The Birth of a Text

As I wrote the last post, I had one of those nagging notions that I was leaving something out, that I had not quite said what I needed to say. I kept writing, hoping that the idea would present itself, as it so often does in writing, but it didn't arrive.

Then today at the office I was looking at the new TED-ED site in preparation for a writing lesson about using imagery in documents. I navigated to a page in search of Hans Rosling's quite marvelous video about data visualizations, when I noticed this other video from Deb Roy about how he traced the birth of language in his child by recording his home over a period of several years. I thought I remembered the Roy video and thought that I might review it again after I watched the Rosling video, which was really the video I needed, so I grabbed my mouse and clicked on the Roy video. Of course, it proved to be the video that I was looking for all along. It visualizes the structures I was trying to capture in my last post and not explaining so well.

I think my mind functions mostly underwater, and I am able to see only the surface. Most of my cognition, like the Internet, is submerged and hidden. Things arrive on my screen and in my conscious mind, but I too seldom know how they got there. Usually I don't think about it. It can be too troubling.

Anyway, let's watch this video, and I'll try to make the connection to writing as a function of complex networks. Deb Roy:



What captures my attention first is our emerging ability to capture and investigate large data sets. This ability is critical, I think, for understanding the network nature of texts and writing (or anything else, really). Those who study writing, through either rhetoric or poetic or both, have long had an intuitive sense of the network nature of writing, and we have developed concepts such as genre and process writing and schools such as feminist studies to try to embody those intuitions. Yet, we have never had the ability to collect and investigate texts as Deb Roy and his associates do in this movie where they can position a given television show (a text) within its ecosystems of other TV shows and the resulting social and scholarly buzz. They have access to the computer systems and networks that allow them to collect and investigate an amount of data that simply was not possible to collect and investigate with paper, even though we sensed the presence of those network structures and actions like some great sea creature moving in the depths, not seen clearly enough for analysis or even identification, but definitely felt.

Not only does Roy have the tools to capture and investigate the networks within which a television show emerges or within which a baby learns a new word—both the show and the word are texts to my way of thinking—but Roy can also express those networks in images and movies that help us to see not only the text itself but its emergence, movement, development, and interactions within its ecosystem. In other words, he can visualize with incredible accuracy the patterns that before we could only intuit in the life of the text but could not capture with any accuracy. Those of us who have had children know that our babies develop language, but Roy captures exactly how they develop it, and he contextualizes the text in ways that we could only intuit about our own babies. He demonstrates conclusively that there is no text without a context. Likewise, there is no context with the texts.

Of course, he can also tease out patterns that we can't even intuit are there. This is one of the most exciting promises of the digital humanities, to my mind. At last, we have the technological tools and techniques (and the promise of more) to capture the kinds of data sets necessary to wrap our heads around a complex network structure such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which some researcher will soon think of as a complex strand of DNA, with its own internal network structures, introduced into an ecosystem of complex networks, taking root there, and then growing rhizomatically as it feeds value into that ecosystem and eats value from that ecosystem. That's enough work to occupy the entire professional life of a literary scholar. It will take a university of scholars with massive computing power to map the genome and the rhizomatic development of The Bible. That would be a damned fine project to work on, though. I hope someone does it in my lifetime.

Connectivism and Ideology 3

So on the whole, I like what James Berlin has to say about reality, knowledge, and rhetoric in his article Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class: that "the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence" (488). Berlin and I are starting from much the same place epistemologically, but a few of his comments secondary to this core concept bother me. I should explore those.

First, Berlin insists emphatically that knowledge depends entirely on language. When he explains the dialectic at work among observer, social group, and material reality, he says:

Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together. … Most important, this dialectic is grounded in language: the observer, the discourse community, and the material conditions of existence are all verbal constructs. This does not mean that the three do not exist apart from language: they do. This does mean that we cannot talk and write about them – indeed, we cannot know them – apart from language. Furthermore, since language is a social phenomenon that is a product of a particular historical moment, our notions of the observing self, the communities in which the self functions, and the very structures of the material world are social constructions – all specific to a particular time and culture. These social constructions are thus inscribed in the very language we are given to inhabit in responding to our experience. Language, as Raymond Williams explains in an application of Bakhtin (Marxism and Literature 21-44), is one of the material and social conditions involved in producing a culture. This means that in studying rhetoric – the ways discourse is generated – we are studying the ways in which knowledge comes into existence.

If I'm reading Berlin correctly, then he is saying that knowledge is created, managed, expressed, and propagated solely through language. If that is his point, then I disagree. Berlin does not clearly define either language or knowledge in this essay (they are not his central terms), so perhaps he is using both or either in a way that allows him to make them concomitant, but my understanding of both leaves room for much knowledge that is not concomitant with language. For me, it is sensible to say that my dog knows where to find his food or knows how to find his way home, yet aside from a few barks and growls, the dog has no language to speak of (sorry, I couldn't help that. I didn't see it coming). Limiting myself to humans, Berlin's view seems to disregard body knowledge. I've coached enough soccer to know that the foot knows how to do some things that the mind cannot speak of. Any craftsman's hands knows things that her tongue cannot articulate. Our lives are laced with aesthetic, ecstatic, religious, and emotional cognitions that capture a knowledge too deep for words and yet that form some of the most profound and precious knowledge we possess. Indeed, it is not uncommon for people to feel that capturing such knowledge in language profanes that knowledge. For me, this knowledge is real.

I suspect that a dialectical materialism – a wonderful ideology – lies at the heart of Mr. Berlin's point of view, yet he may be giving it too narrow an interpretation. For me, knowledge is a collection of beliefs that structure my interactions with the world. In other words, knowledge is what I'm willing to take action on or against. I am well aware that most of what I know is likely wrong, incorrect, inaccurate, unreliable, inconsistent, unreasonable, irrational, and more. Most of what I take for knowledge will be nonsense, error, and myth 100 years from now, much less 1,000 years, but my errors are my current knowledge none the less. Mr. Berlin may not allow for any reality other than the material or any knowledge other than that which can be named, but that is too narrow for me and, in my rhetoric, it is indefensible.