ENGL 758A: Inscribing Media

There is an article in the New York Times about Google Book Search. You need to register to access the article, but the discussion is quite interesting.

Scan This Book! By Kevin Kelly

What follows is a working excerpt from my seminar paper. This section comes in the beginning and is sort of the place where I am setting up the foundation for the conversations that I would like to join and initiate. I plan to add more detail in terms of providing footnotes for articles to reference and trace the history, etc., but I hope this portion will provide an idea of where I am headed.

YouTube has arrived.

If you haven’t heard about YouTube.com, you will. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, friends that met as two of PayPal’s first twenty employees, have created the website that is being hailed as an “Internet phenomenon” (Green). The website’s concept is simple: as Heather Green documents, Hurley and Chen had their idea for the website after a frustrating experience of their own trying to share video clips with friends via email. What Hurley (CEO), Chen (CTO), and Jawed Karim (advisor) have created is a website open to any user who wants to post, store and/or share her own video(s).

The website resembles Flickr, recently bought by Yahoo!, a photo sharing website that uses Ajax, Organizr, and folksonomic tags to allow users to post, tag, and discuss photos on the website. When YouTube first came on the scene, it was heralded as the “Flickr of video,” which many techies and lay-users feel it has proven to be; YouTube uses folksonomy to allow users to post, share, and comment on videos. The website is easy to use, and since it went public in February 2005 its viewership has increased steadily; in December 2005, the website found itself thrust into the limelight as viewers flocked to the site as a means of watching the very popular Saturday Night Live digital video, “Lazy Sunday.”

In the last few weeks, several articles have been published discussing the website; most writers take up one of three main topics found in typical YouTube-related articles: the authors remark on YouTube’s amazing rise to fame, praise and/or cite YouTube as an example of the more democratic and collaborative “Web 2.0,” and/or forecast the website’s soon-to-be demise a la Napster due to copyright infringement. The New York Times has featured articles about YouTube, specifically discussing “Lazy Sunday” “going viral,” as well as the most viewed YouTube video, “Pokémon Theme Music Video.” Slate.com has posted articles discussing “Lazy Sunday” and the potentially “most recognizable lip syncers on YouTube,” “Two Chinese Boys” or “The Dormitory Boys.” Numerous computing and business magazines have had recent articles about how to make YouTube, and other websites like it – Sharkle and Vimeo are two less well-known examples – financially sustainable and/or profitable, particularly with regard to increasing bandwidth costs, the introduction of ads, and the issues of copyright.

Yet, in all of the articles and blog threads discussing YouTube, no one seems interested in actually studying and analyzing the content uploaded to the website, even when authors take the time to mention specific videos. (Though, people have been interested in the commercial videos that have appeared among the amateur videos, for example Kevin Smith’s trailer for Clerks 2, and what that might mean for the website’s future.) In addition, no one is asking what YouTube offers, if anything, to creative artists (and consumers of creative art) or what will be lost if such a website is not, ultimately, economically sustainable. After spending extended time searching YouTube (all in the name of scholarly research, of course), I think scholars of media theory and textual studies are missing an opportunity: YouTube offers an entry into many exciting conversations that not only provide connections to topics of continuing interest to textual critics, such as how we might answer the question of the work versus the text with respect to digital media, but also YouTube is a rich source for furthering discussions of media theorists related to interactive media and remediation. By looking at a specific example from YouTube, it becomes clear that the questions of textual critics and media theorists begins to overlap: the ability of viewers to immediately remediate, respond to, and/or potentially re-enact a video expands the textual critic’s notion of both the text and the author, while, at the same time, providing media theorists with new ways to think about user interactivity and what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call the “double logic of remediation” (5).

In order to carefully consider questions of the author, work and text, as well as to demonstrate new aspects of interactive media and remediation, I would like to turn to a set of videos that, primarily, are locatable on YouTube. Minutes after “Lazy Sunday” appeared on Saturday Night Live, it appeared on YouTube, where it remained until mid February when it was removed at the request of NBC for copyright infringement. In the short time “Lazy Sunday” remained posted on YouTube, the digital video not only went “viral” but also it has grew to involve a network of videos that both remediate and respond to the work. Despite “Lazy Sunday” being removed from YouTube, it remains in the response videos of amateur users; moreover, despite is absence from YouTube since February, videos that respond to and expand the text of “Lazy Sunday” (a point I will later further defend and explain) have continued to appear. Carefully viewing “Lazy Sunday” and the responses to it not only demonstrate and complicate issues of remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy but also raise provocative questions about authorship, the ethics of video or audio sampling as it relates to rewriting or remediating, and understanding how independent works might come together to form a larger text.

