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Some brief analyses of our primary reading.

Interfaces of the word and its transitions

The interface of reading is a pervasive cultural practice. In an oral culture the speaker would be the “contact surface” or interface between an audience and any content. Particular elements of language such as cadence in poetry and song might help an audience navigate an interface as would be the case with epic narratives.

People acquired new skills during the transition from an oral to a print culture because reading and writing require different cognitive activities than speaking. Barbara Eisenstein notes that “rhyme and cadence were no longer required to preserve certain formulas and recipes. The nature of the collective memory was transformed” (66). The audience also had to learn to negotiate a linear page as well as learn to read.

Similarly, the shift from manuscript to book (or script to print) is a fascinating transition in the evolution of print interfaces. However, the modern-day book has undergone a substantial evolution from its raw beginnings (Chartier 18). Title pages and page numbers, for example, were added in 1470 by Arnold ther Hoernen at Cologne (Haynes 34). “More complete and better arranged indices” were mentioned as an advertising tool at the end of the fifteenth century (Eisenstein 58). Readers had to learn how to use these new structural and navigational tools. Eisenstein suggests that the thoughts of a reader could be shaped by the organization of a book: “basic changes in book format might well lead to changes in thought-patterns . . . A 1604 edition of an English Dictionary notes that at the outset that 'the reader must learne the alphabet, to wit: the order of the letters as they stand'“(89).

Cognitive activities such as learning the alphabet help shape our taken-for-granted understanding of a book's interface. The interface of the book is learned early and so seems “transparent” to knowledgeable readers today. However, the interface of the computer is not yet “transparent.” There are few standardized structural and navigational tools a reader can use with the computer interface. Each new computer application presents a different interface to be learned by those who use it. The first printed books were modeled on illuminated manuscripts, and similarly, early hypertexts built upon existing models of print interface. However, like the earlier interface transitions, this book model is now changing and transformations of our literary practices will likely take place. Stuart Moulthrop argues that “in the long run, new media do not erase or extinguish old ones; they intermix and crossbreed, changing all communication in the process” (138). Such transformations of interface will not supplant written texts, but may alter the way we negotiate virtual ones.

Thus the term interface, an unfamiliar word to some, represents some characteristics and purposes familiar to textual experts. As a discipline interested in the study and development of text, English Studies should obviously be concerned with both the concept of interface and its design. So it is important to ask “What elements of older interfaces help generate new ones?” For instance, the integration of particular elements (like pagination) into the interface we now call the “book” was a gradual process. Noted book scholars have been asking important questions about the nature of the new interface. Roger Chartier asks, “How do we situate within the long history of the book, of reading, and of relations to the written word, the revolution that has been predicted, has in fact already begun, which transforms the book (or the written object) as we know it—with its quires, its leaves, its pages—into an electronic text to be read on a screen” (Forms and Meanings 14)? Chartier implies a translation of the current book model onto the computer screen. Yet I believe the question is still larger. How does the interface itself shape the content? Walter Ong states that “writing and print are technologies, requiring effectively prepared materials and tools” (Interfaces of the Word 22). Interface is also a technology in this sense, or at least a crucial tool which impacts and informs other technologies. Elements of interface impacted our history of reading and writing in various ways. By examining elements of older interfaces, we can start identifying similar elements within the new.

Use of interface elements such as illustration, rubrication, colophons, table of contents, structure, index and physical tools (whether a wood block or a printing press) all shaped book design. However, these elements also altered what the book contained. The advent of the printing press heralded (in a general sense) a wider dissemination of information. The Protestant movement may not have been so successful without a wider availability of Bibles that were translated into the common language (i.e., Luther translating the Bible into German). What elements of the interface made this translation possible? What can we learn from the integration of these elements into the hypermedia interface of today?

One element present in most interface design is illustration or image. It is a well-known concept that writing is “integrally related to drawing, that the first writing, for example, was a simplification of drawings,” and that we “have long been torn between the desire to see what we think and yet assert the essential abstract character of writing” (Ruszkiewicz 11). Writing itself can be viewed as illustration, particularly the protowriting found on cave walls from 30,000 to 15,000 B.C.E. (Avrin 17). There are three progressive stages of writing: logographic, phonographic and phonetic. Logographic writing is picture writing, both pictographic and ideographic in nature. Egyptian hieroglyphics are an example of this form (though there are some phonographic elements in hieroglyphics too).

