The Ecology of Reading in the Digital Humanities: Hypertext, Distant Reading, and the Politics of Attention
Abstract
This paper examines the transformation of reading practices in the digital humanities, arguing that the discipline must move beyond the binary of close versus distant reading, and sustained versus hyper-attention. Drawing on Matthewman's study of hypertext in English Literature classrooms, Salmi's defence of distant reading in cultural history, Brooker and Antonini's aesthetics of hypertext, Brady's ecological approach to reading, Liu's critique of the digital humanities, and Kirschenbaum's account of the field's emergence, the paper demonstrates that reading has always been ecological—involving dynamic forms of attention and deep socio-material entanglement. The digital humanities expand this ecology through hypertext, distant reading, and new forms of textual analysis. However, as Liu argues, the field lacks critical awareness of its own institutional and social implications. The paper concludes that a truly critical digital humanities must combine methodological innovation with cultural critique.
Research Question
How do the digital humanities transform the practice of reading—from close reading to distant reading, from print to hypertext, from sustained to hyper-attention—and to what extent can an ecological understanding of reading provide a framework for a critical digital humanities that combines methodological innovation with cultural critique?
Hypothesis
It is hypothesized that the digital humanities represent not merely a technological shift but an epistemological one. The movement from close reading to distant reading (Salmi), from print to hypertext (Matthewman; Brooker and Antonini), and from sustained to hyper-attention (Brady) challenges traditional conceptions of literary study. However, rather than replacing close reading with distant reading or sustained attention with hyper-attention, the digital humanities should be understood ecologically as expanding the repertoire of reading practices. At the same time, the field has not yet developed adequate cultural-critical awareness of its own institutional and social implications; a truly critical digital humanities must combine methodological innovation with cultural critique (Liu; Kirschenbaum).
Introduction: The Digital Turn and the Crisis of Reading
The digital humanities are in a state of rapid expansion. As Matthew Kirschenbaum observes, "Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities" (Kirschenbaum 3). The field has grown from a small group of researchers into a movement with its own organizations, journals, conferences, and funding streams. Yet this expansion has generated a crisis of reading. What does it mean to read in the digital age? How do digital technologies transform the practices of close reading, textual analysis, and literary interpretation?
This paper argues that the digital humanities should be understood as expanding the ecology of reading rather than replacing traditional practices. Drawing on six recent studies—Sasha Matthewman's analysis of hypertext in English Literature classrooms, Hannu Salmi's defence of distant reading in cultural history, Samuel Brooker and Alessio Antonini's aesthetics of hypertext, Alison Brady's ecological approach to reading, Alan Liu's critique of the digital humanities, and Matthew Kirschenbaum's account of the field's emergence—the paper demonstrates that reading has always been ecological, involving dynamic forms of attention and deep socio-material entanglement. The digital humanities expand this ecology through hypertext, distant reading, and new forms of textual analysis. However, as Liu argues, the field lacks critical awareness of its own institutional and social implications. A truly critical digital humanities must combine methodological innovation with cultural critique.
The argument proceeds in four movements. The first section examines the clash between traditional literary culture and digital technology, drawing on Matthewman's study of A-Level Literature students and Brooker and Antonini's aesthetics of hypertext. The second section turns to Salmi's argument for complementarity between close and distant reading. The third section explores Brady's ecology of attention. The fourth section examines Liu's critique of the digital humanities and Kirschenbaum's account of the field's emergence.
The Clash of Subject Cultures: Literature vs. ICT
Sasha Matthewman's study of an Advanced Level Literature classroom in England provides a compelling case study of the clash between traditional literary culture and digital technology. The students in her study were asked to create hypertexts about Great War literature—websites that would display their textual analysis and draw links between texts and contexts (Matthewman 79). The experiment revealed a fundamental dissonance between the "subject culture" of English Literature and the "subject culture" of ICT. As Matthewman explains, "a 'subject culture' may be understood as the shared history and understanding of the curriculum content and the pedagogical methods and discourses to be expected within a subject domain" (Matthewman 71). English Literature, with its emphasis on the book, close reading, and the traditional analytical essay, was resistant to the hypertextual, associative, and digital logic of the project.
The students' resistance was vocal. Emily, one of the most articulate students, declared that "computers should be burnt to the ground" (Matthewman 91). Another student, Naomi, explained: "you don't think of English as an ICT based thing... it's just too modern really for English. I think it's a very personal subject when you're reading" (Matthewman 81). The students associated literature with the materiality of the book, with sustained and reflective reading, and with face-to-face discussion led by the teacher. The hypertext project, by contrast, seemed to them to reduce literary analysis to "copying and pasting from the internet or typing out what you've already got" (Matthewman 83).
