Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

>> Home / Archives for Theory

The Computer and the Information Revolution

by

the history of mathematics + technology = computers

This is book which gets mentioned in any serious history of computers. It’s a study of the mathematical, mechanical, and then the electronic developments which led to the creation of modern computers. The first part of The Computer and the Information Revolution offers an account of the development of mathematical systems, ending with the creation of binary notation in the nineteenth century. This paves the way for part two, which is a history of automatic calculation – first by mechanical devices, then by electronic means. It’s a book dense with a sense of history, and Ifrah’s span reaches effortlessly from 3500 BCE (Before the Common Era) to the maths underlying computer technology in the post-war years.

The Computer and the Information RevolutionHis approach can sometimes be a little disconcerting. One minute we’re in ancient Greece, next in the eighteenth century. A more smoothly integrated chronological narrative would have strengthened his case, just as more pictures and diagrams would have spared him page-length descriptions of the machines he discusses. This is a book which is crying out for illustrations.

However, he more than makes up for this in his wide-ranging inclusiveness. Even small-scale and failed inventors are mentioned. He is particularly good at explaining the relationship between mathematical theory and what was technologically possible at any given point. He points out that there are big gaps in the development of information technology – very often caused by the absence of nought/null in the numbering system.

It’s an odd book, because the translator and editor fills in what he clearly regards as important gaps in the author’s knowledge, and the chronology is patchy too. There’s a lot of back-tracking to make up for a lack of continuous narrative.

However, his account gains a great deal of impetus as all strands converge for the creation of the first modern computers. His description of Alan Turing’s conceptual breakthrough in 1936 and his relationship to John Van Neumann’s idea for a program stored in memory become positively gripping.

In fact it’s a shame he doesn’t stick with his theme once computers had been built, because the latter part of the book spins off into cosmology, genetics, and a mosaic of reflections on culture,science, and ‘the future of mankind’. Nevertheless, for anyone remotely interested in the development of information technology, this is a book which should not be missed.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Georges Ifrah, The Computer and the Information Revolution, trans E.F.Harding, London: Harvill, 2000, pp.410, ISBN 1860467385

More on computers
More on technology
More on digital media

The History and Power of Writing

by

the printed word from antiquity to the present

I’m amazed this book isn’t better known – though I’ve only just discovered it myself. The History and Power of Writing is a majestic, scholarly, and multi-disciplined study of the history of writing. Henri-Jean Martin traces the development of writing from Mesopotamia in 5,000 BC to digital technology of the last two decades. The history is recounted in astonishing detail, and the pace is quite slow. You will have to be a patient reader. He traces how writing styles changed according to the implements used; how the writing surface was made from papyrus, parchment, and paper; and how ‘books’ were assembled in the form of the scroll, the volumen, and then the codex.

The History and Power of WritingAll these apparently simple technological changes produced immense social effects – all of which he examines in impressive detail. He also reveals the relationship between speech, reading, and writing, which until fairly recently was more complex than we might imagine. There were, for instance, three ways of reading a text for Latin scholars – silently (rare) as a form of sub-vocalised or murmured speech (common), and reading out loud (most common).

His study takes in wide-ranging aspects of classical antiquity – politics, commerce, jurisprudence, scholarship, literature, plus anything else which has left traces of its history in the form of writing, such as taxation and legal contracts.

There are all sorts of unforeseen spin-offs and intellectual byways – ecclesiastical practises, medieval poetry recitations, the development of the postal service, tax systems, plus the history of the Bible and the development of Christianity.

One of his key arguments is that all sorts of other developments led up to the invention of printing: the creation of the ‘new’ universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the development of new paper-making techniques; plus copperplate engraving. And the volume of closely referenced evidence he brings to bear to support his arguments is so overwhelming, it would be a brave scholar who challenged any of his claims.

