Technologies of Text (S12)

If you’re interested in the idea of coding as writing, you might also like this video—part of a discussion in the “critical code studies” community—of “live coding.” Ramsay discusses coding as performative art:

Looking through the Norbertine Journal on Monday, I learned a lot about what it means to be able to decipher ancient text and understand beyond the words that are written down on paper. I guess I never thought that just by looking at the font and style of writing that one could learn so much about the time it was written in and what were important ideals at that day-in-age.

There were so many interesting things that were brought to my attention once i knew what I was looking for, such as how he used color on only one of the cover page. The metadata throughout this diary is tremendous. One can tell some much about the text as long as they have knowledge as to the time that the text was written. Anyone can do what we did and seek out all of the distinguishable features of the text, but to actually know the what and why behind the text is what really is going to help figure out meaning behind what these authors were putting into their writing.

Dr. Bolin really reinforced what we were talking about and doing on Monday as well. I believe that he even came right out and said it during his presentation, its not only the words that are telling us about the importance of the texts found in the ancient world, a lot of it comes from the metadata. I can’t wait to do more of this research in this field.

After last week’s discussions my eyes have been opened to a whole new way of thinking; in particular about digital humanities. I was always aware of the influence of digitizing information but never could have imagined how far spread the field of digital humanities actually is. For me, Dr. Bolin’s, “Writing Technology in Ancient Near East” presentation was a perfect example. I can’t even begin to recall how many presentations I’ve sat through that had numerous images and random facts but until I began to contemplate the concept of digital humanities the thought of where these things came from never crossed my mind. The journey each image or chunk of data took to get to that power point presentation is nothing short of remarkable. Pictures of ancient scrolls taken in foreign countries shared in a class room in a private school in Wisconsin, their translations made accessible to anyone who wants to view them, both impossible without the helping hand of digital humanities.
The map of Egypt Dr. Bolin used is a direct testament to how digital humanities enable us to learn. Just by looking at a map of the cities in Egypt, he was able to make the correlation between the location of the cities and their ability to create mud scrolls to write on. This is identical to what Patricia Cohen was conveying in her New York Times article from last week, “Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land.” Dr. Bolin expressed how cities that were located next to rivers were more readily able to create mud scrolls from the river banks and subsequently record any information they wanted. Obviously the actual text that was being recorded took a long time to evolve into a substantial system, but the resources that were available to these cities aided their advancement. Theses like this are direct benefits of what digital humanities allows us to do.
Tied into Monday’s class lecture, the idea of metadata was present even in some of the oldest scrolls Dr. Bolin presented to the class. At the end of these scrolls authors would describe the texts by signifying the end of the document and how many pages came before the end. Other documents had pictures at the head of a document to signify what was to follow. We still use this idea today. Dr. Bolin raised the point of how our diploma’s or important letters have old English text in the header to signify their meaning. Being that we are pattern recognizing beings, we see the old English text on top of a special piece of paper and immediately we know this document is much more than an 8 x 11 piece of printing paper. Recognizing these characteristics allows us to better digitize other documents such as the journal we looked at in lab by being able recreate the text and bring it life in such a way that will accurately represent its message.
If you were to get one thing from this blog it would be: take a second to step back and see how digital humanities play a part in your everyday life. The results will almost certainly be alarming.

When thinking about what it means to say the “technology of text” it is easy to only think about the “good things,” and how the advancement of text has helped us grow. But after reading about the technology of text and the digital humanities, there were some points that were brought up that I never would have thought of had someone else not mentioned them. The biggest point for me was how the advancements in text have some consequences that were probably not intended. For example, how text has allowed for our society to be lazier in how we learn. We don’t have to remember dates, specific battles, or even names because we can google them. (And I argue that it’s not laziness, but rather selecting the data we want to remember). And it is possible that this is not as bad a consequence as it may seem now, because down the road it may allow us to “learn” more things because we can save time by being able to look up the details later. This could put a lot of emphasis on a student taking responsibility of their own learning and being able to take some liberties that may not be afforded to them in a conventional classroom. Oh the possibilities . . . But I digress.