Matthewman's study reveals that the clash between literature and ICT is not merely a matter of technical proficiency but of competing conceptions of what reading is. For the students, reading was a slow, sustained, and solitary activity—what Brady would call "sustained attention" (Brady 4). The hypertext project, by contrast, encouraged "hyper-attention"—rapid switching between different information streams, scanning and skimming, and the making of superficial links (Matthewman 88). The students felt that this mode of reading was incompatible with the demands of literary study.
Brooker and Antonini's aesthetics of hypertext provides a theoretical framework for understanding this clash. They argue that the link in hypertext is not a neutral technical device but a semiotic sign, consisting of a source and a destination, a signifier and a signified (Brooker and Antonini 8). The decision to link or not to link is an aesthetic and ethical choice. As they put it, "To link or not to link—and to what—is an equivalently nuanced question for hypertext" (Brooker and Antonini 7). In closed hypertext, such decisions are more limited in scope; in open hypertext, however, links represent a form of delegation (or sharing) of authority and responsibility (Brooker and Antonini 7).
This insight helps to explain the students' resistance. When Matthewman's students were asked to create hypertexts, they were being asked to make aesthetic and ethical choices about which texts to link, which contexts to include, and which interpretations to privilege. These choices were not neutral; they carried implications for what counted as literary analysis. The students' resistance was not simply a refusal of technology but a defence of a particular conception of reading—one that valued sustained attention, close reading, and the authority of the book. As Brooker and Antonini argue, "Decisions concerning name links are events and potential 'hooks' for subsequent experiences" (Brooker and Antonini 23). The students' resistance was a refusal of the particular experience of reading that the hypertext project was trying to engineer.
Beyond Close and Distant Reading
If Matthewman's study reveals the resistance to digital reading practices, Hannu Salmi's work on distant reading in cultural history offers a way beyond the binary of close versus distant reading. Salmi argues that distant reading methods can be applied to the analysis of cultural transmission in the past, where it is often essential to combine "the study of textual signification with the idea of textuality as material flow" (Salmi 1). Drawing on Franco Moretti's concept of distant reading, Salmi notes researchers must "focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems" (Moretti qtd. in Salmi 2). Salmi demonstrates how computational methods can reveal patterns of text reuse and amplification that would be invisible to the close reader.
Salmi's case study of the Finnish press is illustrative. Using text reuse detection software, his project analysed five million pages from the advent of newspaper publishing in Finland in 1771 until 1920, finding 13.8 million clusters of reused texts or text passages (Salmi 10). These clusters revealed that 85% of all clusters occurred within one year, while the rest were longer textual chains; almost 290 clusters spanned over 140 years (Salmi 11). The case of Johann Strauss the Elder's Sophie Waltz demonstrates how a single text could be amplified through repetition: the story appeared in a Finnish newspaper in 1843, but the database revealed that it had been published earlier in a Finnish magazine in 1840 and in a Stockholm newspaper in 1842 (Salmi 13). The story continued to circulate throughout the century, appearing in an Austrian magazine in 1890 (Salmi 14).
Salmi argues that this material flow of texts constitutes a form of cultural amplification. "Repetition, or text reuse in itself, is not enough to assess the ramifications of the flow of texts," he writes. "It is important to pay attention to how reused texts aggregate and get prominence in the past" (Salmi 13). Distant reading, in this account, is not opposed to close reading but complements it: "The article has aimed at bridging the ideas of 'closeness' and 'distance' and argued that by applying distant reading as a methodological strategy, texts can be interpreted as material flow, which again enriches the interpretation of texts" (Salmi 14).
This argument has significant implications for the digital humanities. If reading is always embedded in a material flow of texts—what Salmi calls "textuality as material flow" (Salmi 1)—then the choice between close and distant reading is a false binary. The digital humanities expand the repertoire of reading practices by adding distant reading to the traditional toolkit of close reading. As Salmi puts it, "close reading and distant reading... are not opposites but complementary practices that can be used simultaneously and in parallel to enrich the analysis at hand" (Salmi 14).
This ecological understanding of reading is developed further by Alison Brady. Drawing on Italo Calvino's experimental novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Brady argues that reading has always involved "dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call 'hyper' as well as 'sustained'" (Brady 1). The novel, which is precisely concerned with the nature of reading, arose within the context of the then-burgeoning field of the digital humanities. It does not offer a straightforwardly cautionary or celebratory rendering of reading in the digital age but instead "showcases reading in an ecological sense—namely, as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention... and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world" (Brady 1).
