Preliminary Class Business
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1. Tutorial on Practicum Assignments
- Logging in to Student Work branch of the course site.
- Intro to Practicums Introduction to doing the upcoming course "practicum" assignments and leaving results on the Student Work site.
- Introduction to text encoding (in-class demo by instructor)
2. Text in the Digital Age (1) --
What Is Text Anyway?
Readings for Today:
William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, "In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface" (Flash animation)
Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People" [PDF or HTML] (2013) [instructor's annotated version]
Michael Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013) [instructor's annotated version]
From Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading..." (last paragraph):
We are at a propitious time when digital technologies are raising questions, not only among scholars but also in the general public, about what texts are, what forms they may take, and how they are used. In seeking answers to such questions, one of our greatest resources is history, for understanding both how modern text technologies originated and developed, and also why they were developed, and why past tools and devices persisted, changed, or became obsolete.... But the opportunity now exists for the study of past texts to move beyond nostalgia, and for dead people and old books to inform and enrich living readers and their new technologies.
- What is Michael Witmore saying in his "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013) [instructor's annotated version]?
- I would argue that a text is a text because it is massively addressable at different levels of scale. Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction.
One hundred years from now, the available computational objects may be related to one another in new ways. I can only imagine what these are: every fourth word in every fourth document....
Textuality is massive addressability. This condition of texts is realized in various manifestations, supported by different historical practices of reading and printing. The material affordances of a given medium put constraints on such practices....We cannot, in a Borgesian mood, query all of the possible datasets that will appear in the fullness of time.
3. Preview of Next Class
4. Heading
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