Even taking the translation into account, he takes no prisoners so far as his intellectual pitch is concerned:

Like cuneiform characters, hieroglyphs can have the value of ideograms, phonograms, or determinatives. The sign for the sun-god provides a simple example. Since the ideogram (the solar disc) might cause confusion because it also meant ‘day’ and was thus a polyphone, two phonograms were added to it, a human mouth for r and a forearm in profile for the aspirated laryngeal consonant ayin, thus providing the consonantal skeleton of the name (a third and final consonant was left out).

Nevertheless, this certainly ranks alongside Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space as a seminal text on the nature of writing. If there’s a single weakness, its the shortage of illustrations.

As soon as the printed book becomes the most popular vehicle for writing to circulate, the subject expands to include typography, page design, book structure, and even the ideology of font sets,
This in its turn leads on to printing, publishing, and the book trade in general, plus a consideration of reading habits, of pirating works, and of censorship.

There’s a whole chapter devoted the contents of Renaissance libraries, which books people actually read, the establishment of private libraries throughout Europe, and even speculations about the manner in which people did their reading:

Petrarch devoutly kissed his copy of Virgil before opening it; Erasmus did the same for his Cicero; and in the evening, when he had finished his day’s work, Machiavelli put on his best clothes to read his favourite authors.

In the ‘modern’ period (1500—1800) the forms and functions of writing are firmly wrapped up in finance and trading, ecclesiastical history and public records.

You’ve got to be prepared for lots of political, social, and economic history – but this is what gives the book its depth, because this material provides the background and reasons for changes in writing, reading, and literacy in general.

There are also detours into related areas. His account of the nineteenth century for instance is largely concerned with the development of printing technology, the reproduction of illustrations and photographs, and most of all, the development of the press as a vehicle for independent criticism of the state.

When we reach the twentieth century this generalised approach to communication spreads out even wider to include telegraphy, stenography, audio recording, moving pictures, and eventually, in rapid succession, radio, television, and the computer. Although Martin looks in detail at the problems of information overload created by new media, he rather tantalisingly stops short of the explosion of the last fifteen years since the development of the Web.

This is a panoptic and encyclopedic study, any one of whose myriad side issues could fill a normal-sized book. It ought to be more widely known amongst scholars. If you don’t yet know it, a treasure trove of history and idea lies waiting for you.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, trns. Lynda G. Cochrane, pp.591, ISBN 0226508366

More on digital media
More on theory
More on typography

The Intellectuals and the Masses

by

pride and prejudice: literary modernists 1880-1939

This book has been around for a while now. I read it on the strength of having enjoyed John Carey’s more recent What Good Are The Arts? His basic argument is that with the rise of mass democracy and universal education at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals reacted with fear to this phenomenon and both denigrated the ordinary person and at the same time deliberately made their art more difficult to understand. It’s a study of literary modernists and their anti-democratic sentiments.

The Intellectuals and the MassesNone of the major figures of literary modernism escapes his charge: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are all quoted making remarks which are undemocratic, elitist, racist, and tainted with a supremacism which Carey traces back to Nietzsche. This basic argument is then extended to the intellectually snobbish dislike of the ‘suburbs’ which were built to house the growing numbers of clerks to service the expanding financial and commercial sectors of the economy.

Here Graham Greene, John Betjemann, G.K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh come in for a similar type of criticism – though they are not accused of putting their writing beyond the reach of the common reader. Returning to Nietzsche’s influence via his ideas about ‘natural aristocrats’ and ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Carey shows these views of the lofty superman alive and well in the work of Lawrence and Graham Greene – and he punctures their lightweight adoption in the work of art critic Clive Bell with his characteristically mordant humour:

So we find, for example, Clive Bell hymning ‘the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art’, and contrasting them with the herd who frequent the ‘snug foothills of warm humanity’. Bell’s language figures himself and fellow aesthetes as engaged upon dangerous and energetic pursuits, when in fact they are merely looking at pictures and reading books.

This is not the only time he points to the false metaphors in which art is often discussed: ‘Spatial metaphors of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture are logically meaningless, of course.’ There’s also an interesting reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which, for all its satirical Utopianism, he reveals as a covert defence of Nietzschean or Christian ‘redemptive suffering’.

