In Kathryn Hayle’s How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine, Hayles creates a framework for analyzing reading under the three titular paradigms. She summarizes existing scholarly work related to these forms of reading, and how they affect each other and the humans who perform them. She concludes that they are best used in conjunction with one another, and that they each have their own advantages and disadvantages – surprise, surprise.

Close reading, Hayles argues, takes many different forms, but in general involves a human analyzing a single text. Hyper reading is “reader-directed, screen-based, computer-assisted reading”, involving many different works linked together, between which the reader regularly jumps. Machine reading, in contrast to hyper reading, is primarily performed by a computer with “human assistance.” Hayles presents the three in this order, which could be also be described as most human-dependent to least, or of smallest context to largest.

My personal experience is in accordance with Hayles’ final recommendation (that students be taught to read in each of these ways, for they’re complementary) but I take some issue with a few of the arguments on which she relies to make this point. I have found hypertext an invaluable improvement over the text I read on paper. Importantly, hypertext can be used in many ways, but Hayles never formalizes exactly which form her “hyperreading” takes, or the form that it takes in any of the studies she cites in arguing that it reduces reader comprehension. Following every hyperlink in a text as it’s encountered would certainly be distracting and negatively influence my understanding of a text. But opening them in background tabs for later reading to further challenge and enhance my understanding of the primary text feels essential to how I read in 2017. It’s equivalent to practices engaged in by scholars from the beginning of the printed word. And it certainly doesn’t detract from the experience of reading.

Hayles also acknowledges that skimming, filtering, searching, “pecking”, fragmenting, juxtaposing, and scanning, are not only essential to understanding large amounts of information, but have been usefully employed by scholars as long as they’ve been available (see the Ferris wheel of books invented in the Renaissance.) These are all hyperreading techniques, but they’re useful in other contexts. Hayles points out that they’re a different form of reading altogether – that’s exactly right, and how they seem to be employed by me and my contemporaries. These hyperreading techniques allow us to understand what’s important to read closely. Hayles acknowledges this towards her conclusion.

Hayles also mischaracterizes machine reading as having the least context available – “limited to a few words or eliminated altogether, as in a word-frequency list.” But a computer doesn’t read a word-frequency list, it creates it. A human reads it. During the reading process, the human-created algorithms that Hayles calls a computer have every single work it analyzes available as a context: much larger than a single work or a few hyperlinked works.

Hayle and I arrived at the same conclusion, through different methods. When she suggests that “literary studies teaches literacies across a range of media forms, including print and digital, and focuses on interpretation and analysis of patterns, meaning, and context through close, hyper-, and machien reading practices” I’m right there with her. But when she suggests that engaging in hyper-reading negatively influences one’s ability to engage in close reading, I cannot agree. We engage in these practices for different purposes, and it’s misrepresentative to analyze them on the goals of each other. They’re best used together, as a suite of tools, to give scholars the best available understanding of the work they aim to analyze.