But I think that the most interesting thing so far (for me at least) has been being able to see how text has evolved by reading the assigned readings, watching the video (which was very neat by the way) in class on Monday, and Dr. Bolin’s presentation. I thought it was cool to see in Dr. Bolin’s presentation how information was first written down and how the alphabet came around. This class has been so much more for me than what I had expected, and it has only been (almost) two weeks! I can’t wait to see what’s next in the evolution:)

After Dr. Bolin’s lecture, one question that I kept asking myself, was how has writing things down changed the way we speak?  Before writing systems, which ultimately are only representations/symbols of the spoken word, syntax, grammar, spelling to name a few, did not exist as they do today.  A grand variety of dialects, languages and colloquialisms were used throughout the world with little or no regulation.  If rules existed, they were in a very different context than our grammar and syntax, which are static because they are written down and permanent until later revisions.  Before writing, this regulation would have been much more dynamic and flexible in nature because the rules changed with different use, passed down from generation to generation sometimes explicitly taught, but likely implicitly learned as time passed.  I suppose it’s possible some rules were designed to keep a language somewhat uniform from person to person in some village or culture, but certainly not on the scale of written languages today.  So writing things down must have had a noticeable influence on how people communicated verbally, right?  Writing could have helped foster the creation of new more descriptive words to help more specifically describe something as writing systems progressed.

This thought reminded me of my childhood in which my father would correct my grammar when I would say for example,  ” me and my friend are going to play” to the grammatically correct version, “my friend and I are going to play.”  This practice probably helped my written communication skills in the long run, but in terms of conveying meaning from these two statements are exactly the same.  The difference is simply a formality that has become part of our written system’s rules.  Is it so terribly wrong to say “me and my friend”?

So I ask the class to respond to this question: Do you think that writing systems changed the spoken language significantly?  If so, are they restricting our speech too much or is it necessary to convey meaning accurately?

The most interesting thing I found this week amoung the tweets, blogs, and lecture was the speaker, Dr. Thomas Bolin, yesterday. His lecture caught my interest almost immediately, brought up, and answered many questions in my mind. I mean I knew that the primitive languages were complex and were changed because they were not practical but I didn’t know the details or the mechanism of it. Dr. Bolin’s lecture clearly defined the major periods in the evolution of writing, stating with the Mesopotamians, and Egyptians. The Mesopotamians used Cubeiform and Egyptians used Hieroglyphics which got complicated quickly. making it quiet impractical; also only a small percentage of their population knew how to write and read the language. Tying  back to the priorities and problems list created in class, the fact that only a small percentage of their population could use the language, conflicts with both:

• public scholarship
• open access—makes scholarship available to all

In my opinion, these bullet points plus the complexity is why I think that Cubeiform and Hieroglyphics did not work. This lecture also brought up question in my mind about modern day writing and how it evolved? and how writing develped after the Egyptians and Mesopotamians?As well as what the mechanisms of change were? As we can see now with Digital Humanities and Digital texts, technology and writing is constantly changing; the fact that the field is always changing and that it is new, makes it interesting.  This was by FAR my favorite lecture of the year as well as the most informative!!! 

Video that was assigned to us impressed me a lot. I asked myself a question: ”Are we the ones who are using technology or technology is using us?” I agree with Susan Blackmore, who said that “we willingly provide ever more energy to power the Internet, and there is enormous scope for teme machines to grow, evolve and create ever more extraordinary digital worlds, some aided by humans and others independent of them.”

We see technology as the source of information. We keep talking about technological progress. But….who is the reason of this progress? We…

So, technology is using us the resource as much as we use technology. We are the source of continuous developing of technology. Everyday by searching the information in the Internet we teach it by giving key words. So, next time it may take less time to find the same information.