In the latter part of the book he offers four ‘case studies’ – in-depth readings of the works of George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis. He uncovers some fairly unhealthy attitudes in Gissing, though I was surprised that he let him off the charge of profound snobbery which made me feel like hurling New Grub Street across the room last time I read it.

It’s not quite as clear why he includes Wells – because his only flaw seems to be a fear of overpopulation coupled with a submerged form of misogyny. But Arnold Bennett turns out to be the book’s hero. Carey describes his writings as ‘a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses’ – and he goes on to give a spirited case for his works as a sympathetic insight into the lives of ordinary people, and a defence of suburbia. In fact he takes on Virginia Woolf’s argument against Bennett in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and demolishes it completely.

He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-Semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

This is a very spirited polemic, which also serves to remind us that many of the technological advances in the early modern era were often regarded with scepticism bordering on outright rejection by the soi-disant intellectuals. Radio, newspapers, photography, cinema, and rail travel were all vilified at one time or another – and the masses who seemed to enjoy them were both sneered at and condemned as philistines.

If you’re going to look at Carey’s views on art, read this one first, before What Good Are The Arts? – then you will have a clearer notion of where his ideas come from. For anyone interested in literary modernism, the history of ideas, or modern cultural criticism, it’s an exhilarating read.

© Roy Johnson 2000

The Intellectuals and the Masses   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Intellectuals and the Masses   Buy the book at Amazon US

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber, 1992, pp.246, ISBN: 0571169260

More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Long Tail

by

how endless choice is creating unlimited demand

Chris Anderson is the editor of WIRED magazine. This book started as an article there, took off, and was expanded via seminars, speeches, and further research. It has now become one of the most influential essays on the new sCommerce. Anderson’s notion is relatively simple, but its implications profound. He argues that because the digitisation of commerce allows more people into the trading arena, and because minority goods can be made available alongside best-sellers, the consumer therefore has a much wider choice and cheaper prices. This gives rise to a new phenomena – niche markets – also known in marketing-speak as the ‘long tail’. This is the part of the commercial results graph where returns begin to flatten out and slope towards zero.

The Long TailBut – and this is a very big BUT – in the new digital world they don’t slope off completely. And if you add up all the income from these many tail end transactions, it can be more than the total sales from the Short Head part of the graph.

Once you have grasped these basic issues, the lessons are clear. The profit is to be made in shifting bits, not atoms, plus lower overheads means more profit, because you can sell more. Much of this is possible because the price of electronic storage has now dropped almost to zero, and digital distribution has removed transport costs – as well as making delivery immediate. A physical bricks-and-mortar store has limited shelf space to stock goods, but Peer-2-Peer file-sharers make the downloaders’ options almost limitless.

The only way to reach all the way down the Tail—from the biggest hits down to all the garage bands of past and present—is to abandon atoms entirely and base all transactions , from beginning to end, in the world of bits.

Much of the new digital economy is amazingly counter-intuitive. Amazon for instance has allowed its own competitors to sell their goods on its site. The net result – more profit for Amazon, and the rise of the small second-hand book trader – the very businesses people thought would be put out of work by online trading.

Other positive elements in the new digital economy are the rise of reader reviews and recommendations; the back catalogue becomes valuable again; and new niche markets become available for more buyers.

Anderson looks at the technological history which has made the long tail possible, using a typical Amazon purchase as a model: postal delivery service, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, and barcodes. Of course Amazon’s genius in its latest phase is it gets other people to hold all the stock and fulfil the orders.

He’s a great believer in reputations and taste being formed by social media – the YouTube and MySpace worlds in which personal recommendations and fan reviews help forge best-sellers more than any amount of advertising hype.

There are lots of interesting nuggets thrown out as he makes his way through the socio-economic implication of all this. Such as for instance the fact that Google searches counteract the tyranny of the New over the well-established. That’s because they rank pages by the number of incoming links, which favours those which have had the time to acquire them.

Even though he goes into some economic theory, the study remains accessible and readable throughout – largely because he uses everyday examples with which most readers will be able to identify: the purchase of music CDs, DVDs of films, and supermarket food purchases.