Logograph contained on the Pioneer 10 by Carl Sagan

Picture writing was the first stage of writing(and survives in many forms today including computer icons and street signs). Logographic writing contains pictographic and ideographic signs. For example, the Pioneer 10 (see above) satellite contained Carl Sagan's logographic representation of human kind (22). Pictographs are graphic representations of objects, but ideographs are signs connected with concepts associated with the graphic symbol or sign. The sign of an ear pictorially would mean the literal object, but in ideographic writing could represent the act of listening.

In phonographic writing, the sign is tied to the sound of the object's name. The combination of phonograms and logograms is an example of early writing systems (23). Determinatives, or semantic indicators, would help the person interpret the word correctly by providing an auxiliary sign to indicate correct pronunciation or meaning. For example, a representation of a flock of birds might be accompanied by a small picture like . Similar mechanisms are also present in our current models of computer interface. Icons are often accompanied by text to insure, rather than pronunciation, a correct interpretation of its sign. Icons are also used by themselves as representations of meaning, as either pictographs or signs.

A later stage in writing is that of phonetic representation, where elements of speech are represented by signs. Alphabetic representation is the final abstraction of symbols and the creation of an alphabet created enormous changes in how people communicated. The interface for information retrieval and transfer had changed, and people had to adapt to that change. Yet the change was part of a larger process, a refinement of writing in general. As the alphabet created a commonality of language for more people, learning to read and write using abstract symbols also closed it to others (generally the lower classes and the poor).

So stages of writing can be likened to those of interface development, and what we understand today as the computer “interface” is really an early stage of development. Yet the stages of writing also demonstrate the palimpsest nature of interface, since they evolved from combinations of earlier technologies. Writing came about as a combination of elements were implemented in conjunction like education, ink technologies, and writing surface technologies. The transition from manuscript to book was also full of palimpsest-like elements. Early books contained many components of manuscript design: justified right-hand margins, typography that resembled script, spacing between lines, contractions and ligatures, proportions of text to blank space and style of decoration and illumination. Certain design elements remain canonical, such as the use of two-column layouts for easier reading, the design of which can be traced back to the fourth-to-twelfth century codex, which was based on earlier scroll designs (Avrin 4-5).

A Gutenberg Bible. UT-Austin's copy

The Gutenberg Bible (created around 1450) shown above is an excellent example of a printed book that retains elements of manuscript design. Though some copies were printed on vellum, the University of Texas' copy shown is on paper. Note the two-column design on both pages, and the use of rubrication in the lettering. There are ample margins on either side of the type as well as space at the bottom of the text. Contemporary books use many techniques modified by centuries of use. The book interface, though not necessarily perfected, seems static because it has been relatively consistent for at least four centuries. Elements present in the Western book interface now appear transparent because we are practiced in reading books. However, the book interface, like the virtual interface, was refined in a process that took centuries. The virtual interface will undergo a similar process, but more rapidly (the crucial difference is in the correspondence between technology and time). The technology of book-making took much longer to realize than the computer technologies of today. Today, anyone can own a computer with the same capabilities as the one that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon less than thirty years ago. Such computing power represents enormous changes over a short period of time.

When Doug Engelbart presented his ideas of interface in 1968, his concepts were enormously influential, but only realized in later iterations. His strategy of direct manipulation, where the user or participant can impact information presented through an interface with third party extensions, has formed the basis for most of the computer interface designs we see today, particularly through the use of the mouse and key commands (Johnson 20). Ironically, the use of direct manipulation takes place through representation—the user does not have direct control, but an avatar to do her bidding.

Interfaces of the word are still undergoing significant shifts, and not all critics think computer interfaces offer as much as older interfaces. In fact, writer and technology critic Sven Birkerts posits a paradox of such metamorphoses of the word:

The earlier historical transition from orality to script—a transition greeted with considerable alarm by Socrates and his followers—changed the rules of intellectual procedure completely. Written texts could be transmitted, studied, and annotated; knowledge could rear itself upon a stable base. And the shift from script to mechanical type and the consequent spread of literacy among the laity is said by many to have made the Enlightenment possible. Yet now it is computers, in one sense the very apotheosis of applied rationality, that are destabilizing the authority of the printed word and returning to us, although at a different part of the spiral, to the process orientation that characterized oral cultures (The Gutenberg Elegies 156).

How does the computer interface destabilize the “authority of the printed word?” By subsuming it? To characterize script as a replacement for orality is too simplistic. A writing culture may displace an oral culture, but elements of orality still remain; palimpsest-like, elements of speech are refigured for writing, just as the slang terms printed in Wired magazine every month demonstrate. The transition from a writing culture to a virtual culture is proving much the same. Within the virtual information spaces of the computer, elements of writing culture remain embedded. For example, narrative, though reorganized spatially, is still often present in hypertext.