literacy – Tech, Text & Thoughts Regarding

Scrolls, Codices, & Rear-View Mirrors: History’s Textual Parallels

It seems the evolution of the written word and the manufacturing of the materials needed for it has a long and convoluted history. The scroll, for example, was the main mechanism by which writers housed and organized the written word, often on one of three primitive writing materials: papyrus, parchment, or paper. It warrants considering the differences between the three:

Papyrus: Made from the stems of the papyrus plants native to Egypt. Prepared by cutting ribbon like strips and placed on top of one another to be pounded together into what we would consider a sheet. Difficult to write on due to its rough fibrous nature and was liable to fall apart over time.

Parchment: Made from the untanned hides of animals. Became the more desired alternative to papyrus due to its ability to endure longer and because it provided a smoother writing experience. Used in roughly the same period as papyrus, but the dynamic relationship between these two types of writing styles allows for the interpretation that papyrus and parchment could be indicators of social status.

Paper: What we know as today’s paper was originally manufactured in China. Production is believed to have originated from pounding rags in water and tree bark. The fibres and pulp would collect on a mat screen and dried in the sun.

The scroll itself refers simply to a rolling up of one of the aforementioned writing materials. Inherently, there are both advantages and disadvantages to this mode of writing technology but it’s clear the disadvantages vastly outweigh the benefits, otherwise, we’d still be using scrolls. I believe the most evident benefit the scroll has is its portability – Scrolls were quite easy to transport, however, they took up a lot of space when trying to store. Additionally, scrolls made it difficult to locate desired passages or sentences as there were no ‘page numbers’ to accurately locate and organize written ideas.

Consequently, like most media, advances and enhances to the technologies typically have some evolutionary birthmark if we look close enough. Marshall McLuhan famously contended that most new media innovations evoke content fundamental to the earlier forms of related media. He called this the rear view mirror effect, whereby individuals use old terminology or concepts to aid in the navigation of innovative forms of technology.

“Ordinary human instinct causes people (…) to rely on the rear-view mirror as a kind of repeat or ricorso of the preceding environment, thus insuring total disorientation at all times. It is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one. (Through the Vanishing Point, xxiii)

This is an idea I’ve touched on in a previous blog posting – It’s no coincidence we still liken the power of car engines to the measurement of horses; it was once the horse drawn carriage. It’s no accident we use the metaphor of a ‘library’ to characterize a collection of online digital artifacts, or how the primitive stone tablet once used to record information has been borrowed to now refer to handheld technologies. This is certainly true for the scroll as well: Think about how we “scroll” from top to bottom through material on our phones or when we read through websites just as the early scroll users would have done.

Moreover, it seems the same issues plaguing the early scroll writers are pervasive in our own culture as well. One of the problematic design aspects of the scroll was it’s deliverance of uninterrupted information; it was essentially one remarkably long page of writing. Today’s websites seem to be running into the same debate when dealing with web design; there are cultural consequences in relation to the selection of such design. For example, continuous scrolling web pages enable higher degrees of interactivity, especially within an ever-increasing mobile society.

When the scroll evolved into the codex, so too did the function of reading and thought. Rather than invoking continuous principles of writing, the codex brought about discontinuous thought and paged writing. I recall Lera Boroditsky’s article about how language shapes thought and her research that outlined how people from the Kuuk Thaayorre culture viewed representations of the past and present differently from people who thought and read in a more linear fashion (Boroditsky, 2011). The move to the codex, first and foremost, codified information for accessibility and ease of future retrieval. It could be opened to any point in a text, was much more durable than its counterparts, and also permitted the use of both sides of the paper. Perhaps most importantly was the cultural positioning and societal stature that the codex reflected of its owner, especially in the context of Christianity. It’s worth noting that the invention of the codex did not wholly overtake the use of the scroll. In fact, it wasn’t until the invention of the printing press that the use and manufacturing of codices truly took off.

Through a socio-cultural lens, the printing press revolutionized, and in some ways, democratized knowledge by making widely available written text. With its inherent ties to Christianity (the first book manufactured was the Bible), the production of books increased literacy levels throughout Europe while simultaneously increased membership of the Christian faith. I can’t help but wonder the various ‘new literacies’ we currently obtain when innovative technologies are presented to us…

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65

McLuhan, M., & Parker, H. (1968). Through the vanishing point: Space in poetry and painting. New York: Harper & Row.

Task 3 – The Boy and The Spoon: A Speech-To-Text Analysis

The Boy and the Spoon

Truthfully, I went to great lengths to experiment with this task. I used speech-to-text technology to record various conversations I had with colleagues at work and analyze if and how that conversation evolved. Those results were quite funny. I recorded a phone conversation with my partner to demonstrate how accurately speech-to-text would pick up speech output from other technologies. It was surprisingly more accurate than I anticipated. Ultimately, I decided to use a recording of myself narrating a story told within The Alchemist to my English class (they were thrilled I was able to involve them in this task).

