1. Filtering

1. Filtering

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Reading—of whatever sort—is a process of selection. To every text readers bring schema or framing notions that focus their attention on some but not all of the marked features of the text and which also supply non-linguistic clues not marked in the text.9 If I believe a text is a romance, certain of its features stand out. If I believe it to be a drama, others do. Characters are given different postures in my imagination and certain passages leap up from the page or screen. The impact of such framing on readers is nicely captured in Stanley Fish’s justly famous experiment recounted in Is There a Text in this Class? As he tells the story, Fish taught two courses back to back in the same classroom. The first was a course in linguistics and the second in 17th century poetry. As the students came into the poetry class, they saw what appeared to be a 17th century emblem poem on the blackboard. In fact, it was a list of linguists which happened accidentally to look like a cross. The inevitable occurred: the poetry class quite successfully read the list of names as if it were a poem providing anecdotal evidence for Fish’s theses about reading communities. During this event Fish’s students in their efforts to assemble a structure of meaning used a framework which was not “in” the text on the board in order to interpret its features. As inheritors of the work of Fish and other reading theorists, most teachers now readily admit that reading is a highly selective process, one in which the majority of details are forgotten, leaving the reader to be content with plot summaries, thumbnail characterizations, representative scenes, and themes, most of them memorable because they can be assimilated into what Frank Smith taught us to call “cognitive structures” (71).

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Hyper-reading of the “constructive” variety is, in my experience, a more selective process than the reading of printed texts customarily allows. No matter where you align yourself in the debate about how much the text influences the reader over against how much is the text a subject of the reader’s imagination, nonetheless the text is usually understood to provoke the selection of its details. In constructive hyper-reading, the selection criteria employed often govern the reader’s interest before the texts are even found. Once these criteria are activated, readers can raid the texts uncovered by their search results in order to assemble their details as ANOTHER text which is, so to speak, re-authored by the reader. The extreme instance of such reading is a search engine. This statement requires a commentary before I can continue the argument in which it is embedded, so forgive me for digressing a bit... I expect my readers to object to my including a computer program in my description of the process of reading. So, let me offer some reasons why I believe it is necessary to do so.

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When I read an encyclopedia, I search through its contents for the information I wish to obtain. If I were teaching someone how to read an encyclopedia, I would surely acquaint them with search techniques and encourage them to attend to the way the book is indexed. Were they not familiar with the roman alphabet, I would invite them to learn it since it is a cognitive map which is essential to reading an encyclopedia. The deployment of the alphabet as a cognitive map is intrinsic to the act of reading an encyclopedia. I mention this trivial matter because many of the cognitive frames we use in reading are so familiar as to appear to be trivial; but situations wherein a reader is not acquainted with them instantly reveal their non-trivial function in acts of reading. If you admit that sorting frameworks like the alphabet are an aspect of the cognitive process we call reading, then you would probably see the justice in saying that the index of a book is a crucial framework for reading it. One has only to attempt to retrieve the information you believe you have learned from a book without an index (and those pre-indexes we call tables of contents) to realize how significant key words are in processing the features of a text.10 Now, to return to my argument.

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Conceptual frameworks are crucial to reading acts because they allow for the selection of relevant textual details. An indexing program speeds up this characteristic reading activity by allowing readers to track the occurrence and reoccurrence of key terms. It’s not that an indexing program does something that a person does NOT do; it merely does it faster, more thoroughly, and more systematically. It’s a machine that extends our intellectual capacity in way parallel to the way eye glasses extend our sight. The glasses do not see, we see. The index does not read, we read. However, in considering indexing as an extension of our reading acts, we need to acknowledge that we borrow a technique of reading (processing a text) from another reader of similar texts—the person who wrote the indexing program who built into it the principles of selectivity by which we search the text’s features. When one thinks of surfing/reading the world-wide text we call the Web, using search engines to do so is indispensable. I believe we need to consider these programs as vital components in the engine of our CAR.

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Hoping that you accept my personification of the programs like Zyindex when I describe such programs as the reading techniques of a designer, I’ll now offer them as evidence for the claim I was making—that constructive hyper-reading (reader-directed, screen-based, computer-assisted reading) has a higher degree of selectivity than the print based, un-assisted reading we do away from our terminals. This claim can also be restated in a more phenomino-logical manner. Surfers of the Web who read its texts by using search engines like Yahoo select from its world-wide storehouse a very modest sample of texts from those available, albeit ones that are captured by the vested interests of the surfers. With respect to filtering, the scale introduced into our consideration of reading by instancing the Web is inordinate. To keep the issue in perspective, we need to remind ourselves that selectivity corresponds to relevance and therefore to the “reduction of uncertainty” upon which meaning depends (Smith 185).