Reading by Design

I’ve been reading my Edward Tufte books. Tufte is an unreconstructed empiricist when it comes to information design, seemingly untouched by decades of critical theory in vision and representation. Within that well-circumbscribed field, though, he is a master, and I’ve never regretted a penny I’ve spent on his books, laden as they are with illustrations and examples lovingly selected. I want to touch here, though, on some of his words, not pictures:

We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, avergae, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats. (Envisioning Information 50)

This is from a chapter on Micro/Macro Designs, of which the Vietnam War Memorial is a prime example. The impact of the moument arises from the interplay between the 58,000+ names, each individually rendered and textured (visitors can often be found running their fingers over the etched letterforms) and the visual gestalt of the Wall, its sharp angles emerging from and sinking back into the landscape. What’s interesting here—and I’m not sure whether Tufte himself is on to this or not—is that the paragraph above is itself a model of precisely this kind of micro/macro design. While it can be parsed word for word, the reader lingering over the distinctiveness of each infinitive, it clearly has a cumulative effect as well, one that is apparent from an optical scanning or pass of the eye. We can fully read this sentence without (fully) reading it. It is thus a demonstration of reading by pattern recognition, a popular—though not uncontroversial—explanation for the cognitive modality of literacy.

Tool for Thought

Steven Johnson links to his own piece on a “Tool for Thought,” a discussion of desktop data mining applications he sees as the Next Big Thing in electronic literacy. Good historical perspective and useful context for the NORA project.

Technologies of Writing Seminar (1)

So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation of images. But here are some main themes to emerge from this first day.

1. The amazing diversity of materials, instruments, implements, surfaces, supports, furniture, and physical spaces associated with writing. Consider this list of writing surfaces: rock, slate, clay, cloth, ivory, sand, bone, wax, plaster, papyrus, parchment (skin), and, of course, paper. Exercise: how many different writing technologies can you pick out in the following image of Saint Jerome (1480)?

2. The importance of erasure. Since writing spaces are often volumetric they have a finite surface area and a finite capacity. The materials are expensive and need to be re-used. In antiquity, wax was the erasable medium of choice. One carried about wax tablets and used the sharp end of a metal stylus to incise text. The other end of the stylus, flat, could be used to erase the text. A servant (or slave) would later transcribe your jottings onto parchment for permanent storage (few of these wax tablets survive, perhaps because they were never conceived as anything but temporary conveyances for the written word). As Peter pointed out, one writes in wax, not on wax—a distinction that would later become important to Freud when he talks about the mystic writing pad, which these tablets resemble. Freud also reminds us of the associations with writing and the mind—Hamlet refers to the “tables of his memory,” which was the phrase that launched PBS and RC onto this line of inquiry. Of course erasable storage is fundamental to computing too. Katie King, my colleague here at Maryland, is in the seminar with me, and at lunch beforehand she talked about an early confrontation with the materiality of computers when, as a graduate student doing her word processing on a mainframe, she was suddenly confronted with the bone-chilling message: DUMPING CORE / OUT OF DISK.

3. “Persistence and chronic tensions.” The phrase is Don Fowler’s, and the point is that writing technologies overlap, superimpose, and feed back on each other in rich and unpredictable ways. Rather than hard and fast breaks in the history of writing technologies, practices persist, co-exist, and exert mutual force and influence. One historian of the book, Frederick Kilgor, uses the phrase “punctuated equilibrium” (borrowed from Stephen J. Gould’s work in evolutionary biology) to talk about writing technologies as characterized by long periods of stasis and stability, marked by periodic eruptions of innovation. This seems wrong to me. While most scholars can talk at some length about Gutenberg, far fewer are aware of writing tables, erasable tablets in the that functioned as a kind of early modern PDA; hence Prince Hamlet: “My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!” The same individual could be entirely comfortable reading aloud to others (declamation), reading aloud to his (or her) own self, and reading silently. Orality is still very much with us. Or take print and manuscript culture. Handwritten diaries have their origins in printed almanacs when people began adding their own marginal notations and jottings. Soon enough, commerce caught on and almanacs were deliberately printed with space enough for people to add their annotations. The point is that here printed objects serve as a catalyst for an outburst of manuscript writing. This makes simplistic narratives of one medium replacing another (“ceci tuera cela”) suspect, and has obvious implications for our current digital age, when book production increases every year and we’ve not yet managed to achieve the nirvana of the paperless office.

4. The oscillation between materiality and metaphor. This is legion in the history and representation of writing. When Plato speaks of older memories hardening, he almost certainly has in mind the materiality of wax writing surfaces, which eventually lost their viscosity and needed to be recast. Likewise, in the Christian tradition the tablets carried by Moses are typically depicted with curved tops (as opposed to the Judaic tradition where they are usually flat). This curvature mimics the shape of wax writing tablets. So, we (literally) have stone shaped by wax. Representation piled on top of representation. In the paintings we looked at writing technologies contemporary with the artist were frequently depicted side by side with those that the subject would have actually used.

5. The importance of the commercial sphere. This is a point RC really leaned on. You cannot separate the culture of the book from the culture of records and archives. Roger noted the parallels between commercial ledgers and diaries, for example. This is particularly useful to me in my work on computer storage, because many of these technologies originated in office and industry, not more belletristic settings.

