Reader6/Angeliki

Reader #6

From Tedious Tasks to Liberating Orality

Practices of the Excluded on Sharing Knowledge

by Angeliki Diakrousi

Introduction

How can automated tasks lead to an open and creative process of producing knowledge? How can this knowledge being distributed afterwards? Scanning is a way of creating copies of original written and printed texts, with the purpose to preserve them and reproduce culture. But as it serves mostly the book culture, what narratives and methods are excluded? Throughout the history of the high-tech world stories are lost or hidden, either because they have verbal form or their language cannot be digitized. Many contextual information and methods are lost when the text are scanned. How then counter and excluded learning is produced and shared without this practice? There are other forms of knowledge transmission and preservation like the ones that were developed in oral cultures. But they are not perceived as evaluated methods. Ong (2002) claims that understanding primary orality is an important element for the development of the writing cultures and why not to of the process of scanning? This reader attempts to go through the automated tasks that female employees were doing in the beginning of the 20th century and their development to producing knowledge. From weaving to typewriting and programming women, mainly hidden from the public, were exploring the realm of writing beyond its conventional form. This was similar to the methods of Oulipians for constrained literature, but at the same time they were excluding women from their movement. According to Kittler (1999, pg. 221) “A desexualized writing profession, distant from any authorship, only empowers the domain of text processing. That is why so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writers”. But aren’t these endless feedback loops similar to the rhythmic narratives of the anonymous oral cultures? How this knowledge is produced through repetitive formulas that are easily memorized? The orality is not built on written practices and texts, but in memory, sounds and human interaction. It doesn’ t need a library to be stored, for people to look up and create their texts. The learning process is shared from individual positions but with the need of the community and is flexible and active to the present. In conclusion, the reader aims to propose critical, conceptual and methodological tools that are needed to define a new scanning culture. This is realized with the collection of diverse texts, presenting theories like situated knowledge, orality and different feminist approaches to learning. The book was made with different tools with the intention to find ways of the automation of the publishing process. Any word that doesn’t make sense is because of that, but also of the manually annotated found texts. All the chapters, except the last one, are excerpts from the original texts. The dates in the titles refer to the time they were first published.