Particularly with the Hayles reading, I found myself examining how the highlighted manners of reading affected my own comprehension and reading style between various modes. Especially with hyperreading, I found myself exhibiting the ‘f pattern’ of reading in real time with the article itself, forcing me to confront how deeply I was actually comprehending the material, subsequently returning and re-reading sections I had not paid attention to. Similarly, the practice of following nested trees of hyperlinks is something I do often, particularly within self-contained communities of short stories that draw upon one another to flesh out and create a consistent world. This practice is at once frustrating as it can lead to forgetting the original text, but can also provide entirely new modes of reading in the digital landscape, similarly to the blocks of text being revealed in Hayles’ example of The Patchwork Girl to simulate a fractured nature. Close reading, meanwhile, is something that never really seems to leave my conception of what it means to read a text, being constantly reinforced as the literary ‘gold standard’ by wider academia. It finds its place as central to the digital sphere too dues to its close synergies with machne reading. This confluence of both machine and close reading can elevate our literary analysis within the modern age to include pattern recognition and highlight trends that may otherwise be entirely missed, representing the fusion of human and digital perspectives that so characterises Digital humanities.
