pp.
20. Subtitling – Ger Groot
The misconception that a picture says more than a thousand words is based on the idea that it is immediately clear what a picture means. You see a shoe, think ‘shoe’, but what do you actually see? It only becomes clear from the story around it that this is the shoe with which Nikita Khrushchev hammered the desk at the United Nations.
The presenter of the television programme tells us that and so conjures up a world of memories. Cold War , Cuba Crisis, the Netherlands hardly recovered and yet happiness was still commonplace. All this flashes through our mind’s eye as a gentleman speaking Russian shows us around the museum of Soviet reality. The man says something in Russian and we read it in Dutch along the bottom of our television screen.
With the exception of advertising slogans and instructions for use, no text has become such a natural part of our everyday lives as subtitles. Everybody reads them throughout the day, so automatically that picture and subtitle have become intertwined and Derrida seems finally to have been proven right: the whole world has become écriture.
There is another way. In many other countries, the viewer doesn’t get to hear the Russian guide, or at most somewhere in the background. A voice in the viewer’s own language is superimposed, so easily understood that it melts into the picture. And in reaction it seems as if the latter is actually speaking. Word and voice disappear in the testimony of the ‘thousand words’ that seem to be spoken to us by what we see.
And so it seems as if the picture has the upper hand over the text, as the prophets of the image culture have been telling us for years. But that demands a very high price. Filtering out the Russian by eliminating the text in the picture also has suppressed the foreign aspect that the original contained. The world in voice-over never really leaves the cosiness of the familiar. It no longer hears any incomprehensible Russian. It only ultimately knows itself.
No wonder, then, that in countries with post-synchronization, not only is the knowledge of languages at a lower level, but also knowledge of the world. That reality is larger, more spacious, and more alienating than they had always thought simply doesn’t sink in.
The classic book reader already knew that, but the subtitle reader discovers that daily. The writing beckons him out of the immediacy in which everything literally speaks for itself. The image is layered thanks to the doubling of the text, which suggests a whole universe between legible writing and foreign voice.
No image speaks for itself and no voice is simple enough to coincide with this. Without text, the visible remains enclosed within the horizon that can be scanned with the eyes. It only becomes meaningful thanks to the word; cosmopolitan thanks to the writing. Looking by itself is, after all, a somewhat narrow-minded activity. Only when the world becomes legible and something can be deciphered in its image can it be freed from the restriction of the look. Only then is there really something to see in its image.
Ger Groot is a writer and teaches Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and Philosophy and Literature at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
21. Ambient Scholarship – Gary Hall
Today knowledge and information are increasingly being externalized onto complex, multilayered, distributed systems of computers, databases, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, video-sharing sites, and other kinds of social networks.
What are the implications of this prosthetization of knowledge for the scholars of the future?
Will the men and women of learning who emerge from the current generation of students continue to internalize particular branches of knowledge by means of extensive, and intensive, reading and study?
Will they still be expected to master their field?
Will scholars not come to concentrate more on developing their specialist search and retrieval skills – confident in the belief that, if they need to know something, then they can find the relevant information quickly and easily using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, as well as a host of open access, open education, open science, and open data resources?
In which case, is there a risk that a large part of their authority is going to pass to administrators, managers, or technicians?
Will scholars themselves increasingly come to resemble such figures: experts who do not necessarily need to possess the knowledge contained in the systems they administer and have access to?
Instead, their authority will rest on their ability to search, find, access, and even buy knowledge and information using online journal archives, full text search capabilities, electronic table of contents alerting, and citation tracking, and to organize the results into patterns, flows, and assemblages?
Or will such developments lead to the emergence of a different form of scholarship, whereby learned individuals no longer acquire the bulk of their information in concentrated immersive doses, as they might have in the past, from sitting down in a library or study and carefully reading a book?
Rather they experience more fragmented and distributed flows of information – at home, in the street, while travelling by car, or waiting to catch a train – that nevertheless enable a certain body of knowledge to be built up over a period of time.
Might this be described as ambient scholarship?
Gary Hall is author of Digitize this Book! and Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University .
22. Set the Text Free: Balancing Textual Agency Between Humans and Machines – John Haltiwanger
The computer has eaten typography, just as it has eaten everything else. The ramifications of the coded extensions we wrap our text in are both practical and ideological.
In a rare ideal, digital text moves fluidly from format to format, expanding to enjoy the material specificities found in, for instance, HTML and PDF. The more locked down a format is, the harder this necessary multiple existence becomes. Microsoft Word is a remediated typewriter with a capitalist agenda, and its outputs are as brittle as ink and pulp in terms of format fluidity.
Modern typography bases itself on a notion of message encoding, meaning that the typeface in which a message is set becomes part of the message itself. This message was initially set in a libre font called Lato. It was generated entirely using libre software, with a method that allows for transduction into not only HTML and PDF but also into any other format for which specifications are available, a material quality not available in the proprietary mechanism of its final typesetting. Generative typesetting demands a retreat from human-biased textualities presented by WYSIWYG tools, replacing it with a more equitable balance between human and machine. A foundation in libre ideology defies the on-going colonization of capital, rejecting the proprietary in favour of liberated textuality.
John Haltiwanger engages new media in theory and practice. He is a member of the Open Source Publishing collective.
23. Educate Well, Read Better – N. Katherine Hayles
Literacy is not without neurological consequences. Recent research in fMRI studies indicates that reading changes how the brain functions. My students increasingly read on the Web rather than in print. What difference does this make? The question is not only what they read, but how they read. Reading on the Web seems to encourage skimming. While useful as a technique to identify quickly items of interest, it can become a disadvantage when working with complex digital literary forms. For example, when I assigned my students Shelley Jackson’s classic hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl, they were unprepared for the work’s density, extent, and complexity. By contrast, when they read Mary Shelley’s print novel Frankenstein, they fully expected to spend several hours (or days) with it. Does this mean that reading on the Web is making us distracted, as Nicholas Carr has argued, or in the more extreme view espoused by Mark Bauerlein, that it is making us stupid? Such arguments overlook the fact that strategic reading practices have always included skimming and scanning, as any scholar can testify. The trick is to have a repertoire of varied reading techniques and the experience to shift to one or another depending on the situation. Where we are failing as parents, teachers, and educators is teaching our digitally native students a full range of reading strategies and educating them on how to use them in disciplined and creative ways.
N. Katherine Hayles is a professor in the Literature programme at Duke University , Durham , NC .
24. Reading the Picture – Toon Horsten
When Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was interviewed in the seventies, he wasn’t certain of things. The comic strip, and Tintin in particular, had had its day. The medium was out of date and the strip story could not compete with the new forms of amusement (including games and animation films).
In the following four decades, it seemed as if Hergé was right. With the digital revolution, it seemed that there wasn’t for the moment any place for the combination of picture and text as they appeared in the comic strip. Reading comic strips on a computer screen was trying. But now that the iPad and other tablets seem to have taken over the market for digital reading, the picture suddenly looks completely different. Comic strips appear to be extremely suitable as reading matter on an iPad. Although the possibilities have to be further investigated.
The iPad version of the Suske and Wiske album De stuivende stad [ed. The Bustling City ], issued to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the series, leads the way. The comic strip, supported with a full soundtrack and some slight animation, shows which possibilities the new applications can offer for reading comic strips.
They will have to ensure, however, that with all the new possibilities, they don’t simply end up reinventing the animation film.
Toon Horsten is writer of Het Geluk van de Lezer [ed. Happiness of the Reader] and artistic leader of Strip Turnhout.
25. Apples and Cabbages – Minke Kampman
‘We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.’ A sentimental line by Norma
