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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 450. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-11-30 21:55:02+00:00 From: Dr. Herbert WenderSubject: Re: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal to reveal Francois, is there any evidence, in the text or elsewhere, that the intention behind the usage of such 'enforced' mirror writing is directed against machine reading? Maybe this sort of resistance is only a collateral good while the 'true' intent was the enigmatic appearance of the verses? (I suppose that the lines are meant as verses, and I would have appreciated a litera translation by vour friend...) Herbert -----Ursprüngliche Mitteilung----- Von: Humanist An: publish-liv Verschickt: Sa, 30. Nov. 2019 11:08 Betreff: [Humanist] 33.447: failure of another sort: conceal to reveal Date: 2019-11-29 14:29:34+00:00 From: Francois Lachance Subject: Failure of Another Sort Willard I have come across an interesting and quirky case... Maged Zaher _the consequences of my body_ Failure of another sort - engineered failure for the monolingual English reader - you turn the page in Zaher's book and on the verso is this section of what looks like Arabic. No translation, no annotation. I turned to an Arab-speaking friend who informs me: [quote] Typically, one has to understand what one is reading in Arabic and do so with a good grasp of the grammar in order to read it correctly. This is one reason why the language is classified as one of the most difficult in the world. Your poet is intentionally trying to make things even more difficult. The Arabic script is in mirror image. And, to complicate things further, it is all in upper case letters without any spaces separating the words. I am assuming the intention here is to have the text resist optical recognition software and hence make it accessible only to a living breathing Arabic reading human. [/quote] In this case the machine is to aid communication, connecting with the human, by resisting the machine. -- Francois Lachance Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance https://berneval.hcommons.org Attachments: zaher-consequences.jpg: https://dhhumanist.org/att/81835/att00/ _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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