Jennifer Edmond is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, Co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities, Director of the MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture and a funded Investigator of the SFI ADAPT Centre. Jennifer also serves as President of the Board of Directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, DARIAH-EU. Her research explores interdisciplinarity, humanistic and hybrid research processes, and the emergence of critical digital humanities as a contributor to both research and technology development.
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Distraction is not a problem for scholarly reading in the humanities: it is, in
fact, intrinsic to how we work. An openness to distraction facilitates knowledge
creation in conversation with and between sources, bringing together disparate
times and places, authors and forms of source material, frames of reference and
layers of insight, harnessing peripheral vision as much as central focus to
create the conditions for serendipitous discovery. This
In spite of the wide availability of digital tools to consolidate and organise the process of extracting information from the reading of sources (be they text, image, landscape or indeed even the self), the notetaking process of the humanist remains stubbornly multimodal, harnessing embodied, material, and spatial dimensions of knowledge. The resulting knowledge environments humanists create around themselves resemble life-sized realisations in mixed media of a Prezi stack, a physical manifestation of the fragmented, capricious, haphazard stream of influences jostling for scholarly attention, and the scholar’s understanding that their system inter-relationships are complex, sometimes tenuous, and largely undiscovered.
This article will lay out the evidence for and implications of this understanding
of humanistic reading, and then explore possible future paths for using
technology to explore and indeed celebrate distraction, including: Technology as
blurring the line between the personal and the professional, not so much as a
labour practice, but as an epistemic one opening the way to the validation of
Explores possible future paths for using technology to explore and celebrate distraction in the humanistic environment,
Lesen als Kulturtechnik ist eine kreative Leistung des menschlichen Gehirns, die aber durch einen Missbrauch desselben erkauft wird. Reading as cultural technology is a creative achievement of the human brain, made possible only by an abuse of the brain.
The mental images evoked by the description of someone engaged in the act of
reading
are generally ones of focus, stasis and concentration.
Portraits of readers from the 18th and 19th centuries have perhaps contributed to this bias,
depicting, as they so often do, a figure (very often female) gazing downward at
her book, unaware of the spectatorial gaze, her head perhaps resting
unconsciously on her hand. Reading a good book is one of the canonically cited
means by which to access the psychological state for which psychologist Mihaly
Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow,
but the flow that we see in our
mind’s eye is a strangely static one, an invisible beam of pure attention
connecting the ideas of the author and the mind of the reader that is so
powerful, that the reader’s body is negated by the purity and undeniability of
her focus.
This perhaps clichéed image of the reader may be real, may be anchronistic, or may indeed have always been driven by urges quite outside of the social understanding of reading. What is clear, however, is that they depict a particular mode of reading, one designed for pleasure, focussed on escape and on passive abandon to the author’s intentions. In his 2008 essay,
The technique of scanning can be organized, alert to keywords, names, dates, or other features of a text. This technique is a form of attention, even heightened attention, although the scholarly reader might ignore the continuous meaning of a text, deferring comprehension until some textual signal brings the scanning process to a temporary halt and initiates a more intensive reading. … At some point reading must be decelerated for the purpose of a more analytic reading, which aims to correct distortions produced by scanning.
This process of accelerating the reading process by scanning, only to decelerate
at the call of a textual signal so as to read intensively, is a response to what
Guillory elsewhere in the essay refers to as the clock time of scholarly reading.
This
imperative, to absorb more text in the course of a project or career than could
be reasonably expected of intensive lay reading strategies, drives the scholar’s
need to fast-forward some passages, and savour others in slow motion, and to
adopt alternating states of intensity, and of scanning, a process that removes
details and yet represents not only attention, but a Distant reading: where distance,
let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on
units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices,
themes, tropes — or genres and systems. And if, between the very small
and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those
cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more.
