User:Ssstephen/Reading

oh this one?

Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines, Lisa Gitelman

Print culture and non print media evolve in mutual inextricability. The phonograph and contemporary inscriptive forms were deeply dependent upon reworkings of the social and economic relations of textuality, of print culture and print capitalism. They engaged literacy practices in toto, the cognitive and the somatic, the semiotic and the social. They helped question authors and readers as subjects and modify the experienced subjectivities of speakers, performers, publishers, and literates. In doing so they kept intervening into dynamic constructions of private and public, community and difference. p13

"Our copyright laws urgently need revision. They are imperfect in definition, confused and inconsistent in expression; they omit provision for many articles which, under modern reproductive processes, are entitled to protection; they impose hardships upon the copyright proprietor which are not essential to the fair protection of the public; they are difficult for the courts to interpret and impossible for the Copyright Office to administer with satisfaction to the public." [1]

Ted Nelson on hypertext

The power of language in Jewish Kabbalah and magic: how to do and undo things with words, Agata Paluch

read on bl.uk

Literary Machines, Ted Nelson

(reading method note: read chapters 1 & 2 with no writing/notetaking, now re-scanning and writing these notes)

TN shows a diagram of "Ordinary" Hypertext which he proposes is a simplification of a (his) bigger more unifying idea. But surely there are more "Weird" Hypertexts? "Different" Hypertexts, "Strange" Hypertexts, "Outside" Hypertexts.

Check out Douglas Engelbart's NLS at Stanford Research Institute.

The reason that it (Project Xanadu) has taken so long is that all of its ultimate features are part of the design

Again this seems super prescriptive to me, not sure if I like that. No room for adaptation of structure, this is apparently the ultimate superstructure. ("unified structure to handle it all", "clean design", etc etc words that start warning signals for me)

TN seems to me to have some hidden/unaddressed desires to make this a corporate or commercial structure, in particular on page 0/6 where he compares Xanadu to Xerox Corporation (even the name dude), and page 0/13 where he offers new recruits "a small chance of fame and fortune".

A diagram of an oppressive hypertext, based on a phrase from Ted Nelson's Literary Machines "repressive hypertext"

THE BOOK STOPS HERE.

Ex TOT DAG: Expanding Tissue of Text, Data and Graphics (p. 0/9)

And publishing--ah consider what publishing will become

I like the optimistic rhetoric though and definitely exciting to read.

Check out The Problems of Hypertext (Chapter 3 of this book?)

This book too is hardly everybody's cup of tea[quote added], since there is not much choice among its sequences

p.1/14 Note: I added the link, it there a protocol for this? I have adapted the more traditional [emphasis added]

Hypertext referred to as "nonsequence". In my experience it is more a multitude of sequences, this is what I assumed the hyper- part meant. p.1/15

"Colored links" p.1/15: Interesting contrast to my interpretation of p.0/2 "Ordinary" Hypertext as part of a prescriptive system.

"Compound hypertext" p.1/16: In general the tone of this chapter sits with me better. I think TN is presenting the same ideas but without the intense rhetoric of the start.

Pictures and diagrams are intrinsically nonsequential

p.16 (mkay)

Talmud as hypertext p.1/16: a body of accumulated comment and controversy Admitting hypertext is not from the future, I'm into this.

It is my belief that this new ability to represent ideas in the fullness of their interconnectedness will lead to easier and better writing, easier and better learning, and a far greater ability to share and communicate the interconnections among tomorrows ideas and problems

p.1/19. Again with the uber-optimistic futuristic rhetoric imo. I get this is still chapter one of the book but I see no space in his language for considering the potential issues of this new system. Where's my hoverboard?

Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski

P63 In Praise of the Cross-Reference

Index card system as authors assistant when cross referencing is used, or communication partner

Conscious and unconscious cross referencing

Clarifying creative prompts

Intentional (re conscious unconscious?) incorrect references can stimulate. Like Denis Diderot in Encyclopedia

Index cards as stars

Index cards as neurons

Index cards as stock prices

Index cards as sex in the city characters

Mapping

Scope/accuracy of a reference... Reference to mathematics vs reference to godels incompleteness theorem. Focus

  “ Every  note  is  only  one  element" 

Claude Shannon Entropy

Nikolas Luhmann physical index cards in the late twentieth century (Anonymous . 1929c . “ Kartei ” als Warenzeichen gelöscht! Rationelle Betriebsführung, n.p.) ( Vogt , Victor . 1922 . Die Kartei: Ihre Anlage und Führung. Vol. 5 of Orga-Schriften. 2nd edition , revised by Dr. Porstmann. Berlin : Organisation Verlagsanstalt)

n.p.

-

P65 On the Gradual Manufacturing of Thoughts in Storage

poetological - to do with the knowledge of creation? Don't have a dictionary right now

Konrad Gessner possible inventor of index cards

"the production of innovations is always based on the fortifi ed recombination of the existing."

Heinrich von Kliest midwifery of thought (On the Gradual Produc-tion of Thoughts Whilst Speaking 1805) borrowed from Kant

analects --- what is this?

Conversation creates ideas

The Text claims index cards are a valid substitute for the new connections and perspectives offered by a human in conversation. To me this implies the humans creativity is the same as the connections offered by the references; surprising, useful, inspiring, but also predetermined?

Index cards as "precise" "infallible", generally true compared to humans but a) has limits and b) has negative results as well as positive

Kliest - knowledge as a "condition" or state rather than a property

Recombinatory power comes from material nature of cards shuffling juxtaposing etc

"born from the spirit of sloth" index cards as laziness

Index cards as boredom

Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account, Niklas Luhmann

Thinking of the index cards as someone to be communicated with

"One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other. "

Information can only be generated through comparison, OR (insert other logical operators here? Combination as information, XOR as information)

Different goals can lead to better mode informative communication

"The fixed filing place needs no system. It is sufficient that we give every slip a number which is easily seen and that we never change this number and thus the fixed place of the slip"

order is a system though, even chronology? Doesn't take relativity into account, implies some observer with a privileged frame of reference

This isn't just a hypothetical or theoretical limit, consider two authors editing the same wiki page

Multiverse library or multiverse wiki - if someone is already editing the page (or the entire wiki) and a second editor appears (or second observer), the new wiki "timeline" splinters from the last. (options in brackets would splinter much more frequently)

How does version history look in this system?

Could be experimented with a small simple system, maybe a single bit of content and two editors, with metadata for edit/version history

Secondary memory

Long term project, how to retain and enable access, preserve information, allow for expansion in future

Order should be purely formal, does this even makes sense? Can form be isolated?

"Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system. " One billion Christians can't be wrong, one billion Muslims cant be wrong, one billion hyperlinks can't be wrong

Combination of order and disorder can (?) arise from formally ordered system

Examine supposedly formal orders, my instinct says they're not

Bookmarks

Bookmark sharing, bookmark searching, bookmark exchange, bookmark folders and structuring

Tags vs links, tags offer bidirectionality and multiple end points, links are just vectors while tags are fields

Accidents are the driving force for evolution

"to isolate these two aspects [ order and disorder] from each other is neither possible nor methodologically meaningful" <-- I like this

"tha accidents of reading"

What unread books can teach us, Oliver Burkeman

how to write a thesis don't have internet right now to find a readable version.

how-the-internet-makes-you-think-youre-smarter-than-you-really-are Another One to check out when I get internet connection

"Start with the title, Introduction and table of contents." Useful for reading and writing I think.

