Text Technologies

A History

Elaine Treharne, Claude Willan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781503604513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The field of text technologies is a capacious analytical framework that focuses on all textual records throughout human history, from the earliest periods of traceable communication—perhaps as early as 60, 000 BCE—to the present day. At its core, it examines the material history of communication: what constitutes a text, the purposes for which it is intended, how it functions, and the social ends that it serves.

This coursebook can be used to support any pedagogical or research activities in text technologies, the history of the book, the history of information, and textually based work in the digital humanities. Through careful explanations of the field, examinations of terminology and themes, and illustrated case studies of diverse texts—from the Cyrus cylinder to the Eagles' "Hotel California"—Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan offer a clear yet nuanced overview of how humans convey meaning. Text Technologies will enable students and teachers to generate multiple lines of inquiry into how communication—its production, form and materiality, and reception—is crucial to any interpretation of culture, history, and society.

PART I

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

THE FIELD OF TEXT TECHNOLOGIES is a capacious analytical and interpretive framework that focuses on all textual records from the earliest periods of traceable human communication (perhaps as early as 70,000 BCE) to the present. These records can take the form of images, writing, sound, or action, as long as these are meaningful and produced with intentionality by a human agent. Text technologies seeks to discover why, by whom, when, how, for whom, and in what contexts those textual artifacts were produced and to uncover the long history of instantiations of each technology. An investigation of these core components of a textual artifact (any meaningful form of communication that is recorded) demonstrates underlying systems and a unifying structure. It is possible, then, to determine specific trends and concepts emerging through successive cycles of text technological facture the better to understand how communication has operated historically and might operate in the future.

INTRODUCTION TO TEXT

TEXT comprises signs, symbols, or sounds of any kind that intentionally convey meaning.¹ It is a conceptual category with a vast demesne that encompasses all forms of human communication. The signs or symbols that convey and display meaning are by definition physical, perceptible phenomena ranging from systematic markings on rocks to radar blips. This is the crux and the friction at the heart of this book: the idea of text is abstract, but our means of perceiving it is always physical and concrete—what we call technological, rooted in praxis and technē. The conveyance of meaning happens through a technological, nontextual form and necessitates know-how, tools, and a medium or substrate.

TEXT can take many different forms. It could be a chair or a government building (its design, architecture, decorations, or the sum of the subordinate texts into a whole text), as well as more conventional vectors of meaning like advertisements, cartoons, bitcoin, posters, songs, magazines, newspapers, YouTube videos, and books. The technologies involved in making a chair can include joinery, carving, welding, molding, weaving, or upholstering, but in order to read it as TEXT, it must have been produced with the intention of communicating a meaningful message that an audience could usually interpret. As we will see with different texts throughout this book, the most complex chairs are multitechnological hybrids—component technologies working together to form a powerful and multivalent whole. A good example of a distinctive text in this case is a throne or an Eames lounger.

This section introduces and explains our working definition, and taxonomy, of TEXT as a concept, providing multiple examples so that you can recognize which kinds of objects fit into this overarching field and which do not. We then introduce a way to analyze objects that are texts.

Finding and Defining text

Since the meanings of texts are conveyed perceptibly, through physical means, we can refine the definition of TEXT that we just offered to the following: TEXT (or, indeed, a text) is a voluntarily and intentionally human-created phenomenon that contains and imparts an interpretable and meaningful message, accessible to a community of receivers (even if that community is just one person talking to himself or herself).² We will go through this definition term by term to provide a working sense of what TEXT can and cannot be.

Voluntariness is an important component of this definition. Emanations of the involuntary physical consequences of having a body in the world, for example, are not TEXT. A sneeze, a shiver, a bruise: these somatic reactions are perceptible phenomena, but they are not TEXT. By the same token, the unintentional side effects of intentional acts are not ordinarily TEXT: the cloud of dust thrown up by a pneumatic drill, the squeak of a door’s hinges, the erosion of a riverbank over time. All of these phenomena, if unintended or if without human agency, cannot be TEXT.

This brings us to the next term in the definition: intentionality. Intentionality has the ability to frame, or reframe, phenomena into TEXT. Phenomena produced or interpreted under the circumstances of active and directed intentionality can be argued to be TEXT. Stars simply existing in the sky are natural phenomena, for example. When humans understand stars to represent astrological signs or read a star’s positioning to detect direction, those stars become TEXT because the human mediator intentionally seeks and interprets meaning.

The presence of the word intentionality in the definition thus reflects our anthropocentric approach to TEXT. We do not consider naturally occurring phenomena, in situ, to be TEXT. Under normal circumstances, phenomena that occur without active or conscious human intervention—the shaping of driftwood, weather events, a rock—are not TEXT. Even if human actions affect our perception of these phenomena (e.g., altered tidal patterns, global warming, mining), they are not TEXT. And even when these phenomena are used as component parts of a text (driftwood as art in a home, depiction of storms or twisters in a news broadcast or a film, use of rocks in garden displays), the underlying natural physical objects are not in themselves TEXT, even though they are component parts of TEXT.

In sum, intentionality is the deliberateness or agency behind a text’s creation, inspiring its production. An author’s intentionality is her willful bringing into being of meaningful communication. A scribe’s intentionality might be his wish to create a regulated, calligraphically expert piece of writing. Bing Crosby’s crooning, developed through careful use of sound recording in the 1940s, intentionally attempted to create an intense closeness to a distant, unknown, and unknowable audience.

