15.608 pencil and paper

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty (w.mccarty@btinternet.com)
Date: Fri Apr 26 2002 - 02:34:20 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 608.
           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: Stephen Ramsay <sjr3a@virginia.edu> (39)
             Subject: Re: 15.603 pencil and paper

       [2] From: Aime Morrison <ahm@ualberta.ca> (60)
             Subject: RE: 15.603 pencil and paper

       [3] From: Aime Morrison <ahm@ualberta.ca> (25)
             Subject: RE: 15.603 pencil and paper

       [4] From: "Patrick Rourke" <ptrourke@methymna.com> (27)
             Subject: Pencil and paper

       [5] From: haskell springer <springer@ukans.edu> (5)
             Subject: Re: 15.603 pencil and paper

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:21:32 +0100
             From: Stephen Ramsay <sjr3a@virginia.edu>
             Subject: Re: 15.603 pencil and paper

    On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 06:52:13AM +0100, Humanist Discussion Group (by way
    of Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>) wrote:
    > >*pencil and paper* n. An archaic information storage and transmission
    > >device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp.
    > >More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved
    > >'write-once' update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse
    > >balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator
    > >skilled at so-called 'handwriting' technique.....
    > The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd edn., comp. Eric S Raymond (MIT Press,
    > 1999), s.v.
    >
    > Explaining jokes is invidious, but perhaps untangling their implications is
    > excusable? There are two interesting ones in the above: (1) that a new
    > technology puts older ones into sharp relief, illuminating their
    > mechanisms, as the computer has done for the printed book; (2) that
    > historiographically seeing a former technology as a crude attempt to be a
    > current one is dead wrong (hence the joke). I am reminded of the fellow who
    > converted all (or so he claimed) allusions and references in Eliot's

    Willard is right on both points, of course. But point (1) seems to
    me to be a particularly engaging line of inquiry. Not long ago, I
    was struck by the fact that while I knew exactly how modern
    register-machine architectures worked, I was still a bit unclear on
    how they get the lead to fit so tightly into the shaft.

    As it turns out, the modern wood-case pencil is an absolute marvel
    of practical engineering, and the story of its development, an
    amazing tale of innovation, politics, genius, and greed. I would
    highly recommend Henry Petroski's *The Pencil: A History of Design
    and Circumstance* to anyone interested in the history of technology
    and engineering.

    Steve

    --
    Stephen Ramsay
    Senior Programmer
    Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
    Alderman Library, University of Virginia
    phone: (434) 924-6011
    email: sjr3a@virginia.edu
    web: http://busa.village.virginia.edu/
    PGP Public Key ID: 0xA38D7B11
    

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:22:03 +0100 From: Aime Morrison <ahm@ualberta.ca> Subject: RE: 15.603 pencil and paper

    hello;

    i'm sad to report i will now analyse all the funny out of that joke. it's sort of what i do.

    there is a counter-joke to the hacker deriding of pencil-and-paper offered in raymond's dictionary (aka 'the jargon file'--find it online at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/); it's a longer piece that describes 'the book' as if it were a remarkably resilient (drop it in the tub! it will still work!), reliable (never any down time!), sophisticated (optical reader! non-sequential access! full indexing!) computer. i see the book joke as the book-lovers' revenge on a culture that seems to prize digital over analog means of communication. the upshot: books are better than computers. describing the book in computing terms only shows, in this case, what poor computers digital machines are in comparison to printed texts.

    the hacker version of this joke, of course, uses the same device of defining an analog technology in the lingo of computing--but to different purpose and effect. with a little effort, it could have been demonstrated that the paper-pencil tech was superior to writing to disk in the same way that the book is superior to the computer (off the top of my head: if you snap a pencil in half, and sharpen, you get two pencils--try that with a floppy disk.) instead, the description uses an inflated 'features' description--being very technical in the description of pencil and paper shows how 'unsophisticated' such tools are.

    i don't know what such jokes have to say about the tendency of a new medium to throw an earlier one into sharp relief (although i know what mcluhan has to say about that ...). but i think that both the book and pencil jokes do serve to maintain a distinction between print technologies and digital ones--this *because* rather than in spite of describing print techs as computer techs. the comic effect stems from the 'ridiculousness' of the rewriting, which reinforces the difference between the two kinds of technologies.