Before turning to the video responses to “Lazy Sunday” as a means of illustrating and discussing many of the above-stated textual and media issues, I’d like to first address a prevalent misconception about digital video that, I believe, is one of the main reasons digital video on the Internet has yet to be studied in the way I’m suggesting. In most of the articles I’ve read discussing YouTube, original content on the website is considered the amateur work of teenagers. Many articles do not even discuss the original content of videos on YouTube and, instead, present the website as only containing clips of commercial footage. At present, YouTube does contain both commercial and original amateur video; the type of original digital video varies greatly – digital blogs, original compositions, re-enactments, and direct responses to other digital video. This last example of original content is what I find most compelling and unique about YouTube and digital video. Like Flickr, YouTube allows users to comment and discuss videos, but, in addition to written comments, many users choose to comment by creating original video that is at once unique and also tied to a previous video to which it is directly responding. In this way, users are remediating our traditional conceptions of commenting and criticism by presenting their ideas using video as opposed to print.

Henry Jenkins first suggested fan fiction and other-such genres as an appropriate means of scholarly study in his book Textual Poachers. In the more recent Rethinking Media Change, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Jenkins presents an article specifically related to digital video and fan culture, again citing the importance of giving this genre serious attention. In “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” Jenkins reminds readers of the stigma surrounding amateur work, particularly the work of amateur fans:

Too often, fan appropriation and transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticised, treated as something that people do when they have too much time on their hands. The assumption is that anyone who would invest so much creative and emotional energy into the products of mass culture must surely have something wrong with them. (282)

In the fan community surrounding Star Wars, Jenkins sees the kind participation, interaction, and remediation that have exploded in the digital videos on YouTube. As Jenkins suggests in this essay published in 2003, “this new production [digital video] and distribution context profoundly alters our understanding of what amateur cinema is and how it intersects with the commercial film industry” (283). Jenkins argument will prove to be fruitful soil for this discussion because while his claim that “the unleashing of significant new tools that enable the grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content” (283) seems to prove valid, the further development of his argument also provides an example of the necessity of keeping in mind the consumerism that drives the Internet, lest we fall prey to the allure of a democratizing vision that is likely more fantasy than reality.

Works Consulted

N.B. This is an abbreviated list for this response paper. A more comprehensive list will accompany my full paper.

Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” in Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Garrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1999. 2000.

Boutin, Paul. “A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace: Point-and-click sites that don’t tell you what to do.” Slate. 28 April 2006. 7 May 2006. http://www.slate.com/id/2140635/

Green, Heather. “Way Beyond Home Videos.” Business Week. 3979 (2006): 64-5.

Heffernan, Virginia. “Now Playing on YouTube: WebVideos by Everyone.” New York Times. 3 April 2006. 7 May 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/arts/03tube.html?ex=1301716800&en=caf7a5c6faee8d3f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Jenkins, Henry. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” Thorburn and Jenkins 281-312.

Johnson, Brian D. “Someone Call Karl Marx: The means of production is in the hands of masses and a revolution is under way.” Maclean’s. 118.51 (2005): 56-60.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge: MIT UP, 2003.

Hi all,

I found this transcript of an interview with Ellen Ullman that I thought was worth taking a look at once you’re done The Bug. It’s also worth noting the digital animation on the side of the screen, which seems to be an animated rendering of the interview.

Anyway, if you have time, here it is:

This is a portion of my seminar paper (not quite done).
–Will

“I open the cupboard in my den and take out my PowerPod, the white lead that I use to connect the iPod with the G4. The connection is made, and the iPod begins uploading the new additions to the library, a further 154 songs. A few minutes later the exercise is completed, and my iPod is full–prone but proud. The iPod lies on the desk in front of me, looking a little like a speaker box. It is white, oblong, ergonomic, with perfectly rounded corners and a pale blue two-inch LCD window that lights up superbrightly for exactly two seconds when I touch one of its buttons (I have told it to do this and it does what it’s told).”
—Dylan Jones, iPod, Therefore I am

“Executive Attaché is a multi function USB 2.0 flash drive designed with the business executive in mind. Elegant styling of a fine writing instrument wrapped around state-of-the-art USB flash drive technology makes Executive Attaché the perfect device for the technology minded executive. Working on a presentation and need to take it with you? Simply copy the file onto Executive Attaché, put it in your pocket or briefcase and go. To access your data, simply plug Executive Attaché into virtually any PC or MAC — without the need for bulky cables or adapters. Access your files. Anytime. Anywhere.”
—From the PNY Technologies web site

The interface according to Lev Manovich, from his chapter “The Interface” in The Language of New Media, is a sphere that exists between humanity, computer, and culture. He argues that “we are no longer interfacing to a computer but to a culture encoded in digital form” (70). This argument is contrary to the previous notion of interface as a means of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): where the computer was considered to be a tool for use instead of a “means to store, distribute, and access all media”: a “universal media machine” (69).

