t2ip2014

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T2iP 2014: Behind the Scenes, 2

This afternoon we spent about 4 hours taking trolleys-full of rare books up to Fisher's 2nd level to figure out how to display them in the vitrines. We've had to move some of our objects out of the modern cases in the corridor and into tall cabinets near the rear of the exhibit space. That will put them closer to our 9 poster panels, which gives the show some cohesion. But we'll also have one corridor vitrine filled with objects as a kind of "teaser," and 3 of the amazing rolling box vitrines, whose lids lift up like space-ship doors:

For a while, the exhibit space was total chaos: strewn with mock-up object labels, measuring tapes, rare books, extension cords, open cases, and notes.

We blocked out the best arrangement for our objects, trying to show each of them to best advantage. We were surprised by the multi-volume series of Martin Luther's complete works, which contains - at the end of first volume - an incredible sixteenth-century "infographic," showing a wonderful biblical timeline that we couldn't resist featuring because of its relevance to the information theme of our show. Look for it on the bottom of one of our vitrines...

Our magnificent poster panels also got dropped off by the production people at Fisher, enveloped in bubble-wrap, and we propped them up against the wall amidst a group of students toiling away at maths problems. We'll hang the posters on museum wire tomorrow.

One of our exhibit "icons" has become the single card catalogue drawer, a symbol of university information systems that now seem obsolete. Of course, the library card catalogue is anything but outdated: many of Fisher's books are uniquely recorded in the card catalogue - they have never found their way onto the digital catalogue! It's the perfect icon of shifting information ages between the paper and the digital worlds.

Tomorrow we hang the posters and install the final object labels...

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T2iP 2014: Behind the Scenes, 1

In mid-August, we spent an afternoon in Rare Books and Special Collections, working on the books that contributors requested for the show. We had to get a sense of the dimensions (whether they would fit - opened! - into display cases), and also of the aspects of the book that contributors wanted to highlight.

Above, we have Fisher's 1497 edition of Dante's Divine Comedy on a cushion, as we discuss showing the opening page in one of our vitrines.

Last week, we began some test-runs of the object displays in the wall showcases in Fisher. They look pretty big, but once you start organizing the space, you realize how compact a showcase is, and how precisely you have to be in disciplining the arrangement of objects. We were testing to see if our object labels were an appropriate size...

There have also been complications with the showcases; we need to think in terms of size, security, and how safe the items will be in them. We will need to keep on our toes as the space available to us fluctuates; our poster-display space, for instance, will need to shift in mid-October when a temporary exhibit celebrating the Fisher renovation will mean transferring our posters around the corner near the bottom of the stairs.

More to follow later this week when the final mounting begins!

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LAUNCH: September 11, 5-7

Our exhibit finally takes off!

Come join us for a launch of our T2iP research show, reconnect with last semester's classmates, and see your research on public display. Bring friends and family to share your work with them!

Thursday, September 11

5-7 pmFISHER LIBRARY - 2nd floor (1 flight down from main level)

Please write to tell us if you will come and how many people you intend to bring along at this email address:

RSVP: <t2ip2014@gmail.com>

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REFLECTIONS on curating our exhibit

After contributors submitted drafts of their exhibit summaries and images, we began to group them together in thematic clusters. I started to work closely with our fantastic graphic designer, Virginia, who developed a sleek, iPad-inspired look for our research to be displayed on both posters and in showcases (for those showing objects).

As we started to put our show together, we had to give a close look to the contributions - some would need to be edited for space, some for sense. We went through the entries and asked ourselves: would this entry make sense to someone who had not read your essay, or had not even taken our class? In several cases, we decided that we had to edit the entry to speak to a broader audience, or to clarify the main point. In many cases, I went back to your papers themselves, and tried to draw out the most important kernel of your research, and I tried to highlight that in your contribution. In other cases, we asked individuals if they could edit their contribution. In a few cases of contributors who were unable to provide entries themselves, I authored them using what I learned from reading your essay. In all cases, we tried as hard as we could to respect your prose, your conclusions, and your concerns while we also aimed to link it up to the bigger themes of the exhibit.

We had meetings with Jacqui Grainger, Julie Price, and Sara Hilder at the Rare Books and Special Collections at Fisher, who pulled your requested books and manuscripts from the shelves and helped us to get them ready for display. We also collaborated with the Nicholson and the Macleay Museums.

