Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 224.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Lou Burnard <lou@ermine.ox.ac.uk> (150)
Subject: Re: 15.222 runcible markup
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (137)
Subject: unruncible paraphrase
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 07:59:59 +0100
From: Lou Burnard <lou@ermine.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 15.222 runcible markup
> This is considerably more carefully stated than your formulation. Perhaps
> we could emend your paraphrase to say "markup *has modeled* text as
> determinate hierarchy and not as recursive network", which is something
> closer to what McGann says. And I think we can agree it is little less than
> the truth.
Well said.
>
> Markup *can*, as you suggest, go further than than DeRose's and Renear's
> OHCO (Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects), or its present-day descendant,
> the XML infoset (or its close sibling, the XPath data model). There is
> currently quite a bit of interesting work going on in using markup to
> describe structures that are more than the "acyclic directed graph" (i.e.,
> the tree) described by SGML/XML. For example, work on both Topic Maps (see
> http://www.topicmaps.org) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) from
> W3C, suggest directions which Humanists will be profitably investigating
> for years to come.
Indeed yes. Not to mention the TEI's work on feature structures which
allows one to model far more complex structures.
>
> In fact (as you know) even SGML/XML, via the ID/IDREF mechanism, can imply
> something more complex than the simple tree structure. But reflecting on
> that, immediately you can see, there's the rub. In order to take advantage
> of such a data structure, be it "a recursive network" or "set of
> interlocking structures", we need an application architecture (objects
> instantiated in memory? a relational database?) and software that
> understands the more complex data model.
This seems to confuse the conceptual representation with its
instantiation and processing. A representation of a conceptual network on
a piece of paper ought to be isomorphic with an encoding of it, using
whatever encoding formalism is flavour of the moment. The network exists
as a concept, even if you don't or can't process it. (I think Bishop
Berkeley had something to say on this topic)
>
> In other words, markup itself is *not enough*. A gap opens up between the
> *notation* we use to describe and express an information set to our eyes
> and hands -- usually meaning, in this case, the actual text-and-markup, the
> lines of characters with all the pointy brackets, etc. -- and the abstract
> data model which our machine is designed to process.
No. The gap you are describing (unless I misunderstand you) is between one
way of reading the encoding and another, less semantically aware. You
*can" read an XML document as if it were a linear string of characters,
but that would be analogous to reading this text as a linear string of
characters instead of (at the least) a sequence of words, and other
linguistic constructs.
(You can understand
> this difference in the difference between processing markup with, say,
> regular expressions, which see only a sequence of characters and which do
> pattern-matching over that sequence, and something like XSLT, which only
> works after a parser has converted that character sequence into a tree
> structure. They work on different data models. Which is "truer" to the
> text?)
The latter. The former is using an inappropriate model, just as I am using
an inappropriate model of discourse if I answer the question "How are
you today?" with a detailed description of my mental and physical state
of being!
We think we're doing something fluid and flexible -- markup -- but
> actually (like the evil imp in the legend) we're locking ourselves into
> something rigid and hierarchical, a tree. But -- Felix Culpa! -- we
> discover this gap is actually fortunate for us, a feature of our systems
> not a bug, as we discover these data models can be layered. Out of your
> stream of characters, if it is well-formed, you can render a tree. Out of a
> tree you can render a set of interlocking structures. Each layer, as a
> medium, "contains another medium" below it (you remember your McLuhan), but
> as a more elaborate and featured structure than its more rudimentary basis,
> can serve to represent something more complex. (So in XPath/XSLT we can say
> a title is "inside" a chapter. In markup alone, this requires assuming our
> parser recognizes containment.)
It's not the parser. It's the semiotic system underlying the markup.
Up until this point, markup systems were
> only being engineered to emulate what print media already did.
This is somewhat sweeping! Plenty of markup systems exist and have
existed entirely unconnected with any idea of "going to print": rather
they were aimed at representing what the users of the markup text
considered important for a range of processing tasks.
> Yet this does not contradict anything in what McGann said. In fact, his
> statements can be taken to suggest (I paraphrase much more freely than you
> did) that the nature of poetry is such that it will continue to evade
> comprehensive "understanding" through markup (that is, there is no way we
> can explain or fully account for a poem, through markup)
That was the real nub of McGann's presentation, as I remember it. This
notion that because a poem can generate multiple interpretations
therefore it cannot be marked up frankly gets up my nose. Only a fool
would claim that any interpretation of any sort was eternal or all
embracing: markup is an interpretation; QED. Are there really still people
who subscribe to this view of literature as mystical experience?
, not because the
> structures of poetry are so elaborate and "intertwingled" -- that is not
> the point -- but because the very nature of poetry is to work at several
> levels at once, between what we are now calling notation and data model
> (each data model potentially providing a notation for another, higher
> model).