Manovich’s cultural interface theory pays particular attention to the graphic user interface, pointing to its role as text, cinema, and human-computer mediator (71). But Manovich’s focus on the narrative of the screen causes him to miss an opportunity to dive into the narrative of the device: What is the physical design of the computer and its various peripheries trying to communicate to the user? How does a user interact with a computer-based device and how does this relationship differ from the user’s relationship with the graphic user interface?

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) Flash Memory Drive—also known as a Flash drive, thumb drive, or key drive—is a device that allows a user to store, transport, and transfer files from one computer to the next. The USB Flash drive is a member of a genre of personal media devices. Other examples include the Apple iPod, the Sony Walkman, the cellular phone, the floppy disk, even the humble notepad and pen. Although the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices occupies physical space rather than cyberspace, the device still contains an understandable user interface and can be analyzed from an interface design perspective in mind—despite the current trend to think of the user interface being solely in the domain of the graphical user interface.

Lev Manovich would most likely categorize personal media devices as being outside the boundaries of interface theory and more inside the boundaries of consumer theory or some other brand of cultural theory outside of the interface. He is not alone in his focus of the interface as an internal, abstract mechanism rather than an external, physical one. Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, introduces his thesis by first defining all interfaces as “software” (4). In his discussion of the interface as The Desktop, Windows, Links, Texts, and Agents, he mentions that computer hardware only as it inhibits the capabilities of the graphic user interface:

“Because the computer was by definition so malleable, capable of shape-shifting from one visual metaphor to another, it was theoretically possible for the interface to look like practically anything: a house, a factory, a movie, a diary. But the limitations of seventies technology—minuscule storage devices, sluggish microprocessors, grainy monitors—meant that flights of fancy would quickly bump up against the ceiling of hardware shortcomings.” (45)

Manovich’s and Johnson’s attention is centered on the presentation and semiotics of the internal cyberspace: the aesthetics of web design, the textual space afforded by the screen, and the dynamics of computer cinema. They feel that this arena is both the primary level of user interaction with the machine, but also, as Manovich puts it, liberates media from traditional physical storage into the realm of access, navigation, and manipulation (73). This belief that physical storage is no longer a concern of media theory is the cornerstone of Manovich’s flight away from HCI principles and Johnson’s belief that hardware provides only limitations to interface design.

A disregard for hardware and storage technology is understandable. For years, the graphic user interface has been the mechanism that we use to compare computers to all other forms of media, particularly print media, as Johanna Drucker mentions in “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation”:

“A language of usability, rather than compositional form, has appeared in parallel with the growth of graphical user interfaces and the realization that their design principles give the lie to the static nature of print artifacts. Books and graphics, after all, are interfaces through which readers interact with a document to produce a text.” (Drucker, 25)

The computer screen presents text and imagery in new ways and allows user manipulation and dynamic representation of media artifacts; it is, as the saying goes, “where the action is.” When we discuss how the computer is forcing us to examine how we write and how we think about text, we focus in on word processors and how the word processor interface aids us, annoys us, or frightens us as we type. Less focus is paid on the physical keys on the keyboard and the buttons of the mouse as is the text that is appearing on the screen. For example, in his essay “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller chronicles the effects of Microsoft Word on how text is created. He mentions the keyboard and the mouse only twice, in passing, focusing the rest of his time writing about the graphic user interface and how it affects the writer:

“Word’s graphic user interface is not simply one unremitting grey avalanche. The essential dilemma of a computer display is that ‘at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer.’” (151)

While this reaction to the graphic user interface as being the “official” interface of the computer is a natural consequence of the immediacy of the screen, the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices clearly do have an interface. But that interface is, again, physical: taking the drive out of your pocket, taking off the protective cover, and inserting the drive into the computer. Only after that sequence of very real events can the user successfully interact with the Flash drive as part of her computer’s graphic user interface (and even then she is pressing on keys and moving the mouse about the table).

Personal media devices such as the Flash drive, however, either contain a screen or are required to be inputted into a computer that will have a screen; the graphic user interface reasserts its primacy and dominance over electronic data manipulation. Devices, keyboards, and control pads cannot allow the user to directly manipulate data in any meaningful or understandable way; there has to be a translator or mediator to convert the language of the machine into the language of the user (Johnson, 4). From there, the user may enter into a separate realm she is free to create her information through the computer, translating that creation into an iconic file, and at last creating the electronic bits and bytes that physically hold that file.

