Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he explains how digital archaeology has revealed Thomas Jefferson’s revisions of the Declaration of Independence. Read his previous posts here.
In a list of the colonies’ grievances against King George III Jefferson wrote, “he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-subjects, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property.” But the future president, whose image now graces the two-dollar bill, must have realized right away that “fellow-subjects” was the language of monarchy, not democracy, because “while the ink was still wet” Jefferson took out “subjects” and put in “citizens.”
In a eureka moment, a document expert at the Library of Congress examining the rough draft late at night suddenly noticed that there seemed to be something written under the word citizens. It was no Da Vinci code or treasure map, but Jefferson’s original wording, soon uncovered using a technique called “hyperspectral imaging,” a kind of digital archeology that lets us view the different layers of a text. The rough draft of the Declaration was digitally photographed using different wavelengths of the visible and invisible spectrum. Comparing and blending the different images revealed the word that Jefferson wrote, then rubbed out and wrote over.
Above: Jefferson’s rough draft reads, “he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-citizens”; followed by a detail of “fellow-citizens” with underwriting visible in ordinary light. Below: a series of hyperspectral images made by the Library of Congress showing that Jefferson’s initial impulse was to write “fellow-subjects.” [Hi-res images of the rough draft are available at the Library of Congress website.] Elsewhere in the draft Jefferson doesn’t hesitate to cross out and squeeze words and even whole lines in as necessary, but in this case he manages to fit his emendation neatly into the same space as the word it replaces.
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Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the difference between scrolls and codexes.
The scroll, whose pages are joined end-to-end in a long roll, is older than the codex, a writing technology — known more familiarly as the book — with pages bound together at one end. Websites have always looked more like scrolls than books, a nice retro touch for the ultra-modern digital word, but as e-readers grow in popularity, texts are once again looking more like books than scrolls. While the first online books, the kind digitized by the Gutenberg Project in the 1980s, consisted of one long, scrolling file, today’s electronic book takes as its model the conventional printed book that it hopes one day to replace.
Fans of the codex insist that it’s an information delivery system superior in every way to the scroll, and whether or not they approve of ebooks, they think that all books should take the form of codices. For one thing, book pages can have writing on both sides, making them more economical than scrolls, which are typically written on one side only (this particular codex advantage turns out to be irrelevant for ebooks). For another, the codex format makes it easier to compare text on different pages, or in different books, which some scholars think fosters objective, critical, or scientific thinking. It’s also easier to locate a particular section of a codex than to roll and unroll a scroll looking for something. These may or may not be advantages for books over scrolls, but it’s not a problem online, where keyword searching makes it easy to find digitized text in a nanosecond, regardless of its format, plus it’s possible to compare any online texts or the parts thereof simply by opening each in a different window and clicking from one to another. In the world of the ebook, codex or scroll becomes a preference, not an advantage.
A few tunnel-visioned readers associate the codex with Christianity, viewing scrolls as relics of heathen religion. Not to be outdone, some people see online books as messianic, and others think they represent the ultimate heresy — but religion aside, there’s no particular advantage for page over scroll in either the analog or the digital world. Finally, although this example of codex superiority is seldom mentioned, the codex can be turned into a flip book by drawing cartoons on the pages and then fanning them so the images appear to move. But then again, a motion picture is really a scroll full of pix unwinding at 24 frames per second. None of this makes a difference if your ebook, iPad, or smartphone won’t play Flash video.
There is one advantage of the book over the scroll that may apply to the computer. According to psychologists Christopher A. Sanchez and Jennifer Wiley, poor readers have more trouble understanding scrolled text on a computer than digital text presented in a format resembling the traditional printed page. But these researchers found that better readers, those with stronger working memories, understand scrolls and pages equally well.
While Sanchez and Wiley’s experiments suggest that for some readers, paging is better for comprehension than scrolling, their results are o
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Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the success of the internet.
You’ve heard the Luddite gripes about the digital age: computers dehumanize us; text messages are destroying the language; Facebook replaces real friends with imaginary ones; instant messages and blogs give people a voice who have nothing to say. But now a new set of complaints is emerging, this time from computer scientists, internet pioneers who once promised that the digital revolution was the best thing since sliced bread, no, that it was even better, Sliced Bread 2.0.
It started in the mid-1990s with Clifford Stoll. You may remember Stoll as the Berkeley programmer who tracked down a ring of eastern European hackers who were breaking into secure military computers, and wrote up the adventure in the 1990 best-seller, The Cuckoo’s Egg. But a mere five years later Stoll published Silicon Snake Oil, a condemnation of the internet as oversold and underperforming. In a 1995 Newsweek op-ed, Stoll summed up the internet’s failed promise of happy telecommuters, online libraries, media-rich classrooms, virtual communities, and democratic governments in one word: “Baloney.”
More nuanced is the critique of Jaron Lanier, the programmer who brought us virtual reality, but who now labels life online “digital maoism.” In a recent interview in the Guardian, Lanier charged that after thirty years the great promise of a free and open internet has brought us not burgeoning communities of online musicians, artists, and writers, but “mediocre mush”; a pack mentality; recreations of things that were better done with older technologies; an occasional Unix upgrade; and an online encyclopedia. His conclusion: it’s all “pretty boring.”
And although internet guru Jonathan Zittrain praises the first personal computers and the early days of the internet for promoting unlimited creativity and exploration, he warns that the generative systems which enabled users to create new ways of being and communicating are giving way to tethered devices like smart phones, Kindles, Tivos, and iPads, all of which channel our communications and program our entertainment along safe and familiar paths and prohibit inventive tinkering. Zittrain reminds us that the PC was a blank slate, a true tabula rasa that let imaginative, technically-accomplished users repurpose it over and over again, but he fears that the internet appliance of the future will be little more than a hi-tech toaster programmed to let us do only what the marketing departments at Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon want us to do.
It’s easy to ignore the Luddites. The internet isn’t destroying English (you’re reading this online, right?) or replacing face-to-face human interaction (Facebook or no Facebook, babies continue to be born). Plus, we’re all using computers and the ‘net, so how bad can they be?
But what about the informed critiques of experts like Stoll, Jaro