that we read
. I want to do so by examining the entangled prospects for both literature and
the analysis of literature as posed by the rapid uptake of computerization in both
the analysis and, importantly, the production of new kinds of literary texts. What I
want to propose is that the computational and algorithmic basis that is shared
between distant reading and new forms of electronic literature instigates
interlocking epistemic and methodological problematics for each. In each, there is a
necessary re-appraisal of the critical distances at work, both as they are actively
employed by readers, but also as they are afforded by the texts.
As a recent focus section of an issue of
PMLA
shows, there is a sustained interest in the diverse
epistemic possibilities afforded by the collection of methods grouped under the
banner of distant reading. While there is no specific
definition of what distant reading means (even within Franco Moretti’s influential
account, several distinct approaches are taken up), it can today be most identified
with a range of approaches (such as network analysis, topic modeling, and word
vectors, among many others) that examine literature or text in general according to
both its meaningful and informational properties . As
Ted Underwood details, the kinds of stereotypical algorithmic and computational
approaches identified with distant reading are not just the result of the rise of
computerization, but are undergirded by a longer and more deeply set connection to
sociological approaches to the study of literature: what has been termed distant
reading comes to support more than just a quantitative explanation of works, but
comes to make possible a layered approach to the interpretation of literature, with
analysis supported through a variety of secondary modes of reading
. The computerization of the study of literature that is
linked to distant reading is less about foreclosing possibilities than opening the
way for new kinds of readings drawn in from other traditions.
At the same time, however, that advances in computational technique have made new
modes of literary analysis viable in regard to a wider set of questions, they have
also made possible new kinds of electronic literature which pose a series of
challenges to these computational and algorithmic approaches. Such literary forms
(ranging from transmedia branching narratives to locative literature) incorporate
computational techniques which augment the physical form of the book and welcome a
host of dynamic and extra-textual aspects into literature. These literatures, more
than just sharing a computational foundation with advances in distant reading, also,
like distant reading, explicitly invite a sociological accounting of their function.
The case of ambient literature
— which utilizes techniques developed in the field of
ubiquitous computing in order to create explicit and
dynamic links between the digital literary text and the lived context of the reader
— offers an opportunity to examine the limits of both old and new approaches to
literary analysis. As a liminal case, this loosely defined set of literary practices
invites new methodological approaches which evoke new critical distantances for the
study of literature and computerization.
Using both distant reading and the challenges posed by something like ambient
literature as a guide, this article argues that the developing influence of
computerization necessitates a re-consideration of what reading can mean in the
study of literature and that methods developed in HCI offer a model for what these
new forms of reading might look like. In advancing an approached derived from the
ethnomethodological analysis of computing, what is detailed here is an account of
reading dynamic and conditional electronic texts through an analysis of how
individual readers come to experience and make sense of the texts. In this way, this
paper draws on the sociological foundations of distant reading and its sense of a
mediated engagement with literature as a guide for helping to consider the
contemporary entanglement between literature and computing.
The Case of the Unreadable Text
In order to frame the methodological challenge raised by a computational
literature, let's quickly look at two distinct examples of works which might be
characteristic of ambient literature. The first is a work by Duncan Speakman,
It Must Have Been Dark By Then, which by using
a smartphone app, a pair of headphones, and a physical book, invites readers to
follow a path through the city that is partially of their own design, and
partially algorithmically constructed by the app. Through audio presented by the
application, readers hear stories about contemporary changes to the landscape
and are directed to read passages from the book which intersect with the stories
being told in the audio. The experience of the work comes in the way that
readers are encouraged to examine the world around them, tracing the resonances
that are instigated by the relationship between their particular surroundings
and the accounts of migration and landscapes altered by climate change and
shifting social organization. In this, the stable linguistic text of the work is
augmented by the arbitrary (yet still specific) surrounding within which each
individual reader is algorithmically guided by the application. As the
implications of the work rely on the particular confluence of the stable text
with the specific surroundings of the reader, there is never a possibility for a
single canonical reading of the text, only for the specific and particular
encounter of any given reader. Each reader’s own location within a wider
geographical terrain of human infrastructures has a bearing on the text of the
work.
The second example to be discussed here inverts this relationship between the
stability of the text and the algorithmic exchange with the situation of the
reader. Based in a smartphone’s mobile browser, Kate Pullinger’s
Breathe is an online work that presents a reader with
a narrative text that is dynamically altered based on when and where the work is
read. The conditional text of the narrative changes with each reading, depending
where the reader is, the time of day, the season, and so on. Developed in
partnership with Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, the work relies on a number of
different APIs to draw information from a range of databases into the work,
based on the context of the reader. As time passes, databases are updated with
new information, or the reader changes location, the text of the work is
altered. It presents a literary text that is bound up with the living conditions
of the socio-technical networks within which the reader is enmeshed.
