vika – Page 64 – Words' End

March 25, 2003

War protest in Boston

Last Thursday, I had a choice: go to a Groovelily concert, or go to an anti-war protest. I sent e-mail to my concert companions, to the effect of – I’m going to the protest. It’s called for 5pm. I may or may not make it to the show at 8.

Drove to Someday Cafe via Mass. Ave. and MIT, and was very pleased to see students &c. marching down the street, blocking most of it (we drivers could get by single-file), the cops accompanying them with their flashing lights on. I was rather depressed about the state of the world, so went to Someday, had some tea, and took the T to Government Center.

The protest was lame. Ill-thought-out, it was a pacifist protest – wholesale against war. Bring Our Troops Home. While a great sentiment, this leads to a perception by the opposition (the war’s/administration’s supporters) that the people there were a bunch of peaceniks. That’s easy to dismiss: Are you pro-Saddam, then? Would you rather he remain in power? Peace-not-war isn’t the point here. The point I was (thought we were) protesting is how the war was brought about, the Bush administration’s blatant disregard for the UN, its hypocrisy and self-serving attitude – all these things are much better articulated by others. The Boston protesters made their arguments an easy target for dismissal, and that’s a pity.

Pity, the above, but not disastrous. What was appalling was one of the first speakers. She was the first one I heard; I might’ve missed others while in a different part of City Hall Plaza. In a shrill voice, this woman informed us that the “bastards” who are ruining this country and what it stands for (I’m wildly paraphrasing here) are to be found not only in our central government, but also in our communities – in the face of police, who are brutal and evil and and…

And the police were standing there, keeping peace, hundreds of them behaving themselves impeccably.

I don’t know that this was the case everywhere, at all times; perhaps there was unnecessary police action. In fact, I think this, at least, signals which side of the protest line the police are officially on. But what good does it do to villify them? Like enlisted military servicepeople, they are doing their jobs. They’ll arrest yo ass if you try to block the entrance to a federal building. In fact, it seem that that’s the point for those who did get arrested; they wanted to be taken in, this is their form of protest. Downtalking the police is going to do zero.

Then the same speaker called on us all, Catholics and former Catholics alike (I am not kidding), to unite – and led us in prayer to the Catholic god. I had no words. She was trying to unite us this way?

Later, we marched down to Copley Square, which actually felt good (if ineffectual with regard to its actual effect on war decisions). It helped that I’d run into some people I knew, so we actually had thought-out conversation while walking.

Then I went to the concert. It was grand, a wonderful way to spend time, and I suspect that the laughter and good vibe generated at that show may’ve done more to counteract the general wave of suck than the protest.

March 22, 2003

Nicely done.

I’m posting this not because I agree or disagree with it politically, but because it’s well executed as Web art.

March 20, 2003

From a colleague in Belgium:

Talking of lanuage abilities: today a demonstration on the big square in Gent with 4.000 school children, some just 5 years old, shouting: 1, 2, 3, 4, we don’t want a fucking war. Proves that they can count and swear in English.

March 19, 2003

tale of two talks

Yesterday and the day before I went to two talks given by N.Katherine Hayles here in the area.

The first, on Monday, took place at RISD. There, NKH talked about her work-in-progress book, titled Coding the Signifier. She spoke from her perspective as a literary scholar, and much of her work is aimed at an audience of literary scholars who, she says, must look at new media objects, evolving experimental digital literature, in order to – well – keep up with their field. We must, she (rightly) insists, study and understand all aspects of digital literature, and this includes the code behind it. We cannot base our understanding of electronic literature (I use terms interchangeably here) exclusively on the natural-language words in it. (The next day, at Brown, Hayles even raised the question of whether e-lit has to have words in it in order to be considered e-lit.) We must know and understand [some variety of] code, even as we continue to work as literary scholars and not computer programmers.

To learn code, she suggests we look at literary electronic objects, for example, Lexia to Perplexia. If they are Web pages, we can view source and see (some of) the code behind them. If they aren’t, well, we can always ask an author for access to muck about inside a particular work’s files, without modifying them.

Allusions were made also to electronic scholarly resources – like, for example, the Rossetti Archive. Conspicuously missing from this first talk, however, was any discussion of the practice of building such resources as this combination of literary and new media scholarship that NKH is getting at. We have already seen, with Rossetti and Dante and Blake and so many others, that looking at print literature through and with our electronic tools yields fascinating ways to look at literary production (“as a system”!) that haven’t occurred to us before. It seems to me that electronic literary study must include a conscious awareness of both creative and scholarly electronic writing. Natural language is changed by code, NKH says, and vice versa. We can’t afford to ignore the ways in which the natural language of exclusively-print literature changes when code is applied to its interpretation.

I’m becoming fond of typologies – they are useful. I wonder how well the following classification works, when thinking of the essential components of literary study. (These aren’t to be confused with a necessity to be an expert in all of them; of course we specialize in one more than the rest. But awareness of each of these categories, an elementary familiarity with the problems they explore, is absolutely critical to our understanding of the interplay between literature and the electronic medium.)

