Can Machines Read (Literature) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reading Machines: On the Surface of Meaning – Beyond the Surface of Discourse
arcadia, 2014
Reading machines are technological devices promising to support or even perfect processes of reading. Although the concept of reading machines is almost as old as the notion of writing machines, it has received far less attention in literary and cultural studies. The following essay addresses this gap. The first part of the argument links the reading machine to Freud's definition of a tool. As a prosthesis connected to the human body and mind, a tool produces 'trouble at times': translation difficulties between the machine and its user affecting matters of materiality, discourse, and meaning alike. The reading machine embodies such 'trouble at times' that results from the paradox tension between machine and meaning. While the machine requires the mechanized processes to be unambiguous, the reading process is ambiguous by definition. Most of the reading machines invented in the past decades, do not take into account the trouble that results from such a tension: first and foremost, they serve to support reading processes mechanically. Yet, some of them stand out and hold a specific potential to stage such troubles and render the underlying tensions productive. The article discusses three of them, each of them focussing on a different aspect of the reading process: the first one is a 'pedagogical reading machine' (1767) concerned with the alphabetization process, the second one is an 'aesthetic reading machine' (1930) designed for reading literary texts, and the third one is a 'critical reading machine' (2007) that focuses on literary criticism.
2025
Workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany. Conception and Organization by Katia Schwerzmann. Reading has undergone dramatic transformations over the past few decades. Media and literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles has discussed how forms of reading, modes of attention, and even neurological architecture are heavily influenced by the medium of reading-on screen vs. on print-and its mediaspecific features such as layout, typography, and the presence of hyperlinks (Hayles 2012; 2021). Under "machine reading," Hayles refers to machines' ability to process vast amounts of text and uncover patterns that would be imperceptible to a human reader. Additionally, the ability to search for keywords in digital texts facilitates a form of "distant reading," enabling readers to engage with texts in new ways by adopting abstract, visual, quantifying approaches (Moretti 2013; Jänicke et al. 2015). Recently, literary scholar Julika Griem has proposed to analyze what she calls "reading scenes," where the practice of reading is explicitly thematized in literary texts and visual media. This media reflexivity enables us to analyze the changing forms, valuations, and norms assigned to reading as a cultural practice (Griem 2021). Griem's approach asks us to attend to the technical, social, and cultural contexts of the practice of reading in addition to its cognitive dimensions. What new reading scenes emerge with large language models (LLMs) and the research practices surrounding them?
How Distant is 'Distant Reading'? A Paradigm Shift in Pedagogy
Asian Journal of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies, 2024
Life's brevity contrasts with the enduring nature of art, and the specter of mortality perennially shadows humanity. In the contemporary landscape, millions of English-language literary works emerge annually, rendering exhaustive in-depth reading an unattainable feat for readers engaged in literary studies. The once-relied-upon method of close reading proves inadequate in addressing the expansive breadth of literary output. The imperative to incorporate computational approaches in the study of literary texts becomes evident. As we stand at the crossroads of tradition and technology, it is incumbent upon literary studies to embrace the symbiosis with computers, commonly recognized as digital humanities. This ethnoautobiographical article seeks to navigate the practical dimensions of distant reading within the realm of digital humanities. Its central thesis posits that contemporary literary academia must integrate distant reading alongside traditional close reading methodologies to comprehensively engage with the vast and diverse literary landscape.
Distant reading in literary studies: a methodology in quest of theory
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, 2021
Since Franco Moretti coined the successful term distant reading, quantitative/computational text analysis methods have gained wide circulation in literary studies. The diffusion of distant reading approaches has raised a lively debate and has attracted various criticisms, both from "traditional literary scholars" and from self-critical adopters. One important reason underlying these critical positions is the fact that it lacks sound and coherent rationales from the point of view of the theory: distant reading is the first methodology in literary studies that does not come with a theory of literature embedded in it. Consequently, all distant reading studies derive their theoretical frameworks and terms from literary theories that mostly rely on the notion that literary texts can be explained only by the way of interpretation. On what grounds, then, can we construct a theory of literature amenable to distant reading methods? I think that the better theoretical frameworks are the cognitive and bio-evolutionistic approaches to literature and cultural evolution studies. These theoretical approaches require a change in the level of description of the literary domain and justify the move from "interpretation" to "explanation" as the real aim of the scholarly inquiry.
Croatian journal of philosophy
Reading starts with the act of perception and rapidly moves into an area concerning the recognition of written words. Word recognition consists of two aspects (functioning simultaneously and working in parallel): the phonological—converting groups of letters into sounds—and the lexical— giving access to a mental dictionary of the meaning of words. But what does the act of reading consist of? According to Peter Kivy, there is a parallel between reading texts and reading scores. And what about the reasons for reading? When we read, we are not just interested in understanding what the signs stand for, but we also activate memory, perception, problem-solving, and reasoning, and our attention is also devoted to identifying those characteristics of texts which help categorize them as works of a specific genre. Readers play a central role: without them and their activity, there would be nothing but a page of black spots. As they read and understand, readers propositionally imagine what is ...
Acta Analytica, 2020
What is reading? Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself. Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille. So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W? Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled. Can other sensory modalities be used to read? What more can be said about the nature of the objects of reading, viz., texts? After critically assessing a few proposals, I defend a final analysis of reading according to which a person reads a text when she uses some sensory modality to cognitively attend to the word structures embedded in that text for the purposes of ultimately grasping its content. Moreover, S must not relentlessly fail to map W to some of W’s contents, and S’s comprehension of W’s contents must be a causal result of W (and not vice-versa).
2016
"I truly believe that the format, content, and structure of this book is so dramatically different from the traditional genre of books about reading research and theory building that it has the potential to bring about a Kuhnian revolution in reading research and theory development on a number of levels.. .. Instead of tediously presenting research findings and interpreting what they mean for reading educators, this book leads its readers on a journey which subtly persuades them to explore and examine their own and others' reading behavior in ways that induce deeper understandings of the complexity of human symbolic behavior in general and the act of reading in particular.. .. I'm hopeful that this book will mark the beginning of a movement to rework reading and learning to read using the tools and perspectives from a wide range of more successful scientific disciplines." Brian Cambourne, University of Wollongong, Australia, From the Foreword "Exciting and timely for the field.. .. This book guides the reader in exploring the processes of reading in ways that challenge common sense views and that have important pedagogical consequences. I love the dialogue. It sounds genuine and creates a kind of conversation space. The book is clearly focused on an important topic-it follows nicely the rule of keeping the main idea the main idea." James Hoffman, University of Texas at Austin, USA "A significant contribution to the field via a powerful theme, 'The Grand Illusion,' explored in a fashion that is multi-perspectival and multidisciplinary. Using a combination of expertise (language, psychology, physiology), the book makes a unique contribution pulling together research findings from various sources, fields of studies, and windows for observing the acts of reading (retellings, miscue analysis, eye movement, text analysis, and linguistic corpus). It provides a more coherent and provocative discussion than some of the government-commissioned/sponsored reports and reviews included in edited handbook volumes on reading."
Automatic Computer Reading and Human Reading
This paper reports a parser that can read English texts and output reading reports that contain all NPs, all clauses of Who Did What to Whom and other findings as a result of automatic annotation. The reports present a meaning representation that computational linguists have long been looking for. They offer a set of criteria that can help evaluate where a reader is correct or where the reading goes wrong, and can be used to build a knowledge base for a given domain that can support reading instruction, selfpaced writing, and expert knowledge discovery.