Both of these works, each in their own way, presents a kind of text that is
unreadable to the literary critic. No one person is
ever given access to all the versions of the text, nor does there necessarily
exist some account of all the possibilities. They are not just algorithmically
unavailable, as in the case of combinatorial works like Raymond Queneau’s
Cent mille milliards de poèmes which presents a text
which, for
practical purposes, is infinite, but these are works
which are physically unavailable, with the imagined reader never having access
to the possibility of the range of variance of the text. On the one hand,
Speakman’s work opens the
text of the work up to whatever
surroundings are offered by the location of the reader, welcoming the physical
infrastructure of the world to be included in the reader’s experience, whatever
that infrastructure might be. On the other hand, Pullinger’s
Breathe, in its reconfiguration of the text proper
based the location, time, and day of reading, presents an almost infinite number
of possible readings, each linked to the specific conditions of the reader. In
each case, the work itself comes as a compound of the authorial text, the
presence and situation of the reader, and the kind of algorithmic work which
mediates between them. For
It Must Have Been Dark By
Then, the situation of the reader is defined by their physical
presence with their movements through space guided by the application, while in
Breathe, this situation is derived as the piece
pulls information from databases to complete the work. These are texts that, in
their algorithmic adaptation to the particular and specific conditions of the
reader, resist an authoritative reading, computationally assisted or otherwise.
Reading Computerization
As evidenced by the case of ambient literature, the forms of the works we read,
and how we read them, have been changed by the possibilities offered by
computerization. This totalizing view of the computational turn in literature in
the 21st century is one put forward by N. Katherine Hayles who writes that
literature in the twenty-first century is
computational. . . . almost all print books are digital files before
they become books; this is the form in which they are composed, edited,
composited, and sent to the computerized machines that produce them as
books
. There is almost no literature produced today that is not implicated by
computerization.
Further to this, the analytic challenges of the rise of computational methods for
the work of literary analysis are not just for those working with specifically
computational methods in the digital humanities. The influence of computing goes
beyond the practical consideration of how books are made and has come to inflect
every aspect of literary research. As J. Hillis Miller has put it:
The whole minute to minute process of my professional
life as a student of literature has been utterly changed by the computer
in a few short years
. In saying this, he is referring to the everyday availability of email,
word processing, electronic documents, databases, and so forth — changes that
coincide with and helped to spur the explosion of interest in the digital
humanities. As Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So note (echoing ) regarding the prevalence of the invisible
algorithmic substrata of academic work:
Each time we enter a search term into Google Books or
some other digitized corpus, we are interacting with these
algorithms
.
For literary studies, the rise of distant reading presents one prominent
expression of the ubiquity of computerization. Closely identified with the work
of Franco Moretti , distant reading is focused on
the experimental Underwood makes the point that, as much as the work of
distant reading might still differ from other empirical sciences,
the best distant readers do in practice approach
their projects as experiments. (We don’t wander around aimlessly
counting things.) But the experimental structure of our research is
not always foregrounded when we write it up for publication. An
article organized in social scientific fashion (methods, then
results, then conclusions) might not be warmly received by an
audience of literary critics who are used to rhetorical panache. It
can be more effective to pretend that your work grew in a casually
discursive, thesis driven way, and then happened to be illustrated
with some scatterplots you had lying around
. analysis of most often large and generally quantitative sets
of data derived from various corpora or individual texts. It is important to
keep in mind that, as Andrew Goldstone has pointed out, while it may today be
usually taken to refer to a computational approach, Moretti initially described
distant reading as making use of
a patchwork of other people’s research, without a
single direct textual reading
.
As much as it has been helped by the rise of computational methods, distant
reading is not synonymous with the digital humanities. As Underwood argues , the origins of distant reading can be traced to
an era of pre-digital research, with a line able to be drawn from Janice
Radway’s sociological study of the actual experience
of readers of romance novels to the present computationally-enabled methods. For
Underwood, what serves to undergird distant reading is its commitment to
analytic techniques developed out of quantitative sociology more than the
digital humanities (or as it was previously known, humanities
computing). In this, more than an appeal to any kind of
computational underpinning, distant reading puts forward a call for a
scientific and evidence-based analysis of literature
such as was and still often is the aim of sociology. As Bruno Latour
points out:
Sociology has been obsessed by the goal of becoming
a quantitative science. Yet it has never been able to reach this
goal because of what it has defined as being quantifiable within the
social domain
. As will be developed, it is perhaps even more appropriate to attempt
to move away from the quantitative social sciences and adopt other
sociological methods as there is in literary analysis often an effort to
understand questions of the occurrence of meaning which stand beyond easy
quantification.
Whatever the final methodological outcome for distant reading as it is applied to
various new kinds of literature might be, what is clear is the end result of
such methods is an empirical one. As Moretti put it in a response to Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young’s review of some of his
earlier, pre-distant reading works:
‘Possible’ does not mean ‘probable,’ or ‘actual’: here,
too, empirical research must have the last word
. That is, distant reading is concerned with the facts of what is actually
there, a concern highlighted by Moretti’s attention
to the importance of being able to plumb what Margaret Cohen termed the great unread body of
literature that remains untouched by literary analysis.
In this way, despite following Lawrence Rainey’s dictum,
the best reading of a work may, on some occasions, be
one that does not read it at all
, distant reading actually has much in common with the New Critical close
reading which sought to analyze only the evidence from the text itself. Each
have an affinity for the analysis of only that which is actually present in a
text and eschew the inclusion of exterior facts as part of the central claims of
their respective empirical efforts . The claims of
computational veins of distant reading rest on empirical evidence from the text
itself that may be
transformed from the continuous flow of our everyday
reality into a grid of numbers that can be stored as a representation of
reality which can then be manipulated using algorithms
. With the quantization of the literary object into discrete units able to
be managed as part of an information processing system , for distant reading, the literary text is able to be treated as a document
(or collection of documents) to be analyzed according
to any number of varying schema which often include characteristics of both
close and distant reading . The work of
computational analysis becomes the evidential framework from which the analysis
of literature works. As Ryan Heuser puts it in a discussion of the use of
word-vectors in literary research:
word vectors provide the close reader with a framework,
language, and method of exploring the semantic implications at work in
an analogy
. As Paul Fleming puts it in describing the computational study of
literature:
In this combined method, one approach does not serve as
the check for the other, quasi confirming or denying its results (as the
instance of final validity); rather, they recursively refine and hone
each other, as in the return to one approach offers insights that, in
turn, modify the other
.
