Week 3 Blogging Response - The Instant Camera and its Digital Representation

Hello,

Apologies for the slightly late posting! I struggled with this week’s question, but alas found my response.

Regarding digitization, we don’t have to look anywhere far but to the cameras in our cell phones and laptops to find ways in which an originally non-digital object has been digitized in a number of ways. With the variety of filters that our devices offer – not to mention Apps and the infamous Instagram - we can manipulate the “original” photographs to whatever hyper reality we choose, while at the same time we still look to the technology of the past.

With so many different ways to emulate or imitate the look and feel of a particular era, I’ve come to find that the digital representation of the instant cameras and photographs illuminates the simplicity that people once had when the advent of technology was still new and developing. In this day and age there are a lot of – or some would say too many - choices and options in creating what was everyday life from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and even the 90s. Perhaps consumerism and photography companies have taken note of this, as the recent surges and continuing release and popularity of Fujifilm’s colorful Instax Mini 8 instant cameras and films reaffirms that nothing ever really goes out of style. Therefore, what a digital representation of an “Instant” photograph could teach us about the original is that, nostalgia always wins. 

Until next week!

- Raquel

Image source: 

Fujifilm. (2016). instax mini 8. http://www.fujifilm.com/products/instant_photo/cameras/instax_mini_8/ (Accessed January 29th, 2016). 

  

The "close-up" – digital facsimiles in academic research and teaching

In his article “Text in the Electronic Age”, Sperberg-McQueen argues that any reading of a text is a theory on account of the interpretative choices made, either regarding content (letter forms, word breaks, punctuation) or formatting (spacing, indentation, paragraph length, margins). Thus, the encoding of texts for the electronic publication of linguistic artifacts is a kind of theorizing. Theorizing is an apt description for the use of digital facsimiles in academic research and teaching. When students examine primary sources – either via online editions of texts or by scrolling through digitized manuscripts – they are engaging in theoretical research. In contrast to the passive experience of the traditional lecture-and-exam model of learning, learning through primary research is an active process in which the learner, to some degree, decides the subject of investigation, the methodology for structuring that investigation and how best to translate their results into knowledge. Learning how to make critical decisions is higher-order thinking and learning that skill is the most valuable take-away from any such experience, even more important than the discovery of new knowledge through personal interpretation, which may or may not be flawed. Sperberg-McQueen is only being kind when he says everyone’s interpretations are valuable.

Another way of describing textual encoding is as abstraction. Sperberg-McQueen observes that electronic texts do not exist as physical or concrete objects, but are conceptual abstractions, representations. In his view, representations are partial, idiosyncratic and deceptive, like fun-house mirrors that obscure rather than reveal in a straightforward fashion. Abstraction is very much what takes place in primary research using digital facsimiles. One can consider a primary source in the abstract, independent of physical or historical contexts. By zooming in, one can examine an object's individual parts in isolation, in minute detail, in different lights. It is this ability to view things at close-range that is the benefit of the digital facsimiles. However, I have made use of a variety of facsimiles in research, ranging from traditional photographs and microfilm to digital images and digital copies of manuscripts on DVD and I know that being able to zoom in is both a boon and a curse. 

Among the objects I have researched was a tenth-century silver book cover engraved with an inscription commemorating its female donor. The Annunciation to Mary was depicted on the cover. After having consulted the object in a library in Rome, I ordered a photograph of it, which was taken in raking light so that the details stood out starkly. In the photograph, Mary's abdomen appeared emphasized, sparking the notion that perhaps the detail was significant from both a theological perspective and in the context of female patronage. In a conference paper, I noted my observation, but was criticized by a male audience-member for being too subjective. In my subsequent write-up of the research, I refrained from including the observation but I still feel strongly that my observation was the 'correct reading'. However, I cannot confirm my observation until I consult the original again. What does this example teach us? That in the end, digital copies just can't replace the original. 

