Reading

Summary

Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling), alphabetics, phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and motivation. Other types of reading and writing, such as pictograms (e.g., a hazard symbol and an emoji), are not based on speech-based writing systems. The common link is the interpretation of symbols to extract the meaning from the visual notations or tactile signals (as in the case of braille). Overview Reading is typically an individual activity, done silently, although on occasion a person reads out loud for other listeners; or reads aloud for one's own use, for better comprehension. Before the reintroduction of separated text (spaces between words) in the late Middle Ages, the ability to read silently was considered rather remarkable. Major pre

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading

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How Leibniz read Pascal’s Geometry: The Practice of Reading as Hybrid Hermeneutics in the Materiality of Leibniz’s Pascaliana

Simon François Dumas Primbault

Between 1675 and 1676, while in Paris, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) got privileged access to some geometric manuscripts from late Blaise Pascal’s hand. Although said manuscripts are not extant, Leibniz’s reading notes were preserved, together with his personal papers in Hannover, under the heading “Pascaliana.” The mathematical content of these notes and the influence they had on Leibniz’s later work are quite known nowadays. At the crossroads of the history of ideas, historical epistemology, and material history, this contribution looks at Leibniz’s Pascaliana through the prism of their materiality—format, layout, organization, corrections, and additions—, and the practices it betrays—copying, commenting, excerpting. Parallel to knowing what Leibniz read in Pascal, this perspective allows us to shed light on how Leibniz read Pascal, on the very intellectual-material operations that allowed him to incorporate a foreign thought and, eventually, start developing his own.

2022

On ten loose handwritten folios dating back from April 1679, Leibniz gradually devised, in the course of three days, a full-blown theory of thought that nonetheless remained unpublished and still has received little attention from scholars. Conceiving of affectūs as the driving forces that set the mind in motion from one thought to another and passions as the inertia opposing such movement, this manuscript results in a systematic psychology understood as a dynamics of thoughts modelled on the mechanical laws of motion for solid bodies. Delving into Leibniz‘s working papers to witness the unfolding of his thoughts, I propose to pay attention to the many intellectual operations that paved the way for his metaphysics. From his reading notes on Descartes to his syllogistically redefining a set of concepts and propositions, Leibniz here defines an affective theory of cognition and sets the first foundations of a combinatorial ontology: his socalled scientia generalis. Focusing on the material practices that govern his use of paper, I would like to show that Leibniz‘s conceptual mechanization of cognition is materially dependent on a practical automation of reasoning reduced to a propositional calculus on paper. Eventually, this contribution is a plea for a media-historical reading of Leibniz‘s working papers.

2020

“Methodological Criss-Crossing”: A Mixed Methods Ethnography of a Digital Library

Simon François Dumas Primbault

At the crossroads of the ethnography of scholarly practices and digital humanities, this study proposes to consider the exploratory aspect of the scientific activity as an intellectual path through a corpus made accessible by an online platform. My case study focuses on the reading paths of Gallica users by combining a qualitative approach—semi-directive interviews and research situations—with a quantitative approach—the analysis of one year of server logs of the platform by extracting paths, modelling them by Markov chains, and identifying typical paths by topological analysis of the data. This method shows the great complementarity of the qualitative approach and the quantitative approach: by confronting the material conditions of the possibilities of navigation with its real material practices of appropriation, in specific social and cultural contexts, this project strikes a middle ground between technological determinism and constructivism. This exploratory study has led to promising results on the navigation of researchers within the Dewey classification, on the role of “pivotal literature” in moving from one discipline to another, and on a first sketch of a variety of “regimes of navigation” grouped according to their topological characteristics. These initial results have made it possible to document in detail the intricacy of material practices and virtual interfaces, as well as the navigation strategies developed by the researchers, which testify to their desire to find “original branches”. I have therefore been able to highlight the non-linearity and indeterminacy of scholarly practices and the fundamental nature of navigation as an orientation practice. But such an understanding of digital libraries as spaces, and their navigation, must not be without a strong epistemological and methodological critique. Recognising, on the one hand, the reification—or the effet de reel—produced by visual representation, digital libraries cannot be considered as uncharted territories just waiting to be mapped. Distrusting, on the other hand, the renewed fantasies of a “cyberspace” that could be constructed from scratch, I would like to argue that it is possible to find a middle way between the referential illusion and the demiurgic fantasy and, in this dehiscence, to deploy a practical use of cartography as an object that performs a space of knowledge, but that performs it under constraint and in a critical and reflexive way.

2022

“Methodological Criss-Crossing”: A Mixed Methods Ethnography of a Digital Library

Simon François Dumas Primbault

2022