Reading the (Post)digital
This recursive transformation of reading in light of computerization is not only
instigated by methodological development. Just as computerization has
popularized new methods of literary analysis, so too has it made new types of
literature possible which in turn require new methodological approaches .
While the whole of electronic literature is far too vast and heterogeneous to
serve as a platform from which any kind of methodological claim may be made
here, I want to put forward the example ambient literature
and use this developing form as a means to highlight
the connection between literary studies and methods developed in human-computer
interaction as they invoke a kind of distant reading. What makes any discussion
of a general sense of electronic literature even more difficult is that what
might be considered the founding and most concise definition of electronic
literature that it is that which is
digital born
conflicts (as noted above) with the idea that almost all literary works
today have their start in electronic form, composed on a word processor.
This apparent definitional contradiction leads the way toward what has been
termed the post-digital. While its status as a loose
periodization discourages a specific account of its features, it is enough to
say that in the ubiquity of digital means of production, the push toward the
digital turns back on itself, encouraging an aestheticization of media which
exceeds the kind of discrete and quantized ordering on which digital works rely,
while at the same time relying on digital tools in order to both create and
offer a counterpoint to such non-digital works .
Without using the term, this is something discussed by Hayles, analyzing
Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Tree of Codes as an example
of the ways in which the kinds of embodiment on which such post-digital works
often rely confound both close and distant readings
.
In this, these works resist a traditional close reading of the text as their
effects extend beyond the linguistic content of the text, an experiential aspect
of the work that likewise resists the kind of quantization necessary for much
distant reading (of the computational sort).
This kind of textual embodiment and blurring of the lines between
reading and experience is
highlighted in the conceptual formulation of ambient literature. First described
by Jon Dovey in a volume on the cultural developments stemming from the rise of
ubiquitous computing, ambient literature is a hybrid form of electronic
literature, merging hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, and locative
narratives, among other forms . It builds on these
forms in order to integrate a dynamic sense of a reader's context into the
experience of reading the work through computational techniques established in
ubiquitous computing.
Proposed by Mark Weiser, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) projects a proximate
future in which computing takes place all around us, quietly functioning in the
background in order to help us in our daily lives .
Alternatively termed ambient intelligence or
pervasive computing, ubicomp offers a vision of the
computational world in which mundane tasks are relegated to the background of
experience, allowing human actors to engage in important, creative, and
enjoyable activities without having to be interrupted by the complexities of
computer interfaces. This utopian vision of ubiquitous computing was not
without critique or comment. For instance
details the economic, privacy, surveillance, and ethical implications of
ubiquitous computing, question the ultimate
achievability of what was taken to be Weiser’s initial vision for ubicomp,
and question the hermeneutic-phenomenological
framing on which much research into ubicomp has relied. It is
computing that is woven into the fabric of human activity and social
existence.
Expanding the concept of a contextual literature which responds and engages with
the situation of the reader beyond a locational or immediate sense of context,
works of ambient literature take advantage of the information communication
networks which complement
human traffic and the flow of goods in and around our
cities. These systems are large scale, city wide, national, and global;
they are dynamic, responding to what people do; they integrate embodied
and imaginary experiences, material, and mediating objects. In short,
they begin to become complex systems, which increase our opportunities
for new forms of reading and listening experience
. In this appeal to a literature that is placed within a living
sociological context as part of the source for its effectiveness, ambient
literature can be distinguished from other, less embedded forms of locational
media or art, such as much of the work of artists like Janet Cardiff and George
Bures Miller, which engages the immediate context of the audience, without
drawing networked connections to a wider sphere of social action, data, and
infrastructure. This is a distinction that holds for other examples of alternate
reality or mixed reality works as well. While a work like Erik Loyer's
similarly app-based Strange Rain effects a
certain kind of literary ambience, merging text with an interactive
environment, it does not connect readers to the really-existing emergent and
networked context of the reader. Again, it is this explicit focus on the
interweaving of these works into large sociological networks that
distinguish works of ambient literature from other kinds of situated and
even embodied textual interactions, as in the case of Romy Achituv and
Camille Utterback's Text Rain in which readers
interact with a projection screen on which they can catch text as it falls.
There, there is a distinctly embodied interaction with a text, but not in a
way which (explicitly) engages these wider networks of social and cultural
networks of support. Even something as textual and situated such as Caitlin
Fisher's augmented reality work Circle, as it
presents an augmented reality overlay across a prepared terrain, offers a
good study in contrast to works of ambient literature which, at their best,
do not just peg texts to a situated terrain, but instead involve the terrain
within the text.
What is important for considering ambient literature within the frame of the
post-digital that bridges between electronic literature proper and the wider
world is that, as Dovey puts it, it examines
what might happen when data aspires to literary form.
It asks how can situated literary experiences delivered through
pervasive media systems produce moments where the individual reader or
listener is repositioned and offered new ways to experience and
understand their moment within the complexity of the urban informatic
flow?
