Scholarly reading (and writing) and the power of impact factors: a study of distributed cognition and intellectual habits.

Using observational interviews and introducing theories of embodied and distributed cognition, this study examines the scholarly reading and the intellectual habits of a group of social scientists. All participants were working at universities in task environments dominated by digital artifacts and technologies. The study found a strong connection between scholarly reading and the scholars' writing processes and a further coupling to their digital publishing activity. While examining the participants' print and online reading, it turned out that their reading was so tightly coupled to their writing that this entanglement had to be at the core of the analysis. In the study, scholarly reading and writing are analyzed as cognitive processes that extend beyond the brain and body and comprise cognitive artifacts of texts and their material bearers, such as printouts, digital displays, computers, and the Internet. In the process of creating text-or reading and writing-brains, bodies, and artifacts are considered to be dynamically coupled in a distributed cognitive process. Based on interviews with a sample of academics, the study analyses how their scholarly reading relates to the other elements in such an extended process and how they utilize the affordances of cognitive digital artifacts in their creative and intellectual endeavors.

Text Materialities, Affordances, and the Embodied Turn in the Study of Reading.

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming that-influenced by tacit knowledge and the task at hand-textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body (including brain), text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading.