Notes and Quotes: Chapter 4

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Chapter 4

One of the central questions facing the humanities in the digital age is the relationship between reading and data (101).

For Manovich, database is potential and narrative is its resulting output. Instead, the relationship is intertwined and inseparable (102).

Literature provides insights into this discourse by illuminating the structural opposition between information and interpretation (reading and data) and invites the deconstruction of it (102).

Databases are not just for storing data. They organize, prioritize, and shape information (102).

Ulysses is an obvious source of inspiration for digital modernism, according to Pressman, because it takes a text from the past and experiments with remediating that older work into a different medial format (103).

Modernist literature developed stream of consciousness, and Joyce was one of its primary innovators (103).

The literary community didn’t care too much for the Twitter remix of Ulysses but Pressman sees it as a significant experiment that shows writers using digital media to explore and renovate modernism specifically modernism’s stream of consciousness (104).

Pressman says that twitter represents the stream of consciousness narrative (105).

Remediation is the central operating strategy of The Jew’s Daughter (105).

The Jew’s Daughter, just like Dakota, uses a complicated medium to provide something very simple. Ciccoricco calls it a radical statement. Pressman reiterates that digital modernism is a conscious act of rebellion (106).

Books are media and that media shape literature and the reading practices we bring to bear upon it (107).

Some people thought that hypertext invited interaction so much that the readers became authors. Such claims have, for the most part, been refuted (107).

Despite its simple interface, The Jew’s Daughter is one of the most difficult narratives that Pressman has ever read on or off screen (108).

The Jew’s Daughter is hard to access, not because it flashed by too quickly, but because its contexts keep changing (109).

The Jew’s Daughter demands rereading and thus posits rereading as central to close reading (109).

The Jew’s Daughter is an adaptation of a section of Ulysses (109).

“Ithaca” depicts the experience of retrieving information from a database. Its formal structure of query and response and the effect of this format serves to focus attention on how the information is processed (111). This whole thing really feels like a stretch.

The database aesthetic of “Ithaca” is often described as resembling the “catechism,” and Joyce himself described the chapter in this way (111).

The idea in both (catechism and database architecture) is that the formal organization of data enables its retrieval (111-112).

Bonnie Mak says that the page is the material manifestation of an ongoing conversation between designer and reader (112).

Pressman says that Ulysses provides RAM (113).

Intention, ordering, and authorship are part of database construction even if their related actions are hidden from the reader/user (113).

The way we read always happens through media that mediate (113).

The idea that consciousness is technologically mediated has become the capstone in theories of posthumanism (113).

The work reflexively displays a cyboric reading practice, with the computer turning pages as human memory is pulled up from its latent depths (115).

Form and content converge to subtly suggest that human and computer memory coproduce consciousness and its textual representation in literature, namely in the technique of stream of consciousness (115).

The Jew’s Daughter uses Ulysses to pursue posthuman cognition and suggests that the modernist one might also present a similar sense of distributed cognition (115).

Stream of consciousness is a technique used to describe, mirror, and model the way the mind works (116).

Our access to consciousness is always already mediated (116).

Stream of consciousness is not just a literary technique but also a literary technology (117).

Pressman says that the literary technology of stream of consciousness is made available for critical reconsideration by digital modernist works (117).

What connects these writers is an effort to use text to depict the associative nature of cognition (118).

In an essay titled “As We May Think” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush introduces the memex (118).

Bush shared with Bob Brown the perspective that changing the way we read would in turn change what we read (119).

Nelson defines hypertext as “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader” (119).

NLA was also called “Augment” because it, like Bush’s memex, strived to augment human cognition (120).

This literary trajectory complicates linear narratives about the progression of social movements by connecting literary history to computer before the period of cybernetics and digital technologies (120).

Ulysses contains both notions of hypertext: (1) a formal means of depicting cognition and (2) a technical format for distributing consciousness across media platforms (120-121).

Joyceware. What? I mean, I get it. But what? (121).

Lexia to Perplexia (Memmott) is a work in the canon of electronic literature (122).

Pressing the Return key represents the central act of digital modernism: returning to the past to make it new through new media (122).

Memmott promotes an understanding that the relationship between writing technologies and written texts constitutes a feedback loop between human mind and media format (124).

What we think to be real and analog about humanness is actually the result of digital production (124).

The works in this chapter take from their modernist inspiration a desire to examine and represent the operations of cognition through literary technologies (125).

They renovate stream of consciousness for a digital age by expressing the intertwined relationship between human consciousness and digital computer (125).

Literature that experiments with representing consciousness as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital (125).