Translating Media from (My Mother Was a Computer)

In the fourth chapter, “Translating Media”, from “My Mother Was a Computer”, Katherine Hayles explores the complexities of contemporary ideas of textuallity. In the first sub chapter called “From Print to Electronic Texts” she compares the printed text and the electronic text through their transformation, which she calles “media translation”. Media translation is not only a transformation of a printed document into an electronic text, but also a process of interpretation with the presumption of gaining something and loosing something in the translation itself. This she sees as an opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about text and creating a new view on it, both in print and electronic format. But it’s not only the translation in its physical way that makes a transfer into a translation, it is also the cultural context, editorial decisions, and shifting relationship to materiality that occurs in the process creates not only a representation of the original text, but also an interpretation of it. Though the words themselves may be unchanged and their order preserved, the context/media creates a new text.

Hayles gives an example of how these issues are dealt in the William Blake Archive, a literary Web site designed through a special editorial policy where every book is treated as an unique physical object and where the “bibliographic codes”, such as the page size, font, gutters, leading, etc., are taken as seriously as the linguistic codes. But still, Hayles is wondering if for example slight color variations or the reader’s navigation on this site can affect meaning of the text? She also argues on how all of the attention is paid to the relation of meaning to linguistic and bibliographic codes and almost none to the relation of meaning to digital codes. By highlighting this problematic she announces the subject that is to follow in the rest of the chapter.