What have I learned? I've learned about the flexibility required in pulling so many diverse projects together into a cohesive whole. I've learned about how to trim and edit your wonderful research while also trying to respect the thought you applied to your prose - this, I now understand, is the job of the curator: to make some greater sense out of the broad research of the team.

I have so enjoyed spending additional time with your research, and I look forward to seeing contributors and other members of T2iP at the exhibit launch!

John

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EXHIBIT - TIPS on writing Poster Text

You have about 200 words to convey what you'd like to share about your research project for this semester. It means you have to be direct. Also, it means you have to be very readable, so that visitors will stop and read your contribution.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1) Don't forget to give dates - of major characters, events, etc., that figure in your project. Our class covered 2 millennia, so it's important that you provide some sense of what period your research examines.

2) In a conversational tone, give your thesis and your evidence - try to convey your central point in simple language, and offer proof of why you've said it. For instance:

Ada Lovelace (1815-52) changed the way her contemporaries thought about what computers could be. She recognized how a hand-cranked machine invented by her mentor Charles Babbage (1791-1871) - and which Babbage called the 'difference engine' for the way it performed differential calculus - could process previously unimaginable calculations. More than Babbage himself, Lovelace saw practical applications for the machine and asked him in 1843: "if I am able to lay before you in the course of a year or two explicit & honorable propositions for executing your engine [...] would there be any chance of allowing myself [...] to conduct the business for you?"

3) Let your sources speak - if you have great evidence, don't be shy to quote it. Just be sure to contextualize it and explain the quote if it's not self-evident

4) Connect to a big theme related to information - you don't necessarily have to be explicit ("this relates to information because..."), but at least point to some of the bigger themes we've addressed in the class. So you could write something like "Scholars debate whether printing changed the concept of a reading public. My research suggests that it did, because..." or "Overload is not a modern phenomenon. In the sixteenth century..."

5) Tell a story, or ask a question and answer it - Draw people in! Highlight the unique component of the history you've studied, or ask a question (ie, your research question) and then spend the rest of the entry giving the answer (your research thesis & evidence).

6) Sign your name & upload your photo(s) - don't forget to sign your entry, and to upload any photos you'd like to accompany your text, with a preferable minimum resolution of 300 dots-per-inch [or pixels-per-inch] = 300 DPI/PPI

If you want some inspiration in the next few days, pop into the Nicholson Museum's 50 Objects exhibit, where you can see 50 short texts describing 50 objects, and you can draw some inspiration from them.

If you have questions, just contact us!

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It’s not Hitler, Aristotle, Jesus or Michael Jackson. The most influential person according to Wikipedia will surprise you. 

Member 116

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Journal 3: Wolfe and Barzillai

Journal #3: A 500-word journal response to a source (primary or secondary) you will use for your research paper

Wolfe and Barzillai: The Importance of Deep Reading

Wolfe and Barzillai’s piece on the Importance of Deep Reading is a fantastic way to illustrate the conceptual focus of my project. My project will engaged with researching the criticisms of information communication technologies, comparing a sixteenth century abbot’s praise of the work of scribes and (likely) this piece by academics Wolf and Barzillai.

The salient point this work illustrates is that the internet does not allow the opportunity for users to engage in deep reading. “By deep reading, we mean the array of sophisticated processes that propel comprehension and that include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight” (Wolf, Maryanne, Mirit Barzillai, "The importance of deep reading." Challenging the Whole Child: Reflections on Best Practices in Learning, Teaching, and Leadership (2009): 130. Page 1). This level of comprehension is apparently vital to our way of thinking and therefore us, as human beings.

Wolfe and Barzillai are no Johannes Trithemius (the author of the other primary source I will be using for my project, In Praise of Scribes), and by that I mean they do not engage in the same almost wilful polemics that Johannes fills his pages with. On the contrary, The Importance of Deep Reading is a professional, academic paper which cites scientific studies to back up their claims. But there is still the voice of opinion in this piece, as in all essays, and for Wolfe and Barzillai it is that the internet is inherently making us less intelligent. There is this fear present in both the writings of the sixteenth century abbot and these twenty-first century academics that by changing what is known and cemented will have a negative outcome. It could be a divine disappointment a la Trithemius or an ephemeral, vaguely ominous hypothetical questioning “could these changes have unintended effects on the intellectual development of generations to come?” (Wolfe, Barzillai, The Importance of Deep Reading, 2009)

This will likely be the basis of my explanation for why there is criticism to these information communication technologies of global scale – that it is based in fear of giving up what is known and confronting what is unfamiliar.

