MLA 2013 Special Session: Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old & New Media
Posted: May 15, 2012 Filed under: criticism, digital, e-literature, history of computing, media poetics | Tags: archives, digital humanities, digital media, e-literature, electronic literature, gaming, history of computing, interface, media archaeology, media poetics, MLA 2013, new media Leave a comment »Below is the description for the MLA ’13 special session panel that Paul Benzon, Mark Sample, Zach Whalen, and I will present on in January. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to pursue together issues related to Media Archaeology.
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Media studies is growing increasingly visible within the broader disciplines of literary and cultural studies, with several critical approaches bringing valuable shape and context to the field. Prominent among these approaches is a turn away from media studies’ longstanding fixation upon the new or the innovative as the most urgent and deserving site of study. Drawing on methodologies as diverse as book history, media archaeology, and videogame studies, this work on earlier media technologies has forged provocative connections between past and present contexts that hinge upon disjuncture and nonlinearity as often as upon continuity and teleology. At the same time, an increased attention to the material particulars of inscription, storage, circulation, and reception has developed the field beyond an early focus on narrative and representation.
New media scholars now look beyond screen-based media, to a broader range of technologies and sites of inquiry. This panel seeks to consider unseen, lost, or unwanted histories of writing/media. Each of the panelists focuses on a particular technology that is not only invisible to the broad history of media technology, but also relies upon loss and invisibility for its very functionality. In keeping with this dual valence, our emphasis on loss and invisibility is intended to raise questions aimed at our specific objects of analysis, but also at the deeper historical and disciplinary questions that these objects speak to: how does our understanding of media technology change when we draw attention to objects and processes that are designed to be invisible, out of view, concealed within the machine, or otherwise beyond the realm of unaided human perception? What happens when we examine the technological, social, and ideological assumptions bound up with that invisibility? How does privileging invisibility shed new light on materiality, authorship, interface, and other central critical questions within media studies?
The vexing relationship between invisibility and transparency is addressed head-on in Lori Emerson’s paper, “Apple Macintosh and the Ideology of the User-Friendly.” Emerson suggests that the “user-friendly” graphical user interface (GUI) that was introduced via the Apple Macintosh in 1984 was–and still is–driven by an ideology that celebrates an invisible interface instead of offering users transparent access to the framing mechanisms of the interface as well as the underlying flow of information. Emerson asserts this particular philosophy of the user-friendly was a response to earlier models of home computers which were less interested in providing ready-made tools through an invisible interface and more invested in educating users and providing them with the means for tool-building. Thus, the Apple Macintosh model of the GUI is clearly related to contemporary interfaces that utterly disguise the ways in which they delimit not only our access to information but also what and how we read/write.
A desire to renew critical attention on the most taken-for-granted aspect of computer writing and reading is at the heart of Zach Whalen’s paper, “OCR and the Vestigial Aesthetics of Machine Vision.” Whalen examines the origins of the technology that allows machines to read and process alphanumeric characters. While graceful typography is said to work best when it is not noticed–in other words, when hidden in plain sight–early OCR fonts had to become less hidden in order to make their text available for machine processing. Whalen focuses on the OCR-A font and the contributions of OCR engineer Jacob Rabinow, who argued on behalf of ugly machine-readable type that (although historically and technically contingent) its intrinsically artificial geometry could become its own aesthetic signifier.
The condensation and invisibility of textual information is taken up by Paul Benzon in his paper, “Lost in Plain Sight: Microdot Technology and the Compression of Reading.” Benzon uses the analog technology of the microdot, in which an image of a standard page of text is reduced to the size of a period, as a framework to consider questions of textual and visual materiality in new media. Benzon’s discussion focuses on the work of microdot inventor Emanuel Goldberg, who in the fifties worked alongside and in competition with the engineer Vannevar Bush, a seminal figure for new media studies. Benzon transforms the disregarded history of textual storage present in Goldberg’s work into a counter-narrative to the more hegemonic ideology of hypertext that has dominated new media studies.
