Archaeoethnologica: Anthropological Theory Nº 25/1 - 2025
+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/05/anthropological-theory-n-251-2025.html
#Anthropology #body #frontier #liminarity #socialtheory #AnthropologicalTheory #HistoryofReligions #materiality #journals
Archaeoethnologica: Anthropological Theory Nº 25/1 - 2025
+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/05/anthropological-theory-n-251-2025.html
#Anthropology #body #frontier #liminarity #socialtheory #AnthropologicalTheory #HistoryofReligions #materiality #journals
The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age
What I’m exploring here are the joys which can be taken in the writing process, as well as how this shapes our relation as academics to the machine writing which LLMs are capable of producing. I use this phrase to indicate a specific focus on how LLMs can be used for writing, as opposed to the many other purposes they can serve. It also foregrounds the continuities between machine writing using LLMs and the far more extensive history of writing, including the many machines other than LLMs which have been used as part of the writing process.
Word processors, typewriters and printing presses have all been integral to how we produce written work. If we’re comfortable stretching the definition of ‘machine’ to encompass all the artifacts used in the writing process, we would obviously include pens, pencils and papers. Once we start to search for the objects we draw upon in writing, we find numerous tools that become so ready-to-hand that we rarely reflect on their nature or the role they play for us. What’s important is being sensitive to the things (in the broadest sense) we use to write, as well as what this means for our experience of writing. This helps ensure that we don’t imagine the introduction of technological artifacts, such as conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT which are powered by LLMs, into the writing process is something entirely new. What’s new are the nature of these artifacts and what they mean for our writing practice.
This focus on the materiality of writing might seem immensely obvious. If you’re an academic with a love for physically writing with a high quality pen and ornate stationery, it will already be clear to you that writing is a material practice. It’s also likely you’ll already have a sense of how the experience of writing is inflected through the materiality of the objects we rely upon. As the writing scholar Helen Sword (2023: loc 2196) reflects: “I love manipulating digital text on my computer screen: cutting and pasting, resurrecting deleted phrases with a single keystroke, messing around with colors and fonts, highlighting words so that I can return to my document later and see at a glance which sections need attention.”
This isn’t an experience I share. I appreciate the practical affordances of editing which Sword points to but I don’t feel enthusiasm for them. What I love is the immediacy with which one can write in a cloud-based writing system. I often write snippets on my phone when I’m struck by an idea which Ulysses, my writing software, will ensure is securely lodged within my database waiting to be reviewed and refined at a later point in time. I often switch between my Kindle app and Ulysses on my iPad in order to respond to something I have read while the idea is still fresh to me. The fact that these snippets, produced in a diverse range of situations and energized by that diversity, will be reliably waiting for when I sit down for more extended writing and editing with my laptop or desktop is something I really love about the materiality of my writing process.
It’s not that I resent or reject the editing capabilities which figure so forcefully in Sword’s experience, it’s simply that my embodied pleasures in academic writing come from elsewhere. In contrast, I struggle to find any utility in writing with a pen despite the appreciation of ornate stationery which I’ve felt since I was a child. It’s such a slow process that I find it frustrating whereas touch typing for thirty years means that I can type as quickly as I think.
I can still find satisfaction in handwriting though, even if the degrading of my penmanship through underuse means that ensuring the legibility of what I have written slows me down even further. I had a free afternoon on a recent holiday in which I was suddenly struck by the impulse to write. I purchased an ornate notebook and nice pen from the nearest bookshop and then sat under a tree and spent a couple of hours slowly recording thoughts which I’d felt germinating that morning. I’m not sure why a whole series of insights had suddenly occurred to me in the middle of a holiday in which I had genuinely not thought about work for days. I suspect they occurred to me because I had detached from my work, including removing work e-mail from my phone.
I’m glad I could feel these insights taking root and that I intuited I needed a notebook rather than my usual note-taking app because a whole series of things I had struggled with intellectually suddenly fell into place. There wasn’t a pleasure to writing slowly but there was clearly an affordance found in it. The enforced slowness of writing with a pen helped those insights gently emerge, even if it took a bit of work to decipher them when I returned home. The fact it was a beautiful summer’s day in an idyllic churchyard garden where the adjacent cafe had kindly left some deckchairs clearly helped as well.
The embodied pleasures we take in writing are varied and often situational. It’s not just that different authors have different inclinations. What works for us at one juncture might not work for us at another. The satisfaction I found in writing with a pen in that Cambridge churchyard was a rare instance where the affordance of handwriting was exactly what my creative process needed at that specific moment. If I had tried to record these germinating insights through my usual apps I would have undoubtedly have been tugged into a different mentality depriving me of the space in which this perspective could unfold.
