Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 476.
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, 29 Jan 2002 10:03:16 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Encoding sounds, images, words
Willard,
In looking back over some notebook entries, I came across a paragraph I
had copied out from Susan Hockey's contribution to _The Literary Text in
the Digital Age_. For some reason, I failed to note the date of
publication. There must be (at least in the occidental division of the
disciplines) something timeless in what I interpret to be a call to bridge
the divide between iconoclastic upholders of the primacy of the word and
those more devoted to the sound or the image.
Allow me to quote Susan Hockey's prose for you to form your own
interpretations:
<cite>
So far this essay has concentrated on handling textual data, but the
electronic edition is going to contain digital images, sound, video, and
so forth. The technology for dealing with these and our understanding of
how they might best be used in an electronic environment are far behind
our knowledge of handling text. Digital images, sound, and video are of
course much more recent, but we can learn a lot from the history of
working with texts.
</cite>
The preceding section of her essay gives an indication what we may learn
from that history. She has described the TEI tag sets and their
applications. I wonder if there exists a preliminary listing of projects
or pilot studies at a proof of concept stage which are critical editions
of multimedia works or critical editions that incorporate multimedia
elements. I ask because I wonder if such a listing is organized along a
typology that can be gleaned from Susan's four possible applications of
different tag sets:
* transcription including nonlinguistic phenomena such as hands, damage,
etc. [one can think of the drama tag set applied to the description of the
staging of animation and the diegetic dimension of a film]
* linking, segmentation, alignment (hypertext and cross-reference) [one
can think of the storyboard and the shooting script as
"reverse-engineered" in some cases from the finished multimedia product]
* analytic and interpretative information [I know that a project at
Universite Laval headed by Martine Cardin has devoted a considerable
amount of resources to the question of searching and accessing an
anthropological archive of audio files through a keyed taxonomy of
concepts]
* header [Susan is quite eloquent on the encoding of metadata (more of
which in a subsequent post)]
As I present this here, the direction is from the encoding of a given
multimedia work into a markup language. We may also work in the other
direction. Just how is a research team able to figure in their production
of an electronic edition the representations of a verbal artefact which
may take on multimedia form through such applications as voice synthesis.
Or how can a statistical view of a verbal artefacts elements be graphed
and feedback into questions of what is being counted and over what
segmentation of the artefact. In other words, how is the stage being set
so that the interaction between text encoding traditionally centred on
verbal artefacts and multimedia authoring (traditionally outside the ken
of markup) will include some understanding of markup as the recording of
sets of performances, some greater understanding of the status of semiotic
objects be they verbal, graphic, or auditory? It sometimes hurts one's
head to think of objects as abstractable to a field of events, wrapped in
a temporality that is not only that of their genesis but also of their
use. But to think this way becomes easier if there are words, images and
sequences of sounds that embody such fields of events in objects.
In the times before the advent of digital technologies, how is it that
literary criticism, art history and musicology bespoke each other, heard
each other, imagined each other?
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
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