Turning to an entirely invisible process that we can only know by its product, Mark Sample considers the meaning of machine-generated randomness in electronic literature and videogames in his paper, “An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing.” While new media critics have looked at randomness as a narrative or literary device, Sample explores the nature of randomness at the machine level, exposing the process itself by which random numbers are generated. Sample shows how early attempts at mechanical random number generation grew out of the Cold War, and then how later writers and game designers relied on software commands like RND (in BASIC), which seemingly simplified the generation of random numbers, but which in fact were rooted in–and constrained by–the particular hardware of the machine itself.
These four papers share a common impulse, which is to imagine alternate or supplementary media histories that intervene into existing scholarly discussions. By focusing on these forgotten and unseen dimensions, we seek to complicate and enrich the ways in which literary scholars understand the role of technologies of textual production within contemporary practices of reading and writing. With timed talks of 12 minutes each, the session sets aside a considerable amount of time for discussion. This panel will build on a growing conversation among MLA members interested in theoretically inflected yet materially specific work on media technologies, and it will also appeal to a broad cross-section of the MLA membership, including textual scholars, digital humanists, literary historians, electronic literature critics, and science and technology theorists.
Like this:
the Apple Mac | a life in computing
Posted: July 11, 2011 Filed under: archeological media lab, history of computing | Tags: apple macintosh, history of computing, media archaeology Leave a comment »Keith Moore has been the Archeological Media Lab‘s most generous donor and a consistent contributor to a series of guest blog posts that I’m calling “a life in computing” on the history of computing from the perspective of folks who have actually worked in the computer industry since the 1970s. Here he touches on his life with the Apple Mac and the line of Apple II computers. Thank you Keith for your posts!
1985 – The year of…
I am just now finishing up and recovering from the annual rotisserie baseball league draft that I hosted at my place on Sunday, last. We were talking about how long we’ve been at this. 26 years! This is not an attempt to impress with how time has just flittered away for those of us who are, say, 45+? Or is it? (45 is the new 39 for me.)
26 years ago. The spring of 1985. A long time ago for some, just back around the bend for others, I was a hobbyist/developer for Texas Instruments 99/4 computers for a number of years when I saw the advertisement that may well be the most famous ever in history. I had only been turned-on to the Apple family of computer and occasionally helped folks with their Apple II’s. Up to that point, I really thought that the Apple computers (Apple II mostly), while way more popular, were inferior to the TI. I still feel that way (16-bit versus 8-bit, color and sound built-in, and etcetera). However, I had seen computers that used more advanced graphics and user interfaces where I worked using Plato training systems. Like I said in a prior post, I had an interest in these large and clumsy big vector graphics screens and clunky keypads. And some of these systems were responsible for my “distractibility” in college. But in 1984, it was exciting to see Apple take an idea from the Palo Alto Research Center and turn it into something that was obviously a whole new approach to home computing.
Plato Computer (CDC Corporation)
From the day I saw the Apple Mac in magazines, I wanted one. Iwas a Byte magazine subscriber, but Apple chose to advertise this new machine in other periodicals. Check out these ads:
Original Newsweek Advertisement (Fall, 1984)
another print ad from 1984
Their advertising campaign turned out to be brilliant because it exposed the computer to folks who had a little bit of money (as opposed to geeks like me). The Mac, as it was called, was pricey compared to the computer pricing war that went on in the mid 1980’s. TI was basically killed-off in the low-end price war that killed almost all of the early companies. It probably remains for historians and business market analysis as to why most of those companies died off. But it is my opinion that the low-end computer market could not sustain the loss-leader distribution model that almost all companies took on at that time just to get name and market saturation. By the time the IBM clones were out (thanks to Compaq and others to follow) the market had already moved a little bit higher in price. One last note on the amazing 1984 ad and its impact and analysis over the years: recently, it was reported that Apple almost did not run the ad. An article in PC Magazine reported that the Apple board of directors didn’t want to run it. It is probably not too surprising that I was a good target for this little beast. I had just seen the Blade Runner movie and loved it and I am a big fan of 1984 (Orwell) and Metropolis (the movie).