Once we are passed the Real effort of physical interaction, we are lead to the Symbolic effort of the graphic user, finally creating the Imagined cyberspace where the mental processes of the user and the electronic processes of the computer communicate in some metaphysical space inside the user’s mind—only to go pack through the chain in reverse to create the data. So while the interface does include more than the graphic user interface, that portion of the interface is essential. Even the Flash drive, one of the few personal media devices that does not contain any sort of screen of its own (yet) still has an LED light to signal when the memory chip is being written to and when it is being read. We cannot get away from screens: they are everywhere.

Works Consulted

• Drucker, Johanna. “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation.”
• “Executive Attache.” PNY Technologies. 2005. PNY Technologies. 1 June 2005.
• Fuller, Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter.” Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn: Automedia. 2003.
• Guillory, James. “The Memo and Modernity.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 108-132.
• Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Harper, 1997.
• Jones, Dylan. iPod, Therefore I am. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive.” TEXT Technology 2 (2004): 91-125.
• Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

To a reader of the 21st century, there is an obvious tone of anticipation for innovative technologies present in the text of The Invention of Morel, although it would have possibly been overlooked (or not viewed as such) by Adolfo Bioy Casares’s contemporaries. They would have noticed the explicit discourse related to existing technologies (such as the radio, which for the narrator is a device with the purpose of satisfying the aural sense), but an underlying, implicit technological structure is present as well. In the widely disseminated treatise, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush made a call for continuing developments in the world of technological innovations. Looking back on this work, today’s reader can interpret Bush’s words with more significance than the reader of 1945 likely did, assigning more value to the thoughts he presented because we see the physical manifestations of what were-at the time-only visions of his imagination. These two contemporaries, although unknown to each other, created works that nearly predicted some of the technologies that are available today. What they wrote came true, in a sense.

Is employing a short novel from 1940 as a comparison to electronic activity of the early 21st century asking too much of the reader? I say no. Adolfo Bioy Casares included so many technological aspects in his work that he must have been writing in anticipation of inventions to come. The realm of the fantastic inserts improbable events into a seemingly normal world, so which shall we consider the invention? Is it an improbability or is it a part of the normal world?

The 21st century computer user has experienced a transformation of schemata to adapt to the new concepts of space and time present in the recently available technologies. Beginning with avant-guard video experiments as far back as the late 1960s and the early 1970s, artists have found new ways to treat space and time by manipulating what is viewed on a screen. One achievement of such experiments is the demonstration that technology allows its users to be “everywhere while really being nowhere” (Kathy Rae Huffman 203). Those new uses of the screen (now apart from standard movie and television viewing) opened up consumers for the eventual shift to the computer monitor.

The fantastic, as a genre, created similar apertures for its readers. Along with other categories of literature-such as science fiction-there is a distinguishable acceptance of the “other,” in this case another world in which temporal and spatial realities function in unanticipated manners.

Although it would perhaps be worthwhile to examine the fugitive as if he were a participant of virtual reality (VR) technologies (including the headset, gloves and other accompanying hardware and software), I have chosen to study him as simply a user of a virtual environment (VE). As Marie-Laure Ryan states in her “Immersion and Interactivity,” very few of us in society have actually donned the gear to experience the technologies of VR. Many more of us have participated in what is called a VE. This virtual environment is created by all users of the Net, a society that includes those who are the hermits of the Net as well as the more sociable members. I prefer this perspective because it is more understood, more inclusive, and more available to the average computer user.

The island of Morel and the fugitive is a simulacra of a VE and vice versa. Like a virtual society, the fugitive (representing the computer user) does not see the mechanics behind the machine is that is creating his world. It is shut away, typically not viewed by a normal user. The fugitive experiences a bit of rage towards this machine and the projections, like modern day computer rage. His rage does not stem, however from a malfunctioning machine, but rather from one that works all too well. He describes his “temptations” to destroy the machines because he knows that for him, “they could become an obsession” (Bioy Casares 67). Perhaps part of his rage stems from the inability to understand the mechanics of how it works: he states “I knew at once that I was unable to understand the machines” (Bioy Casares 77). He only sees what it produces in his “real” world, like a user, the fugitive does not see the real, physical bodies of the other participants within the space he is occupying, they were there in that space during a different time interval. What he views are the disembodiments of the people with whom he wishes to interact.