. In this way, ambient literature offers the literary analog to distant
reading: it is not an informationally-grounded analysis of literature, but an
informationally-grounded literature. In its concern for the literary uses
of information, this ubiquitous version of ambient literature shares a
common theoretical (though not historical) basis with the ambient
literature of authors such as Tan Lin or Sam Riviere who
explore the ways in which informational objects may be restructured into
traditional (non-electronic) works. Just as distant reading might
build upon a foundation of information processing, but still rely on the
scholarly work of interpretation, David Blei puts this directly in his
explication of the use of topic modeling for the study of literature:
the statistical models are meant to help interpret
and understand texts; it is still the scholar’s job to do the actual
interpreting and understanding.
works of ambient literature build on this informational
setting while still remaining firmly and primarily textual (as distinguished
from games, which are not primarily textual As Espen
Aarseth puts it:
Games are not 'textual' or at least not primarily
textual. . . . We might say that the rules of chess constitute its
'text,' but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so
that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a
paratextuality. A central 'text' does not exist — merely
context.
Of course, as works of ambient literature look to explicitly invoke
the reader’s context as part of the work, Aarseth’s analysis of games seems
to circle back to a primary concern of works of ambient literature, without
setting up an exact isomorphism between the two categories. Works of ambient
literature remain equally concerned with both text and
context.). That is, as much as they are
activated by the presence and context of the reader as they read the works as
part of a wider socio-technical field, Alan Kirby provides an account of
the implications of this kind of literature in his conception of
digimodernism. Distancing the importance of this
kind of active involvement with a text from a poststructuralist or
metaphorical account of the co-production of meaning, he says that,
the digimodernist text in its pure form is made up
to a varying degree by the reader or viewer or textual consumer.
This figure becomes authorial in this sense: s/he makes text where
none existed before. It isn’t that his/her reading is of a kind to
suggest meanings; there is no metaphor here. In an act distinct from
their act of reading or viewing, such a reader or viewer gives to
the world textual content or shapes the development and progress of
a text in visible form. This content is tangible; the act is
physical
. these works rely on the literary text in order to evoke the
reader’s entanglement within this field.
As Hayles puts it:
When a literary work interrogates the inscription
technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its
imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as
a physical presence
. For works of ambient literature, more than just leveraging inscription
technology toward highlighting the circulation between ideas and physical
presence, this material apparatus of the work comes to be
the wider world of contemporary society and its informational
infrastructures.
As much as works of ambient literature might be identified according to such
material apparatuses, and as such might be seen to be prime candidates for a
kind of ludological analysis, works of ambient literature, unlike games, do not
require us to actively manipulate their
components
(paraphrasing Aarseth), with these works instead being configured by the
context in which they are engaged. While there is a baseline level of
interaction in works like
Breathe or
It Must Have Been Dark By Then, the experience is
shifted by the situation of the reader more so than any active
interaction.
While there have been arguments made for a more inclusive
sense of ludological analysis which includes social forms and not simply the
immediate materials of the games themselves ,
such approaches have only been applied specifically to games themselves and
the social construction of game specific concepts such as game worlds and
rules.
While it is possible for the features and characteristics of the text of works of
ambient literature to be enumerated as part of a critical analysis, or
individual reports of an individual experience might highlight an example of how
a work may play out as in traditions of ludology, there remains a challenge as
to how it is possible to begin to approach anything like an empirical analysis
of these works as a whole as they come to include the experience of the reader
in them. At the heart of this problem lies ambient literature’s status as a kind
of
writing for probability
that
depends on ambiguity
. The vast field of situated context which a work of ambient literature
might potentially encounter (and thusly incorporate into its meaning) leaves a
wide berth open to multiple interpretations.
These are works which share what Rita Raley identifies as the
reiterable practice
of works which rely on interactive text displays, populated by
contributions to the text via SMS by passing readers. Like this form of
TXTual practice, it can be possible to conceptualize
ambient literature as works which are performed in different times and
places
and
might share the same structure, but they would not have
the same content in the sense that external forces would shape each
event differently
. However, unlike what Raley describes as TXTual practice, works of
ambient literature rely on the building of tacit communities of
practice in order to shape the content of the work (through databases or the
physical infrastructure of an environment), instead of the more directly
evidenced micro-communities at work in the co-construction
of digitally-mediated public texts. Here, a work like Blast Theory’s
Rider Spoke provides a middle ground
between Raley’s TXTual practice and ambient literature: In it work,
participants are directed to record personal stories tagged to geospatial
coordinates, leaving them there for other participants
to hear. In this, there is a reliance on a micro-community for the
production of content, but in a way that is more closely (and more
invisibly) woven into a socio-technical infrastructure, leaving the
micro-community less visible to itself.
In reaching out and specifically engaging wide networks of socio-technical
relations and relying on contemporary network infrastructures rather than
immediate ones, these literary works repeat a question posed by Patrick Jagoda
when he asks:
How do we understand networks when we treat them as
forms through which people daily encounter, manage, and construct
quasi-anonymous forms of being — whether the ambient reciprocities
afforded by social media such as Facebook or uncertain feelings about
the vicissitudes of the global economy?
. This question concerning the ambient reciprocities
of networks lays at the heart of ambient literature, particularly as the
networks engaged by these works are not just traditional networks of people or
data, but are rather broader networks of context.
For researchers and others trying to understand these kinds of works, what does
it mean when the form of a work relies on distributed networks, unknown and
uncontrollable contexts, and the interactive completion of a work by readers?