This is a really inspiring book, and a must for anyone remotely connected with the online world. Even if some of his estimations and predictions might be overstated, it offers a glimpse into processes taking place that will change the way we think about business and technology. Time and time again, I thought “Yes! I’ve already started doing that!” – ordering more books from Amazon’s marketplace traders, buying out-of-print titles at knockdown prices, exploring new music, and looking out for recommendations on the new social media. I would rank this book alongside Nicolas Negroponte’s 1996 study Being Digital as a seminal influence for the decade in which it is published.

© Roy Johnson 2007

The Long Tail   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Long Tail   Buy the book at Amazon US

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, London: Random House, 2006, pp.238, ISBN: 184413850X

More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology

The Myths of Innovation

by

new developments in technology, science, and business

This is a book which seeks to de-bunk the myths of invention. Most of us are brought up to believe that Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, and that Archimedes had a ‘Eureka!’ moment in his bath. Scott Berkun points out that neither of these two myths is true, and that almost all technical innovations come about as a result of years and years of research, failed attempts, and lots of hard work. He also points out that history is not only written by the victors, but that it commonly misses out the failures, wastes, and losses that go to make up a success. His telling example here is Rome, whose architectural glories are actually built on the ruins of a city that was previously burned to the ground.

The Myths of InnovationOnce these myths are out of the way, he looks at how innovations do come about, and wonders if there is any way of planning for them or creating systems that will encourage them. No matter how much we might wish there were, his answer is ‘It can’t be done’ in both cases.

In fact the more he looks at real-life examples, the more it becomes apparent that perfectly good innovations can fail for lack of appreciation, audience, funding, and a host of other reasons. When he looks closely at the provenance of success stories it’s obvious that they must

  • not be too far ahead of their time
  • fit within existing sets of beliefs
  • be simple to adopt
  • meet an existing need

As he puts it in one of his many amusing examples, if free mobile phones had mysteriously appeared in 9th century England, they would have been burned as witches’ eggs.

The World Wide Web, the medium through which we all live and breathe, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he couldn’t remember where his colleagues’ research papers were located. So he devised a simple coding system (HTML) which allowed documents to be tagged. A Eureka moment? No – because look what was already in place, on which this system ran.

First there had been the invention of the computer roughly fifty years before – at Manchester University, where Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both members of staff. There had already been established a world-wide network of computer connections (ARPANET). Packet-switching (the unsung gem of communication technology) had recently been invented. And the personal computer with its attendant gizmos of mouse, screen, and keyboard had been developed. You get the point: the Web and HTML was an amazing development which has changed all our lives – (and I still don’t know why Berners-Lee hasn’t been given a Nobel Prize, if Winston Churchill can have one for literature). But the Web was built on lots of other inventions, and it came at the right time.

The book dips slightly in the middle when he looks at the (largely negative) effect managers have on innovations and efficiency, but true to the theories he is propounding, he pulls some positive lessons out of the exploration.

Then towards the end of the book he looks at the social and political results of major innovations. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be wholly ambiguous. Motor cars liberate people to travel wherever they wish, but they also pollute the atmosphere and kill people in their hundreds of thousands every year. DDT helped to control typhus and malaria, but it got into the lower species’ food chain and caused havoc. Einstein’s theories revolutionised cosmology, but also led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This summary makes it all sound rather negative. But his overall message is not so. He merely wants us to realise that the world is a messier place than we often realise; that we shouldn’t accept the over-simplified stories we are fed – even about successful inventions; and that what we regard as somebody’s ‘breakthrough moment’ might to them be the end of a lifetime’s slog.

It’s also a very readable book – the first I have ever come across in which the technical colophon was the funniest part.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.178, ISBN: 0596527055

More on computers
More on technology
More on digital media

The Struggle for Utopia

by

 Rodchenko,  Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946

This is a series of essays tracing the development of three ground-breaking artists who deliberately harnessed their design skills during the highpoint of modernism to the service of revolutionary social change. The first chapter of The Struggle for Utopia offers an analysis of Alexander Rodchenko‘s designs for public information kiosks, comparing them with El Lissitzky‘s for new forms of paintings and books. This points to the essentially conservative ideology underlying some of Rodchenko’s work, in distinction to El Lissitzky’s attempts to break into new ground. The next deals with the work and theories of the German constructivists – Moholy-Nagy and Lissitzky who had moved to Berlin from the Soviet Union.