The fugitive attempts to open closed and locked doors: why shouldn’t he? Following his normal ideas of what is real, this should be possible, but in his repeating, recorded world, he is unable to change such details. As Craig D. Murray discovered in his study, people do bring real-world understanding to a virtual environment. Also, Kathy Rae Huffman indicates the importance of the depth within the electronic framework, just as Bioy Casares stressed that the characters of Morel’s projection are 3D, not just 2D like a film or a painting. The disembodied representations of a figure (in this case the vacation-goers) must be believable to the fugitive so that they will in turn be believable to the reader. Another consideration presented by Murray is the presence of people in a virtual environment. Their presence is sought out by computer users as an important quality for creating a sense of space. Without people, the space seems too empty or unrealistic. When the vacation-goers joined Morel on the island, he again felt the fear he had before arriving to the island. He was scared of being re-captured. There is a continuum established between the real and virtual worlds for the fugitive, so what was probable in the real world is also ascribed to the island. This occurs with participants in virtual environments as well.

In his “Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures and the Loss of Inscription,” Marcos Novak acknowledges that our current “understanding of territory is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes,” noting that space is no longer as concrete as one previously thought. There are now non-spaces and non-places out there. You can go to these places, but not physically. You can travel through cyberspace and visit sites all over the world, but where have you really gone? The current answer to this question tends to be nowhere and everywhere. Where did the fugitive end up after he recorded his image into the projection? He would have died as a result of the machine “recording” his life away, but he would continue to be there for eternity. Where does that leave him? On the island or nowhere?

Works Consulted

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. The Invention of Morel and Other Stories. Ruth L.C. Simms, trans. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Timothy Druckrey, ed. New York: Aperture, 1996.

Huffman, Kathy Rae. “Video, Networks, and Architecture: Some Physical Realities of Electronic Space.” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Timothy Druckrey, ed. New York: Aperture, 1996.

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996.

Craig D. Murray, et al. “Navigation, Wayfinding and Place Experience within a Virtual City.” Presence 9.5, 2000.

Novak, Marcos. “Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures and the Loss of Inscription.” http://www.krcf.org/krcfhome/PRINT/nonlocated/nlonline/nonMarcos.html

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Richard Howard, trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer

Well, after enjoying the McCloud lecture I decided to scrap my original response paper and begin anew. In his discussion of print comics vs. web comics, form vs. content, and successful/durable mutations, it was the concept of the “spatial disconnect” that intrigued me. I found it especially fascinating when McCloud sort of pooh-poohed the convergence narrative – the idea that all media are slowly merging into an amalgamation of form/content to be played on one device – and suggested an alternative trend. He implied that since media were converging so that they can be played on one device (the computer), rather than having form and content become similar, McCloud stated that each type of media will instead differentiate themselves from one another. In other words, different media will evolve into their own unique media “species” so to speak. Returning to the study of inscription and materiality, it would seem prudent to relate the act of inscription to McCloud’s vision of media evolution. In McCloud’s case, and the case of this short response, the focus will be specifically on the graphic novel.

Considering how much time we have spent on storage and memory, I figured a good place to start would be McCloud’s concept of the “spatial disconnect” and how a comic can manipulate time. We talked in class about the spatialization of the alphabet in new media: how letters themselves become images on a monochrome color background. McCloud talked about the spatialization of time in the graphic novel: where a sequence of images and text can (in the new media format) now represent a single temporal moment. He showed how several panels can now be used to represent what is going on at one time, as opposed to older classical forms when the movement from one panel to the next signified a linear temporal progression. It dawned on me that we can look to the hard drive as a place of inscription to study not only what makes McCloud’s vision possible, but also how the inscription technology influences the form of the digitized graphic novel. In Matt’s article about the hard drive, we received a very in depth analysis of the workings of the hard drive. So the question becomes: is there anything in the inscription patterns of the hard drive that relates to McCloud’s vision about the spatialization of time? The hard drive inscribes bits in an electromagnetic pattern on the disks (platters) in the device. The data is stored in fragmented clusters that are arrayed in different spatial patterns of organization on the platter. These inscriptions, or stored electromagnetic clusters, are then recovered by the Read/Write head that detects the appropriate electromagnetic markers on different places on the platter. Therefore, on the computer (the chosen device for new media), memory depends on the recovery of a set of spatially arrayed inscriptions. These inscriptions are culled together by the hard drive and then presented at the same time before the user. Spatial arrangement is essential to the inscription act in a modern computer. We can link this spatial process of data storage and inscription with McCloud’s discussion of spatiality and the digital graphic novel.