  (Wolf, Maryanne, Mirit Barzillai, "The importance of deep reading." Challenging the Whole Child: Reflections on Best Practices in Learning, Teaching, and Leadership (2009): 130. Page 1).

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Journal 2: Digital Archives

Why Books? Session 2: Circulation and Transmission

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE4kXCgcQHg&list=PLC999777290130500&index=3

Archive (Main discussion beginning at 0:55:00)

Professor Hofmeyr had mentioned one of her sources could not be found in any archive, leading moderator David Hall to begin an interesting discussion on the nature of archive. One almost offhand remark by Hall regarding digital sources started the discussion between Hofmeyr and Meredith McGill that I will be focussing on in this blog post.

Isabell Hofmeyr answered first and illustrated an intriguing point on the usefulness of digital resources. “Outside of the west, archives become questions of money and access to resources and ability to preserve material, so the archival record across SA and Africa is quite patchy” (Isabell Hofmeyr, ‘Print Outside the Book’, Why Books? Conference, Radcliffe Institute, October 29, 2010. [Video]. Retrieved May 18, 2014 from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE4kXCgcQHg&lr=1>, at 0:56:30). This was a serious problem, which lead to part of Hofmeyr’s work revolving around “digitising the newspapers of these various indian ocean ports to provide a platform for people to do further research” (Hofmeyr, ‘Print Outside the Book’, at 0:56:45). This was immediately interesting to me that simply by cataloguing this information and making it into an easily accessible digital resource; they were doing a service to future historians studying this same field of research.

  Meredith McGill, however, spoke more in depth on the nature of digital content and its modern role in academic and literary research. “I think literary critics are only now beginning to grapple with what to do with the vast amount of digital resources we now have available to us” (Meredith L. McGill ‘Print Outside the Book’, Why Books? Conference, Radcliffe Institute, October 29, 2010. [Video]. Retrieved May 18, 2014 from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE4kXCgcQHg&lr=1>, at 0:56:15). This of course refers to the growing field of studying Big Data (which McGill refers to as a “super abundance of texts” (McGill, ‘Print Outside the Book’, at 0:57:24)). Even today, four years after this talk, Big Data is only now beginning to gain some momentum. Big Data refers to digital (but specifically internet aggregated) information on such a scale to be incomprehensible to even data analysts. Data from innumerable sources is collected on a never before seen scale and forms this enormous block of information that at first seems insurmountable. But, like an archaeological dig, we merely need the correct tools to excavate what is valuable from what isn’t. The problem, as Gill describes, is that nobody seems to want to, the reason being, according to McGill, is that literary critics gravitate towards “unique objects” (McGill, ‘Print Outside the Book’, at 0:57:20).

McGill eruditely encompasses the benefits with digital archives and by extension, big data comparative to traditional archives. With traditional archives the material variations work within fields of circulation - we get a sequential order, a history of its printing and reprinting. But collecting and accurately understanding what that circulation is, is incredibly difficult with physical texts, literally requiring scholars to manually search for differences in each text. “What’s exciting now is that we can do bibliography differently, we can sift and sort this archive and digital resources allow us to represent these fields of circulation in a different way” (McGill, ‘Print Outside the Book’, at 0:59:40), namely, a phenomenally easier way. However, there are always drawbacks, as Hofmeyr stated; digital cataloguing is only just beginning to be implemented therefore electronic information can be patchy.

  McGill, Meredith L. and Hofmeyr, Isabel ‘Print Outside the Book’, Why Books? Conference, Radcliffe Institute, October 29, 2010. [Video]. Retrieved April 2, 2012. URL: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE4kXCgcQHg&lr=1>.    