Best, Laura 

Representation and Narrative Creativity - Madiha Zahra Choksi

The idea of textual and digital representation got me thinking about two pieces of literature that grapple with representation and narrative form: Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The Medium is the Massage is a piece of literature that highlights the power dynamics of the digital text which enable it to simultaneously deliver a message and also be a symbolic representation of the message itself – an example where form and meaning are symbiotic. McLuhan argues that societies are shaped by the nature of the media through which they communicate rather than by the content of communications and Medium is the Massage embodies this ideology. The medium through which McLuhan’s narrative is shared constantly refers to the media. Every argument McLuhan makes in the book is accompanied by an image or a representation of the message in a digital form, emphasizing the position of digital culture in twentieth century society.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, alternatively, is written in a fragmented style that counteracts the Victorian tradition by embracing modernism, the great genre shift taking place at the time. Eliot reimagined the narrative tradition when he wrote The Waste Land through its language, form and content. The original textual version of the The Waste Land is full of lines written in various languages, virtually incomprehensible for his English speaking audience. Integrating foreign languages highlights Eliot’s deep sense of cultural understanding and his formal education. The difficult nature of The Waste Land makes it a major point of contact for its recreation as a digital text. Digitizing The Waste Land makes its rhetoric accessible and comprehendible to the average reader. Though it was not written in digital form, Eliot included extensive footnotes to guide his reader through the poem. Websites like “Representative Poetry Online” and e-readers make it simpler to follow a text as difficult as The Waste Land by providing meanings and interpretations with the touch of a button. For example, the “Representative Poetry Online” website highlights foreign languages in corresponding colours which are then hyperlinked to a translation.

Example:

Click to enlarge.

Another aspect of the poetic tradition that Eliot has recreated is its formal structure. The Waste Land is written in four small sections or vignettes, and multiple voices speak, making it extremely hard to follow. Once again, a digital text version presents the reader with an amalgamation of data and commentary to aid its reading and interpretation. Presented in the digital medium, the poem incorporates the meta-data into the text while leaving the original text intact. In other words, the reader sees and reads the poem in its intended lineage and sentence structure; only now its supplementary features are digitally available, making the process immediate and straightforward. 

Biking through a Book

So the idea starts with hearing a CBC radio interview with a Fine Arts professor from the University of Regina who was virtually cycling across Canada using Google Maps. Apparently she was using a not too complicated system of connecting her stationary bike to Google Maps, and furthermore, people could also connect their stationary bikes to the same journey and join her. So having been quite fascinated with this idea, I began to wonder if you could take text encoding and map that to a similar physical kind of landscape experience; in other words, if you connected your stationary bike to an eBook, you could experience text encoding through an environment, and possibly experience it with other people. It could be in inside of a building, a rural setting, a village, a city, a long extended journey through many different environments, in space, and could include sounds, music, or be experienced in silence. Each (encoded) text is ultimately unique, and therefore could generate a unique physical experience as well. So a text could be read (reading in and of itself is an experience) and it could also be experienced with all your senses – you could walk through it, bike though it, etc. Seeing encoding in this way could then also potentially impact or enrich the encoding of texts, or could simply be a new way of experiencing a written work. Reading of course is an immersive act, and it would be a playful, experimental notion.

Time’s up. I better post this before I become too self-conscious about it. 

For more information:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/regina-artist-biking-across-canada-1.3396077

and:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Google-Maps-Exercise-Bike-Virtual-Bike-Ride/

Jackson Ossea on the Difference Between a Digitized Representation and a Representation of the Original

           

                                                                 Picture Source

            The digitizer, much like the cataloguer, is in a position of underappreciated authority. A common, mistaken assumption about their profession is that what they do is a simple cut-and-paste job for whichever work needs to change from its original form into the more accessible digits and pixels. In carrying out their profession, they must be precise – making decisions which will accurately reflect whichever artefact they are working on. Their power comes from the understanding that any mistake they make, no matter how insignificant it may seem, becomes fact, distorting, as Sperberg-McQueen would call it, the theory of the artefact which the professionals are trying to represent.

            I had convinced myself of that notion from the materials and theories I had encountered as a student of Library and Information Science, but the thought first began to germinate when I encountered the Senegalese film, Mandabi, as an undergraduate film student. I watched the film in class as a required screening, but what made this screening unique was the format in which we, as a class, watched it.

            To date, Mandabi is the only film I have had to watch for a class which was projected on chemical film. Every other film which was screened for a class was done with a DVD or a Blu-Ray. And while I thought that it was certainly interesting to watch a film which was on – well – film, I didn’t think that there was anything unique or special about the quality of the picture. Nothing about this particular format made it the picture or sound quality noticeably better or authentic like I had heard from countless purists.

            But the day after, when we would re-watch segments of the film and discuss it, a few things became very clear to me. For obvious practical reasons, the clips of the film which we watched again for the purpose of discussion were ripped from the DVD. The first thing that I noticed was different when experiencing the film this time was one which should’ve been obvious before, that the experience of consuming the film through a chemical print was far less interactive than with a DVD. It’s very difficult to pause, rewind, or fast-forward a reel without doing considerable damage to the print. The only way to watch the film would be from beginning to end without pause for whichever reason external to the film.

