Well, it’s pretty busy in Word Blog land, which is why I haven’t been quite so diligent about posting new entries. I’m taking courses in digital publishing and scholarly publishing these days, and showing up for work, too, so there hasn’t been as much time to hang out here. When I finish these courses in early August, I’ll be the fancy holder of a certificate in publishing from Ryerson University and also have a little more free time to throw around.
In the meantime, since I’m reading Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought at the moment, I thought I’d share this intriguing TED talk with you. Enjoy!
Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-06-093384-5]
The argument that grounds Proust and the Squid is that the human mind isn’t hardwired for reading the way it is for speech. While the average child left in earshot of others’ speech will quickly and spontaneously learn to speak, a child in arm’s reach of writing can only learn to read after years of laborious tuition and study.
While speaking and listening to speech employ areas of the brain that have become recognized as language centers, reading is much more complex, drawing on the same language centers as well as visual regions, occipital, temporal and parietal areas of the brain.
All these parts are necessary to make sense of images, to dissect heard sounds into their constituent syllables, and to connect all this visual, auditory, and linguistic input with conceptual processing that can decode an author’s meaning. Maryanne Wolf argues that each person who has ever learned to read has had to second already existing and unrelated brain regions in the service of reading. To read we must rewire our minds, and the activity of reading itself changes our neural circuitry. Evidence has already shown that each new skill we learn creates new pathways in the brain, so it makes sense that reading would be no different.
Wolf investigates the reading brain by looking at the earliest systems of writing and tracking how these systems have changed in the past 6000 or so years. She discusses the development of logographic writing, syllabary systems, and alphabets. In each case she considers how these written forms were taught to new readers, how they developed over time, and the different parts of the brain readers mobilize to make sense of each of these writing systems. [click to continue…]
A visual representation of the connections in a part of the internet
Ever since William Gibson described cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” a “graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system,” it has been possible to imagine that the internet produces an otherworldly space. So, for example, when I type the word blog into Google, it’s easy to overlook the architecture and material basis of Google. The network of real-world communication nodes, or data centres, the infrastructure that makes Google possible, isn’t, in any case, readily visible. This is also true of the internet more generally.
The invisibility of the internet’s real-world architecture is strange given its absolute necessity for cyberspace’s existence. These buildings and servers make it possible for meaning to traverse the gulf between binary code and pithy blog post. Without it, there would be no way to search our digital lexicon, no possible way for you to type the word blog into your computer and arrive here, at this post.
So what makes cyberspace materialize? There are several good texts that broach this subject—too many to list here—but, for starters, Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet provides a good account of the internet’s early history. For those who gravitate towards more esoteric texts, N. Katherine Hayles’s My Mother Was a Computer is a must-read. It offers a fantastic and thought-provoking presentation of the materiality of the “computational universe”. For those who gravitate towards more concrete texts, take a look at John Markoff and Saul Hansell’s New York Times article entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power”. This will give you a sense of what produces the results that pop up on your screen when you run a Google search. Taken together, these texts are sure to whet your appetite for thinking about the real-world materiality of digital words.
The contributor of the image of the Internet Network isMatt Britt. The image is copyrighted but also licenced for further reuse.
My awesome parents, knowing all about my obsession with words, recorded the Empire of the Word documentary series that aired on TVO last month for me. It was developed and narrated by the very impressive Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, The Library at Night, and The City of Words among other titles.
I watched every episode in a single sitting, and I have a hunch you’ll be as fascinated as I was. So brew some tea, get comfy, and follow the links below to the Empire of the Word.
Episode one is called “The Magic of Reading” and explores the origins of the written word and our irrepressible desire to read.
Episode two is titled “Learning to Read” and considers the intellectual triumph of reading from the neurology of the human mind to the education of new readers.
Episode three is called “Forbidden Reading” and investigates the authorities who have tried to ban the creation and consumption of texts as well as the people who fight for our right to read.
Episode four, “The Future of Reading,” speculates about how technology is changing the way we read and asks what will become of bound libraries in the years to come.
If you’re still craving more programming about the wonders of language, check out the BBC’s Why Do We Talk? over at the Lingua Franca blog. When you’re done you’ll want to stick around and read some of the really fun posts you’ll find there.
Kenneally, Christine. The First Word. Toronto: Viking, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-670-03490-1]
Who spoke the first word of human language? When was that first word uttered? What did that speaker say and why?
Linguists outlawed these questions in 1866 when the Société de Linguistique of Paris declared a moratorium on the topic of how and when language first arose. Scholars who explored these questions were roundly accused of being disreputable, of being engaged in a fruitless search that could only lead to purely speculative answers.
These scholars were shunned by the international linguistics community, their papers seldom seeing the light of publication. It was only in 1990, with the publication of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” that the moratorium really lifted. To be sure there had been scholars publishing on the topic before, but the debate that Pinker and Bloom’s paper occasioned opened the floodgates for studies on the origins of language. The late twentieth century was the moment when anthropology, linguistics, primatology, physiology, computer modelling, neurobiology, and genetics had together reached a critical mass of knowledge that would allow us to begin tracing our way back to the origins of language.
