McCarty 2010

McCarty, Willard, ed. Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions. Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2010.

Cybertextuality by the Numbers, by Ian Lancashire (37-69)

cybertextuality "theorizes the authorial process" by bringing together cybernetics, self-testimony, cognitive psychology and computer-assisted text-analysis (37-8)

"Computer text-analysis (stylistic counts and the repeating patterns in textual concordances) detects what even the author cannot perceive bout himsef: it reveals these chunks in the phrasal vocabularies of authors." (38)

text-analysis software, etc

• "Such tools extend the human mind in uttering. By availing ourselves of them, we bcome cyborgic and partake of the character of a cybernetic organism. Authoring of texts is a recursive process in which hand-shakes cycle between a sender who utters something and a receiver who perceives the sent message and feeds back information about it to the sender." (39)

death of the author and other postmodern ideas arise from a "legitimate perception of how unconscious the author is of cognitive creative process, of how mysterious it is" (41

• "from a cybertextual perspective, however, the author is partly alive in the work" (41)

"Cybertextuality asks us to read texts in a new way, to discover within them the stigmata of authoring -- the marks that distinguish its subjection to cognitive limitations. These are partly observed in uttering-feedback cycles as they create evanescent or frozen texts.

need to re-encode visual text phonetically while reading to understand (44)

error correction in speech through hesitation and paralanguage/fillers (47)

"Language self-consciousness appears to be a stream but, when examined closely, consists of staccato-like pulses in which a succession of chunks, proposed by a cognitive conceptualizer (which we experience as the gist of what we intend to say), are monitored for correctness by a parallel process before being articulated. The Muse who brings texts piecemeal into being from darkness, and the Editor who announces corrections to those texts and knits them together from much the same obscurity, feedforward and feedback our utterances in cybertextual cycles." 49-50)

expert cognitive capacity can be expanded in specific domains, but there are capacity limits

• "So far, little attention has been paid to text genres as evidence of cognitive capacity." (53)
• "The extent of text that an author can write before reating himself might well signal his omega value." (56)

case studies in Shakespeare's Sir Thomas More and Woolf's The Waves

"Readers do not constrain an author's works; the author's cognitivity does." (68)

"When Christians search for the Logos in the texts of the Bible, and today when we use, in a revealing metonymy, an author's name for his collected works, we anthropmorphize an alien neurological entity that we also have within us but of which we are all, nonetheless, largely unconscious. Cybertextuality does not deny the loss of the creator with a photographed face and a pronounceable name but finds in all texts an anonymous entity. We need authorship attribution methods that can analyse more works than are orphaned in copyright limbo." (69)