Interpretable is the corollary term to created in this definition: if a human agent must make the text, then that agent must also perceive it. Here we capture the essentially communicative function of TEXT. Even intentionally created phenomena that leave no physical or mental trace for others to discover cannot be, for the purposes of text technologies, TEXT. Thoughts that pass through one’s head that are never expressed are, in effect, self-perceptible, but in order to be called TEXT, the phenomena usually need to be perceptible and interpretable to some communicatee. This is a tricky area, though. If I speak to myself and have an entire interior conversation, this is, to all intents and purposes, TEXT. However, if I then leave no record or make no summary of this interior conversation, it is as if it never happened and the functionality or potential interpretability of that silent utterance is voided.

Our use of the word phenomenon reflects our belief that texts are first and foremost experiential in their nature. TEXT can generally be studied by others only because in its broadest and most capacious sense, it can be experienced by others; metaphysical, noumenal objects are beyond the scope of this discipline.³ An abstract concept such as justice, for example, could never, in and of itself, be TEXT, however much other texts might address it.

Describing TEXT

To accurately describe TEXT, we have developed a core triad of concepts that might be thought of as the structure of all text technologies. Any text can be taxonomized using this triad:

Intentionality

Materiality

Functionality

Each of these concepts is addressed in this part. But a shortcut to understand how the triad applies to a text is to ask yourself:

1. What was this text intended to do? [intentionality]

2. What is this text made of? What does it look like? What are its component parts? What is it composed of, and what objects were used to make it? [materiality]

3. What does this text actually do? How does it perform in the real world? What is its biography or long history? [functionality]

With this rubric in hand, describing a text seems simpler than deciding whether something is or is not TEXT in the first place. Like all neat distinctions, however, the truth is more complex. In practice, each of these components will interfere with the pure working of the other two. A text’s materiality will inevitably have an impact on how we understand its functionality (and here, we are talking about individual texts, so we move from the semantic, and abstract, field of TEXT). Its intentionality will skew our perception even of its materiality, and while the intentionality behind the creation of a text might remain stable, the materiality of a text can alter dramatically (in the printing of a poem, for example, and its oral delivery to a live audience). To this triad, we have added the concept of cultural value, an inescapable component that evades easy definition but is at work in all cases with varying degrees of predominance: a paper napkin with a child’s drawing may have a minuscule degree of cultural value (in this case, sentimental value for the child’s parents perhaps), but when John Lennon scribbles lyrics for a new Beatles song on a napkin, that textual object has immense cultural and financial value.

Thus, every individual text and individual text technology in this book can be anatomized with the triad plus or minus cultural value to reveal internal tensions and compromises, suggest how each of those factors enhances and undermines the text’s effectiveness, and elucidate the significance of one factor over the others.

TEXT = intentionality + materiality + functionality +/− cultural value

One can consider this full interpretation of a text, or text in its widest sense, to be plenitextual.⁴

WHAT IS THE STUDY OF TEXT TECHNOLOGIES?

Students who are new to text technological studies might be wondering at this point how this approach is distinguishable from disciplines that might be more familiar to them, such as literary studies or history. First, we’ll offer two rough thumbnail sketches of those disciplines and then show how and where text technologies differs.

History is the search for an ever more inclusive set of reconstructions of past actions, decisions, and motivations. Historians weigh evidence with a view to creating an ideally even-handed, accurate account of precisely what a now-disappeared version of the world looked like and (sometimes) how that particular moment emerged from, or led to, other now-past moments. The focus of traditional history has been on conjecturing the most plausible version of people and events possible given the evidence available from a variety of records and sources.

Within literary studies, the subdiscipline that most resembles text technologies is book history, a critical practice predicated on the insight that the material forms of a text influence how that text was read and how later texts were written. In a sense, text technologies simply extends this insight to its logical conclusion: it is the long history of the use of technē to encode or mediate signs. But our approach to the study of meaning differs substantially from that undertaken in most literary courses. For example, one considerable difference is that the notion of intention, or intentionality, is central to our understanding of text. Since at least the 1960s, literary scholarship (from Barthes, Derrida, I. A. Richards, and many others) has insisted—for its own purposes, quite rightly—that the literary text is discrete and isolated from its creator. This phenomenon is known loosely as “the death of the author.” In the history of text technologies, however, the creator of the text as an agent, whether as an author or copyist or film producer, is a central figure, but the materiality and subsequent history and reception of the text are equally important. In this book, we are concerned with the different methods agents have used to communicate meanings over time and the different ways in which those communications have been received, understood, and valued. Any object that intentionally conveys meaningful and potentially interpretable information is a text technology to be studied.

Whereas literary studies concerns itself first and foremost with the structure, meaning, definitions, and use of communicating objects and history with agents, their actions, and their interactions, text technologies treads a thoroughly hybrid middle ground. In short, text technologies addresses the material history of communications among human agents over the longue durée.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is divided into four parts. Each part takes a different tack in its exploration of the conceptual, historical, and material history of text technologies. This book is not designed to be read straight through, but for you to flip backward and forward from section to section. The argument of the book is revealed throughout the book and builds over the successive parts, during which you will encounter new concepts, new objects, and new terms, such as the “chemise” (from the French for “shirt”) that might cover a nineteenth-century book like the cloth version of a modern dust jacket, for example. If there are terms that are unclear to you, look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary (our preferred dictionary) or online.

Undergraduate students who were using this book while it was in preparation found it helpful to write in the book itself, responding to the questions that follow many of the sections, particularly in Part 2. These questions, together with the specifically selected Further Reading lists, are designed to help you think about each section in the wider context of text technologies, as well as stimulate ideas for examples of text technologies that you know fit into the various categories we have offered here.

OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK

All of the four parts of this book are interdependent, and no one part of the book would give a full and fair representation of text technologies without the other three. The part that you are now reading treats the conceptual framework underpinning text technologies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Conceptual Framework
• Part II: Historical Framework
• Part III: Case Studies
• Part IV: Transformations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index