It is becoming easier and easier to find the information. The Internet is all we need! We don’t need to buy books, subscribe to newspapers or magazines. Everything has electronic version. Today, we can do almost everything on-line. We can pay bills, order food, book tickets, hotels, buy almost everything we need. It is time consuming, so it is understandable that we prefer Internet. We somehow become dependent on it.

At the same time the privacy issue has become very serious. We are talking a lot about our privacy. All of us say that we are concerned about our private lives. But… we create accounts in the social network web-sites (Facebook); we put the information about ourselves (school, work, favorite groups, singers, pages etc.). Not only we include personal information, we also download photos and tag our friend on them. So what kind of privacy we are talking about if we share our private lives voluntarily?

We tend to believe that we-humans are the creators, we are the ones that develop and improve our world and we are capable of controlling everything. However, a principle question is if we can consider ourselves being able to control this process or we are just the source?

I thought it was interesting that the oldest form of writing was less for entertainment and more for practical purposes. Dr. Bolin said that kings needed to keep track of the sacrifices made to the gods however they usually could not read or write so they had educated scribes do the work for them. I have always been fascinated by how people figure out what word is associated with an abstract symbol. He also mentioned that one symbol could have multiple sounds or meanings and I wonder how difficult it was to create thousands of symbols.

Seeing the pictures of actual pieces of clay or papyrus made what he was teaching more interesting. I liked imagining a young boy in ancient Egypt learning how to write and somehow we now have it. It really makes me appreciate how far society has come as well as the fact that I have access to an education. With only 1-3% of the population being able to read and write back then, it was still limited to white males so I would not have been able to learn how to read or write.

I was also fascinated by the Egyptians believing the world was a tablet God wrote them signs on like in the liver of a sacrificed animal. Thank God for modern technology! Looking at the thousands of symbols written on tiny tablets reminded me of the article we read discussing the Google database you can plug any word in and see how many times it appears throughout literature. What if someday there is a database similar to that for Hieroglyphics? I t would make a historian’s job easier.

All in all I was really interested in what Dr. Bolin had to say and I learned a lot!

Class this week has been interesting to say the least. I feel like we are all starting to let the goals and purposes of the class sink in; I know I for one have begun thinking about my project already (look at me not waiting until the last minute!). Something else I noticed  relevant to this week’s class (and the future lessons) is how relevant class material is to the rest of my studies. In my marketing research capstone, we are studying the effects of social media and its aid in research methods. In my web design course, my professor stressed the importance of knowledge of HTML code when it comes to professional web design. I was bit wary of what I would/could possibly gain from this class as a whole, but as the weeks go on I am really getting excited about what this course has to offer me.

That being said, there were several things about this week’s content that peaked my interest. I found the video called “The Machine is Us/ing Us” not only pretty well put-together (web design interest coming through) but very explanatory and very interesting, both of HTML code itself and to the purpose and effectiveness of connecting/accessing data and metadata. Another article that peaked my interest was the one on Plato’s conversation, particularly this excerpt:

“…for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

I find this conversation extremely relevant to knowledge gained from social media. While there are many, many useful tools on the web that can be used for learning and job-related tasks, there is a lot of material out there that is basically good for nothing. Often times, we are ‘hearers of many things” without having learned anything at all, we are “tiresome company” because all we can think or talk about is what we see on Facebook, twitter, or similar sites. As for what Plato references of the “trust to the external written characters”, especially in academic settings, we often trust the first link Google gives us as the infallible “truth” and base our assignments and projects on it.

Slightly off topic, but there are many causes for why we as a population are “hearers of many things” and even viewers of many things without really having learned or internalized anything. That is the struggle in the advertising world today; we as a whole are so over-saturated with advertisements and emails and notifications that we only internalize a very small percentage of what we see/hear/read/etc.

I wonder if Plato knew just how relevant his material would be to us even today…