"the line wasn’t there" the blank web page, the imagined memory

Fugitive Libraries, Shannon Mattern

Melissa Adler, study of the politics of library classification

Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Safiya Noble

BlackLivesMatter Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

Should a library be neutral? Neutrality justifies disengagement

Catherine Allen Latimer, Nella Larsen, Regina Anderson Andrews, and Pura Belpré

"Carrollton, Georgia, librarian Edith Foster marked the spines of African-Americans’ books with a triangle, so readers of all races would know which texts were meant for whom"

Patterson Toby Graham, in his history of the struggle to integrate Alabama’s libraries, asks questions that are still pertinent today: “What is the role of a library and a librarian in an intolerant and fearful society? Have librarians been active agents or just passive observers in the ebb and flow of social change and social conscience?”

I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter

to varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. the interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. that is the true meaning of the word 'empathy'.

He's not great with words (penetration, universal machines, true) but moving past that this is a beautiful idea. The idea of a soul or identity as distributed and modular. The possibility to at very least simulate eachother. He mentions coarse and fine grained a lot which makes me think of renormalisation, and in a good way. A mathematical approach that doesnt require division to reach truth. Accepting that truth can be found on different scales at different times. The night of the 10th of November 1619.

the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignored the implications of the everyday manifestations of the [intercirclusion] of souls.

Volumetric Regimes, Possible Bodies

Volumetric Regimes wiki

The So-called Lookalike

read it here A letter Manetta Barends wrote as the so-called designer of this book to a designer, such as the designer of the template used for the entire series, and made me think of a conversation we started to have in Methods yesterday about style.

The series editors insisted that we could take the design of the book into our own hands, as long as we would “follow the template”. They did not specify what this would mean exactly, but made clear that it was important for them that we honored the original design.

I am wondering how to reconnect your template and aesthetics to the way this book is being made?

We found a slab serif font that aligned with the one in your template and we figured out how to replicate the layout’s dynamics and overall structuration.

(emphasis added in all three above)

Aligned in what way, and why? As a fun misunderstanding Manetta then starts to talk about the "face on the cover" by which I thought she meant typeface. When she mentioned this slab-serif face I was already thinking about the implications of honouring the design choices in the template, and this made me think about the implications of using faces based on those from the early ninteenth century (in this book but also generally). If the face is aligned with the template, can it also be aligned with the contributors? Does everything have to be lined up? The spanish for 'line them up' is 'alinearlos' which is a useful term to know if you are trying to work with a designer whose communicates in spanish.

Yesterday (20221005) xpub1 were discussing style briefly while working together as a group. Myself and Bobi had attempted to not put our own formatting onto some texts we were comparing ('designing' and 'editing' respectively). But then when discussing the compared texts as a group, Cara immediately noticed them to be "very xpub". Brought up some thoughts about styles emerging from process and tools, individual and collective styles, and the implied next thought for me would be 'so what?', does it have any effect?

We Have Always Been GeoHackers

read it here Weird coincidence that I read this the day before learning to use the 3D printer. Although it first seemed like something not directly relevant some ties came up even in naming (gcode and gplates), but more interesting was looking at their process as a case study. 'Disobedient bug reporting and disobedient action research' seem like useful tools to me, and maybe are also interesting in relation to Manetta's letter above. I thought this was a good critique of a software environment and environment software.

body of the earth

This essay also references 'Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None' a few times which seems worth looking into.

From Work to Text[ to Sound], Roland Barthes

The title makes it clear already that text good work bad no work me text. When i first got a mobile phone it cost 9c to send a text. This steadily grew to 13c, although never cost as much as an MMS (up to 25c). Presumably the multi media message involved more work than the text, and hence the higher cost. Certainly an MMS usually involves the transfer of much more data than an SMS. Nasdaq defines information cost as

Transactions costs that include the assessment of the investment merits of a financial asset. Related: Search costs.

These days texts dont work in the same way as they used to, messaging has become over the top. An internet connection is required to go over the top, although a cellular network is not.