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Journal 1: Primary Source: In Praise of Scribes

Johannes Trithemius, De Laude Scriptorum Manualium

Johannes Trithemius was a 15th century German Benedictine abbot who wrote a scathing criticism of the effect of the printing press on the lives, customs and devotion of the brotherhood of monks. De Laude Scriptorum Manualium, or “In Praise of Scribes”, seeks to do exactly as it is titled: to praise the work of the monks who laboriously reproduced manuscripts by hand – while also condemning the use of the printing press. There is some difficulty getting a complete translation of the text in one singular source, so each quote will be from various different academics articles quoting the text itself.

  What does this source tell us about the history of information?

This source tells us that there has been, and likely always will be, opponents to the expansion of human communication technology. The printing press had one of the most profound effects on the ability for average people to engage with any and all literature in a global sense. With the technology to easily replicate books relatively.

  What questions do I want to ask about it?

On a basic level, I want to ask why. Why is there this specific reaction to these huge technological leaps in communication/information technology? This attitude of distrust and foreboding that accompanies some of the greatest inventions in human history is as bizarre as it is intriguing.

  What avenues of research does it open up?

The research I wish to pursue for this topic is largely based around a sort of historical psychoanalysis. I want to understand this sixteenth century abbott, Johannes Trithemius, and why exactly he makes arguments such as “We therefore have to work, brothers, so that we don't offend the apostles by eating the bread of idleness” (Dorothea Salo 2010). Trithemius cites religious piety and the glory of God and a host of other reasons but is that truly the reason he despises the printing press? Surely given that this kind of attitude is seen across several iterations of global technological revolutions these reasons given by Trithemius are less than the whole picture. Perhaps, then, a comparative study between Trithemius’ piece on the work of the scribe and the criticism of the printing press and another similar piece. Other technological revolutions on this scale include the evolution of the written language, and possibly a modern example being the internet. Since finding a well-documented criticism of the former seems implausible, a case of the latter seems intriguing.

  What are some of the challenges in working with it, and how do I see overcoming them?

One major challenge I have discovered is that there is no simple way to access the entirety of Trimethius’ work. Many different academics have written multiple different articles about the Scriptorum yet they almost always reference another academic who has also not drawn from the source material. The most useful resource I have found so far is Dorothea Salo’s  translated excerpts, however, that only includes a limited amount of passages from chapters one through seven.

  Can I make reference to another historian whose research might be helpful to me?

I have found that Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution (2005) and Anthony Grafton’s The Importance of Being Printed” (1980) have been incredibly useful. Grafton’s piece supports many of my pre-conceived notions, particularly of the importance of the printing press in general and solidifies the basis of my arguments. Eisenstein’s work has been able to eruditely phrase the notions I was forming about this subject, The Printing Revolution coins the term “apocalyptic genre” (2005) as a means of describing those who would despise technology.

Trithemius, Johannes.  De laude scriptorium manualium. 1494. (translation by Dorothea Salo 2010 accessed 14/5/14 http://misc.yarinareth.net/trithemius.html)

Anthony Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11:2 (1980), 265-286.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005)

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Benjamin on the paywall, the réclame, blurbs, corruption and the history of information.

For a century and a half, the literary life of the day had been centered around journals. Toward the end of the third decade of the century, this began to change. The feuilleton provided a market for belles-lettres in the daily newspaper. The introduction of this cultural section epitomized the changes which the July Revolution has wrought in the press. During the restoration period, single copies of newspapers could not be sold; people had to subscribe to obtain a paper. Anyone who could not pay the high price of eighty francs for a year’s subscription had to go to a café, where often several people stood around reading one copy. In 1824, there were 47,000 newspaper subscribers in Paris; in 1836, there were 70,000; and in 1846, there were 200,000. Girardin’s paper, La Presse, played a decisive part in this rise. It brought about three important innovations: a lower subscription price of forty francs, advertisements, and the serial novel. At the same time, short, abrupt news items began to compete with detailed reports. These news items caught on because they could be employed commercially. The so-called réclame paved the way for them; this was an apparently independent notice which was acutally paid for by a publisher and which appeared in the editorial section of the newspaper, referring to a book that had been advertised the day before or in the same issue. As early as 1839, Saint-Beuve complained about the demoralizing effect of the réclame: “How could they damn a product [in a critical review] when the same product was described two inches below as being a wonder of the age? The attraction of the ever larger type-size in which advertisements were printed gained the upper hand; they constituted a magnetic mountain which deflected the compass.” The réclame marked the beginning of the development which culminated with the stock-exchange notices that appeared in the journals and were paid for by interested persons. It is virtually impossible to write a history of information separately from a history of corruption of the press.

— Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 1938.

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Walter Ong was right...

Writing does restructure consciousness. Here is a paragraph from an article (link below) from the New York Times by Maria Konnikova (June 2, 2014), called "What's Lost When Handwriting Fades":

"Two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, have reported that in both laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students learn better when they take notes by hand than when they type on a keyboard. Contrary to earlier studies attributing the difference to the distracting effects of computers, the new research suggests that writing by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?hp&_r=0

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Journal Entry 2: Why Books Session 3: The Importance of the Digital Humanities

Prior to the Why Books conference I was cynical about the digital humanities. I found the term itself anachronistic and associated it with mining texts for quantitative data - Wordsworth says doth a lot! - and was generally unimpressed by the few run-ins I’d had with the discipline. In the first session of the Why Books conference Matthew Kirschenbaum disabused me of that cynicism, explaining that the field is of importance because digital content will necessarily be part of textual and bibliographic analysis of modern authors. This is a good point and it suggests a lot of work to be done formulating strategies to cope with the proliferation of data. Like maths, though, being important doesn’t make it particularly interesting to me.

My interest was sparked instead by a comment made by Elizabeth Long during the third session’s Q and A. When Paul Duguid defended himself against alleged ‘cheap-shots’ at digital formats, she suggested that digital humanists need to play an important role bridging the gap between analogue books and libraries and the digital future.

As enumerated by Long and Duguid, the problem faced by book readers in the digitising world is that digital books and libraries are less evolved as information technologies than the analogue technologies they aim to replace. This may seem counterintuitive as digital books’ underlying computer technology is massively more sophisticated than the bound codex. But Long and Duguid’s talks are full of instances in which digital platforms do not represent an improvement. For instance, Long remarks that kindle works more like a scroll than a codex. Without page numbers, it is less navigable. Duguid, for his part, explains how Google Books, the putative replacement for the research library has difficulty performing basic search and selection functions. These include distinguishing between volumes of editions and returning corrupted texts to circulation for the first time in hundreds of years. These problems, Duguid suggests, stem from a ‘naive’ understanding of text and its instability.

For new technologies to replace books and libraries, they will have to work better than what they replace. They should not, of course, be straight-jacketed by the organisational technology of books. They should exploit the potential of power and play as enumerated by Hobart and Schiffman, but in doing so they need to  avoid taking a step backward. As professionals trained in both the humanities and computer sciences, digital humanists are ideally placed to do this.

- Member 71

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Journal Entry 3: The Consequences of Selectivity in Library Collections

My research project examines the history of marginal notes and one of the biggest challenges I have faced is finding useful examples. Marginalia in library books consists of those marks made by anonymous readers and those examples collected because they were made by famous or notable readers. Whilst most examples of the former category are erased or discarded in favour of clean texts, significant manuscript notes have been collected and are slowly being catalogued. Marked ms. by librarians, it is easy for us to imagine why cataloguing handwritten notes would be a laborious task at odds with current programs to digitise authoritative versions of texts. Of the examples that do show up in research libraries around the world, notably Yale’s Beinecke, few have been digitized. The vast majority sits in collections waiting to be catalogued or discovered.

However, it’s not merely the cataloguing of marginalia that is problematic. To be useful notes must be able to be analysed and this presents significant challenges. Textual annotation is rare and generalized conclusions about reader response are difficult to draw from individual comments. Traditionally these have been the realm of literary historians more interested in the intellectual process of individuals than era-specific generalisations. The more common underlining, arrows and fists are more numerous but have idiosyncratic meanings. And marks made across copies are difficult to compile across the varying typeset of different editions.

In his paper, A Book of One’s Own: Examples of Library Book Marginalia, Matts Dahlstrom relates the limitations of the work of Kajsa Dahlberg, a Swedish artist trying to visually present reader’s response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Hers was an ideal instance. Of the library books that she gathered, comprising hundred of copies across several editions, all had the same typesetting and pagination. This allowed Dahlberg to scan and overlay every copy, page by page to create a master copy with all reader annotations presented simultaneously in relation to a single copy of the text. The result is visually striking. The passages most of interest to readers are a haze of pencil marks and are not always the same as passages singled out by critics. But as Dahlstrom points out, lacking meta-data (the who, when and why of jots, squiggles and slashes) its hard to draw anything but the most general conclusion - this passage was of unspecified interest to unspecified readers. Now that we have the ‘social-text’ what can we say about it?

