17.587 paradigm shift of textuality

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Jan 30 2004 - 04:01:01 EST


<x-flowed>
               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 587.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:58:16 +0000
         From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
         Subject: Re: 17.553 paradigm shift of textuality (fwd)

[The following apparently went astray. Apologies to all. --WM]

> From lachance Sat Jan 24 08:39:00 2004
> > Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 08:39:00 -0500 (EST)

>
> The deaf dishwasher ponders what will be left to say about paradigms,
> shifts or textuality (wonders who is forcing who to read what)?
>
> Ask the waiter.
>
> The waiter would explain that textuality does not reside in the material
> traces alone. Indeed that all texts can function as pretexts. Context
> determines use.
>
> The indexical nature of the menu can be apprehened as enabling the reader
> to ask questions. The menu not only guides the selection of a suitable
> dish to order it also guides the discourse about the selection.
>
> There is always more than one technique available to process a textual
> artefact. Whether a set of techniques are considered to be one or more
> technologies is a question to ask the cook.
>
> Amid the suds, the deaf dishwasher recalls that even in monocultural
> settings menus require translation. Indeed all textual artefact require
> translation. Textuality resides in the translating: that space between the
> source and the target. A rather intriguing space of freedom.
>
> The deaf dishwasher knows of great feats of coordination between several
> target and source sites. The deaf dishwasher recals how quickly the
> talking menu can be recoded to take into account that the raddishes didn't
> get delivered to the kitchen robots. The dishwasher dreams of going to
> coding school and creating menus that blink.
>
>
>
> >
> > Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 553.
> > Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> > www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> > www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> > Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
> >
> >
> >
> > Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:27:23 +0000
> > From: Patrick Sahle <sahle@uni-koeln.de>
> > Subject: Personal Experiences in the Paradigm Shift of
Textuality
> >
> > A (mediated = medialized) text is a machine or a user interface that
> > “behaves” in a certain way. So we expect the texts we face to behave in a
> > certain way. There is always ONE text technology that sets the standard.
> > Which socializes our notion of a text as the normal behaviour of that
text.
> > Actually we are on the threshold of a new shift, undergoing continuing
> > technical (= mental) socialization. I experienced my own
> > “conversion”/”passover” when I visited an italian restaurant some days
ago.
> > Looking at the menu, my friend said: “I don’t know what I’m going to eat,
> > but it should be something with cream sauce. I will have to read all the
> > lists of ingredients”. And I thought: “yeah, that’s strange. The menu
> > doesn’t behave as it should. You can not press a Ctrl-F-Key and look for
> > ‘cream’ in all the dishes. The text doesn’t highlight all occurrences of
> > ‘cream’. The text doesn’t answer to my questions. This isn’t a normal
text,
> > it’s not interactive, it doesn’t communicate. It’s a dead thing.”
> >
> > To me, at that moment, it seemed to be an outdated, old-fashioned kind of
> > text, an antiquarian text, as from an archive. Surely the
> > printed-book-people had a similar experience for hundreds of years, when
> > they encountered manuscripts. They surely often will have thought: this
> > isn’t a normal text. It’s too hard to decipher and where is the table of
> > contents which directs me into the book and to some certain page numbers?
> > Where are the headlines and footnotes? Why is it so inconvenient to use
> > this kind of text?
> >
> > Maybe some decades from now I will sit in an italian restaurant with my
> > son. And I will hear him talk to some menu: “What pasta with cream do you
> > have to offer?”, expecting it to answer in a clearly audible voice ­ and
> > never even thinking about being forced to “read” a menu. What will be
left
> > to say about "textuality" then?
> >
> > Comments?
> >
>
>
>
>
>

--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance

Wondering if...

mnemonic is to analytic as mimetic is to synthetic </x-flowed>



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