If you cannot express these nicely stacked up models how do you know they
exist? Poetry is *made* to be modelled! When a great critic presents us
with their lucubrations on the subject of a great poem, what are they
doing if not creating a model?
That is, to be rather crudely geekish about it, the poet's work is
> to invent a notation to express a new data model, or at the very least, to
> explore the workings of notations ("texts") and data models (abstractions
> communicated by those texts) with respect to one another.
> Naturally, McGann (being a scholar of Byron and Rossetti) is inevitably
> very sensitive towards the complexity of those models: both systems of
> linguistic and literary-generic conventions, and more overt literary
> allusion, make for extremely complex, though hardly formalized, "networks"
> of meaning. But to get caught up in this -- imagining, for example, the way
> hypertext might represent such a system of knowledge and meaning -- would
> be to miss the main point:
On the contrary, I think that IS the main point. One way of representing
the interconnectedness of things is by talking about specific cases
thereof. If I write down that talk, I will want to do so in some kind of
markup. We now have something a bit more flexible and powerful to use for
that job.
that the poets have done it already, using their
> own materials -- ink, paper, sound, silence, white space on the page -- and
> that the nature of their creation can no more be captured in another form,
> than a cinematic masterpiece, or even a home video, can be explained and
> comprehended in a movie review (or letter to grandma), however artful.
Here you seem to confuse the accidents of medium with a mystical concept
about "the nature of [a poem]". Give it up! A poem is a written object. It
exists to be read. When you mark it up you represent the *reading*, not
the poem. As Michael used to say, you can't actually "put" a text into the
computer (in the same way as you can for example "put" the output from a
deepspace experiment): what you put in is your model of it, expressed with
the best language to hand.
>
> That is, if we look past the tantalizing promises of technology to
> encapsulate and define, finally, such knowledge and meaning as we have --
> to build the system that could, say, "know" what Byron's _Don_Juan_ "knows"
Don Juan don't *know* squat. It dont have anything to know *with*. It
expresses (maybe) a set of systems we can analyse though, and then
come to know that.
> -- and recognize that the poets have always been, not merely users of
> media, but *inventors* of new media out of the old, we'll be closer to what
> McGann was trying to get at.
Well, there I can agree. Poets are indeed adept media-crunchers and
re-formers: that's why we like them! The best of them play upon
expectation and convention, as do all creative artists. Thus they set new
challenges for us, but they don't invalidate our explicatory, hermeneutic
activities. Indeed, if they do -- if we cannot extract any meaning at all
from their work -- we generally feel they're rotten poets.
In that sense,
I do not take his remarks to
> indicate any problem to be solved. The only warning in it is, that although
> we may have shown we can erect buildings with our Lego set, we might still
> not have explained away the art of the builder who has learned to work in
> glass and stone.
>
To explain is not to explain away!
As my favourite disk jockey used to say, "Thanks for listening, if you
have been."
Lou
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 08:00:46 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: unruncible paraphrase
In defense of a paraphrase...
Wendell quotes me as posting in the early morning
> At 05:39 AM 9/2/01, you wrote:
> >I am particulary intrigued as to what subscribers to Humanist might think
> >about the claim that appears to be advanced by McGann at the time that
> >markup models text as determinate hierarchy and not as recursive
> >network. The distinction doesn't seem to hold since markup can provide a
> >system of interlocking pointers.
And Wendell suggests, I'm slightly off the mark:>
> As you know, this is an issue that interests me, so I looked up the page
> you cited (thanks). I don't believe that McGann says quite what you
> attribute to him. The closest thing he does say to your paraphrase "that
> markup models text as determinate hierarchy and not as recursive
network" is:
And then suggests that this passage from McGann is close but not quite on
the mark for the paraphrase I offered:
> >In the field of Humanities Computing the idea of text has been
dominated by
> >conceptions practically realized in the TEI implementation of SGML
markup.
> >Several key theoretical papers published by Steve DeRose, Allen Renear,
> >"et al." explain the ground of that implementation.
> >
> >This ground, explicitly "abstract" (Renear 1997), represents a view of
> >text as essentially a vehicle for transmitting information and concepts
> >(final cause). Text is "hierarchical" (formal cause) and "linguistic"
> >(material cause), and it is a product of human intention (efficient
cause).
And with with finger wagging flare (Wendell always comes at you with an
olive branch):
> This is considerably more carefully stated than your formulation. Perhaps
> we could emend your paraphrase to say "markup *has modeled* text as
> determinate hierarchy and not as recursive network", which is something
> closer to what McGann says. And I think we can agree it is little less than
> the truth.