Moretti privileges certain kinds of theoretical questions as meeting the requirement of distance, and certainly the example he explores in the article quoted above (nothing less than the problem of world literature) is adequately vast. But every perspective requires some distance, every object of scholarship exists within a frame. Scholarly reading as Guillory describes it is therefore not only an admission of defeat in the face of a deluge of scholarly writing, it is also a framing mechanism for scholarly work in a field that privileges the operational mode of the hunter-gatherer, rather than the agricultural consolidation of activity into a limited space. Humanists accept their sources as they find them, with all of their messy embeddedness and resonances born of their provenance as the creations of human beings and their cultures. The controlled experiments and clean environments of the physics lab do not reflect this experience of reading as a human through the artefacts of human creation. Following this logic, to be attentive in the context of the study of the humanities is to be, paradoxically, distracted, focussing not merely on a central figure, but both the figure and the landscape that surrounds it.
The dichotomy hereby established between the
The analysis that follows will unpack some of these statements and defend the
notion that scholarly reading is not only based on the process of accelerating
and decelerating through discrete texts, but through an entire world of signal
and noise. Reading, according to this model, does not adhere in the least to the
image of immobile reader locked in to the limited space between her face and her
book, but is instead a kinetic, embodied, multimodal series of interactions,
engaging not only the centre of focus, but the peripheral vision as well. It is
a place not of happy accidents, but of prepared minds, where the reading process
is not based on an abuse of the
brain
(as per the quote from Ernest Pöppel that stands at the start
of this article) but a harnessing of almost primal human urges to seek, to
gather, to organise and to narrativise.
The conclusions that follow are based upon the results of a modest but revealing ethnographic study, conducted in 2015, and known as
Noise is, of course, not a phenomenon specific to the humanities. Indeed, an
appreciation of noise, in the form of a paradigm-changing
The knowledge environments humanists create around themselves to facilitate the pipeline from reading to writing are like mixed media realisations of a Prezi stack, except that the relationships between objects and places reflect a layered set of interconnections, simultaneously reflecting the places where an individual keeps certain sorts of things and the path by which those things came to enter the system.
The scholar’s desk is often a messy place, a reification of the fragmented,
capricious, haphazard system of influences jostling for scholarly attention, and
for alignment like with its [T]he problem with the desk is
that often you have to clear a space on it, whereas the sofa is generally
kept clear,
said one interviewee, while another made the very
insightful comment that: my desk space
tends to be extremely cluttered and messy and not conducive to reading, so …
tend to take everything off the table and move it or try and minimise what I
am looking at.
The primary reason clutter seems to be such a strong
recurrent theme is because of the need to balance focus and attention with the
parallel requirement to have certain things – notes, primary or secondary source
materials of many types, objects, data, computer environments or tools, or
comfort objects such as water, coffee or a lap desk - at hand
or beside me.
One interviewee even described this arrangement for her
as almost like a nest.
I tend not to write in … my
departmental office which I use more as a teaching and meeting space, even
though I have bookshelf space here, but I tend to write in a box room at
home where the stuff is very close to my desk, um, it’s not very scientific,
there are piles and piles of paper, the paper somehow forms a useful
order.
In some cases, this desire for a particular physical arrangement of space is
clearly indicative of a similar process of arranging ideas, building a knowledge
organisation system to assist information retrieval and prepare for insight. In
some cases, the researchers’ understanding of this system is somewhat ad-hoc and
intuitive: I don’t really have [a
system], I just flick - I have a good idea of the order when I did
something.
In most cases, however, the interviewees were very aware
of the underlying structure of their personal information landscape: I break down the reading by all the
different topics that I’m interested in… so that when I come back to it ...I
have that all stored in logical chunks that will turn into chapters.
Some of this active management of spaces for research work functions so as to
optimise certain kinds of concentration and minimise certain kinds of
distraction. Focus is key to constructing a valid argument, but it is also an
efficiency concern serving the purpose of managing time constraints. Time
pressure was keenly felt by all of the interviewees: …there are so many claims on my time, kind of 200%
claims on my time, so how can I start to segment out?
This reflects
Guillory’s
Indeed, the rise of distraction in the seeking out and assimilation of
information may have as much to do with dealing with these kinds of restrictions
as with the nature of the loosely bounded questions and objects being pursued.
