Harpold 2009 - Revision history

Wtrettien: /* Reading Machines */

2010-09-27T19:18:34Z

Reading Machines

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	:"Once again, it is a problem of '''inside and outside''': of the interior and the extension of the reading machine and the archive; of how the former encircles the latter; of how these circles are traced and also brought to an end in accord with the operator's gesture." (227/7.44)		:"Once again, it is a problem of '''inside and outside''': of the interior and the extension of the reading machine and the archive; of how the former encircles the latter; of how these circles are traced and also brought to an end in accord with the operator's gesture." (227/7.44)

			'''GUI''', use of catachreses, dead metaphors of the "desktop"
			* "the screens of the GUI in the present cultural moment sustain an imaginary of unbroken reference and saturated connectivity, and have bound them in popular consciousness to seeming analog correlates, stripped of their mechanical and operational complexities" (235/7.61
			* desktop ''icon'' is really ''ideogram''

			:"Operations of the reading machine erach a limit where the real object is discovered to have escaped these circuits: where the unreadable surface ''surfaces''; when the machine's operations fall short of the textual procedures it enables. ... The unreadable surface is the final substrate on which readability is cast, precisely to the extent that it is neither flat nor deep, but resistant to both conceptions of its presence." (236/7.63)

			:"The (reading) machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject." (237/7.65)

Wtrettien: /* Reading Machines */

2010-09-27T18:56:55Z

Reading Machines

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	:"The wheel efficiently dislocates the page from simple forms of seriality, but it cannot encompass more general systems of reading, because it cannot account for effects below and beyond the thresholds of the units it circulates." (222/7.28)		:"The wheel efficiently dislocates the page from simple forms of seriality, but it cannot encompass more general systems of reading, because it cannot account for effects below and beyond the thresholds of the units it circulates." (222/7.28)

	Massin's book design for Raymond Queneau's ''Cent mille milliards de poemes'' (1961)		Massin's book design for '''Raymond Queneau's ''Cent mille milliards de poemes''''' (1961)

	Raymond Roussel's ''Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique'' (1932); Fassio's machine to assist in reading it: circuits (Rolodex structure; 224/7.35)		'''Raymond Roussel's ''Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique''''' (1932); Fassio's machine to assist in reading it: circuits (Rolodex structure; 224/7.35); folds (225/7.39); machines (226/7.40)

			:"Textual inconvenience and the risk of forgetting what matters when a textbase projects its operations in ever-greater complexity -- these are recurring concerns of the reading machine. But they are also signs of the machine's potential to generate new and unforeseen field effects." (226/7.42)

			:"Once again, it is a problem of '''inside and outside''': of the interior and the extension of the reading machine and the archive; of how the former encircles the latter; of how these circles are traced and also brought to an end in accord with the operator's gesture." (227/7.44)

Wtrettien: /* Reading Machines */

2010-09-27T18:45:49Z

Reading Machines

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	== Reading Machines ==		== Reading Machines ==

			"Golden ratio" of medieval manuscripts; Jan Tschichold, ''The Form of the Book''

			books designed to be fitted to the size/shape of the human body

			'''Ramelli, reading wheel'''; "resituates problems fo circuits and fields by figuring their relation as a system of concentric and intersecting cycles" (215/7.16)

			Daniel Libeskind; makes Ramelli's wheel, Camillo's memory theatre and Swift's writing machine from the Academy of Lagado; "each of Libeskind's lessons embodies an extensive semiotic by means of an apparatus that moves texts in multiple directions and with irregular rhythms" (217/7.19)

			:"The wheel efficiently dislocates the page from simple forms of seriality, but it cannot encompass more general systems of reading, because it cannot account for effects below and beyond the thresholds of the units it circulates." (222/7.28)

			Massin's book design for Raymond Queneau's ''Cent mille milliards de poemes'' (1961)