The Struggle for UtopiaThere were lots of theoretical wranglings amongst the artists and many bold claims made for the social and even revolutionary meanings in their works. Nevertheless, a simple connection between artist’s belief or intention and its manifestation on canvas or print remains as illusive as ever it will be. And if these abstract paintings dropped out of the sky unsigned, their meanings would be even more intractable.

This is followed by a chapter on Rodchenko’s work between 1922 and1927 when he gave all his creative energy to the cause of ‘production art’ – the design of socially useful objects such as furniture, books, magazines, exhibitions, and advertising posters. His furniture was never put into production [through no fault of his own] but his graphic design was a big success, was hugely influential, and is still fresh as paint today.

Next comes a comparison of the pioneering work in photography done by Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. Then Margolin tackles the difficult task of trying to find positive things to say about the work Rodchenko and Lissitzky produced as propagandists during the black years of the Stalin period. He does his best, but it’s difficult to take seriously the pictures of smiling ethnic minorites and the construction of the White Sea Canal when we now know the brutal truth of what was going on.

Rodchenko amazingly survived until 1956, though he produced nothing more worthy of note. Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago where he influenced a whole generation of product desgners in his new Bauhaus Institute of Design.

This is a scholarly work with a full apparatus of citations, references and footnotes. It’s also beautifully designed, illustrated, and printed – as befits the subject matter. My only carp is that I wish a list of further reading had been extracted from the dense thicket of footnotes which cluster at the bottom of almost every page of the book. I want to read more: make it easy for me to follow up.

© Roy Johnson 2000

The Struggle for Utopia   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Struggle for Utopia   Buy the book at Amazon US

Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917—1946, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp.259, ISBN: 0226505162

More on design
More on media
More on web design

Understanding Comics

by

the techniques, philosophy, and interpretation of comics

Whenever there is a discussion or an exchange of messages concerning comics or visual narratives, one name crops up again and again – Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics is his now classic work on the comic designer’s art. It’s presented in the form of a comic itself – but don’t let that fool you. He could just as easily given his book the sub-title ‘The Philosophy of Graphic Narratives’. He starts with a chapter defining what comics are (sequential visual art) and shows something of their history, going back as far as Egyptian wall paintings in 1300 BC.

Understanding ComicsIf at first this seems rather obvious or over-simplified, two or three pages into chapter two, he is discussing the theory of visual perception and the nature of iconic language. Next comes the sequencing of action and the decision of what goes into (and what can be left out of) each visual panel of a comic. There’s a very interesting comparison of American and Japanese techniques in which he argues that some of the special effects of the Manga comics arise from different traditions of perception in the East.

He explains the depiction of time and motion via the panel or frame. In fact after doing the same thing for emotion by the use of symbols, he extends his argument to claim that we are in an age where a whole new visual language is in the process of being invented.

The traditional modes of dealing with narrative via showing and telling are demonstrated by the same story being related via pictures and words, then re-combined to show the comic creator’s skill in offsetting one medium against the other to avoid tautology and maximise expressive density.

This is a book which will entrance any comic lovers or anybody who has an interest in media studies or how ideas and stories are transmitted.

Quite a lot of these issues of graphics, narrative, point of view, and are now an active part of online, web-based information. I’m sure he will be aware of that, and I’m sure he will take it into account in any future editions.

