3168 ENGL 758A: Inscribing Media » Presentations

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Rhetoric, Collaboration, and Digital Transmission of the Visual

Monday, April 17th, 2006

Hello Everyone,

I’ll be working from PowerPoint slides, paper handouts, and some books during my presentation. I’m going to list the bulk of the topics I want to cover below:

Graphesis

  • Visual expression and knowledge production
  • Imagery combined with text, mathematics, and statistics
  • The image as a “read” medium
  • Interaction between reader and image

The major points I want to explore from the Johanna Drucker piece are the ways visual expressions are read, how science utilizes the visual through diagrams, and a little bit about the Graphical User Interface.

Take a look at the following web pages for some examples of optical illusions. I intend to showcase them to show how the brain interprets and adds in information that is not inherent in the medium it is reading:

http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/optical_illusions/index.html

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

Question: So is this just a neat trick? Or is there something going on here about the interpretation of an image and how similar it is to the interpretation of text?

Next, we have some examples of images used for scientific discourse:

http://science.unep.org/posters.asp

http://www.periodictables.com/

Question: In the commercial world, the push toward clever formatting and visual rhetoric is exponentially increasing. How far can charts and formatting go (i.e. can we consider them to be part of the content or just an accessory to the content)?

Now take a look at your computer screen. Yes you. Scan your eyes around the contour of your monitor and then take a look at all the icons and buttons you use to navigate your internet browser. Notice how images are made interactive.

Question: Even the simplest of tasks on a computer requires a combination of textual and visual interaction, such as typing and using the mouse. Think back to the early days of DOS (a pure text system). Why does the Graphic User Interface (GUIs) maintain such widespread appeal? Can we think of any areas where the GUI has not caught on?

Understanding Comics

  • The interchangeability of words and images
  • Resemblance and meaning (representation and abstraction)
  • Words and images combined

I will be bringing several comic books to class as examples of the medium and how textual space and visual space are combined. If you don’t mind using Amazon.com, you can check them out here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159362011X/sr=8-1/qid=1145253981/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1563890828/002-2973529-5751229?v=glance&n=283155

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593074441/sr=8-1/qid=1145253993/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593072287/sr=8-14/qid=1145254007/ref=sr_1_14/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Question: We see comic books as a collaborative effort between image and textual space. As the humanities trends toward interdisciplinary projects, how does the collaboration of word and picture change the definition of “a canonical text”?

Graphicality

  • The technical aspects of imagery
  • Publishing images and the difficulties therein
  • Storing and transmitting images compared to text
  • Intellectual institutions and their approach to the textuality of imagery

When we talk about the publication of an image nowadays, I think about how an image is supposed to be indexed and searchable on the Internet (that may be a bit of a stretch for others). I wanted to mention the difficulties the internet and computers face when dealing with images versus to dealing with text. Images require metadata and additional storage (several times more than text).

Visit the Blake Archive and think about the storage, bandwidth, and indexing requirements that go into the project:

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

Question: As storage capacities, broad-band capabilities, and digital on-demand publishing expand, are pictures still problems? Will digitization redefine the visual, or do continuous problems (such as indexing) keep images problematic?

There’s plenty of additional topics to discuss, but this post is already getting long. I will leave you with quotes:

“If you take a bunch of ignorance and mix it with PowerPoint charts, you get Weasel Knowledge. Weasel Knowledge is to actual knowledge what a painting of a diamond is to an actual diamond. For every type of ignorance, there is some theoretical amount of formatting that will make it look brilliant. The specific technique is beyond the scope of this book, but it involves fonts.”
– Scott Adams, Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

“Graphesis is defined as the field of knowledge production embodied in visual expressions.”
“[V]isual imagery becomes more stable and more useful when interpreted in combination with a linguistic gloss or statistical base.
“No image is self-evident.”
“Books and graphics, after all, are interfaces through which readers interact with a document to produce a text.”
– All Quotes from Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation

“I can read an entire comic book without really looking at the art. This is a process that horrifies Gabriel - imagine his eyes growing wider as, with each swift turn of the page, his craft is obliterated. By contrast, my cohort holds strong opinions on the topic of visual stimuli. I imagine this is part of the reason we’re able to maintain our chaste union: like the gods of old, we keep to our dominions.”
– Jerry Holkins, Penny-Arcade

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts?
No, the whole is not greater than the sum, the whole is different than the sum. The whole is a new person. The whole is a different entity. And it has written a different book.
…
[P]artly because the act of collaborating gives you a specific audience. A lot of the time when you’re writing your audience is either you or some kind of notion of the reader. The joy of collaboration is it’s no longer you and it’s no longer the reader…”
– Neil Gaiman, Hanging Out with the Dream King

“The man’s words in panel 7 have no particular meaning. He’s just trying to get Batuo’s attention, and while some people might understand him, the main thing he’s trying to convey is hostility. Since it works, it may be a type of incantation.”
–Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell

“We all started out like this, didn’t we? Using words and images interchangeably. It didn’t really matter which we used, so long as it worked.”
“By the early 1800’s, western art and writing had drifted about as far apart as was possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible…the other rich in invisible treasures, senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy…”
– Quotes by Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

“In one of its deeply rooted forms, this antivisual tradition identifies reality with ideas in language and associates pictures with excess and the ornamentation or distortion of reality, and thus with entertainment, fantasy, and luxury.”
“To make Blake consumable, his sponsors had first to make him legible.”
– Quotes by Morris Eaves, Graphicality

“Consider first the image. It attracts and holds the eye, perhaps because its configuration is precisely what a viewer’s verbal powers of description are already prepared to capture.”
— Shiff Richard, Puppet and Test Pattern

“As so often happens, what had begun as an attempt to represent aspects of an underlying reality had gradually come to be accepted as constituting the reality itself.”
– Bruce Hunt, Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether

See you Tuesday,
Will

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Cold Storage: Discussion Resources and Questions

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

Some questions to get us started tomorrow follow.

1) To what extent does the technology take the form of the human mind? Does the Memex reflect back how we may think or want to think, or how scienctists thought they should think back in the day?

2) “The shift from continuous prose to a graphically organized page is just as much a feature of writing in modernity as its degeneration into prolixity.” Guillory, page 126

Do we talk about different things or ideas in substantively different ways depending on the technological environment? Does our rhetoric change with the tools of communication?

3) Preservation of the human record will always be threatened by external threats like fire and flood, as well as the limits of the solutions devised to hold that communication viable through time. Does not the consideration of microfilm illustrate the storage problems of media with other structures?

4) Does the present-day study of the humanities lend itself to coordination like the sciences of the mid last century? Does a current economic struggle for world markets or the war on terror not present a need for a coordinated cultural conversation that is about not the metrics of death but something else?

5) I posted some general issues that might structure some thought about the theory and practice of New Media including the topics of materiality (how does the physicality affect the technology), ethics, the humanist agenda. Does the imaginary machine or the real-life microfilm relate to these issues?

6) If you could propose an ideal machine that would solve some social or intellectual challenge, what would it be?

I have prepared some web links about the Memex machine and microfilm. They are available by visiting http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kfries/present.html

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Immutable Mobiles

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Here is a link to a section of Latour’s website. It deals with an art exhibit he helped put together in 2002. Specifically he talks about images in art, science and religion which may be useful in a discussion about inscriptions. Pay special attention to his presentation on iconoclash, a slide show that deals with cascading images and inscriptions. You can also browse the rest of his website if you’re curious. Enjoy.

Hello Everyone,

Hope everyone had a good spring break. Here is some information for my presentation on Tuesday.

