11.0400 report on Computing the Edition

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Thu, 13 Nov 1997 21:07:04 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 400.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 23:29:14 -0500 (EST)
From: Francois Lachance <lachance@chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: translating Computing the Edition

Dear Willard,

At the recent Computing the Edition conference, Keren Rice, the
linguist spoke briefly on the concluding panel however it was with
depth in word and gesture that she spoke true as elders do. Her
presentation of the challenges facing the deliver of a dictionary of a
living Athapasckan tongue to a community of users where electricity
may often fail, where the the socio-demographics call out for an
edition with sound files searchable by voice recognition software, all
deliverable on the newly developed cousin of the wind-up radio (the
laptop rechargeable by hand-cranking) could not help but remind
provide an excellent example of a them running throughout the
conference the intricate resonance of the "popular" reader woven
across the categories of audience, public and community.
I hope Humanist will carry reports about this fine project.

It is also my hope that the intense exploration at this conference of
vehicular, architectural and even culinary models of textual artefacts
has contributed significantly to deconstruct the digital imaging
versus textual encoding opposition. I suspect in the months ahead we
will hearing from Robert Rosenberg at the Thomas Edison Papers Project
at Rutgers about how the problem of encoding pictorial elements can
be resolved by the use of overlays (grids applied to images). I'm sure
there will be papers inspired by the discussions at Computing the
Edition that will outline how mark-up is a process akin to the
application of templates. Plus, I bet, someone will, drawing up
recently developed encryptolope technology point out that we need to
rethink presumptions concerning the location of metadata. Others will
generate a counter-discourse claiming that metadata clusters always
existed. Some catchwords in these debates will be "recursivity" and
"granularity".

And watch for the birth of Technomorphogenia - a savant term for the
process by which technology transforms and is itself transformed.

By the way, in your closing remarks you doubted that there might be
professional translators present. There was a least one member of the
gathering who earns a living exchanging the labour of wordsmithing for
money. I am sure if you could find that person they would have much to
say about the translated text, the translating text and the
translation.

There was a lot in motion in that room at that time --- some spherical
music, I hear

Francois

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