It’s not that one mode of writing is more authentic or enriching in itself. Rather, experiences of authenticity and enrichment through writing rest upon understanding how the affordances (what the objects enable us to do and what they constrain us from doing) and the embodied satisfactions (the rewarding feelings which tend to be associated with or absent from their use) play out in specific settings with goals and pressures which vary between us.
For example, there are times when writing by hand has been helpful in preparing for a talk because it helps me isolate the core elements of my message. But if I’ve left it to the last minute to prepare, with the need to make notes as I was on the way to the venue, the slowness of my writing and the unreliable legibility of the ensuing text would be too much of an obstacle. Sword (2023: loc 400) vividly captures how different modalities manifest themselves in different experiences of writing, involving strikingly different pleasures found in what some might imagine was an overlapping process:
“When I touch-type on my computer keyboard, the pleasure that I feel is almost purely intellectual; my physical surroundings seem to fade away as my fingers surrender to the flow of ideas. When I write by hand in a notebook, by contrast, my pleasure becomes more intensely embodied; my heartbeat slows along with the pace of my pen, and months or years afterward I find that I can still recall physical details such as the chair I sat in while I was writing a particular passage, the weight and size of the notebook in my hand, even the temperature of the air and the quality of the light.”
The physicality of writing with a pen is easy to grasp. As Baron (2023: 202) observes “Those of us logging years of writing by hand still bear our ‘writer’s bump,’ that callus on the inside of the first joint of the middle finger of the writing hand.” I was struck when reading Lacan’s Seminar X, a transcript of his annual seminar in Paris, how an aside about the physical difficulties often associated with writing could assume everyone in the room shared that experience. It left me with a sudden apprehension of an entirely different academic culture to the one I inhabit as a millennial academic who began a PhD in 2008. I understood intellectually that handwriting was ubiquitous prior to the personal computer, but this was the first time I was left with a more intuitive sense of what a radically different academic culture that entailed.
It can be useful to reflect on how this has changed in order to sensitize ourselves to what remains an embodied experience of writing with digital technology. I learned to touch type at a young age. I can’t remember why I taught myself to touch type, nor it seems can my parents. But from the vantage point of my late 30s it strikes me as the most useful decision I ever made. The ubiquity of typing in our lives means that it can often fall under the radar, such that we don’t think comparatively about technique any more than we would find ourselves musing about the different ways in which adults brush their teeth.
Touch typing, relying on the feel of the keys to guide your hands around the keyboard, obviously constitutes a vastly superior physical technique for typing. It is vastly quicker, avoids the need to stare down at the keyboard and enables an immersion in the process of typing. A recent test I took online suggests I can type at 140 words per minute if I’m willing to make some mistakes. If writing in its early stages is a matter of expressing thought, touch typing means that you can physically write as quickly as you can think. This is hugely significant for the process of writing, even if it might not be unambiguously positive.
As we confront the emergence of AI writing tools, we should approach them with the same reflective awareness we might bring to choosing between pen and keyboard. How do these tools shape our thinking? What pleasures do they afford or deny us? What modes of engagement do they facilitate or constrain? Just as I discovered that handwriting occasionally offers creative insights that digital tools cannot, we may find that AI tools have their place within a thoughtful writing practice: neither wholesale replacements for human creativity nor mere gimmicks to be dismissed.
The landscape we inhabit as academics can be immensely confusing because the options available to us now have little relationship to those many of us confronted in the formative stages of our careers. The reflexivity I’ve illustrated here, in which we engage in a dialogue between the tools we are using and the practices in which we are deploying them, becomes essential in order to realize the emerging opportunities for academics and avoid the potential pitfalls.
#academicWriting #digitalScholarship #generativeAI #helenSword #materiality #objects #writing
Current Global #Digital #Stack
🔎
#Data #AI
#Software
#Cloud
#IoT
#Networks
#Chips
#Materiality
and its geopolitical players (and aftermath)
🌏
#USA
#China
#Germany
#Korea
#Japan
#Taiwan
#Netherlands
#Russia
House of Day. Those facade panels are 🤌🏼
https://zarcola.com/projects/larun-house/
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#architecture #italy #larunhouse #zarcolaarchetti #haptic #grain #texture #materiality #adaptivereuse
Postbinary Genetic Sequences is a series of 13 computationally woven tapestries that challenge traditional biological and sociocultural frameworks through hand-woven tapestries made from the genetic data of various organisms. it sparks curiosity about the complexities of existence and promotes a nuanced understanding of life's intricacies through the interplay of genetic data, art, and activism.
#genetics #bioart #biodesign #weaving #fiber #materiality #textiles
Kee Avil’s new album Spine, out May 3 on Constellation Records.