There are two main issues I would like to take up concerning Latour. In their response papers both Jess and Will touch on the paradox of inscriptions which seem to be both fleeting and permanent. This seems to be a reoccurring theme in class. One of the key elements in Latour’s immutable mobile is stability. Does this model offer any explanations for the permanence or lack of permanence for inscriptions? Can we read newer types of inscriptions as containing the accumulation of previous levels? For examples of ways to think about new types of inscriptions here is a link to a site designed by M.A. Syverson at the University of Texas at Austin. The actual URL will be posted below. It deals with some of these issues and directly engages Latour. I think it has some short comings so we can talk about that as well. Also at stake in this issue of stability is of course time and space manipulation. This is something else I would like to take up.

The other issue that seems to be at stake in Latour’s work is modeling. I would like to discuss the Gorman piece in relation to the strengths and weaknesses of Latour’s model. In relation to this I am including some quotes from Willard McCarty below that also touch upon this topic

That it’s for now but I’ll be adding some more info by Monday. Thanks.

Pete Sinnott

Syverson: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/talks/cccc01/exampleprojects.html

Quotes

“The cascade of fourth, fifth, and nth order inscriptions will never stop, especially if the population, computers, and the profession of demography, statistics and economics, and the Census Bureau all grow together. In all cases the nth order inscriptions will now stand for nth-1 order paper forms exactly as these in turn stood for the level just below” (Latour, 234).

“Most of the difficulties we have in understanding science and technology proceeds from our belief that space and time exist independently as an unshakeable frame of reference inside which events and place would occur. This belief makes it impossible to understand how different spaces and different times may be produced inside the networks built to mobilise, cummulate, and recombine the world” (Latour, 228).

“Watching the graph paper slowly emerging out of the physiograph, we understand that we are at junction of two worlds: a paper world that we have just left and one of instruments that we are just entering. A hybrid is produced at the interface: a raw image, to be used later in an article, that is emerging from an instrument” (Latour, 65).

“What is behind a scientific text? Inscriptions. How are these inscriptions obtained? By setting up instruments. This other world just beneath the text is invisible as long as there is no controversy” (Latour, 69).

“The new inscription device brought the living objects to their desks with one crucial change: the irreversible flow of time was now synoptically presented to their eyes. It had in effect become a space on which, once again, rulers, geometry and elementary mathematics could be applied” (Latour, 230).

“All the distinctions one could wish to make between domains (economics, politics, science, technology, law) are less important than the unique movement that makes all of these domains conspire towards the same goal: a cycle of accumulation that allows a point to become a centre by acting at a distance on many other points” (Latour, 222).

“But although sacred the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables” (Grenvill, qtd in McCarty, 1).

“Two effects of computing make the distinction between ‘idea’ or other sort of mental construct on the one hand, and on the other ‘model’ in the sense we require: first the demand for computational tractability, i.e. complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a computational representation provides” (McCarty, 3).

“There are in general two ways in which a model may violate expectations and so surprise us: either by a success we cannot explain, e.g. finding an occurrence where it should not be; or by a likewise inexplicable failure, e.g. finding one where it is otherwise clearly present. In both cases modeling succeeds intellectually when it results in failure iether directly with the model itself or indirectly through ideas it shows to be inadequate. This failure, in the sense of expectations violated, is as we will see fundamental to modeling” (McCarty, 4).

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Kittler and the Typewriter

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Hello Everyone,

For Tuesday’s class, there are specific issues that I hope to talk about regarding the Kittler and supplementary readings. First off, I have included some links to descriptions of Turing’s military devices that should help clarify their usage.

Description of the processes at work in the Bombe and the Enigma
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/tbombe/tbombe.htm

Pictures of the Bombe and the Enigma (and physical description of their engineering)

http://www.ellsbury.com/bombe2.htm

http://www.ellsbury.com/enigma2.htm

When looking and reading (briefly) these pages and pics, I think we should pay special attention to the concepts of the spatialization and discretization of language ascribed, according to Kittler, to the invention of the typewriter. From there we can make productive connections to our discussions of Film (think of Manovich’s digital films and the “Machinima” of last week) and the Gramophone. Here are some quotes that speak to this point:

“Spatially designated and discrete signs, that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter…It[writing] became selection from a countable, spatialized supply” (DN 193-4).