			Raymond Roussel's ''Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique'' (1932); Fassio's machine to assist in reading it: circuits (Rolodex structure; 224/7.35)

Wtrettien: /* Allographs: Windows of Afternoon */

2010-09-27T17:41:35Z

Allographs: Windows of Afternoon

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	* "software variants of digital texts and the hardware and software conditions under which they are read are necessary subjects for literary-historical and literary-critical investigation" (203/6.60)		* "software variants of digital texts and the hardware and software conditions under which they are read are necessary subjects for literary-historical and literary-critical investigation" (203/6.60)
	* "a basic fact of literary production is that it is always ana llographic system" (205/6.63)		* "a basic fact of literary production is that it is always ana llographic system" (205/6.63)

			:"The historiographic problem lies in how we have applied the new tools to the old texts, or in how we have reimagined the old texts in terms of the new tools." (207/6.67)

			:"Conceiving of digital reading solely or even chiefly as a practice of excavating meaning from the machine's secret registers means mistaking for signs of depth objects that may be best thought of as stuck to the surface of the text: jammed, with the reading subject, someplace among the clattering apparatus of the reading scene." (208/6.69)

	== Reading Machines ==		== Reading Machines ==

Wtrettien: /* Allographs: Windows of Afternoon */

2010-09-27T17:34:59Z

Allographs: Windows of Afternoon

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	challenges [[Hayles 2002] on "first wave" and "second wave" divisions of e-lit; "'''simplif[ies] relations of technical change to literary change''', and obscure[s] intractable but basic problems of the historical currency of much about the new media that is not-quite-new." (178/6.06)		challenges [[Hayles 2002] on "first wave" and "second wave" divisions of e-lit; "'''simplif[ies] relations of technical change to literary change''', and obscure[s] intractable but basic problems of the historical currency of much about the new media that is not-quite-new." (178/6.06)

	early critical responses to ''Afternoon'': Nelson, Steve Johnson, Espen Aarseth (Barthes, ''tmesis''); revisits them, thinking about how different iterations of the text, on different machines running different OS/software, affects reading experience		early critical responses to ''Afternoon'': Nelson, Steve Johnson, Espen Aarseth (Barthes, ''tmesis''); revisits them, thinking about how different iterations of the text, on different machines running different OS/software, affects reading experience (Windows user have more freedom to navigate through text searches, resize windows, etc.)

	'''Janespace''': lost node in hypertext fiction; "avant-texte or peritext valued by the genetic critic: the trace of material, historical conditions of composition, preserved in a form that may, potentially, be read backward, so as to deduce those conditions" (192/6.37)		'''Janespace''': lost node in hypertext fiction; "avant-texte or peritext valued by the genetic critic: the trace of material, historical conditions of composition, preserved in a form that may, potentially, be read backward, so as to deduce those conditions" (192/6.37)
	* relation to software watermarks, "Easter eggs"		* relation to software watermarks, "Easter eggs"

			:"Regimes fo grammatextuality are absolute; changes in the visual or material presentation of a text will influence the reader's reception of it." (196/6.47)

			'''instructions for how to read as paratext''' (200/6.55)

			first generation of hypertext criticsm looked at "what the reader was expected to look for -- not at -- in these texts" (102/6.56); ignored technological enframing, etc. -- "material registers of the text"

			"necessary to '''widen the definition of what is taken to be meaningful''' in the matter of the text and to include in this traits o texts and their operations heretofore neglected because of critics' predisposition to look first beneath the surfaces of texts" (202-3/6.59)
			* "software variants of digital texts and the hardware and software conditions under which they are read are necessary subjects for literary-historical and literary-critical investigation" (203/6.60)
			* "a basic fact of literary production is that it is always ana llographic system" (205/6.63)

	== Reading Machines ==		== Reading Machines ==

Wtrettien: /* Allographs: Windows of Afternoon */

2010-09-27T17:10:00Z

Allographs: Windows of Afternoon

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	== Allographs: Windows of ''Afternoon'' ==		== Allographs: Windows of ''Afternoon'' ==

			reading of Joyce's ''Afternoon''