Despite it’s challenges, this kind of work is important. In his Foxcroft Lecture Libraries as Museums of Marginalia, librarian David Pearson explains that as print is digitised the function of library is changing. As their role as the depository of authoritative text is being eclipsed by online collections of digitized books, libraries remain a store of information about how books have been read for the last five hundred years. Beyond text, library collections contain numerous editions, manuscript notes and borrowing records which tell a social history of the library’s public and its intellectual life.

Unfortunately, this extra-textual interest in relatively recent and much has been lost to zealous librarians with erasers. This has affected our ability to use reader marginalia to conduct analysis of how books were received. My search has made it plain to me that meta-data is the source material for information history and past and future selectivity directly affects our ability to carry out bibliographic studies.

- Member 71

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Journal Entry #1

For my primary source I have selected a page of William Wordsworth’s copy of The Works of the English Poets annotated in his hand, with a response by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This initially grabbed my attention for Wordsworth’s appraisal of Shakespeare as “abominably harsh obscure & worthless,” and Coleridge’s reasoned rebuttal. As two of the most important poets of the Romantic era, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s views are of obvious historical interest. But I’ve picked this as an object because it’s also an important artifact of information history. In addition to poetry Coleridge was known as the most prolific reader and critic of his generation. This marginal note was solicited by his friends and later republished with 800 odd others for his reading public. It provides an insight into the changing ways texts were received and books were used.

The codex was the preeminent form of information technology in the early 19th Century, but prior to the 1750s critical annotation was rare. If made, annotations tended towards ‘book improving’ glosses that summarised, clarified text or defined individual words. By the late 18th century, however, readers increasingly wrote their own opinions in their books, or as in this case, each other's books. Several reasons for this change has been mooted; a change in the psychology of reading, an evolution of page layout, the democratisation of book ownership, a response to the proliferation of information and social fashion. I believe that all five played a part, and this will be the focus of my essay.

Coleridge’s works are fertile ground for scholarship and east to get lost in. In the Fisher stacks you can find four shelves devoted to Coleridgiana, to speak nothing of what’s available offsite or online. Thankfully these shelves include Heather Jackson’s Marginalia, a general history of the topic to which I owe most of the above paragraph. Though this is very helpful - Jackson is a Coleridge scholar who was prompted by the study of his manuscript notes to write the first general history on marginal notation - it is not sufficient to understand marginalia as information technology. I will have to bookend my examination of Coleridge’s marginalia with William St Clair and Leah Prices’ studies on book usage and ownership in the Georgian and Victorian eras. This will help me understand issues such as which readers this page is representative of, who, in it’s republished form,  constituted it’s reading public and how reading publics were changing at that time.

Here, however, I think it’s sufficient to note the things about the way reading had changed as represented by this page. Firstly by writing in texts, readers become writers. As Wordsworth demonstrates above, just as books were no longer sacrosanct, neither were their authors. This iconoclasm created new texts. Secondly, reading was a social activity. The book from which this page is taken was lent to Coleridge specifically so that he might annotate it. Thirdly, annotations were later collected and published in Marginalia, demonstrating that  there was a book-buying public for the meta-texts that were the product of marginal annotations.

The lighthearted textual squabbling of romantic poets may seem quaint, but the practices of 19th century marginalia mirror those of the modern day. Playful criticism, annotation of texts and the breakdown of authorial authority are the hallmarks of today’s digital culture.

- Member 71

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Member 7: Journal 3 - Response to extended reading.