“The typewriter creates in the proper position on a paper a complete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer’s hand but also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work” (Angelo Beyerlen quote, GFT 203).

“As a doubled spatialization of writing – first on the keyboard, then on the white paper – it imparts to texts an optimal appearance. And, following Benjamin’s forecast, as soon as “systems with mare variable typefaces” (such as rotating head typewriters or thermal printers) became available, “the precision of typographic forms” can directly enter “the conception of…books.” “Writing is advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness” (228 GFT).

“He (Alan Turing) reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring, third, reading…or computing discrete data” (GFT 245)

“[The typewriter contributed to] a pervasive reconception of spatiotemporal experience” (109 CP).

“Typewriters accomplish their goals by spatializing information – the letters of the alphabet are dispersed in a standardized arrangement, each immediately accessible to the user” (109 CP).

“Before being compiled, code is written text, characters in a row, that is at the same time a machine. It exists both in a two-dimensional and multidimensional processual space. This dual quality of a program feeds over in the machinery of language and suggests that both the language of Word itself and the kinds of language it machines deserve scrutiny” (CP 130).

Lastly, since we have been reading Kittler for over a month, I think now we can address the reception of Kittler’s work along with a more general analysis of his theory. The following quotes are taken from several reviews of the books we have been reading:

“Thus, Kittler’s book ultimately turns out to be a narrative history surprisingly unreflected with regard to its methodological procedure…This, however, always assumes an unproblematic readability of historical data…The epochally inopportune is thus excluded by the fable of two mutually exclusive historical orders.” - Thomas Sebastien, MLN, Vol. 105 (3), 1990. 583 – 595.

“In 1900, the unity between poet and nature has disappeared. Kittler provides no convincing explanations for the failure of pedagogy that created a nation of writers without readers and a poetry of signifiers disconnected from their signifieds.” - Virginia L. Lewis. “A German Poststructuralist.” PLL. Vol. 28 (1), 1992. 100 – 107.

“Because he makes very large arguments on the basis of very specific and often idiosyncratic examples, Kittler’s readers might with good reason remain skeptical. Why, for example, is film a fundamentally montage-based medium, when the Lumiere brothers and the Film d’Art directors largely eschewed editing, and when long take plays such an important role in cinema throughout the twentieth century? And why does the computer evolve primarily out of the typewriter and, this, emerge from linguistic rather than numerical practices?” - Matthew Biro. CLIO, Vol. 29 (4), 2000. 485-492.

“Kittler wrote Gramophone, Film, Typewriter just as chaos theory was arriving to throw a wrench into such stark digital determinism, precisely through the operational finitude as well as non-linear iterations of “finite state machines.” – From the Bruce Clarke review on the blog.

See you in class,

- Dan

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Further thoughts on “Film”

Monday, March 6th, 2006

If you’ve had time to view “The Great Train Robbery,” I’d like to offer the following passages from Kittler; tomorrow, I’d like to focus on the ideas of continuity/discontinuity and “the real,” particularly as they relate to the medium of film. I look forward to hearing everyone’s ideas tomorrow. Oh, and sorry for the problem with the first link. Thanks for the correction, Will.

From “Film” in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

“Cinema, in contrast to sound recording, began with reels, cuts, and splices” (115).

In response to Munsterberg’s writing about the use of cutting and splicing in film, Kittler writes, “Munsterberg’s questions remain unanswered because the making of films is in principle nothing but cutting and splicing: the chopping up of continuous motion, or history, before the lens. … The fact that cuts stood at the beginning of visual data processing but entered acoustic data processing only at the end can then be seen as a fundamental difference in terms of our sensory registration. That difference inaugurated the distinction between the imaginary and the real” (117-8).

