accidentals and substantives

Kathleen Morimoto's phonograph

As I mentioned cryptically a few days ago, my student Kathleen, inspired by her fellow classmates' oral presentation on paleoacoustics (aka archaeoacoustics), was plucky enough to build her own phonograph with the help of her boyfriend, Bernie. She's posted a diary of their adventures in sound on the class blog.

While they've managed to record on the wax cylinder, the playback at this point is indistinguishable from static. I suspect they'll keep troubleshooting in hopes of getting better results. One possibility is that the stylus is dragging too heavily across the wax rather than tapping it in a more digital style.

Kathleen's let me borrow it for a few days to experiment with . . .

word and image

One of my earliest blog posts attempted to grapple with the semiotic distinctions between ascii and bitmapped words within the context of applied Humanities Computing. I eventually reworked some of the prose, appending it to the Blake Archive DTD documentation and incorporating it into my dissertation. Here's the slightly revised version:

Like many other first-generation humanities computing projects, the WBA delivers both high-quality digital facsimiles and meticulously prepared ascii transcriptions of its primary source materials. The images enable the study of visual attributes that aren't easily accommodated by the cramped codes of ascii text, while the transcriptions offer increased legibility (Blake's serried calligraphy can strain the eyes) and, perhaps more importantly, finely structured search queries. These two editorial mandates--one pictorial, the other textual--are realized in separate documents rather than unified in one. But the desire for unification runs deep. The project team's cyclical debates over the transcriptions nearly always revolve around issues of iconicity: how far should we go in trying to render the visual codes of Blake's poetry and prose? Can we capture his horizontal and vertical spacing, his mirror-writing, his multi-directional text? One might suppose that because the transcriptions are accompaniments to the images, the former might not feel the onus of the latter. But the material strain of the WBA is paramount, and so iconic codes occupy a place of honor in both the images and the transcriptions. In the WBA, as in contemporary editorial theory at large, the word is an image. Consequently we have strained the limits of browser technology to deliver granular representations of Blake's text via course sgml-encoded ascii. Phenomenologically we want an image, but ontologically we want a text. Or, to put it somewhat differently, we want a machine-readable text and a human-readable image to coalesce in one and the same document.

Until now, our editorial reach has exceeded our technological grasp. Our transcriptions have become pictures just to the extent that mid-90s software packages (Dynaweb) and browser technologies permitted. At the time of this writing, the project has reached a crossroads where some important decisions need to be made. As we transition into xml/xsl stylesheets, the opportunities for pictorial rendition of text increase by several orders of magnitude. I have seen stylesheet-rendered ascii that can float over other text, drop the ascenders and descenders of letters, and lay claim to the screen in a breathtaking array of spatial configurations. The extent to which the transcriptions converge on the images is an issue that now devolves back onto the editors.

Since then, I've wanted to put a tangible face on some of these ideas. Today I spent a couple of hours with html/css to generate something of a proof of concept:

The screenshot shows two word collages. Although visually very similar--nearly identical, in fact, when viewed under optimal conditons--computationally they couldn't be more different from each other: the upper collage is an html/css file, the lower a gif file--the same gif that greets you each time you load Accidentals and Substantives into your browser window. The different file formats translate to different media behaviours: I can open and read the ascii collage in a text editor (NoteTab) and view the gif collage in an image editor (Photoshop). The individual letterforms of the ascii collage are subject to automated search and retrieval, cut and paste, and other kinds of character string manipulation, while those of the gif collage are not; in Matt Kirschenbaum's words, the latter are "largely opaque to the computational eyes of the machine" ("The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction" in Eloquent Images MIT P 2003).

Perceptually, the ascii collage--with its overlapping letters, colorful palette, and mixed fonts--is an image; ontologically, a text. The experiment raises larger editorial issues: to what extent might a digital archive like the WBA pictorialize its transcriptions? Abandon a letterpress model of textuality in favor of a visual model that is realized not only through photomechanical reproduction (digital facsimiles) but also typographical reproduction (xml/xslt)? Leverage the same data optically as an image and computationally as a text? I find such questions endlessly fascinating.

I've posted the two collages here. Caveat lector: The html letters look like so many windblown leaves strewn across the screen unless you view them under optimal conditions, which means in IE 6.0 or higher on a Windows OS. You also need to have Lucida Handwriting and Bookman Old Style fonts installed on your machine. (The html looks god-awful in Mozilla and Netscape. Ditto in IE if you don't have the appropriate fonts installed.) If you do visit the page, I hope you'll suspend the optical illusion of two nearly identical collages by locating the interactive hotspots: use CTRL-F to search for individual letters or words in the ascii collage, or use your mouse to select and copy some of them onto your clipboard and paste into MS Word or your favorite text editor. Then try to repeat the experiment with the inert characters of the gif collage: no dice.

Tachyon

After we watched Smarty Jones cross the finish line more than two lengths ahead of Lion Heart earlier this evening, Matt asked me what name I'd like to give a Kentucky Derby contender were I well-heeled enough to own a race horse. I only needed a minute: Tachyon. (Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light. From the Greek word tachys, meaning swift.)