I’m still fascinated by the CaPiTaLiZaTiOn that appears online. When i posted about it last, folks gave me some *great* pointers. Since then, i’ve followed up on the Azn style and started talking to people. I talked with folks about different spelling styles that emerged with chatrooms and BBSes. I talked with folks about the motivation for spelling words phonetically.
Some of this has obvious technical roots – like pager culture. There’s also a desire to be writing in an encoded fashion so that outsiders can’t tell what is being said. Folks also write this way because it’s cool or because it lets them personalize text.
When thinking about it, i realized how much this was common even in class notes. Remember the hearts above the i’s or the backwards slanted writing? It was all about personalizing the communication – giving it character.
Digital modes of textual presentation are very prescriptive. You have a choice of the following n fonts. Each letter looks the same. There’s no emotion in the letters. It’s sooo boring. No wonder folks have come up with ways of expressing themselves through the typography as well as the text. Think graffiti.
By doing this, people are pushing against an emphasis on the text. They are challenging that text as text is nothing; it’s all about the surrounding features of the text. There was once an art to typography; people haven’t lost that.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html
illuminated text
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html
CaPiTaLiZaTiOn
Apophenia asked what the CaPiTaLiZaTiOn—apparently known sometimes as Azn style—was about and found some answers….
Explain what relevance this has.
knuth wrote a book with manipulation of the typesetting: there is a lecture on his web page that anyone interested can down load.
Knuth invented the TeX system and was instrumental in developing the fonts that we now use on all of our computers.
was trying to add a different perspective on manipulating and Capitization that interects with Knuth’s 3:16 book.
how far is berkley from stanford? he does teach bible lessons every thursday at his Lutheran church over in Palo Alto: he is very open and would recieve anyone interested in bible lessons from a typographical and historical perspective:
Even if you are not religious, Knuth does know alot about the history of computing science and would be a great person to ask some of these questions if it is becomming a entire paper on the subject:
maybe you can interview him on this.
stef
anne forrest handed a early print of Martin Luthers original text: the discussion was about printing presses and how the fonts where chosen for the computer…it comes up in the lecture
Donald Knuth literally wrote the book on the Art of Computer Programming. Actually, several volumes of such books – they were required reading 100 years ago when I did undergrad computer engineering (before it was called that.) Along with Ted Nelson, Knuth is one of my all-time computing heroes!
But back to the point of the evolution of text. Walter Ong (of Orality and Literacy fame) spoke about how instantaneous, multi-way communication create conditions of “secondary orality” (where primary orality was what existed in Ancient Greece, for instance.) This suggests that our text in email, on blogs, instant messages and SMS have more of an oral quality in their effect, as opposed to a “literate” or typographic character (described by Marshall McLuhan in Gutenburg Galaxy.) In pure oral forms, we can convey a tremendous amount of information in vocal inflection, tone of voice and nuance. In secondary oral forms, we do the same via our text tricks, including alternative spellings, abbreviations, odd capitalizations and so forth.
Mark
echis thikio! (you in the right)
i have been doing sousavaillence communication via just digital imaging with steve mann: one could say something with photos: this Moore guy does the same thing with cliping and rearranging for his movie.
[AHHHHCH {my mistakes are very verbal in the written form}]
but back to Don’s booK: i often wonder how many 2.56 checks he sent out for all the errata people fixed with letters…
i really dig his 3:16 illumiinations: he says the same thing with different text to get at multiple meanings.
Now are we DOing the same thing with all these blogs…glogs, and sent shadows of speach, visual and verbal?
I wonder about the broca, wernicke, and visual cortex and how we derive meaning. we see and think: hear and think: we now see a flash of an image on a phone or a community computer: we then see the blog: and then a phone call into the future.
and yes: SPENGLER was a loSer!! its all naturally non linear, with each persons glog as the key to understanding a vicarious soliloquey.
if i say to you all this capitization has everything to do with being able to extrapulate data about clusters of cancer in NJ you will say its all tangental: i agrue that its the very connections of ideas that leads us to the discoveries that the medium of communication leads us to.
If we signal process as speaking, then we can see in the aggregate: if we p2p, and text message as a force, we can in a cool way discover facts about an enormous problem hidden from the public.
it all starts with the goofing around with ideas: learning interpassionatly.
PS: i never met an ancient greek so i can’t say for sure if they really knew what we claim they know {but i know they where ironic and quarrelsome} ;-{)
Maybe there’s room for a graphics tablet chat application.
The you can write ‘hearts above the i’s’ 🙂