    i'm glad i could offer a counter example (i'll send it to you later, because [and i've always wanted to say this] that joke is on my *other computer*)--i think it's important to see that either the book or the computer can be the butt of this kind of joke, and that what's really interesting is the continued separation of the two cultures (as neil postman sees them--'technology versus everybody else').

    now that i think of it, both jokes sound suspiciously hackeresque in tone; however, i tend to see the book joke on the doors of academics who are counter-computer--it speaks to them more than the pencil joke, obviously. so, authorship notwithstanding (and it is not the hacker way to quibble about such things ...), i think each joke causes a particular group to rally around their pet technology *in opposition to the other technology*.

    new point: recalling mcluhan's point that new media take as their content the entirety of the previous dominant medium, i think it's 'natural' that we seek to understand the computer in the terms offered by books--that being the case, it becomes humourous to try to 'reunderstand' the book in the terms offered by the computer. it also reminds us that the more 'invisible' process of understanding a computer like it's a book is a metaphorization we might do well to critically examine every now and again.

    i could go on at great length on this topic, such jokes comprising a sadly-excised-from-dissertation-but-reconfigured-as-future-project chapter of my research, but i'll stop. i'll try to find that book joke (remove other computer from closet, etc ...)

    so glad to be able to be useful ... aime ps-where can i find that copy of _the wasteland_? :-)

    . ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Aime Morrison "It is our national joy PhD Program, Dept. of English to mistake for the first University of Alberta rate, the fecund rate." ahm@ualberta.ca -- Dorothy Parker, on literary productivity

    --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:22:23 +0100 From: Aime Morrison <ahm@ualberta.ca> Subject: RE: 15.603 pencil and paper

    and another thing ... the jargon file on 'pencil and paper' continues from where willard left off:

    "...These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. "

    this would seem to support my initial idea that these jokes are about human kinds of belonging as much as they are about technologies.

    or maybe hackers have a thing about pencil-and-paper generally. true story: i was show-and-telling a 1978 opus called _the home computer handbook_ (john brockman, edwin schlossberg, lyn horton) which has a cover photograph showing mom-dad-girl-boy around a trash-80. mom is actually in the background making cookies and smiling, while dad-and-daughter grin at the monochrome display of columnar information. a hacker of my acquaintance (hello terry butler) took one look at this picture and said:

    "oh sure. of course the man is writing down everything he sees on screen on a piece of paper."

    coincidence? i think we've identified a real hacker-test here! aime

    . ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Aime Morrison "It is our national joy PhD Program, Dept. of English to mistake for the first University of Alberta rate, the fecund rate." ahm@ualberta.ca -- Dorothy Parker, on literary productivity

    --[4]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:23:19 +0100 From: "Patrick Rourke" <ptrourke@methymna.com> Subject: Pencil and paper

    Well, I guess my first comment is a question: what does it say about us that we all (myself included, I should note), in a "discourse community" dedicated to the advancement of the use of electronic technologies in the humanities, and many of use dedicated to the advancement of electronic academic publishing, nevertheless found WM's citation of the print form more authoritative than the citation to the constantly evolving and rather more accessible version at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/pencil-and-paper.html (i.e., the Jargon File), even given the context of the entry (which ends "Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts")? It seems even those of us on the cutting edge in the humanities have not yet escaped our preconceptions of the newer technology. I suspect that something about the concreteness of print (particularly its relative lack of volatility) continues to lend it weight in our minds over the virtual.

    > I am reminded of the fellow who > converted all (or so he claimed) allusions and references in Eliot's > Wasteland to hypertext links.

    The interesting thing there is of course that Eliot chose to note some of his allusions and leave others unnoted. Certainly hypertexting the endotes of *The Waste Land* is an interesting and useful exercise in learning how to adapt electronic publishing to the needs of differring texts, and I'm not sure that Eliot would necessarily have disapproved. But the unnoted ones? At this point the editor becomes a commentator. Certainly a commentary on *The Waste Land* is useful to the student, but the value of the hypertext commentary will lie in the hyperlinked content, not in the links themselves.

    Patrick Rourke ptrourke@methymna.com

    --[5]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:23:52 +0100 From: haskell springer <springer@ukans.edu> Subject: Re: 15.603 pencil and paper

    Forgive my possible naivete, but if that fellow was creating links (rather than paper footnotes) for T.S. Eliot's numerous obscure allusions, taking care to make them more illuminating, contextualizing, than academic footnotes usually are--even if he did so with Eliot's endnotes themselves--why isn't that a useful application of newer technology rather than a humorous misconception? Hakell Springer



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