Brady's argument is that the binary between sustained and hyper-attention, between slow and fast reading, between the natural and the artificial, is misguided. Reading has always involved both modes of attention. As she puts it, "the attentional orientation deployed in reading has never been solely slow and sustained, in conflict with or threatened by the hyper-attentiveness we experience in online settings" (Brady 5). Even the most sustained reading involves moments of drift, of wayfaring, of following associations beyond the text. Citing Thomas Lewis and Peter Hyland, Brady describes reading as a form of "drifting"—a rhythmic drifting back and forth between summiting and browsing. This is not a failure of attention but a different mode of attention, one that has always been part of reading.
The Ecology of Attention
Brady's ecological approach offers a way beyond the anxiety about digital distraction. Instead of lamenting the loss of sustained attention, we should recognize that attention is always ecological—shaped by the socio-material environment in which reading occurs. "Attention is never one 'thing,'" she writes, "but must instead be understood in interaction with the 'ensemble of scientific, political, environmental, social and mental ecologies' that surround us" (Brady 9). This means that the digital environment is not simply a threat to reading but a new ecology in which reading takes place. The task is not to resist this ecology but to understand it and to negotiate between different forms of attention within it.
Brady's ecological approach has significant implications for the digital humanities. If reading is always ecological—involving dynamic forms of attention and deep socio-material entanglement—then the digital humanities are not a departure from traditional reading but an expansion of its ecology. The hypertext, the database, the digital archive, the text-mining tool—these are not replacements for the book but new elements in the ecology of reading.
This is precisely the argument that Alan Liu makes in his report on the state of the digital humanities. Liu argues that the digital humanities have recently expanded in five ways: the unification of foundational concepts; integration with the past; rejoining the social; scaling up; and expanding the interpretive paradigm (Liu 4–16). These expansions have made the field "capacious and multifaceted enough to serve as a credible allegory of the humanities of the future" (Liu 21).
Yet Liu's report ends in a critique. The digital humanities, he argues, are not ready to take up their full responsibility because the field "does not yet possess an adequate critical awareness of the larger social, economic, and cultural issues at stake" (Liu 3). The side of the digital humanities that descends from humanities computing lacks cultural-critical awareness, while the side that descends from new media studies is "indiscriminately critical of society and global informational 'empire' without sufficient focus on the specifically institutional—in this case, higher education—issues at stake" (Liu 3).
Liu's critique is that the digital humanities have expanded their methodological toolkit but not their critical consciousness. They have developed powerful tools for analysing texts at scale, for detecting patterns of text reuse, for visualizing data—but they have not developed an adequate critique of the institutional and social conditions in which these tools are deployed. The digital humanities, he argues, should not simply facilitate the work of the humanities but should "represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state" (Liu 1).
This is a crucial point. The digital humanities are not just a set of technical methods; they are a set of institutional and social practices. The expansion of the digital humanities is bound up with the corporatization of the university, the casualization of academic labour, and the conversion of higher education into a marketplace. The field needs to develop a mental and policy firewall against postindustrial takeovers of the digital idea.
Kirschenbaum's account of the emergence of the digital humanities provides a useful complement to Liu's critique. Kirschenbaum argues that the digital humanities are "more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies" (Kirschenbaum 4). The field is a social undertaking that "harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years" (Kirschenbaum 5). The rapid rise of the digital humanities as a term can be traced to a set of specific circumstances—the publication of the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, the founding of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and the launch of the Digital Humanities Initiative by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Kirschenbaum 5–6).
Kirschenbaum's account helps to explain why English departments have been hospitable to the digital humanities. He identifies six reasons: the tractability of text as a data type; the long association between computers and composition; the convergence between editorial theory and electronic archives; the tradition of hypertext and electronic literature; the openness of English departments to cultural studies; and the explosion of interest in e-reading and large-scale digitization projects (Kirschenbaum 8–9). These reasons suggest that the digital humanities are not alien to English studies but are an extension of its existing concerns. As Kirschenbaum puts it, the digital humanities are "a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active, 24-7 life online" (Kirschenbaum 9).
The Digital Humanities: Expansion and Its Discontents
The tension between Kirschenbaum's celebration of the digital humanities and Liu's critique of the field is the central tension of the digital humanities today. The field has expanded its methodological toolkit and its institutional footprint, but it has not yet developed an adequate critical consciousness of its own conditions of possibility.
