Response to Hayles

[Anonymous]

#342

I was intrigued by Hayles’ articulation of the relationship between digital publishing formats and possible upsets to long-held hierarchies of academia, particularly within the arena of scholarly research. Noting the significance of low citation rates in printed scholarly journals, she suggests that such publications have a “negligible audience and a nugatory communicative function” (3). Yet such publications are used on an internal, institutional level, as a barometer for scholarly credentialing and promotion within the business of academia. Hayles notes the challenge posed by digital publications, (even widely read blogs), which may engage broader audiences, in considering what exactly entails meaningful academic work; especially if one considers academia’s purpose as rooted in the art of teaching and learning, rather than upward career mobility.

Another important notion Hayles presents is the collaborative effect of digital formats on gathering, interpreting and disseminating research. The digital database grants the ability of “different scholars (or teams of scholars) to create different front-ends for the same data, thus encouraging collaboration in data collection, storing, and analysis.” (4). Hayles makes an interesting supposition on the depth of interpretation a digital scholar might be afforded through a more flexible, malleable digital organization of research data. She even suggests this more accommodating navigational structure might influence how the “audience will encounter and assess the research and thus for what the research is taken to mean” (4). Hayles is pointing towards the shift these aspects of digital publication, research, collaboration and dissemination may ultimately have on the relationship between academia and the public; where ideas may become accessible and therefore tenets of progress within the public arena of learning (5).

I am particularly interested in Hayles’ articulation of materiality as a dynamic process, which “changes as the focus of attention shifts” (14) And in her foregrounding of cognition as always embodied, while simultaneously traversing the limits of one singular body, extending “beyond the body’s boundaries in ways that challenge our ability to say where or even if cognition networks end” (17). This area of embodied knowing is of interest to me and I hope to develop greater understanding of this notion as it is interpreted differently by the scholars we will study this semester. Aside from a body in its spatial placement, or intersection with a piece of technology (keyboard, screen, pencil), I am interested to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of knowing, in a singular soma and in the interplay and intra-action between multiple somatic presences through space and time.

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