What might be thought the most obvious strategy for maximizing time (by focusing
narrowly on one project before moving on to the next) is not one that fits
comfortably with the humanities researcher’s modes of work. In fact the
researchers, in particular those at the more senior level, consistently referred
to the fact that they would work on several projects at the same time. While
this was sometimes viewed in the pejorative (…when I was at school my Latin teacher called me a
I like to flit around to lots of
different things and I try to keep my view broad,
I have too many projects on the
go
), it was clearly also a strategy to manage the implications of
potential blockages in insight, access to sources or sustained time for
research, ensuring that a mix of activities was available at any given time to
provide a good
The idea of instrumentation is central to the understanding of any epistemic culture. For the scientific communities in which the term is most familiar, such as the high energy physics and microbiology research teams studied by Karin Knorr Cetina in her landmark ethnography of science,
The first of these creates the footing or foundation, which is almost inevitably
comprised of knowledge of the primary sources, the objects of study. Being
I don’t really arrive at the argument
until the evidence takes me there.
The potential for meandering
through a landscape of sources is inherent in this approach, but the researchers
also stressed the idea that a single contact with a primary source was never
enough to fully comprehend it: you
don’t just look at something once ever;
reading it five or six times
over;
…doing lots of reading, but also by
reading it multiple times.
In most cases, this rereading is however
also a process with a time component to it: …it’s no good reading anything once … having read
something once you may return to it because at a later point you may find
it’ll solve a problem for you, or it will have a suggested
connection.
As implied in this quotation, the rereading process as
it takes place over time, bringing the same text into different juxtapositions
and contexts within the scholar’s instrument, is widely viewed not only as
essential but transformative: …that
involved kind of going back over some of the older stuff that I’d looked at
beforehand as well, oh yes very much changed the kind of thing that I was
looking for.
A further omnipresent has changed most dramatically if
you look back 30 years is the volume of secondary literature, it’s just
exploding and getting faster and faster and we’re still expected to stay on
top of so much of it.
In spite of the challenges, however, secondary
literature is a key component in the humanistic instrument: without embedding
and contextualising within the community of practice, scholarship feels
insubstantial, and indeed even risky. Ensuring that this base is covered is not
always possible, however: [recognition
of the secondary literature is] what I feel that I would need, but I
recognise the flaw in the piece but there’s no way that I could commit to
that either, so you know I gave them what I had!
This simple strategy of managing time by accepting one’s limitations within a
certain area of enquiry was not the only one, of course: a different approach
described was to focus on particular genres of scholarship (books being more
important than articles, for example), or to set a certain representative sample
and work within those constraints. The ideal situation, as described, was one of
following the trails of connections and references until reaching a point of
recursion, however. [you know you are
done] when you start just going round in circles… one of the things I like
about [conferences] is that every time you stand up in front of people
there’s always the opportunity for someone to say
In this way, reading (and rereading) secondary material is an
exercise in itself, but also a part of the all-important dialogue with the
primary sources and the researcher’s growing understanding of them. In the
process of going ah but you haven’t read
X
, or you haven’t thought about Y, so that is a really important
part of the process to really make sure that you’ve covered all your
bases.round and round in a
few circles and … reevaluating what you already think, reevaluating what
other people have suggested,
knowledge of the secondary research
provides that key layer of the documented thoughts of others. It helps to test
the place of pieces of evidence in an argument, and also to form the overall
size and shape of a work, and to contribute to what can often be long periods of
semi-active or even inactive gestation (quite often when another project has
taken over).
These strategies for managing the I knew I had to be able to really try and
not master, but at least engage sincerely with their literature. In fact
given the reading I’ve done since, I’m amazed that I got away with
it!
Although they present a further challenge, informing one’s work
through interdisciplinary investigation was also seen as one of the most
invigorating ways to extend one’s filter for research questions: …the thing I get a real kick out of would
be the things that are off to the side… the different ideas, and it is
challenging.
Such interactions create new layers in the scholarly
stone wall of independent, but integrated sources and influences from which
research questions and eventually scholarly output will flow.
Sources and scholarship were not the only contributors to this apparatus,
however. Certain skills, often focussed quite literally on new ways to read,
such as palaeography or languages, were key to specific disciplines or
approaches: if you’re an early Irish
scholar, those people are much more learned than me, it takes them probably
a decade and a half before they can even begin - because they need to learn
Hiberno-Latin as well as Old Irish - as well as probably Russian, German,
French, maybe some Scandinavian languages … the apprenticeship is very
long.