I’ve taught this book a number of times and so the story about the boy and the spoon is one that I am quite familiar with and can recite from memory. It’s a story about balance and how that balance contributes to happiness in our lives. I typically close with asking my students what the oil is representative of and we have a discussion about what this story means, and how it can be applied practically. The text of my narrative is as follows:

So I want to tell you a story that appears in The Alchemist the story about happiness it's a story that's good that gets related by Santiago throw to Journey so there is a young boy who lives in a village and he wakes up and he philosophizes about life and decides that he wants to find the answer to what is happiness and how do I achieve it so we asked his that he asked his father where he can find the answer to this question his father tells him that he can ask the wise man there's a wise man that lives not too far from their Village and he would need to track in Journey to see the wise man and ask him the secret to happiness so the boy undertakes this journey outside of his town walks a long way down ashley finds this Grand Palace if he thinks that you walk up to the Palace knock on ask the wise man a question and you'll find the secret to happiness but that's not what happened in fact he walks into the palace and he sees this man surrounded by Merchants Travelers journeyman they're all talking and having a diet after a long wait the boy lee has his opportunity to ask the man of the secret to happiness and the man responds to him son before I answer your question I want you to take this spoon to give the boys spoon fills it with oil and he says I want you to walk around my palace with this spoon and not drop not one drop of oil so the boy grease and he walks around the palace he spends 4 hours walking around this beautiful palace tapestries paintings and fountains Gardens and all the things he walks through and finally he comes back to the wise man with his spoon full of oil and the wise man says well what did you see and the boy cannot respond he didn't see anything he was focussed his entire time on not spilling the oil so the man says well I can't answer your question just yet in fact I need you to continue to walk around my Palace and I want you to come back in 4 hours time and tell me all the beautiful things that you've seen in my Palace so the boy continues with the spoon walks around the palace sees the beautiful tapestries the forest the gardens The Fountains the paintings and sculptures finally comes back relates to the old wise man what he had seen and the old old wise man asked him what happened to the oil because in the process of him taking in all the beauty and experience around him he spilled all the oil and he says son that is the secret to happiness the secret to happiness is balance balancing the oil and with all of the things and experiences that surround you in life what is the oil

Analysis

When we tend to the deviations within this body of text, the most glaring issue is the absence of basic English grammatical conventions. Rarely, if at all, do we see the use of periods, commas, quotation marks, question or exclamation marks. Paragraphs are not used at all to space out and organize ideas. Capitalization is used haphazardly and there are a number of ‘misheard’ or missing words that fundamentally change the context of the story or create confusion in its plausibility. Perhaps this is the English teacher in me but the entire story is one long run-on sentence. The aforementioned absences of grammatical conventions is what I would consider ‘wrong’ with this text when we look at it from a purely textual perspective. These deviations from the customary processes of written English diminish the significance, impact, and overall meaning of the narrative when it is read. Comparatively, when we speak to one another, we do not mention or indicate the use of a comma, period, or any other grammatical symbol through word, rather it’s expressive, implied, and embedded within our spoken language conventions. This is not something that is available with speech-to-text technology, at least not accurately. To indicate a period or comma, one must say it as they speak in order for the technology to pick up on it. Imagine speaking like that to another human being…

Perhaps that is my mistake in not effectively speaking the language needed to successfully operate speech-to-text technology.

When I related this story to my class, I was animated in it’s retelling, utilized various modes of intonation, gesture and volume, and injected fierce emotion to keep my audience engaged. It does not seem that this recording captured these elements at all. I’m not entirely sure I consider this a mistake, but I certainly feel like this recording did not do my performance justice. This experiment revealed to me the relationship between grammatical conventions and spoken emotion, body language, and intonation. Speech-to-text technology, and writing itself is unable to effectively capture the elements used in spoken storytelling. Despite the symbols used to appeal to these sentiments, it doesn’t seem like our writing can ever truly re-animate the aspects of spoken word; it may be able to inform the way we read the written word. Walter Ong mentions this idea in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word:

“It would seem inescapably obvious that language is an oral phenomenon. Human beings communicate in countless ways, making use of all their senses, touch, taste, smell, and especially sight, as well as hearing … Some non-oral communication is exceedingly rich —gesture, for example. Yet in a deep sense language, articulated sound, is paramount (Ong, 2002)”.

