Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
KMV wrote: Michael, I have my own thoughts about it, but could you say more about what or which you mean by bogus folk histories? I am working on a history myself and have not been very impressed with the largely anecdotal and narrow accounts that I see then being universalized, and the term new media has all kinds of problems. --Florian can sum those up much better than I though. ;-) Pretty much that. I've heard a number of people recently present historical accounts in this area that are more or less just anecdote or personal impression. Rhetoric, which it the academic field I'm currently mostly in, tends to fetishize history (the fascination with Classical rhetoric, lots of publication on the history of rhetoric, etc), but not all that many rhetoricians actually do real historical research. A good number do, of course, and more are careful to avoid making historical claims, but there's a lot of the here's how hypertext happened sort of argument being made. Sometimes these are interesting narratives, but they're often presented as incontestable fact, or at least as general hypotheses well-grounded in the available evidence. I don't want to go into specifics, particularly since I don't have texts at hand to cite (I thinking primarily of conference presentations at the moment). It's just a general trend that I've observed and discussed with a handful of folks - mostly historians. I will say though that I think the digital distinction has some historical importance as well because of the way it changes reproduction and distribution, and because of the way it makes audio, video, text, and sill images in a sense equivalent, which has allowed new artistic/musical/literary practices to develop. OK. I'd have to think about that, but it seems like those are a couple of places where the digital/analog distinction still carries some weight. Another might be questions of uniqueness and the metaphysics of aesthetics: it'd be interesting to consider what Matt Skala's concept of bit color does to Walter Benjamin's concept of aura, for example. I'd like to know what you and others think would make a better history, or what has been left out? I'm really not sure, mostly because I know I'm not a historian, and I haven't really thought about what might go into such a history. That's what bothers me - if I can think of counterexamples and omissions when I hear one of these narratives, what would some serious digging turn up? -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric Writing, Michigan State University # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
Michael Wojcik wrote: Florian Cramer wrote: [...] technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus computable] units. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), generally with a sampling rate around 60 samples/second. But the analog frames of the projected film are not amenable to lossless copying, and they are the meat of the film. The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Outside of human culture, digital information transmission and storage is nothing new, as Richard Dawkins would remind us. The genetic material we all carry, what he called the digital river, predates any other information storage and replication system we know of. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
The problem at hand is a basic literacy. 'Digital' is used as a completely unsuitable substitute for 'discrete'. Film is discrete, even images on the computer monitor are discrete, but their internal representations can be digital or not. The two are not related. By the same token, traditional projected film is a digital system, since it's quantized into still images (frames), # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Friday, January 23 2009, 18:57 (-0700), inimino wrote: The meat of text is in the sequence of letters; the actual analog details of those letters are irrelevant. To me, the capacity for lossless copying is the hallmark of digital information. Can we extend Florian's remark to all written language? Hand- written manuscripts seem as digital in this sense as printed texts. Even orally-transmitted stories, arguably... Quick answer: We cannot extend it to all written language because for some texts, those analog details - the calligraphy or typography - are essential. This is true, above all, for visual poetry since the antiquity and across languages and cultures. In philology, there have been controversies about the hand-written manuscripts of authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka, and to which extent their strike-through corrections and doodling should be preserved in text editions. (A hardcore respective stance is been taken, since the 1980s, by the French critique génétique.) A technically literate digital humanities could greatly benefit from such differentiations since it could reconstruct how for example for most epics, religious works, academic treatises and later for pamphlets, novels and journalism the analog text information was nonessential, and that they were digital precisely to facilitate their own reproduction. So, in this example, techno-terminological precision and a historical reflection beyond anecdotal first and second waves of digital media go hand in hand. Florian -- http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
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