N. Katherine Hayles
Welcome to my website. Here you will find links to the usual scholarly material, including my CV, books, articles, videotaped lectures, and other material. This body of work traces a trajectory that began when, in graduate school, I made the life-altering decision to switch from chemistry to literature. I soon discovered, as Valentine puts it in Stoppard’s play Arcadia, that “everything I thought I knew was wrong,” including such basic assumptions as how one demonstrates learning, what counts as evidence, how one makes an argument, and so forth. Yet despite the new (to me) disciplinary environment into which I was plunging, I began noticing uncanny similarities between current literary theory and texts and the contemporary scientific models with which I was familiar. How to account for these convergences fascinated me and provided the impetus for my first three books, where I grappled with it in various contexts and using a spectrum of different strategies. Since two of those books (The Cosmic Web and Chaos and Order) are now out of print, I have provided pdfs for those who may find them of interest.
In addition, you will find some of my newer work here, including my article on hyper/deep attention. I would like to call special attention to How We Think: The Digital Companion, which takes some of the “raw data” I used to research my print book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis and makes it available for others to use, either to test my conclusions or to ask entirely different questions. Readers of Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions will find valuable material in the Digital Companion; researchers in the Digital Humanities will find the full audio files of interviews with prominent scholars in this area; and aficionados of telegraph code books will find an extremely useful interface through which to access the entire corpus of code books that are online.
February 18, 2013
Re-visiting My Mother Was a Computer
Recently I had the strange and pleasant experience of re-visiting one of my books with a couple of graduate students doing an independent study with me on computation. I have suspected for some time that My Mother Was a Computer is the least-understood of my books, and my session with the students confirmed my view. The problem, of course, is not with readers but with my writing; somehow I did not sufficiently convey the powerful idea at the center of that text. So I will give it another go here. Intermediation refers to an idea that originally came out of research on simulations and complexity science. One of the long-standing problems with simulation is how one bootstraps from emergent patterns on one level of complexity—let us say, the one-dimensional cellular automata that Steven Wolfram shows can simulate a Universal Turing Machine—and more complex phenomena such as we see all around us. How do we get from cellular automata to cells, from cells to organisms?
... ... ...