This is the difficulty that poses a challenge to both traditional and
computational approaches to literary research. As these works rely on the
enacted context of the reader as it is embedded within wider contexts of global
communication networks, in each instance, works of ambient literature are always
different with different implications and different meanings. How can they be
reliably read?
Reading the User Study
What I want to argue here is that by treating the literary object of electronic
literature as much as a piece of literature as a piece of software to be
interacted with, it becomes possible to engage a kind of distant reading of
these unique and variable literary works. In doing so, critics are able to
engage these works as the overdetermined objects they are, attending to their
combined digital, historical, cultural, social, material, and textual lineages.
The idea of studying human interactions with computers has a rich history, one
which at many points seems to mirror the kinds of changes that can be found in
the shifting approaches to reading in literary studies. Starting in earnest as a
form of software psychology the goal of which
was to establish the utility of a behavioral approach
to understanding software design, programming, and the use of
interactive systems, and to motivate and guide system developers to
consider the characteristics of human beings
, HCI started with an explicit attention to the empirical investigation of
human behavior around technology. Taking a cue from human factors research,
particularly the approach developed by the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss,
iterative user testing came to be a hallmark of the interaction design process
. For HCI, it was not enough to design
innovative computer systems: the design of these systems was to be guided by
studies of how users actually engaged such systems, with the results from these
studies feeding back into the work of design. While I am arguing here that
methods taken up and developed in HCI research are necessary for the
contemporary study of new forms of electronic literature, there are some
important differences between the aims of research in human computer
interaction and the aims of literary studies. Primarily among these is that
HCI is oriented not toward the study of existent phenomena, but toward the
enactment of new technological paradigms through the process of design. That
is, research in HCI is expected to produce some outcomes for future design,
rather than pure analysis of what exists. This is something that was
considered explicitly in relation to ethnographic work in a series of
articles by Paul Dourish
, who, responding to reviewers who demanded the
inclusion of specific recommendations for design that might be generated out
of ethnographic work, noted that these ethnographic works have value in that
they
provide us with new ways of imagining the
relationship between people and technology. They provide us with
ways of approaching design. However, they typically go beyond
specific instances of design. More to the point, they draw, in
general, on the fundamental repudiation of a traditional separation
between designer and user, between technology and practice
.
Entwined with this empirical attention to human users, the history of HCI is
colored by the scale and scope of its attention. Starting from concerns for how
to simply get hardware to be functional and extending through a cognitive
consideration of a single user at a computer terminal, toward a social space of
collaborative work, and finally to the cultural uses of computing
, computing (and the study of interacting with
computers) can be seen to expand both as computational techniques increase in
sophistication and as additional domains come to be the subject of such
computerization.
As computing spread to areas beyond specialized and expert systems, the question
of how to conceptualize use beyond an individual user seated in front of a
computer terminal necessitated new approaches. In a critique of the positive
ontological framing of the Cartesian cognitivism used to undergird early work in
HCI, Lucy Suchman proposed a situated account of cognition, saying that
behavior can only be understood in its relations with
real-world situations
. That is, the context of the interaction came to be at least equally
important to (if not more important than) the psychological function at
work. One of the most famous examples that reinforces this comes in
the 1990s from research around the design of computerized systems for
aircraft control
. The aim was to replace antiquated paper systems
with computer displays to help controllers better perform their work. In
this case, the existing formal workflow described by the controllers which
involved the passing of paper slips with flight information around the
control booth as aircraft moved in and out of certain zones left out the
importance that the physical visibility of the paper slips themselves played
in supporting the controllers’ situational awareness of where other
controllers were tracking aircraft as they looked around the room. Initial
design work for computerized control systems which captured the specific
informational content of the paper slips but neglected to incorporate the
important role that the slips themselves played in supporting awareness
proved to be a failure. It was only through subsequent ethnographic analysis
of work practices that the source of the failure of the system design work
was discovered. This reevaluation of the methods used in
human-computer interaction research directed researchers away from (though not
entirely) lab-based studies of psychology and cognition and toward more in
situ studies. Through the use of ethnographic and other methods
developed from the social sciences and anthropology, human-computer interaction
research began to capture not only static, representative, and formalized
information practices, but also the situated, contextual, and meaningful
awareness that the movement of information itself illustrated. While HCI has
continued to expand the sphere of its concerns, addressing cultural, historical,
and aesthetic aspects of computation, Susanne Bødker
has argued that these situated methods and an
attention to user studies remain a valuable part of HCI research. Just as with
distant reading, though the scale and scope of examination changed, the core of
the enterprise stays the same.
Reading Experience
As has been detailed above, in Speakmans’
It Must Have Been
Dark By Then, what comes to be included in the authored text of the
work is extended by the algorithmic function of the smartphone application
beyond the text proper. In it, readers are asked to seek out categories of
things present in their surroundings (an apartment block, a barrier, water,
etc.) and to transpose the specifics discussed in the narratives onto their
immediate experience. For Speakman’s piece, the specific buildings, trees,
horizons, people, etc. that a reader comes into contact with in the duration of
the piece are fodder for literary effect, with the authorial text coming to be
inscribed upon and altered by the contexts of the reader. While Speakman, as the
author of the piece, remains central, the work is opened up to the particular
contextual conditions of the reader.