This tension is particularly visible in the debate about reading. Matthewman's students resisted hypertext because it threatened their conception of reading as a slow, sustained, and solitary activity. Brady argues that this conception is a myth—reading has always involved hyper-attention as well as sustained attention, and has always been embedded in a socio-material ecology. Salmi demonstrates that distant reading can complement close reading, revealing patterns of textual amplification that would be invisible to the close reader. Brooker and Antonini show that hypertext links are not neutral but are aesthetic and ethical choices.
Taken together, these studies suggest that the digital humanities expand the ecology of reading in three ways. First, they add new modes of reading—distant reading, text mining, data visualization—to the traditional toolkit of close reading. Second, they reveal the materiality of texts—the ways in which texts are embedded in networks of production, circulation, and reception. Third, they make visible the aesthetic and ethical choices involved in reading—the decisions about what to link, what to include, what to exclude, and what to privilege.
Yet these expansions also raise questions that the digital humanities have not yet adequately addressed. Who has access to these new modes of reading? What institutional conditions make them possible? What are the politics of text mining, data visualization, and algorithmic analysis? These are the questions that Liu raises in his critique. The digital humanities, he argues, need to develop a critical awareness of their own institutional and social conditions. They need to ask not just "how can we read differently?" but "who benefits from these new ways of reading, and who is excluded?"
Conclusion: Toward an Ecological and Critical Digital Humanities
This paper has argued that the digital humanities should be understood as expanding the ecology of reading rather than replacing traditional practices. Drawing on Matthewman, Salmi, Brooker and Antonini, Brady, Liu, and Kirschenbaum, the paper has demonstrated that reading has always been ecological—involving dynamic forms of attention and deep socio-material entanglement. The digital humanities expand this ecology through hypertext, distant reading, and new forms of textual analysis. However, the field has not yet developed adequate cultural-critical awareness of its own institutional and social implications. A truly critical digital humanities must combine methodological innovation with cultural critique.
The ecological approach to reading developed by Brady provides a framework for this synthesis. If reading is always ecological—shaped by the socio-material environment in which it occurs—then the digital humanities are not a departure from traditional reading but an expansion of its ecology. The hypertext, the database, the digital archive, the text-mining tool—these are not replacements for the book but new elements in the ecology of reading. The task is not to resist this ecology but to understand it, to negotiate between different forms of attention within it, and to ask critical questions about who benefits from these new forms of reading and who is excluded.
This is the challenge facing the digital humanities today. The field has expanded its methodological toolkit and its institutional footprint, but it has not yet developed an adequate critical consciousness of its own conditions of possibility. As Liu argues, the digital humanities need to "represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state" (Liu 1). They need to ask not just how digital tools can enhance literary study but how the digital humanities are implicated in the transformation of higher education, the casualization of academic labour, and the corporatization of the university.
The ecology of reading, in this sense, is not just a metaphor. It is a way of understanding the digital humanities as a set of practices that are embedded in material, social, and institutional ecologies. To read in the digital age is to read in an ecology that is shaped by platforms, algorithms, databases, and networks. The digital humanities do not simply describe this ecology; they are part of it. A critical digital humanities must attend to this entanglement, asking how the ecology of reading is shaped by power, how it reproduces or challenges existing inequalities, and how it might be transformed.
As Brady writes, "Reading has never been (solely) this" (Brady 10). Reading has always involved negotiation between different forms of attention, different materialities, different social relations. The digital humanities do not change this fundamental fact; they make it more visible. The task for the digital humanities is to make this visibility critical—to ask not just how we read differently but how we read better, more critically, and more justly.
Works Cited
Brady, Alison M. "Negotiating Attention: An Ecology of Reading in the Digital Age." Rethinking History, 2025, pp. 1–14. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2025.2486651.
Brooker, Samuel, and Alessio Antonini. "On the Aesthetics of Hypertext: A Case Study on Names and a General Framework." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, vol. 31, nos. 1–2, 2025, pp. 7–29. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2025.2463889.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?" Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 3–11. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv8hq.4.
Liu, Alan. "The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 11, nos. 1–2, 2012, pp. 8–41. SAGE, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211427364.
Mattewman, Sasha. “Clashing Cultures? Linking Literature and Hypertext at Post-16”. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 7, no. 4, Oct. 2007, pp. 69-92, https://doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2007.07.04.05.
Salmi, Hannu. "Textuality as Amplification: Reconsidering Close Reading and Distant Reading in Cultural History." Rethinking History, 2024, pp. 1–17. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2024.2360318.
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