He ends with what is obviously a heartfelt plea that comics should be taken seriously as a cultural genre, and he extends this to claim that they haven’t yet even scratched the surface of what they are capable of expressing.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Understanding Comics Buy the book at Amazon UK

Understanding Comics Buy the book at Amazon US

Scott McCLoud, Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp.217, ISBN 006097625X

More on art
More on media
More on design

Understanding Media

by

re-issue of classic 1960s media studies text

This is the book which made McLuhan famous with the phrase ‘The medium is the message’. Understanding Media was issued as a warning to the many pundits who refused to take seriously what we now call ‘media studies’ – though his range was much wider than just communication. The first part is a critique of contemporary culture – ‘electric’ as he calls it. Much of this is couched in rash generalisations and dressed up in some of his slightly batty distinctions – such as those he makes between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. All this is steeped in a rich soup of cultural references. On any single page you might be taken from Matthew Arnold and Edward Gibbon, to de Tocqueville, E.M. Forster, and the World Health Organisation.

Understanding MediaThe second part consists of meditations on cultural phenomena ranging from clothing and money, to transport, comics, radio, and the telephone. These tend to be thought-provoking and patchy rather than systematic – but it has to be remembered that reflections on the cultural significance of television shows, advertising and motor cars was something of a novelty forty years ago.

Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some parts of ourselves into various materials, any study of one medium helps us to understand all the others.

He has interesting observations to make on anything from clocks and bicycles to advertising and weapons – and these are often delivered in a witty and epigrammatic manner.

There’s a lot of generalising about the relationship between technology and history (or ‘civilization’ as it was still called back then) and he places a great deal of reliance on books such as Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and Louis Mumford’s The City in History.

His reflections on the typewriter made me wish he had lived long enough to comment on the word-processor and the computer – surely two of the most powerful and widely used devices of the ‘electronic age’. This is a lively and a thought-provoking book. If you didn’t read it first time round, this is a good chance to catch up.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Understanding Media   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Understanding Media   Buy the book at Amazon US

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, (first published 1964) London: Routledge, 2001, pp.392, ISBN: 0415253977

More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory

Virginia Woolf an MFS reader

by

academic essays on Woolf and her major novels

For those who may not know, MFS is not some sort of DIY building material, but Modern Fiction Studies, a prestigious academic journal, and Virginia Woolf an MFS reader is a compilation of essays on Virginia Woolf drawn from its archives going back over the last half century of its publication. The chapters are arranged in three thematic sections, each arranged chronologically according to the text under consideration.

Virginia Woolf An MFS ReaderIt’s a book written by university teachers, designed to be read and (they hope) quoted by other teachers in the books that they write as part of seeking career promotion. That’s the nature of academic life today. In some instances it produces valuable results: for the main part it results in worthless dross. This system is the root of both the main strength and the weakness of this book.

Brenda Silvers’ introductory essay huffs and puffs about the adoption of Virginia Woolf into popular culture – but it’s mainly hot under the collar about Edward Albee’s play (Who’s Afraid..) and its possibly disguised gay theme. She also goes in for some quite bogus generalizing on the interpretation of photographs:

Woolf’s photographs [she means photographs of Woolf] in general … prove frightening to their viewers.

That will be news to the many people who buy and admire her portrait wherever it is on sale.

Susan Friedman offers an account of The Voyage Out which sees Rachel Vinrace as an example of Woolf’s ‘Common Reader’ – someone unprejudiced by formal academic experience and unburdened by the authority of criticism. This is quite a useful way of matching Wool’s theory with her fiction.

Charles Hoffmann traces the development of Mrs Dalloway from a short story (Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street) to a full length novel following the connections between notebooks, manuscripts, and drafts which are scattered in various collections on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an approach to literary scholarship which has the advantage of being unencumbered by lots of ‘theory’ and is rooted in the practicality of literary texts.

Tammy Clewell has a thoughtful piece on death, mourning, and grief in Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. This argues with persuasive supporting evidence that Woolf was promoting more radical views on these topics than is commonly supposed. She does not want her readers to relax any opposition to the barbarous mass slaughter behind every war memorial and slogans such as ‘their names shall live forever’:

In relation to these postwar forms of memorialization, Jacob’s Room stands out precisely for what it withholds: the text offers no faith in religious immortality, no applause for individual heroism, no celebration of male comradery, no stoical acceptance of fate, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human cost of any kind.