            The second thing which became obvious was the quality of the image, itself. Like my many peers who were purists for chemical film, I saw how much more compressed the image was when compared to what I had watched yesterday. Many details which I simply observed the day before had now become an obviously pixelated representation, simply a different version of the work which came from what the digitizer believed would best represent the film in digital form.

            The digitizer(s) of films need to be keenly aware of the consequences of the decisions they make when trying to adequately represent the artefact precisely because of the way film, and other traditional media, are increasingly being consumed digitally. The director, Ousemene Sembene, created the film for an audience to be experienced on film. He did not, at the time, anticipate the way in which modern, digital devices would dramatically affect the way in which his work.

Rightly or wrongly, many people choose to watch films, read books, and listen to music this way over their original format. Even I didn’t notice the difference until I had the two different versions which I could immediately compare with each other. It’s possible that, as Walter Benjamin argues, we lose the aura of the original artefact every time we experience a mechanical reproduction and not the original piece itself, but even the chemical film print which I saw was a copy of the original print. Any aura would have been from the form of the object and, while I noticed many disheartening differences from the digital copy of a copy, I don’t doubt that my experience of the film wouldn’t be terribly different had I watched it digitally instead of chemical film.

Still, I earned an appreciation for the work carried out by those who digitize and markup “classic” works for a living. They need to recognize the best way to represent the work in digital form in order to ensure that the experience can be continued, despite the idiosyncrasies of future projection methods. 

            

Week 3 Blogging Question - Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci reached its artistic completion in 1517. Access to the painting was limited to the gilded halls of the palace belonging to King Francis I upon his purchase until ownership slowly trickled down to the Louvre where the famed work currently draws thousands of art/history/curious enthusiasts a year.

I remember standing in line at the Louvre on a hot, sticky July in 2010 yearning to catch a glimpse of the iconic work. A massive crowd was furiously clicking away at the gilded painting and my desire to stand quietly and contemplate the intricacies of DaVinci's painting was a futile dream.

A girl behind me huffed, “We waited in line for this?! It's much bigger on my poster at home.”
I remember feeling flabbergasted that someone would dare to say such a thing. Merely being in the presence of such renowned art work was a pleasure in itself ... however, she was right in her own way. I'm sure her poster at home looked exactly like DaVinci's painting, that she could spare pockets of time to dwell on the use of colour, the tint of the secret smile and other precious details that we standing right in front of the painting could not.


The Mona Lisa has evolved from a half-length portrait to plastic cellphone covers, life size posters, tiny magnets, laminated bookmarks, ambitious knock-offs, wooden coasters, lighters, shot glasses, bags and it goes on and on. There are hundreds of ways to experience the Mona Lisa beyond a framed physical painting. The representation of the Mona Lisa is far more accessible now than it ever could be. Does the meaning get lost in the various methods of representation? Possibly. But each person experiences art differently and not everyone is able to travel through the glass doors of the Louvre (and like that afore mentioned girl, some don't see the point when they can access the works much closer to home).

Like books that are now iBooks and read on iPads and Kindles, do we lose more than we gain from accessing them in a different manner? Yes, we can't hear the rustle of paper but we can increase the text size and change the font. There will be always be pros and cons when artifacts such as books, paintings and music are transformed and represented in a new light, but I feel the pros will always outweigh the cons as they are far more accessible to a larger audience and can be enjoyed in new ways.

~Fareh
Below is a picture I took of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the madding crowd who had come to see her. 

Books for Contemporary Impatience

It was a year ago that someone lent me a copy of a pocket sized little book titled “Introducing Slavoj Zizek, A Graphic Guide” written by Christopher Kul-Want and illustrated by Piero Ferruscci (2011). It was part of a larger series of pocket sized condensations of various Philosopher’s views.

For someone of my temperament, it was a sort of idea-candy, and importantly,  I speak not of it’s content strictly, but very much it’s vehicle of delivery, particularly surrounding its pacing and parsing; it’s form.

Each paged contained a single disquieting notion in a very small paragraph or simply sentence or two, and then a variously grotesque accompanying illustration that took up most of the page.

