academic_workflow

Mention by way of saying what i am not meaning when I talk bout close reading.

This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education. He just separates "creative writers" from creative people so that the students have creative ideas but communicate them in an "uncreative," dull, mechanical, machinelike way where the fact that computers and people have different ideas about creativity doesn't matter. I'm interested in how machines read, but I'm not interested in their ability to mimic the dullest responses that humans can generate. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that computers (and other objects) participate in the aesthetic experiences of composition in ways that are "creative" rather than explicitly ignoring creativity. Rather than think of writing as a process where students produce widgets that can pass factory inspection (by robots or humans), maybe we can take up Davidson's suggestion, which might be read here as an invitation to develop new aesthetic relationships.