DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

Well there’s the caterpillars in my garden:

(Hundreds of the buggers) . They make me go ‘Hmmm’

Then there’s streetart and how fantastic and generous the artists are to put it out there for all to see (even though some people just walk past).

And isn’t it amazing that some people can concetrate so hard that they can read a small screen for hours in the middle of New York’s Chinatown:

Then there is the range of cakes available in Starbucks:

(And how is it that Miles always leaves a bit?)

But also there is the difficult pithy problem of trying to sort out what digital literacies are.

I think that if you come at the definition from technology based disciplines and epistomologies, digital literacies are skills and knowledge needed in order to make technology work It is about ‘how do you use the web?’ Or ‘what can I make my mobile phone do?’ ‘What is the best way to use Google?’ or ‘ What is better, Google or Yahoo?’ (etc.) Or ‘how do I do a podcast?’

Whereas if you come at it from the angle of a literacy/language specialist, , you are thinking about
‘What kind of text does technology produce?’ and ‘How does this affect the message?’
‘How do texts change when we have more technology available?’
Do readers respond diffrently to digital texts?
What do we need to learn?
What are the social implications?
How does the meaning change?
How do the different modal properties work together?
What are the affordances and constraints?

If we have a broad definition of text, does that mean that we need to broaden our notion of literacy? I am happy to think about speech as spoken text and I am happy to analyse speech in context and therefore take into account the range of modes that contribute to the meaning of that text … e.g. what people are wearing; where and why the speech event takes place (etc.) But I do not think this is literacy.

I think literacy involves writing/reading. But I also think that because context contributes to meaning, that literacy is never JUST about writing. So we have to think wide. But not too wide. Just because something is digital does not mean it is literacy. Just because something is communicating meaning, does not mean it is literacy. This does not mean I value the written word more than other types of communication. It is just that literacy is something in particular.