idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
idw - Informationsdienst
Wissenschaft
02/27/2025 - 02/28/2025 | Bochum
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.
The emergence of large language models has transformed modes of reading and introduced new forms of attention and valuations. Traditional reading methods such as “close reading” that relies on an inquisitive and cautious analysis of a short passage—a reading that pays attention to the formal and rhetorical dimension of a piece of text—competes with automated tools that establish the relevance of the components of a text through the statistical weighing of its constitutive elements. The shifts in reading raise a series of critical questions:
What forms of reading are automatized through machine processing? What cultural, technical, ethical, and economic valuations are encoded into these machine reading scenes? What are the normative implications behind machines’ “interpretation” of what counts in a text and the reduction of texts to containers for information?
Do close reading and the reading of longer texts, both of which require sustained attention, lose their status as foundational skills to be learned in educational settings? Do reading competencies become superfluous as machines automate the reading process?
Since computer science literature is a scene on which AI gives an account of its “paradigmatic worldview” (Amoore et al. 2023), what forms of reading might researchers of the humanities and social sciences develop in order to engage with computer science research, which is often outside their traditional fields of expertise?
How does machine translation, as the foundational problem of large language models, relate to human translation as a reading-writing practice that accounts for specific temporal, geographical, and affective contexts? What are the implications of reducing these contexts to the “highest likelihood” norm of machine learning?
The workshop is a public event. If you want to participate please register.
CONCEPTION AND ORGANIZATION
Katia Schwerzmann, Thyssen@KWI Fellow
Workshop of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in cooperation with the SFB 1567 Virtuelle Lebenswelten, Ruhr University Bochum
PARTICIPATION
The workshop is a public event. If you want to participate please register. Online participation via Zoom is possible.
Information on participating / attending:
Date:
02/27/2025 08:00 - 02/28/2025 20:00
Event venue:
Ruhr University Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150, Room GB 8/129
44801 Bochum
Nordrhein-Westfalen
Germany
Target group:
Scientists and scholars, Students
Email address:
Relevance:
local
Subject areas:
Cultural sciences, Language / literature
Types of events:
Seminar / workshop / discussion
Entry:
01/31/2025
Sender/author:
Ahlam Youraoui
Department:
Pressestelle
Event is free:
no
Language of the text:
English
URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event78576
New Reading Scenes On Machine Reading and Reading Machine Learning Research You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
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