Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 64.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 06:53:17 +0100
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 17.046 nesting
Willard and HUMANIST:
At 12:52 PM 6/1/2003, Jan Christoph Meister wrote:
>Anyway 2: Gerard Genette's defines this type of structure as
>a case of 'metalepsis'.
Thanks for this reference: I wasn't aware Genette had identified it this way.
> As far as I know Marie-Laure Ryan was the
>first to address this particular variant of the aesthetic problem of
>embedding from a computational perspective, interpreting it in terms
>of infinite recursion as it occurs in a badly written program (the
>proverbial 'loop' - but let me quickly read Patricia Galloway's
>article which probably already discusses the problem from the
>same angle.)
Yes, at ACH/ALLC in Georgia (USA) last week, we were privileged to hear
Marie-Laure Ryan speak to this. It was marvelous. Not least because of a
fortuitous warning her machine imposed on the proceeding, just as she was
about to demonstrate a recursive program (or what would prove to be a
mock-up of one): low battery, plug the machine in or data may be lost....
the Trickster phenomenon. (Anyone interested in following *this* reference
can look at www.tricksterbook.com, and yes it is relevant to this entire
conversation.)
As it happens, I myself have used the term "metaleptic" in a more
restricted context, namely the design of markup languages. A markup
language is metaleptic when the tags seek to reflect or elicit some feature
or aspect of the text marked up. So, for example, the typography and
organization of a complex text such as Robert Burton's *Anatomy of
Melancholy* (which has a rather large and elaborately nested structure)
can't be represented directly by a plain text transcription, but must be
represented by markup. The typography represents something about the text,
and the markup must represent that representation, or at any rate
re-express it to convey what it represents. A distinction I draw between
different markup applications' needs to be "proleptic" (looking forward to
future processing) and "metaleptic" (looking backward to an extant,
authoritative source of some kind) allows one to avoid many design
pitfalls, by better isolating requirements and guiding the designer in
dealing with inevitable tradeoffs. (Note that *both* these are
"descriptive" strategies in distinction to a "procedural" strategy, in
which the implied semantics of the language are not generally descriptive,
but are rather more tightly tied to its processing.)
Of course, it hasn't escaped me that perhaps in this sense (and
particularly in light of Ryan's discussion), "proleptic" technologies are
rather a special type of "metaleptic" technologies, and that all markup
languages are metaleptic in a more general way (as representing
representations), as indeed are all languages for computers from Assembler
on up. Prolepsis is merely the special case in which the representation
that is represented hasn't occurred yet, such as when one designs a
language as input for a process that has not yet been built.
You can imagine that I am intrigued and gratified to find two threads of my
interest in all this to interweave in this way. (Anyone interested in that
reference can find my papers on this topic at
www.piez.org/wendell/critique.htm.)
>And Wendell: what exactly is it that interests you in the phenomenon?
Well, this particular question came up because I'm thinking about tracing
the origins of what markup practitioners in the Humanities have called,
since the seminal paper by Renear et al. "What is Text, Really?" (1990),
the OHCO (Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects). It occurred to me that
nested narratives are the original and perhaps pre-eminent examples of such
ordering, even (especially) when such orderings are sometimes breached by
the invasion of one narrative thread by another. How these nestings appear
in oral and pre-literate traditions, and how deep they can get, would
apparently bear on the issue of how "natural" they are. (Or possibly less
tendentiously, how characteristic of narrative generally, as opposed to
being a characteristic of works in print particularly.)
On the other hand, it is also apparent that the issue itself has more
levels than I expected.
Cheers,
Wendell
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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