The mastery of such fundamentals can be a key differentiator
between scholars, and will drive the definition of research questions over the
course of a career, as new skills open up access to new source material. They
also open up interesting questions about the plasticity of the mind of the
humanities researcher, shifting frames not only between different kinds of
sources, but code switching as well between distinct semiotic systems.
Beyond this, however, external factors such as political imperatives or funding
priorities can also create layers that highlight attention to certain seams of
evidence, or encourage connections to be drawn between things that might
otherwise seem disparate. Across society, we can see that the personal and
professional spheres are collapsing in a negative way, due to the pervasive
influence of technology and its application as a tool for controlling (and
extending) labour. But the personal experiences of the scholar form a powerful
layer in the epistemic apparatus, and always have. This is what one interviewee
called those itches you want to keep
scratching,
where your own subconscious urges and
fascinations come up,
and these may or may not have a direct
connection to a recognisable personal history. The personal nature of many
research projects is however a largely taboo subject, being viewed as
compromising the As embodied products of
researcher-researched interactions, emotions may either motivate or
discourage further engagement. The emotions that we express (or
suppress) and articulate (or mute) in the encounters with our research
protagonists, shape the ways in which stories are told and social
realities are conveyed. Ignoring the epistemic quality of emotions
obstructs our capacity to make valid claims about other peoples’
experiences, behaviors, and speech.
Historical knowledge is a mode of
self understanding
…every historian
writes from their own context and how we see history from one generation is
going to be completely different … you read … the research done in the 50s
and 60s and it comes with a completely different set of assumptions about
what’s right and what’s normal and what your basic default assumption about
who you are and what history is for, that tells us something about why we
tell and retell history. It's also how we explain us to ourselves as well
which makes it a really interesting conversation to be part of, ‘cause human
beings are creatures of narrative, really!
These many layers of the humanist’s instrument combine to create both a scaffold
and a filter for the identification of research questions and the development of
responses to them. The SPARKLE interviewees were able to describe the process of
creating and using these interconnections through reading and rereading very
vividly, often providing extensive narratives detailing the development of key
elements of their argument: how influences from other areas of study became
integrated with and understanding their own area of focus, or how a similar
methodology was applied to a different corpus; how they work through the
connections between both the evidence they want to present and wider
disciplinary trends; how they traverse within and between the layers of their
apparatus, knitting together notes and texts, primary and secondary sources,
theoretical and methodological insights, extradisciplinary material, hard won
archival gems and chance comments from friends and colleagues, gradually
resolving any doubts about the reliability of connections and conclusions. The
application of this method is about balancing the context in which a piece of
information is being situated, and the precise nature of the evidence itself,
moving as well between initial reading, and the creation of prosthetics to
prompt and promote future reading (note-taking, filing or organizing, condensing
information) and preparing for the next foray to gather material (following
footnote trails, testing resonances) all along the expected and the unexpected
pathways through the evidence, which may be dense and extensive or consist only
of fragments. In most cases the
evidence is quite fragmented and you need to compile your evidence across a
number of archives, plus literary works, plus narrative sources, chronicles
and so on, so you’re building a picture.
This fragmentation, like
gaps in the wall, is a challenge to the epistemic authority of the scholar, but
it should not be allowed to become a barrier: I go as thoroughly as I can and within the range of what I can
see I will gather as much information as I can before reasonably making a
judgement on what I think happened… And I think that’s rigorous and I think
sometimes more imaginative and brave or misguided than what scientists do in
that you’re willing to take a risk and you’re willing to roam a little more
freely outside of your [expertise].
Like a climber planning a summit attempt, the researcher plans their angle of
approach, aware that some parts of the planned route will almost surely be
blocked, and that their unique constellation of sources and influences may very
well be leading across known territory, but in a new way: there’s a discussion in one of the chapters which ...had
my approach been purely literary ... possibly wouldn't have been there at
all.
In the end, this researcher will follow the terrain, one hand
or foot hold at a time, until it leads … somewhere. That somewhere, like
climber’s peak is often shrouded in mist, but it can be inferred - I was fairly sure that something would be
produced of that that would be interesting
– but the process of
building some aspects of this journey can feel like beating my head off what felt like a solid brick wall,
to the point where I ended up talking to a couple of lecturers within the
department and they were like
At some point, however, momentum
takes over yeah theory kind of always feels like that
when you’re building it.