With the computer, time also becomes dependent on spatial organization. Each inscription is recovered and presented in a precise temporal organization. Remember that McCloud made explicit the spatial potential of the graphic novel in a digital medium as it relates to time. However, so far, all I have done is contribute to the convergence narrative I wanted to avoid. All data is recovered from a hard drive in this same spatially specific way. So what makes the graphic novel unique? What makes the inscription process specific to the graphic novel compared to the other mediums of text, film, and the digital art we looked at for last class? To proceed from these questions, we move from one of Matt’s essays to another. Specifically, I am thinking of his discussion on the “differences between texts and images [that] have proven all but irreconcilable” (138). At a superficial level, it seems obvious to note that the graphical novel relies on images, albeit images with text embedded, and not just text. Yet that seemingly obvious observation becomes important when considering the differences in the inscription processes of text and image. It is a difference that becomes apparent when working at a slower bandwidth (which both Matt and McCloud have noted). The difference originates from the huge disparity in storage space needed for an image compared to a text. Since the image requires much more space, I think we can safely say that more emphasis is being placed on the spatial configurations in its inscription. The differences in inscription processes parallel the differences in media. More required storage space means more emphasis on the recovery of spatially arranged electromagnetic clusters on the platter. And more emphasis on spatial arrangements translates into the medium’s unique manipulation of the space-time relationship (think of McCloud’s example of a sequence of panels simultaneously representing one moment). Of course this does make the rather simplistic equation of more size with more emphasis on spatiality, and once we examine film files our discussion becomes problematic.

To avoid the simplistic association of size with spatiality, we must further examine the processes of the hard drive. It seems to me that it is not only the inscription process itself that is important, but it also would behoove us to study the process of retrieval of inscriptions. McCloud constantly referred to the idea of the sequence and how important that is to the field of the graphic novel. Here lies a crucial difference in memory processes between image and film: film is recalled from memory platters as one large file; the comic “strip” is made of several images recalled as a sequence of images loading one after another. The sequence that McCloud talked about is built right into the inscription process itself! To further explain this difference just think about how an mpeg file loads on your computer, and think about how websites with images load. The mpeg may take a while, but once it is loaded from memory it represents a whole file that can be played from front to back. On the other hand, the website with images will load one or two images at a time proceeding down the screen until the page is completely loaded. There is an inherent sequence to the actual expression of those images on the screen, whereas the mpeg file appears all at once, completely loaded. This represents just the beginning of a larger discourse about digital film and inscription, but I think we can see the beginnings of an important exchange between media particularities and inscription.

At first, we discussed the physiological relationship of inscription: how the body was influenced by inscription and, conversely, how the body influences the device which performs the inscription. What I mean to suggest is that the inscription processes in the computer also affect the types of media that are used by the computer. Thus, when a particular form (such as the graphic novel) is used on the computer, it will evolve into its own “style” because of its relation to inscription processes.

“…[M]agic is not lost, as it was in the age of enlightened fathers, when the Elf King’s whispering voice became rustling leaves” (Kittler, Discourse 219).

“A trick applied with intelligence can make visual that which is supernatural, invented, or unreal,” Melies quoted by Kittler (GFT 154)