In its second wave, this is the position in which HCI found itself. There was an
explicit recognition that the situation of use wasn’t simply determined by the
specifics of the system with which users interacted. The success or failure —
the meaning of system — was determined, in large part, by the other conditions
of work that were present:
Even so many work situations do not consist solely of
work at the desktop. Many other artefacts are used in changing
configurations with and around the computer. Most user interface design
has failed to recognize this, and accordingly we are still stuck with
the idea that new design should replace existing artefacts, rather than
exist together with them
. As John McCarthy and Peter Wright approach Sherry Turkle’s examination
of people’s experience of the internet:
People differ in many ways, including how they
integrate computers into their lives
. The specifics of any interaction come to be determined by the situation
of use and the individual history of the user.
For McCarthy and Wright, what comes to matter for human computer interaction is
the experience of technology, a widening sphere which comes to
include everything from
what work is and what it is likely to be; our
orientation to fun and leisure; possible futures for education;
boundaries between private and public, between home and work, and
between knowledge and information; and even our own sense of what it is
to be ourselves, people situated in an increasingly strange relationship
with time, place, and other people
. For ambient literature, the context that is brought to the work by the
reader opens itself up to a similarly broad set of sociological determinations
and engagements.
The imperative for understanding these conditions which color user engagement has
been answered most often in HCI through programs of contextual inquiry toward the aim of an ethnomethodological analysis
. Often coupled with an ethnographic method
(identified by its qualitative, thick description of the perspectives
experienced by the subjects of the study), ethnomethodology refers to the
analytic perspective of the
investigation of the rational properties of indexical
expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing
accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life
. The constitution of these indexical practices is not given by a
pre-defined social structure, but is enacted by individuals who, by the efforts
put into their activities, come to be members in common
social accomplishments of intelligibility. Literature which incorporates the
reader’s wider field of social being into the work can be understood to likewise
engage in this work of creating social meaning.
Rather than being focused on the societal facts that guide social interactions,
ethnomethodology focuses on the negotiation of the meaning of social
interactions. Like close reading, it looks to delve into the present surface of
a social text and come to understand what goes on in the processes of making
such a text meaningful or effective. For thinking about ambient literature
through such an analytic lens, an ethnomethodological approach is focused on the
explication of the functional processes by which meaning is enacted as part of
the situated context of the text.
In the study of ambient literature, what this means is a focus on the ways in
which the text of the work and the wider contextual (social, locational,
cultural, etc.) forms with which it engages come to enlist the reader in a
process of meaning-making. In the attention toward the text of the work as is
the aim of literary studies, there is a kind of inversion of a
ethnomethodological practice in that it is here concerned with how the text writ
large engages in the practical action of accomplishment rather than how
individuals form social meaning. In this, an ethnomethodological approach is
utilized in order to understand the function of the work, this as a work is
constituted by the experience of the participant. In this,
ethnomethodology has much the same aim as some varieties of close reading as
they are concerned with the
the examination of an artifact to see how it was
made and how it worked
. Like an ethnomethodological approach, close reading encourages
a respect for the stubbornness of texts, which
resist easy comprehension or description in terms of expected themes
and motifs. The close reader needs to be willing to take seriously
the difficulties of singular, unexpected turns of phrase,
juxtapositions, and opacity. Close reading teaches an interest in
the strangeness or distinctiveness of individual works and parts of
works
. Like close reading, ethnomethodology encourages digging into the
present surface of a given text. The aim is to first come to
understand the manner by which the work engages in the artful
practices of everyday life in communion with the given cultural,
social, and situated context of the reader and then to come to understand the
specific experience of the reader.
What ethnomethodology comes to offer is the opportunity to not only understand
the meaningful function of works of ambient literature, but a chance to engage
in a close reading of the experience of the work. It is this experience of the
work that provides the proper object of an empirical study of these kinds of
works. This reading is conducted through a series of “reader studies” which,
modeled on user studies, offer the text up to multiple readers in order to
capture their engagement with a work. These readers might be interested
participants already primed for the experience of electronic literature or a
more generally representative population, but what matters is that there is an
attention toward the enactment of the work of ambient literature by multiple
users, in multiple contexts, and on multiple occasions, with the record of their
experience of the work (collected through observation of and interview with
participants) coming to form the basis of a critical
reading of the text.
The quasi-ethnographic methodological approach of a deep investigation of the
motives, reactions, opinions, and general situation of the readers to the works
supports an ethnomethodological analysis of the ways in which a work comes to
make its meaning. In his rough sketch of a kind of phenomenal reading,
Brian Reed presents an account of a reading which is concerned with
developing what Merleau-Ponty termed
an account of space, time, and the world as we
‘live’ them
. What is particularly of interest in this approach is the perspective
taken on the perceiving subject
which has a
history and an array of attributes and affiliations
that uniquely inflect his or her experience of the world or, to put
it more accurately, that prompt the world to disclose itself to him
or her in a unique way
. For Reed, these kinds of narrative accounts of the experience
of a text allow for the conveying of the
intricacy, contingency, and richness of perceptual
and affective experience
. The investigation into readers’ experience of the work is not
limited to what goes on in the given text, but as the text of the work itself is
extended to include the wider contextual world of its enactment, the
investigation must necessarily approach the mechanics of the network of factors
at work that lead to the production of meaning. In this, there is an importance
given to the entirety of readers’ experience of a work, including any paratext,
infrastructure, technologies, or other networks which come to play a role.