Art CoDirection by Jacqueline Beaumont 🦠
HMU by Carole the artist 💋
Photography by Fatine Violette 📸
📖 Maria Romeiras Amado @mariaromeiras was one of the editors (woth Pieter Verstraete and Carlos Manique) of the dossier "New cultural histories of disability and education" published in Paedagogica Historica.
👉 https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cpdh20/60/4
#Histodons #DisabilityHistory #HistoryOfEducation #Disability #NewCulturalHistory #Historiography #Materiality #ColonialHistory
2 x ethnologist / anthropologist
@ The Institute of Ethnology, #CzechAcademyOfSciences
"2 positions of ethnologist/anthropologist for the four-year project OP JAK "Land gone wild: archaeological and transdisciplinary research of resilience strategies in 20th century." The project focuses on the research of #archaeology, #materiality and individual, collective and landscape #memory of 20th century #Czechia
Come to work with us!
Deadline: 15/01/2024
https://www.eu.avcr.cz/en/news/Applications-for-2-positions-of-ethnologist---anthropologist-invited/
Abrimos as inscrições (gratuitas) para o Joint International Workshop IHC / Drexel University, subordinado ao tema "Materialidades da violência, história e historiografia".
Tal como no ano passado, será acolhido pela Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, e está agendado para 19 e 20 de Dezembro.
ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/events/materialidades-violencia-historia/
#Histodons #Historiography #Materiality #Violence #Historiografia #Materialidades #Violência #EnvHist #HistoryOfScience #TechHistory #HistóriaAmbiental #HistóriaDaCiência
"Irish Materialisms" by Colleen Taylor provides 5 original case studies on nonhuman agents in Irish colonial culture, in #IrishLiterature: on coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and the pig 🐖
#nonhuman #materiality
#PostcolonialStudies #IrishStudies #LiteraryStudies #Irishness
OnlineFirst - "Material subjects: Wetland enclosure and the making of a speculative peasantry in peri-urban Vientiane" by Wanjing Kelly Chen and Miles Kenney-Lazar:
#periurbanization #agrariansubjectivity #materiality #dispossession #Vientiane
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25148486241285646
Archaeoethnologica: Mateliality & Diplomacy in Ancient Mediterranean - Book / Materialidade e Diplomacia no Mediterrâneo Antigo - Livro
+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2024/09/materialidade-e-diplomacia-no.html
#Archaeology #AncientHistory #Diplomacy #War #Gallia #Greece #Iberia #hellenistic #Rome #NearEast #Africa #CentralEurope #Numidia #AncientDiplomacy #AncientLaw #Materiality #materialculture
Archaeoethnologica: Mateliality & Diplomacy in Ancient Mediterranean - Book / Materialidade e Diplomacia no Mediterrâneo Antigo - Livro
+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2024/09/materialidade-e-diplomacia-no.html
#Archaeology #AncientHistory #Diplomacy #War #Gallia #Greece #Iberia #hellenistic #Rome #NearEast #Africa #CentralEurope #Numidia #AncientDiplomacy #AncientLaw #Materiality #materialculture
Last but not least in our session: Wenyi Shang (presenting), Yuqi Chen, Ryan Dubnicek, Ryan Cordell and Stephen J Downie: "Interplays Between #Materiality and Content in #Book History: Evidence from 16th–19th Century #Chinese and #English Books", at #DH2024. #BookHistory
They used #HathiTrust Extracted Features, which is very cool of course. Book size and print size interact in interesting, and different, ways in Chinese and English.
New #introduction: I’m the Mark Andrews Fellow in Book Science at OBNS (Old Books New Science) Lab, University of Toronto, and a #MedievalManuscripts scholar and cataloguer. My research mainly focuses on later #medieval European #manuscripts with an emphasis on scientific and #quantitative methods, #materiality, and provenance studies. 📚 📜 🔬 📊
#BookScience #codicology #palaeography #BookHistory #HeritageScience #parchment #DigitalHumanities #quant #statistics
Are you a member of @ANZAMEMS Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies? Make sure to join the #ECR #postgraduate reading group - next session is June 25.
@rejinl
It has a ribbon tacket in the upper corner.
Many items in this series are legal documents so I don't want to separate or cut the attachment material.
CONGRATULATIONS to University of York's Kirsty Ryder who passed her viva with minor corrections.
Her PhD was "Purple, White & Green: The Material Construction of Women’s Suffrage," examining women's liberation through the #materiality of direct action.
FORESIGHT + MATERIALITY. New book about materiality in design. A hundred years ago, who would have thought our world would be made of plastic, polyester, and particle board. A hundred years from now, maybe our world will be made of self-healing masonry, bacterial-sculpted blocks, and photosynthetic biocomposites. Designing with living organisms.
#design #ProductDesign #MaterialScience #engineering #materiality #futurism #foresight #architecture #LivingArchitecture #biology #Microbiology