Creative electronic writing. As said above, this includes both the literary-plot text and the code used to manipulate and present it. If this means looking at what’s possible in DHTML, Flash and GIS, then so be it. It doesn’t actually take all that much time to understand the principles behind these systems, at least to the point where one understands what all the pretty pictures mean.

Philosophical and other theoretical bases for creative electronic writing. This includes theories that were put forth long before the advent of the electronic age. NKH talked a lot about Saussure and semiotics, for example.

Paper-based or paper-presentable criticism of creative electronic writing. [Part of] Hayles’ own Writing Machines – or at least the paper-bound book (as distinguished from the Web supplement) – is an example of this.

Electronic theory and criticism of new media. Take some ebr articles, for example.

Electronic theory and criticism which takes as its object of study non-electronic writing. An additional example to the ones I gave above would be the Decameron Web.

I guess what I am driving at is: the natural language that is being changed by code is not only the literary, but also the critical. This applies not only to literary studies, but to the whole of the humanities. We theorize in code – for example, by semantically encoding literary texts. I do not presume to ask that all humanists perform semantic encoding, or use GIS to study history. But to understand in rudimentary ways how these systems work is an imperative.

Of course, NKH talked more about this more the next day, at Brown. (What follows is more of a disjointed sketch of what was said, by her and the audience, than a detailed analysis.) Here, she discussed her and Anne Burdick’s work on Writing Machines. In the book, NKH takes a close look at three objects belonging to three different genres: Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia (new media work), Danielewski’s House of Leaves (experimental print novel) and Phillips’ A Humument (artist’s book). Analysis of a literary work should be medium-specific, she says as she discusses the materiality of these works. (She distinguishes this from physicality – which “doesn’t get you closer to the work’s meaning.” Materiality is those aspects of the physical object which are part of a work’s set of signifying strategies.) Wholly ignoring the physical aspects of a work of literature, attempting to study some sort of an ethereal Text which is unconnected to how it is presented in any given artifact, excludes a significant body of semantic information from the scope of inquiry.

Fascinating and rich, and I’m not doing it justice here. Her emphasis, even in electronically-anchored study of print literature, is on the contemporary and the experimental. Extremely useful, essential; but, in a literary-scholarship context, this needs to be considered alongside more… traditional… literature – I use this word with caution. After all, the Divine Comedy was pretty radical in both content and form, in its time.

March 14, 2003

little victories!

The mysterious They (being a selection subcommittee) are recommending my Intro to Humanities Computing course for approval to the curriculum committee. I get to teach it come next spring. I am so pleased!

February 10, 2003

CALL FOR PAPERS — MLA 2003 (http://www.mla.org)

27-30 December 2003, San Diego, CA

—Electronic Theory and Criticism—
Session sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (http://www.ach.org)

This session will focus on humanistic critical and theoretical exposition composed in and for various forms of the electronic medium. Submissions are invited on any related topic. The following are merely some examples:

– semantic encoding as critical exposition;
– audience, and readability with regard to scholarly hypermedia;
– the role of interface in critical electronic exposition;
– reception of critical electronic exposition.

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words; completed papers are also acceptable. Participants in all sessions must be listed on the membership rolls by 7 April or have been granted a waiver of membership. By submitting a proposal you agree to travel to San Diego for the convention in the event that your submission is accepted. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide travel funding; however, MLA does have some financial assistance available on a year-to-year basis. Please see the MLA Web site for more details.

Please use plain text or MS Word format. The deadline is 3 March 2003. Submissions and any questions should be e-mailed to vika–at–wordsend.org. Please pass on this Call For Papers as you deem appropriate.

January 10, 2003

time surfing on little cards

Yesterday, I spent several hours looking through a card catalog in the Houghton. A card catalog! They don’t have a reliable electronic catalog for their manuscript collection, and were mildly apologetic. Actually, I find card catalogs amusing; it’s as close to time travel as we get. The one I looked through, a chronological catalog of all the manuscripts from the 9th century through the 16th, contained many deeds of property and endowments, fragments of the Bible and Koran, antisemitic laws and decrees issued in various European countries, biographies of classical authors written in the Middle Ages and Renaissance… It also had several singularities of note. I wrote some of them down; the Latin, where applicable, should be mostly easy to figure out:

Miscellanea medica, alchemica, et astrologica. Bound in contemporary pigskin over wood boards.

French, XV cent.: La somme des vices et des vertus.

Cessdis, Jacobus de, fl. 1290. De ludo scacchorum. (Of the game of chess.) The binding record on this one states: "19 cent. half sheep."

English, I think, manuscript on mercantile arithmetic.

James IV, King of Scotland. Solemnity of the marriage of James and Margaret, daughter of Henry VII.

Rules of a charity-school and cofraternity (I have to assume England here as well).