6. Finally, a word about scholarly method. The history of writing has some very practical things to teach us about our own work habits. As Peter notes, it’s difficult, in illustrations such as the one of Saint Jerome above, to tell if the figure is author, scribe, or translator. Reading and writing are always bound together, and the writer is always surrounded by his (or her) reading—which in turn propels the writing. Cayce,in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, calls this always asking the next question. Take the line in Hamlet, the “tables of the mind.” Well, what are those? That question lead directly to PBS and RC’s findings in this area. Likewise, paintings are a rich source for learning about writing technologies. What is that thing dangling from the book? And so on. (Peter had hilarious tales about being pursued through galleries as he snapped some of the illicit pictures he used to illustrate the lecture.) Likewise, the the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, now online (1674 to 1834). Many of these cases dealt with forgery and written fraud. A gold mine for any scholar interested in such things. The lesson here, I think, is that the historian of writing has to be alert to finding his or her materials anywhere, scavenging and scrounging from records and representations of all kinds, and must always be prepared to ask the next question. This dovetails nicely with a thesis Peter has about working instead of thinking, but that’s an entry for another day.

I’ll end with this image, which amazingly I had never seen before.

Cubism? Nope. It’s Arcimboldo, The Librarian 1566. Notice the fingers as bookmarks (Stallybrass: “The culture of the codex requires not only that you remember your hands but that you make them proliferate.”) Extra credit: what are the things in the librarian’s hair (look closely, just above the eyes)?

Gmail Quotas

Has anyone had a problem with Gmail’s reporting of disk quotas.

I’m (supposedly) currently using 25 MB (3%) of my 1000 MB. But I don’t believe that’s accurate.

I’ve less than 1500 messages in the account, saved, sent, spam, and trash all included. I’ve sent around my share of attachments, mostly Word .docs, but all moderate size—I’m not pushing uncompressed video through that account. How the heck do 1500 messages and some .doc attachments add up to 25 MB?

Pyrotechnic Insanitarium

A couple of weeks ago, feeling impish (whee) I was kicking around a draft post on why I resolved to spend more time reading blogs than books this year. I never got it to where I wanted it, and now I see that Mark Dery has a blog (I proffer the word gingerly, you’ll see why) and that he’s gone and said it much better than I ever could.

No surprise there.

You’ll like the part about Beaumont and digestion.

Flat Panel?

I’m looking to pick up an extra LCD flat panel to use around the apartment (in conjunction with my laptop). Used would be fine, doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just has to work—suggestions on where to look to avoid paying an arm and a leg? Yes, I’m watching eBay.

My Own Private IVANHOE

My personal adaptation of the IVANHOE game is now online, as part of the new Innovations feature at RC.

Spring Plans

Plans for my spring semester are posted in my sidebar (I keep pinching myself).

A New Kind of Post-Doc

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is pleased to announce a post-doctoral fellowship program, offered in conjunction with a consortium of academic research institutions, that will establish a new kind of scholarly information professional. It will educate new scholars about the challenges and opportunities created by new forms of scholarly research and the information resources that support them, both traditional and digital.

The program will offer postdoctoral fellowships to individuals who have earned their Ph.D.s in disciplines in the humanities within the past three years (or who will complete it before starting the program) and who believe that there are opportunities to develop meaningful linkages among disciplinary scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools.

Details for the 2005 application should be up soon.

Wetware

I get some of my best writing ideas in the shower. Seriously. I even compose sentences whole-cloth. Problem is, the words have a half life and my phrasings often end up going down the drain. So what I’d like is this: a water resistant tablet and a pen or marker that writes waterproof ink. Of course the trick is it would still have to erase by some other, equally mundane means. Suggestions anyone?

The Atrocity Archives

Charles Stross wears his influences on his sleeve: Neil Stephenson, H. P. Lovecraft, and Cold War puppet-masters like Len Deighton. Still, that’s a pretty potent mix, and for those of us who like this sort of thing his The Atrocity Archives (which I found via Mark Bernstein’s blog) goes down like a hot fudge sundae. To wit:

Yum. One enters the super-secret spy agency, the Laundry, by pulling the handle up in a certain public toilet in a certain station of the London Underground—the fixtures rotate and the wall swings outward (just like in a novel). The chief spook has a restored Memex as his workstation because he obsesses over Van Eck radiation. This world’s Necronomicon is the legendary fourth volume of Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming. The really scary thing is that Stross is apparently one of those first novelists who has piles of unpublished mss just lying around. So I suspect we’ll be seeing (a lot) more of him. Sign me up.

Lithium Rhythms

Over the holidays Kari’s uncle Jamie, who works in the high tech repair industry, voiced one of his pet peeves: batteries. They’re the Achilles’ heal of modern, mobile computing. You’d think in 2005 (he said) we’d have a way to work for more than a few hours without plugging in.

Today’s NY Times has an article on that very topic—and the new social etiquette that’s emerging around the quest for power sources in coffee shops, airport concourses, and other public venues. (Apparently it’s acceptable for one person to take over no more than half of the sockets in any given outlet.) The unused electrical outlet is becoming like that rare low-traffic public toilet, the one no one else knows about but you. I was most taken, though, with the article’s final paragraphs and what they say about the way technologies regulate our writing selves:

Update: In Archive Fever, Derrida notes that email “. . . is not only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term”; it is an “unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantenous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of the destruction of the archive” (17).