… and then what happens is
that all that snowballs and gathers speed and gets to the point where you’re
being carried along by it.
A key result of the application of this form of reading-led instrumentation for
the interviewees was that it maximised the capacity to harness serendipity. This
is not serendipity in terms of the The time that you
have the serendipitous find may occur a year or two years after the initial
browse but because you’ve done that initial browse you have embedded a
context for later on when you meet it. I think that certainly in my type of
history it’s the endless building of more and more context in different
contexts, laterally, chronologically or conceptually, and also mining
downwards and piling more and more detailed evidence on top of it. I think
that that’s what expertise really is, in our world.
Experiences of serendipity were reported in the finding of research materials in
an archive (coming across an
object
), searching in an electronic source (…you could put in the thing that you’re looking for, but
a whole lot of other entries come up and you go, oh that looks interesting,
and it turns out to be a whole lot more interesting than the thing you were
looking for
) or through reading (how did I find them? I found them by reading really widely…
How do I come by that motley crew? My own interests, my reading exposure, my
language limitations.
) These examples are all relatively
conventional in some ways, in that they are based in the experience of insight
coming through the finding of something new. Serendipity does not always work
this way, however: very often the experiences of serendipity were of ideas
sparking together, of connections arcing across the time from exposure to
moments of engagement with certain sources and ideas. Serendipity comes from
working through sources and absorbing them for what they are, rather than for
what you think you may need from them. Serendipity grows out of what you store
in the background of your thinking for later use. Those moments don’t seem to come on call necessarily
they just seem to pop up. But the way to get them is just to sort of
saturate yourself in the text.
These descriptions of how insight may
come unbidden, but not without effort, are reminiscent of Koestler’s theory of
how creativity can stem from the collision between matrices of perception, which
end in …laughter, or their fusion in a
new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an aesthetic
experience
This preparation for serendipity is actually a key part of the historian’s
method, and a cornerstone of their version of professional seeing
there will be stuff that’s not there that
you’ll never see and no one else will, or there’s stuff that you won’t know
about.
In secondary literature, there are potential blind spots as
well: I discovered that there was more
said, or there had been more said in other disciplines and I didn’t really
see.
It also can express how the scholarly method operates: …when I sort of started seeing, when I
started not seeing the parts where it didn’t explain things, where it was
adequate but not complete, where there were lapses sort of seeing that I
started having a feeling that there was enough here that I could work
with.
But the importance of seeing for the harnessing of serendipity
– across interactions, across spaces, across time - was one of the most
interesting aspects of such utterances: I have the kind of mind where later I think
oh actually those things did
fit together
and I only saw it later and actually it’s only been in
recent years I would see myself, and … I actually think that all the things
I do do actually fit together, but I think there was a sort of underlying
motivation in my mind that I’m interested in that I didn’t see
originally.
This constitution of professional seeing as one part reading and one part insight
results in a knowledgescape with a very broadly informed tacit dimension, which
the philosopher Michael Polanyi summarised well in the phrase we know far more than we can
tell
If there is nothing that cannot be read as text, and if the work of the humanist is to apply an individualised instrument to frame and reframe, to accelerate and decelerate through an unknowable mass and density of scholarship, then where does the introduction of technology into this system leave us? Do the technical tools that enhance our capacity to read at a distance or otherwise organise masses of information into visual codes or telling images give us mastery over the process of ensuring that our distracted reading is captured, or do they make us lazy, tempting us to skip over the all-important step of registering our full field of vision?
Certainly the SPARKLE interviews indicated that technology and tools were
increasingly present in the researcher’s apparatus. Although some of the
interviewees would have had experience working on digital projects, none of them
would have self-identified as primarily a digital humanist. In spite of that,
they each gave a sense of how technology was influencing their work. In
particular for those historians who worked in archives, the ability to
photograph and save images of archival materials was transformative. You notice a really big difference in
somewhere like Kew where you can photograph and somewhere like PRONI [Public
Record Office of Northern Ireland] in Belfast where you can’t. It does make
a huge difference in terms of the volume of material you can get through …
certainly dictates why certain sources are used more than others.