My defense:
<cite>
Unlike expository text, poetry is not organized in a determinate
hierarchy. TEI and SGML markup, therefore, while reasonably adequate
vehicles for expository and informational texts, fails to render those
features of poetic text that are most salient for its makers and
users. Poetical texts are recursive structures built out of complex
networks of repetition and variation. No poem can exist without
systems of "overlapping structures", and the more developed the
poetical text, the more complex are those systems of recursion. So it
is that in a poetic field no unit can be assumed to be self-identical.
The logic of the poem is only frameable in some kind of paradoxical
articulation such as: "a equals a if and only if a does not equal a".
</cite>
Now doesn't this passage from McGann suggest the paraphrase given above?
<cite>
> >I am particulary intrigued as to what subscribers to Humanist might think
> >about the claim that appears to be advanced by McGann at the time that
> >markup models text as determinate hierarchy and not as recursive
> >network. The distinction doesn't seem to hold since markup can provide a
> >system of interlocking pointers.
</cite>
Agent = markup (figured by synecdoche TEI & SGML)
Verb = fails
Object = features
So I translated failure as a type of modeling. Must be my sense of a limit
conditioned by early encouters with definitions by negation. What I do
want to stress is that the pair hierarchy-recursivity are set in
opposition. That setting is likely conditioned by a New Critical heritage
that is fond of the paradox. What I want to suggest is that such paradoxes
are the result of rereading and the "lifting" of that process of rereading
into a single temporality. In other words, certain types of readings
invite readers to remember or to forget the time element in their
traversals of poetic space. I really want to belabour this point. The
features picked out to be represented by markup are themselves
representations. Overlapping structures can be considered as different
representations that entertain relations among themselves. I turn to
Willard Espy in _The Garden of Excellence_ offers an example from
Voltaire of epanalepsis
Common sense is not so common.
The structure of the sentence.
The structure of the repetition.
The strucutre of the first complete syntagmatic unit ("Common sense is not
so")
The structure of the "m" and "n" alliteration and the assonance of the
vowels.
My use of "structure" here is of course being stretched into "pattern".
The point being that one can consider markup as dealing with patterns by
recourse to a structured language. Such a formulation does not exclude the
use of markup to deal with structures. I do want to underscore that often
in English use of the term "structure" it needs to be accompanied by the
adjective "dynamic" in order to bring out its temporal characteristics.
"Pattern" is in commonly suggests the repetition of instances and thus
more evocative of temporality. If in computing one begins with
"repetition of instances" one can arrive at ordered hierarchies along a
time line (a sequence is a primitive tree - may the mathematicians forgive
me)
[...]
I guess I am more Cartesian and less of a German Idealist. I am not
looking for "understanding". I want to play to play with translations. My
hero is the Erasmus of the _De Copia_. A translation is a "passerelle".
Markup is a way through a space.
> Yet this does not contradict anything in what McGann said. In fact, his
> statements can be taken to suggest (I paraphrase much more freely than you
> did) that the nature of poetry is such that it will continue to evade
> comprehensive "understanding" through markup (that is, there is no way we
> can explain or fully account for a poem, through markup), not because the
I expand on your free paraphrase. Markup is a species of poetry *wink*
<snip/>
> Naturally, McGann (being a scholar of Byron and Rossetti) is inevitably
> very sensitive towards the complexity of those models: both systems of
> linguistic and literary-generic conventions, and more overt literary
> allusion, make for extremely complex, though hardly formalized, "networks"
> of meaning. But to get caught up in this -- imagining, for example, the way
> hypertext might represent such a system of knowledge and meaning -- would
> be to miss the main point: that the poets have done it already, using their
> own materials -- ink, paper, sound, silence, white space on the page -- and
> that the nature of their creation can no more be captured in another form,
> than a cinematic masterpiece, or even a home video, can be explained and
> comprehended in a movie review (or letter to grandma), however artful.
Granted the irrudicibility of the artefact. Not granted the
unconnectability of an artefact. Translation is about link an source with
a target by passing through a space of possibilities. Markup is about
translation. Where does the "dream of reproduction" comes from?
> That is, if we look past the tantalizing promises of technology to
> encapsulate and define, finally, such knowledge and meaning as we have --
> to build the system that could, say, "know" what Byron's _Don_Juan_ "knows"
> -- and recognize that the poets have always been, not merely users of
> media, but *inventors* of new media out of the old, we'll be closer to what
> McGann was trying to get at.
Is Romanticism always to intimately tied up with birthing? Inventio is a
trope about finding. Of course, I'm translating a bit here for my own
ideological purposes: inventors as techno-breeders.
Whatever McGann was trying to get at, I am thankful for Susan Hockey's
foresight in having the materials from the Renear-McGann exchange dwell on
the web. I am informed that they are also available from the ASSOCIATION
FOR COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES web site by using the following URL:
http://www.ach.org/abstracts/1999/hockey-renear2.html
And thanks to Wendell for a fine meditation carried on the wings of
paraphrase.
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
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