It took me awhile to understand what Hayles was talking about as I read her piece on close, hyper, and machine reading. It was definitely targeted to people with a working definition of close reading because the piece never gives a clear answer on what that is. The best definition I can come up with is “reading, with close attention paid to literary techniques and concepts”. Close reading involves thinking about and looking for themes, intent, and rhetorial devices in the text. The definitions Hayles quotes are laughably nebulous. One “more specific” definition she gives is “a modern academic practice with an inaugural moment, a period of development, and now perhaps a period of decline.” This says absolutely nothing about what close reading is. The same could be said about Mendelian genetics or many, many other practices, but they aren’t close reading. I don’t know why Hayles included this confusing and unhelpful definitions.

Hyperreading is better defined in the text, since it is a term that Hayles helped create. Hyperreading is the type of reading we do online. It may involve links, multiple pages, navigation menus, and other web-type elements. It involves scanning and skimming techniques and is more interested in getting the gist of a document of set of documents than a close-reading-style analysis.

Machine reading, as Hayles describes it, seems to be more about word counting and concordances than other types of reading. In the five years since this piece was written, machine summaries have become much more powerful tools in analyzing text. I can see a machine-read summary being a very useful thing to have while reading a long text, just to keep things in context. Things like word vectors, thought vectors, and sentence vectors are also interesting in that they allow computers to cluster these abstract objects into a Euclidean space where more traditional numerical methods can be applied to text results. I would be very interested in seeing Hayles’ thoughts on more recent machine reading developments.

I found some of Hayles’ arguments and examples to be a bit tenuous. At one point she writes on the important of anecdotal evidences, calling it “perhaps the most valuable” tool for analyzing the trends in reading techniques. She writes, “We make daily observations that either confirm or disconfirm … scientific literature.” While this may be partly true, it is also almost the definition of confirmation bias. If a person has an idea in mind about how people might read and trust their own observations over those of well-crafted studies, they are at great risk of just reaffirming their own opinions. Another time, Hayles describes how two sisters, one literate and one not, apparently think differently because of their literacy levels. This is really interesting, but Hayles uses it in an argument that print reading skills lead to high-level cognitive abilities when compared to hyper reading. The use of this example is incorrect here because while there is clearly an effect of literacy on thought in the story, there is no suggestion that the same effects wouldn’t come from hyper reading literacy. This paper had some really interesting points but I kind of distrust it because of how it was at times very vague and at other times used what I feel were dubious supports to its arguments.