Body language accounts for an overwhelming percentage of effective human communication- these are factors that embody hand and facial gestures, voice volume and intonation, unconscious reading of facial muscles, and eye contact among various other things. Consequently, these are also aspects of communication that cannot be effectively paralleled in text-based communication. Even despite the rise of emoji usage, icons meant to convey the unspoken and emotional fundamentals of communication can’t convey these aspects to the same degree. As Ong suggests, there is something unique about human articulated sound that results in deeper meaning.

An interesting aspect of the story I’ve chosen was that it is a narrative that is written down. It is a story that can be found within The Alchemist. I decided to relate this story from memory and it’s revealing to see the differences. Had I chosen to tell the story using the written version, I feel as if my re-telling would be more measured and rhythmic; I would essentially be following a script of symbols annotating for me the ways in which the story should be related. With the recollection from memory, I felt that I was afforded a lot more freedom to narrate the story as I saw fit. I was able to repeat certain aspects, emphasize important plot points with visual or verbal gestures; ultimately the story became my own to tell.

Similarly, it was interesting to see that when the narrative body of text was compared to the recording of myself and my colleagues having a conversation about the different assessment strategies we use as humanities and science teachers, the narrative recording was exceptionally more accurate. I think it warrants a mention that my colleague has an incredibly strong English accent and I’m convinced this played a major role in the inconsistencies of the following text-recording. This was another aspect of speech-to-text technology that can could be perceived as ‘flawed’: it’s inability to pick up on accented language, or dialectic speech.

As an individual who is capable of speaking dialectic Italian, it comes as no surprise that accents and dialectics can lead to miscommunication. Many times, when I speak to other Italians, my utterances are often met with looks of confusion or laughter; it’s not seen as speaking the true or purest form of the language. Thus, I wonder if the same can be said for the following recording; my colleague is heavily accented, and this gave way for severe confusion when reading our recorded conversation.

Okay so basically give you copper sources i'm going to go out to eat on some questions on the sources cited fast one strand Moltres chase I was wondering the true then anisocytosis be by Sousa Center might as well stop by if you detox metals to write summary about you understand about similar Behavior drivers I meant turn you up spelling punctuation that's all that they remarked on I was an English teacher. So it's has nothing to do with the content where am I 3 secret right now we didn't surprise you points so i'm not response you should read through the achievements on side honestly each section using the comments the qualities that make demonstrate as instructed during standardizing you can. Why are these statements heavy guy assessment objectives identify and cut right explicit and implicit information ideas Lexington 5 evidence from the text explain, what is use language instructor to achieve effects in infants read this using relevance of a terminology cuz of views this is more about the structure can the rating men it is both content pupusas all this is what you have in a response receptive. Play relevant summary some attempts of summary limited summary hot mop English papers and the arts for that reason like is so much judgment made on your point or there is but I mean you do follow some type of criteria right it goes back to what we were talking about there with with the strands in the the compass talking about right so if if a student is able to relate to me that he understands Canta knowledge if you can apply it and like make inferences like that saying there then that would be the inquiry if you can apply it to something outside extra-textual or even something else in the text there's application and communication just overall is he able to to to express himself in writing when you have those pillars I feel like it's a lot easier to understand what you're looking for mean enjoyed English stop the stop of The Green Mile what was The Green Mile yet was when Tom Hanks it all the old Tom Hanks is in the whose wagon wheels are killer man they're so killer

Degrees of Literacy: Evolution of Writing’s Contractual Beginnings to the Hypertext

I’m always wary when a chapter claims to base much of its analysis in a domain conventionally perceived as an extension of “Marxist or neo-Marxist examinations” and then attempts to veil the terminology with different nomenclature. The red flag, for me, occurs when these examinations are coupled with mentions of French postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida.

I think Jacques Derrida was an exceptionally brilliant thinker and there are many things he put forth that I agree with. For example, one of Derrida’s central claims was that of deconstruction; the idea that there are a near infinite number of ways to interpret an event or a text. I believe this to be technically true, however, when you begin to couple this type of thinking with the aforementioned neo-Marxist viewpoints, we begin to run into a potentially dangerous paradigm depending on how far you push this ideology. Further, despite the agreement that there may be a near infinite number of ways to interpret an event or text, there remains only an incredibly small percentage of those interpretations that can be considered tenable by any reasonable standard.

Having studied Walter Ong in years past, it was refreshing to review his distinction between primary and secondary orality and contrast it with the theories of Havelock who insists it’s essentially impossible for a literate mind to conceptualize what primary orality would even look like. I can’t help but wonder if any members of primary orality would be able to function in or comprehend the secondary or even tertiary evolutions (I would consider this the digital age we currently find ourselves in) of language we are experiencing today. Regardless, all these thinkers share the same central tenant – that writing is a technology invented by human beings and that technology has evolved over time. But why? And what relationship does it have in shaping our cultural makeup?