The act of inscription, the production of any part of the human record, is simultaneously a radical individual and communal assertion of a range (or syntagum) of meanings for inscriber and audience in a given paradigm of communication. Leaving one’s mark, either in stone, in ink, in flesh, or in spirit is no easy task.
The “trick” of Melies is the application of the human will and imagination to use embodied (voice, dance for example) and disembodied (chisel, pen, or HTML, for example) technologies to make “visual” in the mind’s eye or on the page or in the ear the producer’s point of view. The structure and function of communication has been continuously in a state of change as people have learned to manipulate, contain, transmit, and store messages intended to close the interpretive gap (defined emotionally, economical, politically, spiritually) between producer(s) and consumer(s).
Responding (in the short-term) to the work of Bruno Latour, Michael John Gorman, Jeffrey Sconce, Robert Brain, Len Manovich, and Jerome McGann (in a March 28 class session) has sparked efforts of mine to respond (in the long-term) more completely to the issues they raise for this moment of emergence for the digital humanities scholar.
McGann models the predicament of the late-twentieth century scholar in what might be read as a kind of stand-up bit of scholarly vaudeville, The Textual Condition. With Charlie Chaplin-like brevity and decisive gesture, McGann models in miniature a larger puzzle: how does the modern scholar accumulate truthful expression given the constraints of the chosen medium in a larger cycle of accumulation of intellectual (and other types) capital. John Michael Gorman’s “immutable mobile” ponders a similar rhythm of “call and response” between producer and work in a given culture of knowledge production. Both vignettes show the gaps in the communication circuit of print communication specifically and the role of the textual scholar to refine the interpretation of scholars whose primary methods and objectives were not those of an editor. The Latourian loop (220, Figure 6.1), the Cybernetic feedback loop (Weiner, N. 84), and the revisions of the textual scholar are linear and circular, confounding students today much like ether (long described as a kind of vortex) confounded scientists of an earlier age.
Sconce, Brain, and Manovich share thematic challenges, constraints, difficulties (a matrix of similarity and difference) among them in their inter-connected disciplines as McGann and Latour share as textual scholars. The puzzles of form faced by the textual scholar become magnified in the mind’s eye of cultural analysts of a different tribe such as Sconce, Brain, and Manovich. The cycle of revisions of both the producer and the consumer of McGann’s conference summary and Latour’s explication of the role (or lack of a role) of pre-printed tools in the observation of Mars’ transept in 17th century Europe become meditations on what “noise” lives in the knowledge production channel when viewed through the lens of mechanized writing tools to record research data (Sconce), and the structure of databases used to interpret and disseminate later generations of those same tools (Manovich). While facing similar barriers to the use and interpretation of communicative forms with simultaneously ether-like linearity and circularity, these two sets of scholars differ in the scope of the application of their ideas when the center of calculation moves closer and closer to the disembodied and the scale of the more modern media explodes the theater of action and meaning from being a set of a few scholars to the means of macro-level, group, mass communication assisted by database-driven communication to whole populations.
Communication has always been associated with the “other worldly.” The higher truths of a society have come from oracles and prophets, from interpreters of dreams. The arts and sciences’ progress in the production of means to automate this essential element of human expression, to externalize it, allows for a business model of Pygmalion proportions. Narcissus’ mirror takes not the form of a shallow pool of water as ancient mirrors were just that, but in the form of telegraphs that pound out, letter out, messages with ghosts or wireless Internet connections that reach out into space with their signal to give the illusion and the reality that your interlocutor thousands of miles and many time zones away sits beside you.
Students of human expression have marveled at that space between, the gap, in which mysteriously meaning is transfered. They stand with their noses pressed to the glass, peering in at the theatrical employment and deployment of one Rube Goldberg after the next. In conversation, on the page, or through the channels of mass communication the energy or effort expended to act becomes the input, and interpretable performance the output. No matter in which discipline, the construction of meaning that holds an audience’s attention is a process that both producers and consumers find mysterious in some manner. The sciences have intellectual control over the physics, the arts control the message, and the spiritual (or the lack of spiritual–or other systems of value and ethics) influences the interpretation—but then each simultaneously has and lacks a piece of the truth that lies elsewhere. A discourse of ether spans the work of ancient philosophers to contemporary scholarly efforts to forward knowledge production using the best of what has gone before, leaving in the ethereal space between trace elements in the human record.
Ether has been to the history and philosophy of science what meta data has been to the information professional: a world between, a portal into the circularity of self-referential systems and the linearity of mass communication via radio, television, and the Internet. Ether holds a unique position in the history of the production of the human record and the human understanding of itself and the cosmos. By what method and with which tools is the Book of Life written, is any meaning inscribed? Has it happened or is it happening? For divine blessing to be written on one’s heart, how does that work? Is the Book of Life (or an analgous source of the highest level of knowledge) written on vellum or with UTF-8? (Is it written at all?) What wonder is a world that contains these multiplicites simultaneously? For the language arts scholar (any student of literary production, reception, interpretation, and application) the multiplicities (the internal and external and the vortex’ linear and circular aspects) of ether reveal new opportunities for collaborative, synthetic, knowledge production.
Ether has defied definition for thousands of years. Is ether in us or in the stars–or both? Like the debate over the wave versus particle theory of light, a definition of ether has challenged understandings of heat, motion, gravity, form, time and space. Indeed, ether could simply be seen as the metaphor invoked to permit those in communication to visualize in a personal way the limits of their knowledge. Yet the fuzziness of ether is not simply a tool to mythologize human ignorance (set completely aside any possibility of the Divine into the landscape). Human efforts at stabilizing expression of the glue of the universe leaves scholars today, who face an increasingly modular, fluid, digital world, to set a new course through the wilds of communication theory and practice. If ether is fairy dust and one does not believe in fairies, substantive interpretive gaps exist. If ether is both analog and digital, how does a generation in the midst of a paradigm shift in literary production (soap operas began on radio, thrived on TV, and emerge today in cell phones; poems are Perl scripts that self-destruct after a single reading) accept a synthesis of forms while material demands of one’s earning potential, the political and economic demands of segmented distribution, and the compartmentalization of knowledge production disciplines (secular and non-secular, artistic and academic, etc., etc.) “makes eyes” at only the mastery and exploitation of the digital? Enter, stage left, the digital humanities scholar: the magic Kittler mentions then indeed is not lost, in fact it is with us still.