The best-written essay in the collection (and unsurprisingly the most frequently quoted by others) is Karen deMeester’s on ‘Trauma and Recovery in Mrs Dalloway‘. This argues that Woolf gives accurate expression to the condition of psychological trauma – particularly of course in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, who has seen through the horrors upon which his society is based. But even more bravely, deMeester argues that Clarissa Dalloway is a social coward, because although she sees the same truths as Septimus, she chooses to re-unite with the world which has caused the horrors in the first place. As Peter Walsh says of her:

she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination

It’s not often one sees Peter Walsh (a lightweight figure) quoted with such approval. But he has a point – and so does deMeester.

Urmila Seehagiri desperately wants to offer a racial and post-colonial reading of Woolf’s work, and she digs and digs, hoping to come up with some suitable material. To the Lighthouse yields the fact that Lily Briscoe has ‘little Chinese eyes’; Woolf took part in the Dreadnought Hoax and attended the Ballets Russes. No distinction is made between fictional and biographical evidence. When To the Lighthouse is addressed in detail, broken teacups are the signal for an extended account of the history of the tea trade with India and China. Then, via a detour into the theories of art held by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, she concludes that Lily Briscoe’s ‘little Chinese eyes’

attain the ‘ultra-primitive directness of vision’ that Fry attributes to East Asian cultures, and her arrangement of forms is liberating because it is autotelic. Privileging the completion of Lily’s painting over mending broken familial structures, Woolf creates a racially differentiated model for modern English subjectivity that holds itself separate from patriarchal and imperialist hierarchies.

Many of the other essays suffer from this very dubious critical method. A single word or short phrase is seized upon; a tenuous connection with another text (fiction, biography, or theory) is made; and a literary critic’s comment upon some apparently similar phenomenon is noted. The flaw is that a logical and positive connection between the starting and finishing point is taken for granted without any critical examination or supporting evidence. The connections between these elements are at best loose, and more often mere fugitive verbal associations.

And that, I’m afraid, is the state of literary criticism in the university today. Some good solid textual scholarship, holding out against a tide of convoluted windbaggery masquerading as ‘critical theory’. Can you understand the last quote above?

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009

Maren Linnet, Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp.443, ISBN 0801891183

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Visual Language for the Web

by

Visual Language for the Web is a book about the language of icons, buttons, and navigational aids used in the design of graphical interfaces of computer software programs. The first chapter deals with Mayan hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms – writing with pictures. This establishes how much information can be conveyed semiotically. Paul Honeywill then looks at how graphical icons are used in interface design – and how well we understand them, particularly on a multi-national level. Some, like the folder icon, have been successful and are now widely used.

Visual Language for the WebOthers seem to be understandable only within the context of the program for which they are designed. Next comes an explanation of the design of icons, taking account of the psychology of visual perception and the technology of rendering images on screen. He explains for instance why colours and font sizes are rendered differently on PCs and Macs.

He offers an introduction to digital font technology which will be useful for anyone who doesn’t already know how serif and sans-serif fonts are used for quite different purposes.

To illustrate the principles on which graphic icons best operate, he presents two case studies of designing business logos. He considers pictographic languages ranging from the natural Mayan hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform, to recent experiments such as Elephant’s Memory. But he seems reluctant to acknowledge their limitations in telling anything but simple narratives.

However, the very absence of any individual authority on the Internet means that any graphic icons which become generally accepted will be those which are commonly understood.

The last part of the book looks at testing recognition of icons – and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the most effective and best known are those such as the magnifying glass ‘Search’ icon which appears in lots of different programs.

It has to be said that all this is sometimes discussed at a very theoretical level:

the day sign for Manik when it appears without the day sign cartouche in a non-calendrical context is chi

But this will be of interest to anybody concerned with the study of writing systems, as well as graphic designers, usability experts, and information architects.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Visual Language for the Web   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Visual Language for the Web   Buy the book at Amazon US

Paul Honeywill, Visual Language for the World Wide Web, Exeter: Intellect, 1999, pp.192, ISBN: 187151696X

More on information design
More on design
More on media
More on web design

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016