Category — Text

Text is away of expressing information.  I view the ability to express yourself and share those expressions with others to be of great importance.  Expressions can be in the form of ideas, concerns, issues with social status, or simple musings.  I chose to include a few lyrics from an N.W.A. song because they represent a movement in American society in which an underprivileged and racial discriminated group used the power of text translated to music to express their opinion on contemporary society.  You can watch the video, on youtube, which adds images to enhance the text here.  Sorry no Embedding possible….

I’m expressin’ with my full capabilities,

And now I’m livin’ in correctional facilities,

Cause some don’t agree with how I do this.

I get straight, meditate like a Buddhist

I’m droppin’ flava, my behaviour is heriditery,

But my technique is very necessary.

Blame it on Ice Cube… Because he says it gets funky

When you got a subject and a predacit.

Add it on a dope beat

And that’ll make you think.

Express Yourself…

Express Yourself…

Come on and do it…

Noah

N.W.A. Retrieved from www.nwaworld.com

View from my house near Monte Alban, Oaxaca

My definition of a text:

A text is a collection of symbols that carry meaning. A text can be interpreted or “read” because the symbols are coherent and understandable, i.e. they are a code in the semiotic sense.

In this way, I hope to define a text as more than just words, but also include images, tattoos, facial expressions and gestures, and perhaps even landscapes.

Could an ancestral landscape be considered a text to an indigenous community, where rocks, trees and clouds can be read as they have meaning?

As I looked up the word “text”, I started to see the link from one term to another.  It seemed natural to display my findings in this fashion.  The yellow bubbles are my own thought processes.  Once this organizer was complete, I felt the title could be “from text to technology”.

The representation of ideas, feelings, concepts and meanings through symbols.

I found this interesting image on Abraham Lincoln. If you take a close look, you’ll see it’s the Gettysburg Address  pronounced by Abraham Lincoln (Pennsylvania, USA, 1863). I found this image a “metaphor” on text and the way it can send different messages and concepts depending on the way it is used and arranged.

Image by Yelnoc: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yelnoc/361303918/

Weblog posting on TEXT

Given the debate over the academic validity of using sites that are created by a ‘community of experts’, I decided to go to the source that most of us equate with this movement, namely Wikipedia. There it was confirmed that ‘text’ has multiple meanings:

• Plain text refers to computer code
• A text is a coherent set of symbols
• A textbook is an instructional manual
• And a text can refer to a particular Biblical passage
• TEXT is the name of a hardcore band from Sweden

To me text simple means a way to getting a message across and that is why I chose the Rosetta Stone as a pictorial representation of text. Without text we would rely on other means of communication (oral, gesturing, smoke signals etc.). Most if not all of these would be far less efficient than using text in one form or the other. I mean how else would I be able to describe to what text means to me without actually using text?

Scrabble

What is text? At the beginning of this course, text for me is the act of putting in a form of writing another form of communication. For example, text can be printed, inscribed or typed to communicate a message.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED) text is “The wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written.”, literally that which is woven. Interestingly, there is an area in academic study called “text mining” and according to Hearst (2003) it involves computers discovering unknown text-based  information by extracting what is known and creating new connections to produce new knowledge. This led me to consider text as a system of creating such links, to slowly weave together ideas in society.

I selected this image to represent text to me as a form of expression that is open to new connections and evokes a sense of woven words. The image is based on the popular game Scrabble, where words are connected until the board is filled in an elaborate pattern of text. When I saw the image, I instantly read the words, searching for a meaning.

My name is Erin Gillespie and it is a pleasure to be in 540 with you. I teach grade four at an international primary school and I prefer texting to phone calls.  

References

Hearst, M. (2003). What is text mining? Available online 10, September, 2009, from http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/text-mining.html

Ho, A. (unknown).  Aran Scrabble Layout.  Wikimedia Commons. Available online 10, September, 2009, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aran_Scrabble_layout.JPG

Oxford English Dictionary Online. (2009).  Available online 10, September, 2009, from http://dictionary.oed.com/