On B-dog's comparisons with music:

"to play" and "to listen" constituted a virtually undifferentiated activity

Barthes maybe saying that listening without playing is passive, spectating society? The text made me think of the word 'action' a lot, until Roro finally offers it in the cadence 'deferred action', the signifier as the beat that never drops. At sonic acts yesterday i found myself listening and also hearing. Trying hard not to see or read, which is difficult but Very Important Participation. Also attempting to keep silent, which is certainly easier but still a challenge (run through a forest with your hair tied in a braid without breaking a single branch). Sound good text bad because a sound is always part of an environment. You can't hear any thing except the mechanotransduction of your hair follicles, which your body is overcoding to stop you from overfalling and to give you spatial orientation. Sound is space or at very least they are signified in the same text.

Exploratory Programming, Nick Montford

1.7 Free Software and No-Cost Software

Free as in free beer, free speech, free love, free money, free palestine, freebird, free education, free ride, freefall, free willy, freesound.org, free facebook, free Tom Mooney, free your mind, free your mind arnhem, free music, free movies, free movies online, free movies watch now.

Further reading from this section: Free Texts Free Verse Free Software Free Software

America, Allen Ginsberg

America why are your libraries full of tears?

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.   

Nuestra Herencia: Senior Legacy Project at El Paseo Community Garden, On the Real Film

watch it

Nuestra Herencia

. .. ... .... ..... ...... .......

An Invitation for Wildness, Happen Films

watch it

Non-action as a forest-gardener, sun tzu sort of thing

As a forest gardener one of the things that you do come to realise is that you're a bit-player, you're not the main driver out there, and that really your responsibility becomes learning more about how that works, stepping back, being a bit more relaxed about the whole thing and just watching those processes. And even changing the way that you think about harvest and about what you eat or what you need from your garden and so your diet could change as ours has, and rather than looking to eat lettuces we might each alexanders or a perrenial french sorrel.

The more intervention you make, the more mistakes you're likely to make

time-code for story about weed management

The opportunities that need people, its the opposite of industrialisation or intensification where you need hardly any people because machines are doing it, herbicides are doing it. Putting people back into an environment, help them to make it worthwhile and healthy 

Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles

Material Metaphors p18

Research in Experimental Documents (RED) team at Xerox PARC, including Anne Balsamo and Richard Gold.

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759064/the_what_of_XFR_eXperiments_in_the_future_of_reading (found this one)

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759063/The_methods_of_our_madness_research_on_experimental_documents

It aint what you do it's the way that you do it

Technotexts p25

Further reading mentioned in this:

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Milorad Pavic

Always Coming Home, Ursula LeGuin

High Tension, Paul Zimmerman

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen Aarseth

Cent Mille Milliards, Raymond Queneau

Afternoon, a story, Michael Joyce (where?)

Hypertext has at a minimum the three characteristics of MULTIPLE READING PATHS, CHUNKED TEXT, and some kind of LINKING MECHANISM

What about a text with only two of these characteristics, or just one? Multiple reading paths and chunked text, but no links? Chunked text and links, but only one reading path? Links without chunked text?

Reflexive Loops

N Kate includes the phrase reflexive loops in her definition of technotexts which is v interesting. A text that creates a feedback loop by connecting the nodes of materiality and inscribed constructions (avoiding the words form and content? which is great if that's what she's doing) necessarily can achieve more than a text that doesn't. Feedback of information at the moment makes me think of emergent complexity, eg video feedback as described by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop, example here and here. Or in the audio world, Karplus Strong synthesis or other techniques that use feedback to an extent that the initial inputs become irrelevant, the emergent sound (or video, or text) having its own properties. Also the recording surface of the body without organs. How can the process of recording and inscribing be creative and what is created or emerges from it? Why does a self-referencing iframe not infinitely loop and crash my machine?

The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the real machinic element, which constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p.102

The Future of Writing, Vilem Flusser

                          





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                            [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0087 eternal return]




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                                                                                                     ‘Well! Once more!’


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‘Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. 


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