User:Kim/reading/N. Katherine Hayles: Writing Machines

MIT Press, 2002

chapter 2

Material metaphors, Technotexts and Media-Specific Analysis

• "metaphor" from root meaning "bearing across" (transfer of sense between two associated)
• Hayles coins Material Metaphor foregrounds relation/ back and forth between words and physical artifacts
  • take the book for example, so obvious we barely recognize it:
    • page defines a unit of reading
    • binding pages indicates, fixates order of reading
    • opacity of paper defining if page appears linear, sequencial or interpenetrating and simultaneous
• inscription technologies is device that initiate material changes that can be read as marks
  • in print books: words are ink marks left on paper
  • in computer text: computer changes electric polarities and correlates these changes with binary code
• Technotexts connects technology that produces texts to the texts verbal constructions
  • parallels to Hypertetxts (follows min. 3 characteristics: multiple reading paths, chunked text and linking mechanism)
• media constantly engage in recursive dynamic of imitating each other

Media Specific Analysis insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world.

• materiality emerges from interactions between physical properties and a works artistic strategies

chapter 3

Entering the Electronic Environment

word was interwoven with world

chapter 4

Electronic Literature as Technotext: Lexia to Perplexia

• computers are more than hardware and software: they produce environments
• hence the need for material metaphors, they control, direct and amplify traffic between physical actions and imaginative world a work creates

reminding us that the computer is also a writer

chapter 6

A Humument as Technotext: Layered Topographies

Visually these rivers of whitespace trickle down the page, often branching into multiple pathways. Other devices creating hypertextual profusion are leaky borders.

• two diemnsional page is stretched into something three dimensional, a topographic space
• text as a space to explore rather than a line to follow

chapter 7

Embodiments of Material Metaphors

Even when the interface is rendered as transparent as possible, this very immediacy is itself an act of meaning-making that positions the reader in a specific material relationship

The implication for studies of technologies and literature is that the materiality of inscription thoroughly interpenetrates the represented world.