Measured Attention


Benjamin MacDonald Schmidt

Fellow, Cultural Observatory @ Harvard

Ph.D. Candidate in History, Princeton University

Overview



  1. The History of Attention

  2. Reading Digital Sources

  3. Focusing Attention: A case study

Attention as self-evident

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

William James, Principles of Psychology

Reading Digital Sources

  1. Technical Competence
  2. Understanding of biases (Source Criticism)
  3. Technique for reading (Hermeneutics)
  4. Argument

Texts without Authors

Whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

Stanley Fish

Reading Digital Sources

  1. Technical Competence
  2. Understanding of biases (Source Criticism)

Library Origins of Bookworm Volumes

Reading Digital Sources

  1. Technical Competence
  2. Understanding of biases (Source Criticism)
  3. Technique for reading (Hermeneutics)
  4. Argument

Focusing Attention

The History of Attention

Bookworm: Exploring Texts through Metadata

(http://bookworm.culturomics.org)

c. 1 million books, 80 billion words

Library metadata via Open Library

Digital Public Library of America funding
Team: Martin Camacho * Neva Cherniavsky * Erez Lieberman-Aiden * JB Michel * Billy Janitsch
Concentrate Attention
Focus Attention

Focusing Attention: a psychological metaphor

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.

William James, Principles of Psychology

Mind as Camera

Those who lay stress on the unity of mind regard it as almost evident a priori, that but one concept can occupy the focus of attention at a time... Attention, like the lens of the eye, is now [ie, first] accommodated to act as an instrument of near focus, high magnification, but limited aperture, and again [then] as one of distant focus, small magnifying-power, but wide range

Can the Mind attend to two things at once? Science: July 18, 1887

Measuring Attention, c. 1890

Focus Attention




Measuring Attention, c. 1890

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