Ars Hypertextualia (original) (raw)
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This exhibition tells the story, through 40 examples, of the ways in which texts from different languages, cultures and religious tradi-tions have been preserved, right up to today’s digital mechanisms. Seen from this perspective, the ‘history of binding’ becomes the history of different cultures and societies, showing ways in which what we call the ‘book-object’ has been transformed through time, while re-maining a specific apparatus suitable for transcribing, preserving, transmitting and reading texts. The book-objects (in whatever form they take) are indispensable tools for accessing book-texts.
The New Library of Babel? Borges, Digitisation and the Myth of the Universal Library
The growing capacity of digital encoding and storage has opened up vast new avenues for the archiving and distribution of texts in virtual space, prompting many to declare the imminent obsolescence of print media, the book included. An interesting correlate to this situation is the revival of interest in and support for the idea of the universal library, a collection of every text in existence, albeit reimagined as an immense database of digitised material with online accessibility. Drawing mainly upon two texts by Jorge Luis Borges, a short story and an essay, this article challenges the premise that such a project would be possible or even desirable, and problematises the perceived equivalencies between print and digital media, reading a book and reading onscreen text, and library and database.
2018
Scholarship is often a collaborative practice masquerading as solitary achievement. The worlds of making knowledge always rely, both formally and informally, on webs of collaboration. This was as true in the past as it is today. Before a printed book could emerge from the press, it required the labor of writers and editors, typesetters and correctors, patrons and financiers, censors and privilege-bearers-often people who were divided across boundaries of religion, gender, space, and class. The transit of books after their production was similarly complicated: printed leaves traveled from printer's shop to bindery, onward to markets, fairs, and peddler's carts, where they were purchased by scholars and lay-readers, returned to circulation as gifts and bequests, and eventually incorporated into new libraries and private collections. 1 The story of even a single individual book copy often makes manifest an extensive network of relationships that facilitated its production, dissemination, reception, and preservation. In the last few decades, the history of the book has emerged as a form of analysis for the study of cultural, political, and social change. Historians recognize that the technology of printing was never solely determinative of the spread of culture or habits of reading, and that users encounter books and their content in different ways-realizations that call for careful 1 For a limited selection of works on the transit of books as indices of social and cultural relations, see: [1À4].
Through the page, darkly: the data in the Text
This talk will be about texts and digital technology. This is a complex space, with emerging forms, models and hybridities that are not always easy to categorise. I will therefore carefully desist from attempting the typological. However, my longstanding interest in textual studies and whatever experience I have acquired working with texts and computers over several years and on various projects will inform the following attempt. This talk will therefore try to explore the actualities, possibilities and probabilities of the written (and visual) texts's engagements with technology: firstly I will try to outline the various ways in which we engage with texts and technology with the help of illustrations drawn from a wide range of notable projects. This will lead to the second movement which will focus on the interface between textual editions and digital technology. I will try to navigate through the forking paths of the possible space that the rich textual material available to us in this country offers us in order to do more meaningful things with historically enriched textual objects. In so doing, I hope to be able to argue for the need for critical scholarly editions of historical or contemporary cultural documents. Micro data environments, calling for intense and focused study of a single text or a cluster of texts, also need to be built to counter the flattening tendencies of big data. I hope to be able to show not only how necessary such projects are from hermeneutic perspectives, but also how, given the often unique and nontraditional processes of knowledge production and dissemination staged within Indian texts, such projects might possibly offer new glimpses into the very nature of texts and textuality as well. 1 One handy way of understanding the eletronisation of texts has been ontological: was it born digital or is it a digital surrogate? In these terms, hypertext (by hypertext I mean hyperfiction and creative textual experiments predicated upon what has been called "screening" rather than "reading") can be 2 distinguished from the numerous and disparate bunch of activities indulged in by, say, heritage computing. However, this does not take us very far. What, we might ask, about the 'desired' ideal of Peter Shillingsburg's 'knowledge site' that expands the boundaries of the textual edition with the 3
Transmissions of Texts and New Technologies: Memory or Transformation?
Załącznik Kulturoznawczy, 2015
The paper discusses some aspects of possibilities and dangers that new digital technologies bring in the camp of transmission of texts, especially the literary ones, and their scholar edition. While the new trends and achievements are still under discussion, a glance towards the similar situation of some 500 years ago, when printing press was introduced to replace, step by step, a manuscript communication, could be useful to understand what we experience and to foresee some ways these new technologies will probably undertake.
Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality
Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.
This text takes the form of a conversation between Danné Ojeda and Mathieu Lommen with a preliminary introduction by Danné referring to book history and the history of reading. The talk took place on 14 May 2014, in the Special Collections (Bijzondere Collecties), that house medieval manuscripts, books, prints, among other heritage materials in the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Through the introduction and the following conversation, we will examine books’ materiality and form as they define both the history of the book from its infancy and that of reading. The former will help us to understand how books have influenced not only thinking but also human ergonomic behavior towards these artifacts. The text also highlights the development of book forms by examining why certain transformations or deviations to the traditional book form took place and their impact on the history of book development and reading. This is in order to ascertain the consequences of the book’s physical transformation on the reader’s use and appreciation of it as a basic object of knowledge. In this regard, first the introductory text offers a succinct overview of the changes and transformations of the book’s physical forms. Second, the conversation focuses on the Special Collection of the University of Amsterdam in order to expose the criteria, guidelines, and parameters which classify a book as a “collectable object”, to be archived for the preservation of a record of the history of books and their forms.
Constructing texts/understanding texts: Lessons from antiquity and the middle ages
Computers and Composition, 1997
During the present shift from print to computer-mediated communication (CMC) literacy, much scholarship has taken a short view, looking at the history of the Internet, for example, rather than at other eras of maior change in communication technology, such as the development of the alphabet or the shifts from the scroll to the codex to the printed book. This era of CMC resembles other ages-particularly manuscript eras-when changes in communication media restructured human thought, how communicators and teachers conceived of and constructed texts, and the processes by which they mode sense of texts and imparted them with authority. By studying the oreas of similarity between the rabbinic and medieval manuscript eras and our own time, technical communicators may come to an understanding of how changes in technology sparked shifts in the social and intellectual dynamics of text construction. And by looking ot these earlier traditions and the environments in which texts were studied, we may develop a deeper understanding of some of the intellectual, ethical, and educational implications of texts in this CMC era. authority authorship computer-mediated communication memory technical communication Human history has entered what Sherry Turkle called a liminal era, when "old structures have broken down and new ones have not yet been created" (as cited in McCorduck, 1996, p. 157). This moment, like others in the past, has been brought about by a change in communication technology, and like earlier liminal periods, this is a time of great tension and opportunity. Digitalization of information, which computers made possible, is responsible for the transformation we face just as the invention of the alphabet, the development of writing, and the advent of printing brought about earlier changes.
This exhibition tells the story, through 40 examples, of the ways in which texts from different languages, cultures and religious tradi-tions have been preserved, right up to today’s digital mechanisms. Seen from this perspective, the ‘history of binding’ becomes the history of different cultures and societies, showing ways in which what we call the ‘book-object’ has been transformed through time, while re-maining a specific apparatus suitable for transcribing, preserving, transmitting and reading texts. The book-objects (in whatever form they take) are indispensable tools for accessing book-texts.