Bradamante, Donato, 1444?-1514. A 1512 receipt for salary as architect of St. Peter’s.

Raphael’s receipts for work done in the Vatican.

Giovio, Paul, letter to Federigo II, duke of Mantua. "Sends medicine, announces that plague is over in Rome." (1524, so unlikely the Black Death – I wonder which plague?)

Collection of Italian love poems addressed to prostitutes and servants, ca. 1561.

Italian recipe book: "Contains recipes for perfumes, ointments, medicines, glass, bombs, alchemy, and iron tempering."

A declaration of the state of Spain and Portugal, translated into English, 1608.

Blow my mind, Batman.

January 4, 2003

money on the web

I’ve been thinking, thanks to Noah (see his 1 january entry, and also today’s), about subscription-based Web content. He writespeaks out against it because, among other things,

if the network becomes largely subscription based (or micropayment based) then we’ll be restricting writing and reading to those who can pay – giving up on the dream I grew up on in public schools and libraries (of people being able to read and write at all income levels, or even as children with no money to spend).

He also talks about this in terms of linking – following Ted Nelson, he envisions the Web as a docuverse, in which we continually link the writing we add outselves to other writings already up there. If a link leads to a subscription-based service, and the reader is not subscribed to it, the reading experience is frustrating. (Consider: Even if the reader is subscribed to NYTimes, which does not require payment for subscription, the reading process is often annoyingly interrupted by a sign-in request.)

I can’t say I disagree with Noah’s lack of desire to publish writing that is not freely available. However, on a larger scale, it seems futile to me to attempt complete eradication of money-based Web publishing paradigms. One may choose to not participate in them, but they will remain, and will continue to offer content for which someone will be willing to pay. I think it would be better use of energy to (in addition to not writing for subscription-based publications) concentrate on getting, say, public libraries and schools subscriptions to this content and thus making it, like paper-bound books, available to the public at large at least through those venues.

The reason I’m so interested in this topic is that the Web, essentially, multiplies to some grand power the speed of cultural transmission – which is one of the things I am observing while studying Roland’s progress through the Western space and time. The reasons for cultural borrowing, the volunteering of information (literary and performative included) that may then be borrowed, the impetus to make use of one foreign story more than others… humans are fascinating.

On a slightly different note, this discussion is food for thought with regard to scholarly publication. There is a plethora of free Web-based publication space. So why publish in, say, Literary and Linguistic Computing, or in Computers and the Humanities? The first one is put out by ALLC and is available only with a membership in it. The second is published by ACH and, while available for subscription separately from a membership, is significantly discounted for members of the organization. Both publications are available in print and electronic forms.

The answer for me – and this is applicable in my mind only to scholarly publication in this still very small, heavily dependent on peer review, field – is that the two are not mutually exclusive, and not mutually harmful. I choose to pay for membership in both organizations because they provide me with tangible benefits aside from these publications, and because the work they do cannot happen without members’ financial support. This means that some of my writing (and I do not intend to place undue value on it, here) will not be available without someone’s – say, a university library’s – payment of a subscription fee. I am not really sure what the benefit for me is; except perhaps that as of this moment, publication that is only electronic is considered somehow less academically credible. This perception is slowly changing, but it will be some time; and it will also take more electronic publication venues that are rigorously peer-reviewed than we now have.

This last paragraph above isn’t really applicable to electronic literature and other artistic pursuits. But then, the linked/linking docuverse doesn’t consist solely of art.

November 18, 2002

echoes in the network

I mused recently:

If you send an e-mail
and there’s no answer
and you send another e-mail
and there’s still no answer

did your e-mails make a sound?

Talan responded to the effect of: data makes language-like noise which is interpretable by the machine.

“In that regard, it is not the message that is silent, not producing a sound, but the human agent, the correpondent at the other end of the line. […] [I]t would seem… the riddle is more about the echo the message produces.”

The message produces an echo, but we don’t know where it is. We can’t hear it, cannot physically access the network “space”. Sometimes we request receipt, an electronic bounce that tells us the intended recipient (or hacker) has opened our e-mail, if not actually read it. But, unless the hands on the other side of this cup-and-string phone type OK, we don’t get receipt. So it’s not an echo. The only echo is the transmission.

Songs about Roland were transmitted first by the jongleurs, traveling minstrels. If we follow the above logic, then the results of this transmission � the comic-epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, the Sicilian puppet theatre, the recreation of Roland as fanatical religious martyr in Germany and as Civil War Hero in the U.S. � do not matter. What matters is the transmission itself, and possibly the vehicles of the transmission.

I’m most interested in the echo aspect. Echo is not the exact repetition of a sound; it is the original sound, modified. The precise way in which it is modified is directly dependent on immediate surroundings. The precise ways in which Roland is modified are a direct result of the cultural exigencies of the time. So, changes in cultures across geographical and temporal space may be inferred from a close look at the mutations Roland’s character and his stories continue to undergo.