As I said, I was not exactly a rich little nerd. I was working full time as I had since college (see my prior post about Vetrex). I read about the device and bought copies of MacWorld Issues 1-4. I thought there was no chance of getting one at a price tag the was around $2500 (my human memory may, or may not be right on this). But, it just so happened that I was given access to an employee discount (a deal that only lasted a few months). I suspect that part of this promotion was because Apple was going after the business and education market much more than most people realize now as they look back at all of the strife for home computing markets that was to follow into the 1990’s. At any rate, I saved-up my nickels and bought a Macintosh 512 (Fat Mac) with an external disk drive for about $2200 at that time. It was quite a deal but way more than I could afford.
Apple Macintosh 512
Here is what you got with a 512:
- Motorola 68000 8MHz CPU with the newer ROM software.
- 512K of RAM
- A one-button mouse, and little keyboard
- A 3.5” hard “Floppy” drive
- 9” black and white display with very high resolution for its time
I am cheating a bit by not mentioning the Lisa Computer which preceded this computer by well over a year and introduced these features (like the display, the mouse, processor, and etcetera). However, the repackaging of the same basic computer, and the successful software and marketing release made Mac viable whereas the Lisa failed because it was too expensive and lacked the software development enthusiasm that is necessary to succeed in the market. This is still true today. Look at the new generation of personal computers – hand-held phones. iPhone and Android prevail because the development community has embraced these operating environments for development of application software. If not for that, the devices wane and struggle for market viability.
The first few generations of Apple Mac lacked a hard drive and it took a while for third-party companies to develop them because the Apple device was a closed, proprietary architecture. (This is something that has contributed to creating a huge inflection point for the two dominant physical PC markets to-date (Microsoft/Linux or Apple.)
First Macintoshes took the chance on two/three huge new technologies: the 3.5” disk and the one-button mouse. Nearly everyone used keyboards and sometimes joysticks to control computers. Even Apple II computers had no mouse accessory. It was an all new interface to everyone except some who used the early PARC systems and the Lisa from Apple. The 3.5 drive turned out to be a standard all the way until the USB drive took its place in the the late 1990’s! It was a much longer lasting non-volatile memory device than its predecessors (the 8.5” and 5.25” floppy disks). This, combined with the strict software graphical User Interface (GUI) design guidelines, helped make Apple Mac very easy to learn to use and transfer interface skills from one software solution to another without a complete re-learn. With prior computer operating systems (especially personal computers), the interface was inconsistent from one software package to the next – even on the same computer.
Microsoft eventually had to buy/build something that could copy these similar capabilities. But the user interface consistency took years to become comparable to the Apple software interface consistency.
I could write for hours about the things I did with this machine: music, rotisserie baseball drafting and scoring, work, online software development and playing (CompuServe), and on and on. But I longed for a device with a hard drive. Eventually I got a used Mac SE but I kept using the Mac 512 with an aftermarket SCSI interface that I installed myself (along with a daughter card memory upgrade). It just seemed to go on and on. The machine that I donated is that very machine from February of 1985, the same year that we began our League of Mythical Batsmen. I never thought the baseball league would last as long as it did; nor did I expect that I’d be writing about a computer from 1985 in 2011!
- mkm
the lab’s latest addition: Compaq Portable III “laptop”
Posted: March 20, 2011 Filed under: archeological media lab, history of computing | Tags: history of computing, laptop, portable computer Leave a comment »Thanks to a very generous donation by Wade Peterson, the Archeological Media Lab is now the proud owner of a Compaq Portable III “laptop” from, I believe, 1987 – a year which was heralded “the year of the laptop.” This early version of a portable computer weighs in at a mere 20 pounds and, as Wade rightly notes in an email to me, it is also remarkable for its orange gas-plasma screen pictured below. The computer uses DOS and, with a built-in 20 megabyte hard-drive, no floppy disks are required to run it. In 1988, it sold for nearly $5000.
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