What stuck me immediately was how unbelievably effortless and frictionless it was to read, and the particularly kind of reading it seemed command of the reader. I spent many years in my undergraduate slogging through primary texts of philosophers, theorists and historians and suppose I had come to expect a certain resistance or threshold of density, a tenor to the activity, yet this book contained none of that. No walls of text. It was almost a sort of comic, and an airy one at that. In truth, compared to my previous experiences, it did not strike me as ‘reading a book’ at all, but in practice, because of it’s slim pacing, seemed more like hitting ‘next’ on some online content churning service (like Digg, back in the day.. or more lately, meme humor sites like 9-gag)

The large instantly perceivable illustrations paired with each tasty tit-bit of thought, provided a great lightness to the pacing, and the limit of 1 concept to a page, or 2 concepts to a leaf, granted an immediate satisfaction of progress and/or consumption of the document. And yet, the book seemed barely based on causality, the pages often not so much building an argument but existing as simply a variety of instances in the constellation of thought of the given philosopher.

I am particularly intrigued by the ‘hit’ of page turning satisfaction, which sometimes seems to exist regardless or even in spite of a book’s content. This Zizek book seemed to maximize this “hit” while abandoning any claims to a coherent building and layering of a concept as might warrant one’s deserved satisfaction of progress. This kind of short-circuited consumption satisfaction, for me, typifies a particularly contemporary mode of digital information/entertainment, where there is always a ‘next’ item regressing into infinity. (e.g the Facebook news-feed)

And yet, this is a genuine ink and paper book which was exploiting, through format, so many of these arguably ‘impatient’ attributes of digital media. I am reminded of Kirschenbaum and Werner’s (2014) notion of modern books as hybrid artifacts that betray the fundamentally intertwined nature of print and the digital.

Regardless of what pure digital incarnations of this book might exist,  

I would tentatively venture to say that the physical form of this book (beyond it’s obviously digital printing etc…) could not have come into being without a consciousness informed by the impatient modalities of the internet. Or it is at least, a spin on an older more graphical and seductively less prolific reading culture that pre-dates thinking in paragraphs, and thinks more through images, maxims, aphorisms, quips, and quotes etc…

For it's lightness, I was surprised by how informed I felt afterwards, and it's content still remains vivid to me. The whole experience has forced me to seriously question the efficacy of many traditional formats of writing Ive encountered, and caused me to wonder whether the needs and expectations of information and communication have shifted dramatically, regardless of the Academy's reliance on a format of thinking and communicating that now strike me as often antique.

-Ben

-----

Kirschenbaum, M. & Werner, S.(2014). Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline. Book History 17(1), 406-458. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved January 22, 2016, from Project MUSE database.

Hinges and Pencils

Hello webloggers.


Last term I did a group project on artists’ books, a conceptual form of book that challenges the notion of what a book is (you are probably all aware of what artists’ books are). This form of book is potentially, but not necessarily, a huge departure from the codex book. It can take any form and the narrative is not necessarily expressed through words; it may not have pages, it may not be rectangular, it may not be made of paper. It can be something completely new and exploratory, and potentially quite political in nature. Form is very important to this kind of “book”, but form is adapted to the function (the message, the concept) communicated through the form. This was a healthy exercise for my brain and I valued the way it challenged my preconceived notions of what a book is. This form of book potentially conceptually links to many ideas, makes you conscious of the act of consuming it, and is very much an “off the page” kind of experience. And yet the artist-writer continues to call it a book because they consider the function of it to be what a book is and does. I would describe this form of book as being highly conscious, due to its conceptual nature, but that doesn’t mean that it is uniformly consumed or experienced.






It is hard to choose one from among this genre of book because they are so wondrous. Instead of identifying a specific book, I will choose the genre for its exploratory and conceptual nature.







If a book can be all these things it is not a stretch at all to consider that a book can also exist in digital, coded form, as something that doesn’t adhere to the recto-verso concept of pages, where even the narrative takes a new form. This ties into Joanna Drucker’s point in her book SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, that developers of the e-book have been much too focused on “simulating the way a book looks” rather than considering how it works.






Paul Duguid’s chapter in Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book makes some interesting points as well: one, that the creators of the e-book have possibly failed thus far (Duguid’s paper was of course published in 2007) to create something more interesting because people haven’t been able to reconceptualise the book, in part due to a “pastoralisation” of the book, but also because of the focus on form and not function. Perhaps, too, they have overstated the notion of isolating the text (or information) from the container. As Drucker pointed out, the form of the book evolved out of the changing relationship with the act of writing and reading; the move from pure consumption for religious purposes to a more conscious act of creating narrative and scholarship, and the necessary evolving methods to navigate these texts; also, the written language as an oral construct itself changed as reading became an act carried out in silence. It is far too simplistic to dismiss “the book” as a constraining form, and it is certainly true that each time a book is read or interacted with, it is a new experience, it is dynamic.