“A medium that is unable to trace the amplitudes of its input data is permitted a priori to perform cuts. Otherwise, there would be no data. Since Muybridge’s experimental arrangement, all film sequences have been scans, excerpts, selections. And every cinematic aesthetic has developed from the 24-frame-per-shot, which was later standardized. Stop trick and montage, slow motion and time lapse only translate technology into the desires of the audience. As phantasms of our deluded eyes, cuts reproduce the continuities and regularities of motion” (119).

“Coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday’s stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient condition for the illusions of cinema. One only had to automatize the cutting mechanism, cover the film reel with a wing disk between moments of exposure and with a Maltese cross during moments of projection, and the eye saw seamless motion rather than 24 single and still shots. One perforated rotating disk during the recording and projection of pictures made possible the film trick preceding all film tricks. Chopping or cutting in the real, fusion or flow in the imaginary — the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox” (122).

“While optical data in film are storable, they are also ’shadowy, fleeting’: one cannot look them up, as with books (or today’s videotapes)” (142).

In thinking about continuity and discontinuity within the context of the medium of film, I’d like to offer the definition of continuity that Jonathan Auerbach suggests in his article, “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema.”

“Continuity: how time and space are organized according to ‘a logic of the visible’ that renders ’spatio-temporal and causal relations coherently and consistently’ ” (798).

“Continuity as such usually refers to spatio-temporal articulation between shots, which is something of a problem given the fact that most films prior to 1901-2…were taken in a single shot” (799).

And, From “Detours in Film Narrative: The Development of Cross-Cutting” by Andre Gaudreault:

“The scenario of this later film [The Great Train Robbery] is somewhat ambiguous, allowing us, as we’ll see further on, an interpretation that may be quite different from what Porter intended to express and which I think he did express. Indeed the ambiguity of the scenario is such that among the many studies that have been made of the film it is difficult to find a sound, or at least clearly stated, understanding of its temporality. If anything, the opposite has been the case, for the film itself offers little help to those who approach it without some prior inkling of Porter’s handling of temporality at this period” (43).

Tomorrow, I’d like us to think about the discontinuity of the medium film, and, in particular, in relation to “The Great Train Robbery,” I’d like for us to think about the use of the single shot and what it suggests about time and the real. How does the method of inscription compare to the gramophone? Also, I’ll have a bibliography for those of you who may want to do further work in this area.

Until class,

helen

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Film presentation

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Hi all,

In preparation for discussion tomorrow night, I’d like to ask you to check out the “Inventing Entertainment” section of the Library of Congress’ American Memories website. The website focuses on the motion picture and sound recordings of the Edison companies. In addition to looking around and perhaps reading about and/or viewing/listening to some of the clips, it would be great if you would watch the short film “The Great Train Robbery” by Edwin Porter. It is three parts, and the total viewing time is about 12 minutes. We will be viewing it and talking about it tomorrow night in relation to what we have read in Kittler and Manovich.

Here’s a link to the front page of the website:
http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html

And if you’d like to go directly to “The Great Train Robbery,” here’s a link for that.
http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@filreq(@field(NUMBER+@band(edmp+2443s3))+@field(COLLID+edison))

Later today, I will be posting some quotations from the readings that might be worth considering again after viewing the film. Also, I’ll be adding some thoughts from others that we did not read in class. If something strikes you after viewing the movie, by all means, don’t hesitate to start the discussion now on the blog.

That’s it for now.

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Feb. 21 Presentation: The Gramophone

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

[For whatever reason, this post has become a magnet for comment spam and I have had to turn off the comments function. Sorry–MGK]

Hi everyone,

Here are a few links to various advertisements for “talking machines” that I will use to frame our discussion on Tuesday. Check them out when you have a chance and feel free to comment on anything you notice.

http://www.clpgs.org.uk/advertising_page.htm

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images4/14120101-034-0201a.jpg

http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/gramophone_ads.jpg

http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/brunswick_ads.jpg

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images4/14120101-034-0201b.jpg

http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/talking_machine_ad.jpg

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=berl&fileName=10010126//
berl10010126.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D?berl:1:./temp/~ammem_UKAr::&linkText=0