			:"the most unadorned text will be subjected to the illocutionary influences of icons, buttons, menus, windows, and other interface widgets. It will be caught up in paratextual and grammatextual structures on its periphery: borders and control of document windows, the overlapping or intersection fo these elements with others on the screen, like and different from them, audio and visual feedback. '''In short, all the visual, aural, and procedural resources of the 'desktop' apply to the situation of reading in this way.'' Perhaps more important than that graphic signifiers have been jammed against textual ones -- writing has always been so crowded, programs of the image and text have always knotted in this way -- i s the problem of what their interleavings and disjunctions represent in the present moment of reading." (179/6.05)

			challenges [[Hayles 2002] on "first wave" and "second wave" divisions of e-lit; "'''simplif[ies] relations of technical change to literary change''', and obscure[s] intractable but basic problems of the historical currency of much about the new media that is not-quite-new." (178/6.06)

			early critical responses to ''Afternoon'': Nelson, Steve Johnson, Espen Aarseth (Barthes, ''tmesis''); revisits them, thinking about how different iterations of the text, on different machines running different OS/software, affects reading experience

			'''Janespace''': lost node in hypertext fiction; "avant-texte or peritext valued by the genetic critic: the trace of material, historical conditions of composition, preserved in a form that may, potentially, be read backward, so as to deduce those conditions" (192/6.37)
			* relation to software watermarks, "Easter eggs"

	== Reading Machines ==		== Reading Machines ==

Wtrettien at 22:44, 26 September 2010

2010-09-26T22:44:08Z

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	* cutting apart, rearranging, starring the text		* cutting apart, rearranging, starring the text
	* "arbitrary, performative character of the reader's attribution of meaning to the text" in Barthes (149/5.14)		* "arbitrary, performative character of the reader's attribution of meaning to the text" in Barthes (149/5.14)

			"'''Reading is one of the sciences of combinations'''" (152/5.20)

			reading of Shelley Jackson's ''Patchwork Girl''

			:"Reorienting the concept of the lexia away from a purely node-based segmentation of the text to parsings that are more variable and opportunistic, and including within the lexia's purview grammatextually activated expressions that may have no direct relation to the text's on-screen chunking, means that objective characteristics of the text will necessarily be bound to elements of a subjective reading encounter." (172/5.62)

			* ''possibility of hypertext infiltrating how we act as literary critics -- not enclosing a literary commons but constructing pathways out of them, or through them''

			== Allographs: Windows of ''Afternoon'' ==

			== Reading Machines ==

Wtrettien at 21:30, 26 September 2010

2010-09-26T21:30:48Z

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	:"Subscribing to a myth that inefficiencies of the book may be somehow corrected, many designers of new media appear to seek, in contrast to projects such as Earls's, to turn the digital artifact into a pure fetish-object, in what I would term a restricted economy of perversion: a phylactery, a reliable guarantee against the vicissitudes of reading, a meaning-making thing stripped of its ambiguity, contingency, and its fundamental, real insecurity. Rather than recognizing that the ramifying network exposes one to evidence of the farces of satisfaction, apologists of the new reading machines seem to hope that a well-designed ''electronic'' page or book wills ave us from the vicissitudes of the papered sign, on which the page's grammatextual registers ''insist'' in any reading. Earls's achievement reminds us that we should, instead, '''look at these surfaces, paper and screen, not through them'''. Designers and users in the digital field may need to be reminded of this, so that the late age of the book should not be accompanied by a forgetting of all that the word, line, and page can effect upon us." (141-2/4.58)		:"Subscribing to a myth that inefficiencies of the book may be somehow corrected, many designers of new media appear to seek, in contrast to projects such as Earls's, to turn the digital artifact into a pure fetish-object, in what I would term a restricted economy of perversion: a phylactery, a reliable guarantee against the vicissitudes of reading, a meaning-making thing stripped of its ambiguity, contingency, and its fundamental, real insecurity. Rather than recognizing that the ramifying network exposes one to evidence of the farces of satisfaction, apologists of the new reading machines seem to hope that a well-designed ''electronic'' page or book wills ave us from the vicissitudes of the papered sign, on which the page's grammatextual registers ''insist'' in any reading. Earls's achievement reminds us that we should, instead, '''look at these surfaces, paper and screen, not through them'''. Designers and users in the digital field may need to be reminded of this, so that the late age of the book should not be accompanied by a forgetting of all that the word, line, and page can effect upon us." (141-2/4.58)

