Translating Media

Katherine Hayles (2005)My Mother was a computer: digital

subjects and literary texts

Is the work still the work in a new medium?

Examples of medium: print, electronic, speech, braille

•Hayles proposes that when converting print into electronic – this is a form of translation.

•Something is gained as well as lost in translation and this reading seeks to uncover this.

•The internet has transformed our ideas on textuality “to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes.”

William Blake Archive

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

• A free site intended to be used as an international public resource which would provide access to William Blake’s works.

• Comparison – The marriage of Heaven and Hell

http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/comparison.xq?selection=compare&copies=all&bentleynum=B1&copyid=mhh.c&java=yes

TokenX

http://jetson.unl.edu:8080/cocoon/tokenx/index.html?file=..%2Fxml%2Fkeats.0001_sample.xml&fileChooser=on

“Is text abstract, independent from its medium?”

Some differences between print and digital works

Print Digital

Storage and delivery vehicles are the same

Storage and delivery vehicles can be highly disparate

Exists before the book is opened Does not exist in the form it acquires on screen (requires more process)

Stable, unchanging Fluid, can be rewritten

Dependant of physical location Convenient, on demand

Appearance is solid Appearance is dependent on software programs, hardware and connectivity

Ages and weathers with age Preserved as always was

“Does the text lose its meaning when taken from print to digital?”

Is the printed book doomed?

What can’t the i-pad can’t do?

House of Leaves

www.houseofleaves.com

A look at OHCO

OHCO: the idea that text can be encoded into an ‘ordered hierarchy of content objects’

1) x and y are the same text if and only if they are the same ordered hierarchy of content

objects.2) Therefore texts are ordered hierarchies of

content objects.

New media translationBased on translation theory...

1) all acts of communication are acts of translation

2) The translator is not just a conveyor of meaning between languages but an artist in their own right

3) Translation is an art that relies just as heavily on process as it does on a product

4) The source text of the process, possesses a physicality that must be addresses in the translation process

“No translation, no matter how successful, ever renders the original exactly the same

as it was” Hayles

Grigar D. And Barber J. ; New Media Translation Theory and online Brautigan Biography; (2003)

Sources

Hayles, N. K. (2005). ‘Translating media’. In My Mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 90-116.

Bornstein, George (2001). Material Modernism: The Poetics of the Page Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

Newspapers adapting journalism to internet reading habits. Accessed 8 April 2010 fromhttp://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2006/04/newspapers_adapting_journalism_to_intern.php

Guzman, Maryanne. Bibliographical codes: the unassuming things that hold a silent station in this beauteous world. Accessed 8 April 2010 from http://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/material-modernism/files/userfiles/file/maryanne-guzman-bibliographic-codes.pdf

Renear, A., Mylonas, E., Durand, D. (1993). Refining the notion of what text really is: the problem of overlapping hierarchies. Accesses 8 April 2010 from http://www.stg.brown.edu/resources/stg/monographs/ohco.html

Books in the age of the iPad. Accessed 7 April 2010 from Books in the age of the ipad http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/