Class Notes: Meeting 1
When you hear the word "materiality" or "material," what (in the practice of your own work) comes to mind?
- The materiality of the book and what gets lost in digitization;
- The notion of an original and copy;
- Medium awareness, or drawing attention to a medium within a medium;
- Something that can be touched, or that which is tactile;
- Objects in books or important to books;
- The shelf life of objects as well as preservation of/interaction with texts;
- Production process, including the technologies themselves as well as labour; and
- Bodies, or the tensions between virtuality and actuality (e.g., the production of online identities).
From the perspective of literary and cultural criticism, what responses does "Arguing with Computers" elicit?
- Nervousness, including a possible lack of engagement with the life of the text;
- Distance (or not holding the book, the one physical book);
- Punctuation, including how a computer reads special characters;
- Questions about what, exactly, algorithms are doing;
- The need for a methods section;
- The question of how good the research questions are;
- Questions about who taught the computer as well as the cultural perspectives of the computer;
- Whether and how a computer has memory, and its relation to cultural/human memory;
- The question of how the information is interpreted after it's been gathered;
- The historical context of interpretation and interpretative practice; and
- Concerns about what the computer is missing.
Why are frustration with computers and computational devices important or relevant to literary criticism?
- Cultural expectations of computation to be fast;
- The "second language" of programming/computing;
- The process of learning to use a tool;
- The book says it's your fault; the computer says the world has stopped working;
- The question of how to "unbreak" things or fix bugs, including the processes of searching for and finding help;
- The role of context when determining whether to ask others for help; and
- The assumption that code does what it says (or that it's either right or wrong).