Introduction to the Workshop “New Reading ScenesOn Machine Reading and Reading Machine Learning Research” (KWI, RUB)

The task at hand as I envisaged it for these two days is to analyze the new reading scenes emerging with large language models (LLMs) and the research practices that surround them. How is reading transformed in terms of modes, methods, but also valuations, when machines read for us, that is, “interpret” content, summarize text, propose essay questions? What does the format of the machine output do to our understanding and valuation of reading? What do we read of a text, a philosophical position, a source in a foreign language, when we read it through machine reading? Is this reading through the machine a reading with or a reading from the machine? That is, do we form an assemblage of shared cognition and co-constitution of meaning-making when we think and read through an LLM? Or have we become the necessary supplement to machine learning models?