Perhaps e-books could “take a page out” of the artists’ books sphere and shake free the notion of mimicking form (though this has already started to happen) and focus on what the purpose of a text and “container” is; that is to say, how they interact and support each other.








Ultimately, Duguid’s point that the nature of thinking surrounding the book has been far too dualistic, or binary, and the rush to dismiss an old technology for the new is foolish. At the very least, much can be learned from the way the form of the book evolved (that of supporting the function) and that it is a very highly evolved, apex type of entity. It is not easily swallowed up by some new, “gadgety" thing. Unless the e-book can offer the same sophistication, with added features of layers and dimensions that the digital world can offer, it will fail. The book itself has never insisted that it remain unchanged.

Jackson Ossea on the Form of House of Leaves and the Potential Bridge for E-Books

                                                                    Picture Source

When reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it becomes clear that the author was quite interested in toying with the idea of the traditional, paper-bound form of the book which every reader is familiar with. House of Leaves creates its unique experience for the reader through its use of footnotes, page and letter formatting designed to create the effect of claustrophobia and cognitive deterioration, and even the use of colour in the font. The idea is that employing these tricks allow the reader to better empathize with the main character(s), transforming the idea of the book beyond something which a reader passively absorbs into something which the reader becomes further immersed with through the way in which they physically engage with the object.

            For the sake of this discussion let's use the Dictionary.com definition of a book: "A handwritten or printed work of fiction or nonfiction, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers." For the sake of specificity, let's also include that the text is always printed in such a way that the reader can always read it with clarity.

           The first way the book’s form affected the way in which I, the reader, experienced the work was Daneilewski’s use of footnotes. The prologue of the book is told from the perspective of one of its main character, Johnny Truant. The main text of the rest of the book is in the form of a fictitious academic text regarding an equally fictitious film entitled The Navidson Report which was written by someone known throughout the book as Zampano. The footnotes were composed by Truant, and used any time the text reminds him of his own deteriorating life.

            House of Leaves was certainly not the first book I ever read which used the idea of multiple narrators but it was the first – and so far only – book to do so through the use of footnotes. Most of my experiences with footnotes are when an academic is citing their source or briefly expanding on an idea before their argument soldiers on. Here, Truant’s footnotes often go on for pages allowing the reader to further experience the character’s deteriorating mind and increasing fear of their surroundings.

            The effect is created from the use of language within the footnotes. The Navidson Report is supposed to be an academic text and Zampano’s diction reflects the writing that such a word would require. The footnotes are mostly informal, filled with colloquialisms and metaphorical writing that is much more expected from fiction. The effect of the footnotes comes from their unusually long length as well as their juxtaposing language.

            The other one of the Danielewski’s tricks which play with the traditional conventions of reading the book is the way in which the text is formatted. To simulate how Truant and other characters are increasingly frightened of their situation, the text removes itself from the confines of the horizontal lines. There are pages which are intentionally printed upside down, diagonally, and in the direction of the spiral; forcing the reader to physical turn the book around in their hands in order to properly read it.

Before House of Leaves, the most I had ever touched a book while reading it was turning to page to continue the narrative was to turn the pages or refer to the author’s notes later in the book. The idea of physically turning the book in order to experience it was an entirely new experience the book. Combined with the lengthy footnotes, Daneilewski’s novel was the first book which required more than just passively absorbing their words.

The edition which I read was a traditional print book, but it has been argued that the way in which I experienced House of Leaves was a precursor to the way readers would experience e-book years after Danielewski’s book was published.  Bruce Chanen’s thesis is that novel’s use of footnotes and unconventional use of text, forcing the reader to go back and forth between different sections of the book, mirrors “the navigation of digital space, whether hypertext fiction or the World Wide Web.”

Now that I’ve read a number of e-books which use footnotes, I’m not entirely certain that I agree with this notion. Partly because one of Danielewski’s other tricks is his use of different coloured text and many e-readers does not project any colour, but also because the process of going back and forth between different sections of an e-book is much different than going through the same procedure with a print book. With an e-book, the process of clicking on a footnote and the e-reader revealing the contents of the footnote is quite instantaneous. Chanen is correct with their assertion that the book requires the reader to take a non-linear approach to the book, much like the way current students use digital technologies to conduct their research. But the experience requires physically engaging with the book as an object, an idea which the e-book is trying to remove.

Still, House of Leaves was a unique experience for me as a reader because the way in which the book was composed and designed requires the reader to do more than slouch in their seat and occasionally turn the page.