This ethnomethodological approach constitutes a different kind of analytic
reading practice in which the experience of participants is “read” as part of
the study of literature. The reading of literary analysis
comes in the form of a user study in which real readers are studied as they
really engage with the texts. This approach is not unlike that taken up on
a smaller and more reflexive scale by Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, and
Jeremy Douglass in their own Reading
Project in which they collectively chart their own experiences
of reading William Poundstone’s Project for
Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}. Presenting a challenging text
that through its presentation attempts to escape an easy reading,
Poundstone’s project presents readers with a dynamic text. Of course, the
readers of the Reading Project are professional
readers in that they were reading for the specific purpose of analysis. In
some ways, it presents similar challenges as do works of ambient literature
in that
[i]ts fast-flashing aesthetic is seemingly
incompatible with the slow, sustained contemplation of close reading
and other traditional methods of literary analysis
. For these works for which the ultimate text experienced by
readers is unavailable, it is only through this distant method of reading the
experiences of participating readers that a full picture of the work is able to
be developed.
Reading Distance
Such an ethnomethodological approach developed from HCI follows on both distant
reading’s empirical orientation, its sociological foundations, and its frequent
use of secondary experiences of a text. However, ethnomethodology is
differentiated from the approaches that form the early core of distant reading
particularly in that it presents a largely (though not exclusively) qualitative
account of the constitution of social action rather than being founded on a
largely (through again, not exclusively) quantitative description of its
objects. So, while these digitally-founded works of ambient literature might
elude a computational distant reading due to their explicit inclusion of an
extra-textual and non-quantifiable context as part of the literary text, an
ethnomethodological approach as developed from HCI is able to provide insight
into these works, even as they present a variable text that is particular to the
situation of the reader.
This method presents a hybrid approach to reading that is illustrative of
combinations of interpretive and programmatic readings as found in many other
examples of distant reading. It is close in the attention to detail
and examination of the mechanics of the text (as represented in the experience
of the reader), but it remains distant in that it is derived from
information coming second hand. It is distant in that it extends its analysis
beyond the text itself, but it is close in that these extra-textual aspects of
the experience of the reader are part of the text itself.
Perhaps most provocatively, this kind of method presents a radicalization of
Moretti’s infamous conjecture on literature that
literary history will quickly become very different
from what it is now: it will become ‘second hand’: a patchwork of other
people’s research, without a single direct textual reading. Still
ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!);
but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the
text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance
be
. Beyond looking toward multiple existing critical engagements, we look to
multiple readings of works by a number of readers. Unlike reader response theory
or cognitive studies of literature which might also take on some aspect of a
user study (the further development of which Hayles recommends in her account of
Foer’s erasure), this method of reading through the experience of other readers
takes on a sociological, rather than psychological approach. Such a method
accords with the decline in the view, as noted by Reed, that
academics, believing that they brought to light
what had been ‘hidden, repressed, deep,’ implicitly cast themselves
as diagnosticians, detectives, and truth speakers, thereby lending
their profession seriousness and social significance
. By opening the interpretation of a work up to multiple viewpoints
(oftentimes selected at random, and often from subjects standing not in
appreciation of the genre and often hostile to the works), any monolithic
rendering of a work is resisted.
As a mode of literary analysis, this approach is indebted to the perspective
given in Peter Middleton’s
Distant Reading, where
he takes a quasi-ethnomethodological approach toward a reading of the entirety
of the
long biography of a poem
. In this, Middleton’s version of distant reading
is distinct from something like Moretti’s, while still preserving an empirical
and sociological intention. Where Middleton examines the life of well known
works of literature from a largely historical perspective, what I am proposing
here is a fully contemporary account of present day readers and their experience
of works as they exist and are enacted today. Where Middleton might rely on an
analysis of existing interpretations of a work by other readers, an
ethnomethodological account in the tradition of HCI research calls for an active
engagement with the actual situations of the meaningful occurrence of a work.
While Middleton’s focus on 20th century poetry guided his approach, the
challenges of the study of electronic literature require a different approach to
ethnomethodological research that incorporates the influence of HCI.
Nevertheless, the focus on both the really-existing conditions of a work’s
reception and the reliance on the experience of a work by readers remains a
strong common core between these two approaches.
Coming to a work at a distance through a qualitative method such as
ethnomethodology, it remains possible to address the
obscurity, difficulty, strangeness, and the upwelling
of the unknown in a text are themselves part of the
signification
, allowing the question of interaction with a work to be, as Bødker had it
speaking of HCI, one of
multiplicity, context, boundaries, experience, and
participation
. As Brian Reed points out, the perspective developed by Middleton favors
a more multifaceted account of the experience of a text . What is gained from approaching a text as an occasion for a user study is
that a user study (and the approach described here) provides insight that is
distinct from any single narrative. For Middleton, this
history of responses, uses, memories, expectations and
other actions (much more heterogeneous than literary criticism usually
acknowledges) constitutes the only singularity it has
. The same can be said of the experience of ambient literature.
Methodological Nearness
What makes the figure of a computational and algorithmic distant reading so
striking, beyond its being embroiled with a wider span of computerization
movements , is that it calls for, as Ryan Heuser and
Long Le-Khac point out, a new kind of reading, a new
interpretive mode by which the meaning of texts is understood. For works of
ambient literature, this movement moves in the opposite direction, but is the
same move: new works of computationally derived literatures require new modes of
reading. In each case, the method of reading requires proximity to that which is
being examined. Largely, the distant reading of the digital humanities works to
bring a vast corpus nearer, to
to pursue big questions we’ve always wanted to ask with
evidence not from a selection of texts, but from something approaching
the entire literary or cultural record
. For us here, looking at these works of electronic literature which tap
into the fabric of our collective data and algorithmic-obsessed lives, this
method of reading the experience of a number of different readers as they come
to make sense of the works brings us nearer to the transient and serendipitous
nature of works which are never the same, but are always specific and not
random. This mode of distantly reading an ethnomethodological account of the
experience of readers, one which focuses on the implications and possibilities
of the work and not the social or psychological formation, reinforces the
humanistic foundations of any kind of reading.