This already ambiguous positioning of increasing access as something that not
only supports, but incentivises scholarly attention (potentially to the deficit
of other sources and collections that may reveal a different narrative) also
comes with a further disadvantage: although the ability to photograph sources
may maximise the time one spends physically in an archive (thereby also
maximising one’s research travel budget) it doesn’t increase one’s overall
available time for reading and analysing the materials captured: …while it’s fantastic that we can now go
into archives and take photos of materials, there is a problem that you take
all these photographs and try to remember what you have, and trying to
remember that taking photographs of stuff is great, but you have to, you
also have to use the time, allocate the time to work through the
material.
Discussions of other technological interventions continued this theme of both
benefit and compromise. Laptops are ubiquitous, and often used for analysis of
sources or note-taking, but they are seldom seen as flexible and extensible
enough to be the only place for these activities: notetaking, as we have already
seen, is highly multimodal, and even for analysis one researcher was wishing for
multiple screens.
Databases
were used for capturing structured information, but they had to be created for
the purpose, and relevant information often then was exported back out to
another format, such as a flat spreadsheet or pdf. Even then, one particularly
digital scholar commented about his method: I think this is maybe a key point for Digital Humanities
that, certainly for me anyway, the first time I go through a big body of
evidence, the hard copy remains crucial and I still find it hard to really
do close reading on screen.
On-line searches through bibliographical
sources and repositories of scholarship were also common, in particular as a
starting point, but never able to support the full scholarly process: …the jumping off point is certainly always
digital, and the majority of the resources that I use are digital, but again
I think that tends to increase as you get to know the field better, because
you have to read the big books and the big books are almost always in book
form.
The common conception of humanist scholars as luddites is
clearly not upheld by these accounts – instead, it seems that the available
tools simply aren’t up to the standards of these consummate microtaskers and
their highly refined, multimodal, embodied methods. As more and more disciplines
adopt or adapt big data approaches and methods, we can only expect this gulf to
become more pronounced, not only because the source material to underpin big
data research in the study of history seems unlikely to emerge any time soon
Distraction may be a key element in the scholarly processes of the humanities, but it is also an element that its practitioners have yet to fully validate as a positive rather than negative force in their knowledge capture and organisation processes. A very good overview of the kinds of statements made by prominent historians on their strategies can be found in Keith Thomas’ excellent diary piece published in the
messy ways of putting things together.To truly appreciate these strategies, they must be understood not just for the many things they lack, but for the power with which they triangulate between the elementals of humanistic scholarship, such as sources and peer opinion, and the path and cognitive strengths of the individual scholar. They must also be viewed at the macro level, not just at the level of the individual’s curious habits, but as an almost endless set of variations that nonetheless share common goals and structures.
Scholarly distraction in reading is a powerful and productive force when guided
by serendipity and commitment to the values of humanistic scholarship. This is
not to say, however, that the epistemic process of the humanists is all
encompassing, and that no distractions are viewed negatively. Administrative
work, for example, is viewed as a
First, we need new evidence and new frameworks for validating the kinds of distracted reading processes humanists demonstrate. For example, it might be helpful to view the frame of scholarly reading not via outdated images of absorbed readers, but of something broader, like, for example, a macroscope: “Macroscopes provide a ‘vision of the whole,’ helping us ‘synthesize’ the related elements and detect patterns, trends, and outliers while granting access to myriad details. Rather than make things larger or smaller, macroscopes let us observe what is at once too great, slow, or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.
In addition, validating the place of distraction in the epistemic practices of
the scholar can help us to understand the pedagogical place of distraction. Many
learners, from undergraduate students to citizen scientists, are by and large
more interested in creating a self through their education, than a knowledge
base. How can this dimension of their distraction, and the technologies that
enable it, be engaged? Can we not do that in the digital humanities better than
anywhere else? Early learning emphasises
Finally, embracing distraction as the noise that below the level of the work,
when we have redefined what the work
is
The author would like to recognise the Irish Research Council for their funding of this work, as well as her collaborators on the original SPARKLE Project, Dr Naveen Bagalkot and Dr Alex O’Connor and the anonymous DHQ reviewer.