Gnanadesikan’s article was the most impactful to me when dealing with this concept – Outside of its readability, it formulated the most convincing argument: despite the Platonic arguments of a binary relationship between speech and text, writing has a foundation in memory. Writing has a contractual beginning; one that was invented out of necessity to track, record, and mark information. This information has its roots in both economic and psychological purposes: Early forms of writing reflect records of information pertaining to taxes, trade agreements, but also extends to the grand narratives and mythologies of societies. Weaving together the Haas article, this is essentially what the West was built upon: the importance of having the spoken word written, as if that made it unbreakable. That word exists solely in the ether until it is written down and made physical.

Ong’s line of thought supports this – Before material information was present, all one could do was ‘recall’. He also claims that writing was invented in urban centres, thereby lending to the theory that writing is a central cornerstone in the flourishing of any civilization. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ideas developed by Ong is his characterization of new media:

“A new media never wipes out the old, it always reinforces it, but it changes it, so that it no longer does what it used to do the same way. You must know the new medium or you can’t use the old…“

When it comes to our newest form of media (digital media) I am compelled to think about all the changes it has brought and the changes that it has brought about. I stand by a previous claim about one of the more undervalued and revolutionary changes brought about by our new digital media: the hypertext. The hypertext has created fundamental changes when it comes to the storage, retrieval, and obtaining of information within digital realms. It transcends the existing barriers of physical texts and has transformed the internet itself into something like a disentangled book. At the most superficial level, the layering of digital information through the transcribing of data nodes has, by and large, increased the speed with which digital text users can access information. I wonder what other deep cultural changes this may have produced…

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).

Haas, C. (2013). “The Technology Question.” In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy Routledge. (pp. 3-23).

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Chapter 1 .New York; London: Routledge.

Task 1 – What’s In My Bag?

My name is Carlo Trentadue and ETEC540 is my final MET course before I round out the program! Born and raised in Toronto, I moved out to the west coast in 2018, where I currently work as an educator and member of the administrative leadership team at a private school in Vancouver.

I chose the bag I use on a daily basis and let me say firstly, I’m thankful for this exercise because it prompted me to do a thorough cleaning and reassessment of my need for some of these items. Most of the contents of my bag permit or enhance my daily responsibilities. For example, the laptop is central to my work as it affords me communicative abilities through email, academic organization and management, and overall connectivity to the digital world. The day timer and manuscript folder reflect a non-digital type of literacy, in a more literal sense, and provides me a platform to keep personal and professional events in order. I believe these to be representative of the ‘standard literacies’ we should be equipped with in today’s professional working society.

An interesting “text” I’ve considered here is the gym gear. It represents a literacy that is unique in comparison to the other digital technology pieces in this bag: a type of physical literacy. Subsequently, I think the masks evoke a type of literacy as well; one that symbolizes the current spirit of the times and the willingness to participate and demonstrate awareness in the circumstances we find ourselves in with respect to the current public health climate. It’s clear that many of the pieces in this bag have literal text on/in them, but I feel that text, in a way, is more than letters and words, rather it’s a reflection or symbol of understanding and communication.

There is an abundance of digital, print, and physical technologies in this bag. Of the one’s considered text, I think the most overwhelmingly obvious aspect is that most, if not all, are written in English. There is, however, a number of printed technologies (ie – stickers, packaging etc.) that reflect some degree of multicultural exposure. The gift cards have both English and French writing, while one of the stickers from Costa Rica is in Spanish. Zooming into the computer decals proved to be interesting as one indicates I am on #TeamPixel. I found this quite telling – Not only does this text reflect a mobile and technological literacy, it also asserts acumen in a specific software or operating system and claims there may be competitive circumstances involved. Centred in the image is a brown leather folder that houses a manuscript I’m currently collaborating on with a partner.

Truthfully, I think the narrative constructed by the contents of my bag are consistent with the narrative represented in the image I outwardly project. I also think it’s easy for me to say that, and would be more interested to hear what others think when they glimpse a photo of me and compare their impressions with that of what’s in my bag.

This bag certainly would not have looked the same 15 years ago – I think the digital technologies would look a lot more archaic, and that there would be an overwhelming amount of text technologies present, like textbooks and notebooks. Alternatively, if an archeologist were to assess these contents many years in the future, I feel the most glaring object in terms of defining our current cultural spirit would undeniably be the mask. The mask reveals that there is a potentially fatal threat in our daily lives that we are battling through. It symbolizes safety, commitment to others, respect, and to some degree a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.

Ultimately, I can’t help but think that future archaeologists would think many of the current cutting edge technologies that I house in my bag to be archaic in themselves. It will be interesting to look back on this image in 20 years and reassess the text, the technology, and my thoughts regarding.