Any empirical method of reading, or any reading that follows along a logic of
semiotics, rotates on this interpretive moment. As Heuser and Le-Khac put it in
their study of word vectors, it is necessary to distinguish between signals
which are available to computers and the concepts that are
the phenomenon we take a signal to stand for
. They go on to say that
[i]n the digital humanities, the interest and impact of
our arguments are based on concepts, but computers can only measure
signals, which are always smaller than concepts
. In turn, they cite Dan Cohen in his assertion that for work in the
digital humanities, one has to be careful in simply using the terms developed in
pre-digital work: new scales of work require new concepts . More than this, however, Lisa Marie Rhody reminds us
that Moretti’s invocation of distant reading enjoins us to look instead of read,
with such an approach reigniting
long-standing philosophical, political, and cultural
tensions in its attempt to transcend socially constructed boundaries
between the temporal and spatial arts
.
However, here, in looking at ethnomethodology a kind of distant reading, the
signals which are received from empirical research are not smaller than
concepts, they are simply another layer of concept. What is received is not
simply a numerical account of a phenomena (as if capturing a numerical account
of anything is ever a simple matter), but a phenomenological one. In this case,
the newness of the concepts required in this work of the digital humanities
comes in the lattice of concepts that is developed and built, an assemblage
fitting to the more widely socio-technical for of the works examined. There is
an introduction of the question of scale not just as a matter of scope, but also
of depth and magnitude.
James F. English and Ted Underwood raise this explicit question of scale as they
identify a cluster of scalar constructs which serve to orient literary studies:
Certain temporal spans (century, literary period,
artistic generation), geocultural categories (national literature,
regional literature, diasporic or exilic literature), formal entities
(protagonist, genre, individual work), and so forth supply us with the
basic units we need to organize our research projects and structure our
intellectual and institutional divisions of labor
. As they note, the history of literary studies is the story of the
contraction and expansion of the scale of study, from the text itself out to the
surrounding context. Where previously there might have been a call to attend to
only the text of a work of literature itself, it becomes possible to see a
revived
attention to the history of books and manuscripts and
textual variants, to systems of print and publication, institutions of
sale and circulation, practices of reading and reception
. For us, looking at an algorithmic literature which is able to invisibly
draw in wider socio-technical networks, it becomes possible to add to Underwood
and English’s examples.
These different literary materials (information networks, data, urban
infrastructures, databases, algorithms, and the specifics of their experience)
bring with them both a different scale and different texture. In describing
their concept of literary pattern recognition, Long and So
invoke something that
brings together close reading, cultural history, and
machine learning so that they supplement one another
. In this, Long and So highlight the effectiveness of working at different
scales, of the ways that these different kinds of literary textures can be felt.
For works of ambient literature, as they engage the specificity of the
socio-technical context of individual readers in particular and irrevocable
ways, there is a call to understand the multiple expressions of these works
through a distant reading of the experience of others. Just as a computational
distant reading opens the patterns it reveals to interpretation, so too does a
computational literature. There is a nearness to the distant method at work.
This nearness is on display when Andrew Piper says, in reference to the uses of
computational modeling in literary analysis:
technology impacts argument not solely through the new
truths it produces, but also in the ways it changes our affective
attachments to the texts that we read
. In many ways, this is Piper’s answer to his quoted rheumination that
started the present article:
What would it mean for a novel to turn us as we turn
its pages? How are we not simply moved, but transformed — turned around
— through the novel’s combination of gestural and affective
structures?
.
Placing this alongside Dovey’s initial provocation of the idea of ambient
literature in which such works can be seen to ask
how can situated literary experiences delivered through
pervasive media systems produce moments where the individual reader or
listener is repositioned and offered new ways to experience and
understand their moment within the complexity of the urban informatic
flow?
, it is possible to chart out the links that bind not only ambient
literature to a kind of distant reading, but also the affective connections that
resonate across a computational field of socio-technical effect.
As literature comes to embrace the kinds of contextual variability made possible
by ubiquitous computing, it becomes necessary to adopt new methodologies for
analysis that are able to capture the embodied, situated, and experiential
nature of the works. By reading electronic literature through an
ethnomethodologically-oriented user study, it is possible to engage in a reading
that is simultaneously close and distant, one that is founded on both the
experiences of readers at large and on the interpretations of an expert reader.
In doing this, in these cases, literary studies takes up a method nearer to the
computational object of its attention.
Acknowledgements
An early version of some of the ideas presented here were presented as part of
the Locating the Literary seminar hosted by the Centre for Literature Between
Media (Aarhus, 2017). I would like to thank Stephen Gregg, Søren Pold, Alice
Bell, Amy Spencer, Jon Dovey, Sarah Mygind, Tore Rye Andersen, Kate Pullinger,
and Nick Triggs for comments, advice, recommendations, assistance, and material
support. Thanks also goes to the editors of
Digital
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