Works Consulted

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We’ve been enjoying pretty heady and thoughtful presentations at MITH this week. In less than an hour Scott McCloud will speak again at the University of Maryland in SQH1120, but this morning he took questions from facutly and students at MITH.

Conversation ranged widely including the following topics: the relation among comics, film, games, and the computer; mimetic strengths and weaknesses from the “general reader’s” perspective; the culture, visual, information, “literacy” that supports or challenges production of messages for either informational or aesthetic purposes; the role and nature of escape in popular (American?) culture; among other topics (superheros on the sidelines, etc).

What I took away from the experience was, again perhaps like my take on Dr. Liu’s presentation and rhetoric, is very much my own. Somehow, technology has brought back the idea of skill and craft in a culture that has for more than 50 years (and how many wars now?) turned its back on cultures of manufacture. Comics are a skill, a craft, one as worthy as applied chemistry. I’m not taught to apply for graduate school in the humanities by communicating my ideas graphically, but linguistically — and that cultural bias has some consequences that go beyond the crevices of theory, which I think we explored a bit in conversation. Digital humanities, nay scholarship more and more and more, is becoming a guild of women and men of diverse being and purposes who hone their skills with the tools available to them.

Waking up, as a complete outsider in games and comics (and perhaps even Digital Humanities, who’s in there anyway?) is a process, and I need my coffee. The range of issues here is exciting. I can’t wait to hear how Mr. McCloud addresses computers more specifically in just a few minutes. I wish I could blog live from the ENGL Department lecture hall. A fantasy for another day.

Alan Liu spoke last Friday in McKeldin about the ELO’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination Initiative (PAD) and the Transliteracies project at the University of California.

The in medias res structure of the discourse about handling electronic work born digitally fascinates me. Liu, like everyone else, has to face diverse audiences from different professions and address detailed/complex issues of theory and practice that go to the heart of the scholarly enterprise.

The novice rhetorican in me was fascinated by his having to face simultaneously the tasks of advocating the position of ELO (an organization of early adopters who want their work preserved) as well as the demand to speak of detailed technical standards of other disciplines (METS, RDF, OWL, and OAIS). Discussion of the preservation of electronic records has a history of over thirty years among a small professional group of archivists, a history of ten to fifteen years from some of ELO’s number, and both groups are working dilligently to lower the boom of intellectucal and physical control over dynamic objects no more stable than ephemera in many circumstances. These dual(+) demands on the rhetor are like the dual demands on receptive media and interpreters’ schemas to allow for two-way communication visually and textually (IF you can separate them). Inscriptions are by definition (deeply?) coded performances producing a schismogenesis: the rhetor must be singly focused in dynamically diverse landscapes.

The rhetorical challenges of digital humanities scholars was certainly not his purpose for speaking. He addressed “smart” and “dumb” constraints of the current matrix of tools to achieve scholarly control of “texts”. One constraint is that the meta data standards above do not adequately describe the behaviors of texts produced in Flash or XHTML, for example.

The focus on description as a path toward control (better control) has me thinking. One must begin somewhere, certainly. In my archives experience, the nexus of arrangement, description, preservation, and access as a simultaneous process applied to relatively more stable objects has limited application here. The different parts of each of those areas are in different stages of development. Hopefully, those who can will build test libraries, special collections, and archives (NOT the same thing!) and conduct longitudinal studies that will begin to speak to the scope/scale of future inscriptions.

I guess Transcriptions will have to be another post! [I hope to post on Jospeh Tabbi’s remarks as well, btw.]

Since I know you like Hard drives so much, Matt, and because the technology is of interest to me in my seminar paper, I’m posting this link on some hard drive innovations currently in production:

“1.8″ Hard Drives: Small is Beautiful” from Tom’s Hardware

Of interest in the article’s conclusion:

However, we need to make one thing unmistakably clear: the hard drive is still the main performance bottleneck in many application scenarios, and on all existing PC types. Whether you start Windows, launch applications or flip through large digital photos, you will always experience a delay due to the hard drive.

…

The bottom line is that there is an essential tradeoff between performance and physical characteristics. If you want an ultraportable PC using a 1.8″ drive, you will forfeit performance. There is nothing that can change this right now, but ultraportable notebooks, UMPCs and smallest-form-factor solutions will lose their 1.8″ drive handicaps in the near future.