Something to think about…

Lisa Gitelman notes in “Souvenir Foils” that “audiences greeted the phonograph with both enthusiasm and skepticism” (157), and in the advent of this “excitingly modern connection between aural experience and inscribed evidence” (157)–it seems only natural that such a mixed response would result. In the course of my reading, what struck me most was the way in which sound recording was subsequently presented to and received by the public –through various advertisements, “scientific” articles, and exhibitions that explained and demonstrated how to replicate the basic mechanical process. Certain words appear again and again, emphasizing reliability, indestructibility, quality, and affordability. What does it mean that newly founded gramophone/ record companies all describe the new media in this manner? Particuarly in light of the Kittler and Gitelman readings, what does this martketing approach suggest about the implications of recorded sound?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
~Adriene

The hard zinc disc “becomes a picture of sound waves which, though slumbering in a bed of hard metal, is ready at any time, even centuries hence, to burst forth into the soft cadenzas of word and song, the ripple of laughter, the strains of martial music, as well as the melancholy and imploring drag of the organ grinder’s tuneful melody.”—Emile Berliner on the visual aspects of recordings (1890)

“I am carrying on a vocal correspondence with my friends in Europe, by means of small gramophone discs, which can be mailed in a good sized envelopes…I could cite a number of instances where persons have been made happy by hearing and recognizing the voices of loved ones whom they had not seen in years, and the owners of which were thousands of miles away.”—Berliner (1890)

“…you can’t write literature with it, because it hasn’t any ideas & it hasn’t any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or ivior of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil. I filled four dozen cylinders in two settings, then found I could have said about as much with the pen & said it a deal better.”—letter to William Dean Howells, April 4, 1891

“I don’t mind them away back two or three rooms, but I don’t like to be close beside them when they’re talking through their teeth. They never really represent the human voice, and for that reason I’ve always declined to talk a record into one.”—quoted in The New York Times, June 30, 1907, “Mark Twain’s Experiences in the Hands of British Interviewers”

“The Machine Age can affect music only in its distribution. Composers must compose in the same way the old composers did. No one has found a new method in which to write music. We still use the old signatures, the old symbols…Handiwork can never be replaced in the composition of music. If music ever became machine-made in that sense, it would cease to be art.”—George Gershwin on the photograph

“That leads to the whole question of what you are aiming to produce when you make a record…one argument that is frequently leveled at me is: “You’re not being very honest.” I say, to hell with that. We have a different art form here.”—Beatles producer George Martin

“The recording industry has lived mainly by what might be called the transparency perspective, according to which a sound recording is understood on the model of a transparent windowpane through which we can see things undistorted…The rhetoric of the recording industry has tended to suggest its recordings were transparent in virtue of the mere fact that they were documentary…A blurred photograph could hardly be regarded as transparent, even if it is essentially documentary in function. However, the recording industry has not been quick to acknowledge the analogous fact about sound recordings…Each of its technical breakthroughs, from acoustic to electric, from shellac to vinyl, from monophonic to stereophonic, and from analogue to digital, was described in the same glowing terms as the one that came before. The cliché image of Nipper mistaking a recording playback for his master is only the best-known piece of hype the industry has always used to sell the idea that its transparency is a realized fact.” —Lee B. Brown Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music

“Although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object…Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master’s voice.”
—Theodor Adorno The Culture Industry p. 99

Works Cited and Consulted:

Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. J.M. Bernstein, ed. London & NY: 1991.
Berliner, Emile. “The improved gramophone.” (Paper read at the 52nd Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, New York, 16 December 1890). Quoted in: Susan G. Sterrett, “Pictures of sounds: Wittgenstein on gramophone records and the logic of depiction.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 36:2, June 2005 (351-362).
Brown, Lee B. “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music.” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 58:4, Fall 2000 (361-372).
Gracyk, Theodore. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Duke UP, 1996.
Twain, Mark. Quotes from:
http://www.twainquotes.com/Gramophones.html

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Alphabetization and Digitization

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 3 (1789)

“By alphabetization I mean the array of individual, social, and institutional practices surrounding the internalization of the alphabet, the first step in literacy training” (4). –Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, 2000).