In Worlds within Words David Harrison discusses the intricacies of the undeniably complex world of language, and uses a plethora of international examples to express his thesis, in particular those in which are coming into near extinction. Throughout this text he makes the following statement:

  … Most of the world’s languages remain undescribed or underdescribed. We have no established way to measure complexity within a single language or across multiple languages.[1]

  With this very observation noted, it is interesting to examine how this perspective expressed by Harrison is still relevant today. Something that was particularly striking about this reading was how it can be closely linked to the intricate language of our own Indigenous Australians. There has certainly been an undermining of the complexity of this exchange of information, and its ability to connect families and social tribes to one another. According to Malin and Maidment, this is due to the fact that there has been a cultural genocide as a result of the destructive History of the Indigenous people, and the removal of their families.[2] In addition, ‘Indigenous languages and cultures were specifically proscribed, demeaned and diminished by the state.’[3] This slow eradication of culture and language has resulted in affecting Indigenous families up until today. It has been, like Harrison points out ‘undescribed or underdescribed.’[4] It has therefore by default devalued the importance of this language (or in some cases languages) expression of things such as key events, exchange of cultural knowledge, rituals and belief systems for future Indigenous generations. May explores the importance of these aspects in Language and Minority Rights. He discusses in great detail throughout this text how:

…the ‘cultural stuff’ of ethnicity – ancestry, culture and language does matter to a significant number of people. Likewise, ethnicity has meaning not only at the level of social and political mobilizationbut also as a principle form of individual and collective social identity.’[5]

In addition, it is noted by Harrison that ‘humans rely first and foremost on language because it is the most compact and efficient form of transmitting ideas’[6]. Thus, when Grillo suggests that subordinated languages are despised languages[7], this probably explains the animosity many Indigenous people endure when trying to communicate in English. However, on the other hand, the other subordinated language that everyone is struggling to understand and also connect with is confusion. This lies heavily as a result of two issues: the first is a result of the tumultuous past of Indigenous Australians, and their experiences with their loss of language and meaning. The second is Australian’s never fully being able to understand the significance Indigenous communication holds towards these communities and the integral nature of solidarity that it provides. It is what Harrison describes as being ‘an orchestra without a conductor or even a musical score’: a situation that was in nobody’s control and has thus unfortunately  in summation resulted in the division of the ancestors and future generations of Indigenous Australians.

[1] K. David Harrison, When Languages Die, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 208.

[2] Merridy Malin and Debra Maidment, 'Education, Indigenous Survival And Well-Being: Emerging Ideas And Programs', Australian Journal Of Indigenous Education, The 32 (2003): 85.

[3] Stephen May, Indigenous Community-Based Education, 1st ed. (Clevedon [England]: Multilingual Matters, 1999) p.1

[4] K. David Harrison, When Languages Die, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 208.

[5] Stephen May, Language And Minority Rights, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008) p.26.

[6] K. David Harrison, When Languages Die, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 210.

[7] R. D Grillo, Dominant Languages, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

[t2ip2014]

Member 7: Journal #2

Elizabeth Long in the “Why Books?” conference uses her time to speak about the world of tangible books and e-books. She speaks about how these two modes of expression are at war with one another amongst readers and how ‘whenever technological features come into introduction, there is a chaos.’[1] This, in her opinion is surrounded by the idea that the experiences people feel has been replaced and lost with the introduction of the e-book. That ‘when readers talk about their love of books, they talk about the feel of the pages, the text, the joy of the cover.’[2]

Although she does briefly discuss the possibilities for the ways in which e-books advance user understanding, there is one big flaw in her conclusive results. This lies heavily on the fact that Long only uses older interviewees that were either over forty, or from book clubs that consisted of elder candidates. This in itself, as she mentions restricts her horribly in coming to any sort of reasonable conclusions, without her observations being skewed to some degree. In addition, although she does discuss the significance of the e-book, and uses the kindle as an example as being a relatively new concept, she fails in fully recognizing the potential of the digitalized future of reading. This is due to her argument lacking solid academic evidence, but rather being heavily reliant on her own first hand accounts, and of those that have had either very little or close to no experience with this new technology. It reflects to audiences that Long fails in fully exploring the ways other avenues of digitalized mediums such as leap pads for children, or even the ways which an iPad that can be utilized to revolutionize the way future readers will be both benefitted and/or affected.

Thus, with this said, although Long does put forth some ideas to the table, her talk merely skimmed over what has already been previously known amongst the mass of individuals who indulge in print culture.

[1] Elizabeth Long, 'Why Books?: Session 3: Reception And Use And Closing Remarks', Youtube, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpFCFNFPzvA. Accessed: 14/5/2014.

[2] ibid

[t2ip2014]

At the advice of one of the MacLeay curators I went looking on youtube for a video of the orrery I'm exhibiting in action. Sure enough, there one was! I am incredibly excited by this! - member 45