			== Lexia Complexes ==

			Landow (mis)uses Barthes' term ''lexia'' to define hypertext
			* "Barthes's lexia is a virtual structure of the reading situation. Landow's lexia is a concrete segment of the textbase." (144/5.02)

			for Barthes, "this mapping of signifiers to practices and techniques -- even when anticipated by the text's or image's author -- is specific to the reader; it is multiply oriented; it may even be internally inconsistent." (145/5.05)
			* cutting apart, rearranging, starring the text
			* "arbitrary, performative character of the reader's attribution of meaning to the text" in Barthes (149/5.14)

Wtrettien: /* Ex-foliations */

2010-09-26T21:08:29Z

Ex-foliations

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	[each term has examples to it] "Erasure; folding; peeling; perforation; plucking; shuffling; and so on: all are varieties of a crisis of surfaces that reading represses and memorializes, and that rereading, especially close, critical reading, must repeat. I propose the term ''ex-foliation'' for a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of the text's surfaces without resolving them into distinct strata or hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies." (137/4.50)		[each term has examples to it] "Erasure; folding; peeling; perforation; plucking; shuffling; and so on: all are varieties of a crisis of surfaces that reading represses and memorializes, and that rereading, especially close, critical reading, must repeat. I propose the term ''ex-foliation'' for a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of the text's surfaces without resolving them into distinct strata or hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies." (137/4.50)

			:"Subscribing to a myth that inefficiencies of the book may be somehow corrected, many designers of new media appear to seek, in contrast to projects such as Earls's, to turn the digital artifact into a pure fetish-object, in what I would term a restricted economy of perversion: a phylactery, a reliable guarantee against the vicissitudes of reading, a meaning-making thing stripped of its ambiguity, contingency, and its fundamental, real insecurity. Rather than recognizing that the ramifying network exposes one to evidence of the farces of satisfaction, apologists of the new reading machines seem to hope that a well-designed ''electronic'' page or book wills ave us from the vicissitudes of the papered sign, on which the page's grammatextual registers ''insist'' in any reading. Earls's achievement reminds us that we should, instead, '''look at these surfaces, paper and screen, not through them'''. Designers and users in the digital field may need to be reminded of this, so that the late age of the book should not be accompanied by a forgetting of all that the word, line, and page can effect upon us." (141-2/4.58)

Wtrettien at 20:59, 26 September 2010

2010-09-26T20:59:50Z

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	appropriation of codes iconography in new media (136/4.47-8)		appropriation of codes iconography in new media (136/4.47-8)

	[each term has examples to it] Erasure; folding; peeling; perforation; plucking; shuffling; and so on: all are varieties of a crisis of surfaces that reading represses and memorializes, and that rereading, especially close, critical reading, must repeat. I propose the term ''ex-foliation'' for a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of the text's surfaces without resolving them into distinct strata or hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies."" (137/4.50)		[each term has examples to it] "Erasure; folding; peeling; perforation; plucking; shuffling; and so on: all are varieties of a crisis of surfaces that reading represses and memorializes, and that rereading, especially close, critical reading, must repeat. I propose the term ''ex-foliation'' for a loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of the text's surfaces without resolving them into distinct strata or hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies." (137/4.50)