User:Joca/grad seminar 0410

Synopses

Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities approaches to interface theory. Culture Machine, 12.

In this paper Johanna Drucker formulates a number of principles to create a theory of interface from the perspective of the humanities. Her motivation for that is the move of academic authoring and reading environments from print media to digital media. This creates the need to reflect on and formulate the theory of interface that is behind the interfaces academics use daily.

Traditionally interface is the domain of engineering and developed into its own field: Human Computer Interaction. This is embodies in the task-oriented and efficiency driven approach in interface design. Drucker finds this mechanistic approach problematic, because it looks at people as users of an interface, and not subjects whose engagement with a digital environment can be analyzed with the insights from critical study.

Building on that she looks for a definition of interface that fits this approach. She cites different authors: Chartiers (2004) and his concept of embodiment, Nunberg (1993) who applied embodiment on the context of digital interfaces and relates it to how it mediates cognitive and intellectual activities. Then Drucker refers to authors from the field of HCI, namely Laurel (1990) in which interface is the necessary contact between interactors and tasks to allow certain functions to be executed. She concludes with Long (1989), a sociologist that defined interface as 'a critical point of interaction between life worlds.'

Showing these definitions from different fields, she states that, although diverse, there is much reason to jettison the idea of the interface as a thing. Drucker sees interface as the combination of what we read and how we read, brought together by engagement. Thus, it is a provocation to cognitive experience.

By seeing the interface as a collection of protocols and activities, mediated by the graphical cues, content and the viewer, Drucker tries to find connection practices from mediastudies. One example she draws is from graphical reading practices. McCloud (1993) looks into ways we connect different frames in a comic. A category of connection that relates to digital interface is the non-sequitur: We shift from text to advertisement to video without a visible connection. But unlike comics, there is no existing narrative to organize these tasks of correlation. As an alternative to the narrative, Drucker brings up Frame Analysis by Goffman (1974). It is an schematic outline of basic principles of translating information to cognitive value. It tries to analyze a combination of information, viewer and graphical interface in terms of relations rather then entities. As there is an interaction between the environment and the viewer, which differ at each reading of a text, there are n-dimensional ways to process the interfaced information.

Drucker concludes that her sketch of interface theory from a humanities perspective involves a synthesis of multiple approaches: graphical reading, frame analysis, and constructivist approaches to subject. She states that these are fundamental to understand the dynamics of the codependent relations between (digital) environments and cognitive events.

Next to a mechanistic view on interface, a different perspective should be accepted according to Drucker: one where ambiguity and uncertainty have a place, and accomodate for a reading experience that is probabilistic.