“The term alphabetization derives from the romance-language verb—to alphabetize, to be alphabetized—for the getting and giving of literacy. English lacks an equivalent term. I find it useful in a number of ways: it allows us to think of literacy as an action—derived from a transitive verb—rather than a state or quality. It also goes a small way toward defamiliarizing literacy and keeping the forefront the importance of the alphabet to the kind of literacy I mean” (6). –Crain

“The alphabet slips easily out of focus as an object of study. The alphabet functions best when it dissolves, disappearing into text; only then does it become fully legible. . . . As an object of representation, the alphabet is an androgyne, moving back and forth between text and image. Images often convey material that strongly contrasts with the verbal messages of the text, and I read them as ways in which the culture pictures to itself the complexities of its formation of literacy” (7). –Crain

“As I shall construe it here, digitization is not a notion confined to electronic devices but a technological norm that operates across a spectrum of materials and processes. As a rule of thumb, the more deeply digitization penetrates the more efficient the process becomes. . . .Alphabetic technology, the division of all words into a small set of uniform letters—twenty-six in the Latin alphabet, plus 10 numerals and a few “accidentals”—made efficient letterpress printing possible. Typesetters set their type in letters, not words or sentences, and a handful of little metal blocks could print every sentence.” (186) –Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Cornell UP, 1992)

“The implementation technology must produce perfect outputs from imperfect inputs, nipping small errors in the bud. This is the essence of digital technology, which restores signals to near perfection at every stage” (18). –Danny Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (1998)

“The authority of written documents . . . does not depend upon their pristine and unaltered condition. Quite the contrary—it is the capacity of the material documents to record change that makes them such believable witnesses.” –Johanna Drucker, “The Future of Writing in Terms of its Past: The New Fungibility Factor.” Émigré 35 (Summer 1995).

“Virtually all erasures can be detected by thorough examination” (96). –Ordway Hilton, Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents

Electromagnetic data, though “material . . . if deleted and overwritten, leaves no scratch on any surface” (31). –Bruce Clarke, From Energy to Information

“Digital writing celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure. What is undone is as if not ever done. Thus digital inscription is of another order than any previous inscription, closer to speaking to another without the presence of a third as witness, than, even, to the passing of a ciphered note.” –Marcos Novak, “TransTerraForm”

“You no longer retain the slightest visible or objective trace of corrections made the day before. Everything—the past and the present—everything can thus be locked, cancelled, or encrypted forever. Previously, erasures and added words left a sort of scar on the paper or a visible image in the memory. There was a temporal resistance, a thickness in the duration of the erasure. But now everything negative is drowned, deleted; it evaporates immediately, sometimes from one instant to the next” (24) –Jacques Derrida, “The Word Processor” (1996, 2005)

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quipu

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

Hello all,
Since I am presenting on the quipu this week in class, there are some links I wanted to provide you with.

Here are some images of the quipu, in photographs and also in drawings from the early 17th century:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/inca/inca_culture_3.html

http://www.vtv.gov.ve/Actualidades.php?IdActualidad=1010
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/khipu_08112005.html
http://kelane.people.wm.edu/andes_folder/pages/andesm58_jpg.htm
http://www.cesga.es/mostra/carteles/quipu.html
http://www.remote.org/jochen/projects/quipu/
As I’ll discuss in class, very few quipus survived the Spanairds’ arrival in the Americas, so there are correspondingly few photographs.

There are also a couple of articles I’ll be referencing, one is in the most recent issue of the PMLA. If any of you received it, it is the article by Lorraine Piroux called “The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture.” It can be found on p. 107.
Another of the articles is available through Project Muse:
Beyersdorff, Margot “Writing Without Words/Words Without Writing: The Culture of the Khipu”
Latin American Research Review - Volume 40, Number 3, 2005, pp. 294-311.

-Lori

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