Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 291.
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[1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: book on computer graphics (41)
[2] From: David Hoover <david.hoover@nyu.edu>
Subject: A New Book, a Confirmation, and a Refutation (34)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2021-10-09 06:38:46+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: book on computer graphics
Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects, An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT
Press, 2021)
> How computer graphics transformed the computer from a calculating
> machine into an interactive medium, as seen through the histories of
> five technical objects.
>
> Most of us think of computer graphics as a relatively recent
> invention, enabling the spectacular visual effects and lifelike
> simulations we see in current films, television shows, and digital
> games. In fact, computer graphics have been around as long as the
> modern computer itself, and played a fundamental role in the
> development of our contemporary culture of computing. In Image
> Objects, Jacob Gaboury offers a prehistory of computer graphics
> through an examination of five technical objects—an algorithm, an
> interface, an object standard, a programming paradigm, and a hardware
> platform—arguing that computer graphics transformed the computer from
> a calculating machine into an interactive medium.
>
> Gaboury explores early efforts to produce an algorithmic solution for
> the calculation of object visibility; considers the history of the
> computer screen and the random-access memory that first made
> interactive images possible; examines the standardization of
> graphical objects through the Utah teapot, the most famous graphical
> model in the history of the field; reviews the graphical origins of
> the object-oriented programming paradigm; and, finally, considers the
> development of the graphics processing unit as the catalyst that
> enabled an explosion in graphical computing at the end of the
> twentieth century.
>
> The development of computer graphics, Gaboury argues, signals a
> change not only in the way we make images but also in the way we
> mediate our world through the computer—and how we have come to
> reimagine that world as computational.
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2021-10-08 16:32:26+00:00
From: David Hoover <david.hoover@nyu.edu>
Subject: A New Book, a Confirmation, and a Refutation
I announce here my most recent book, *Modes of Composition and the
Durability of Style in Literature,* Routledge, 2021.
https://www.routledge.com/Modes-of-Composition-and-the-Durability-of-Style-in-Literature/Hoover/p/book/9780367366704
I was recently able to confirm and refute a claim I made in the book
simultaneously. In a discussion of Barthes' "The Death of the Author" in
the book, I quote from his provocative essay, in which he claims:
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single
“theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space
of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of
writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations,
resulting from the thousand sources of culture.
I point out that the idea that a text is a tissue of un-original citations
is problematic because a web search for a string of eight words from almost
any novel returns only hits to that novel. Yet, a search for a string of
eight words from my own book (before it was published) returned no hits at
all. The phrase from my book was “will almost certainly return no hits at
all.” Interestingly enough, a current search for my eight-word phrase
produces hits to a Google Books preview of my book and to more than twenty
pirated copies of my book.
I guess I should be flattered?
--
David L. Hoover, Professor of English, NYU
212-998-8832 244 Greene Street, Room 409
http://wp.nyu.edu/davidlhoover
"They had the Nos. of the rain bow and the Power of the air all
workit out with counting which is how they got boats in the air
and picters on the wind. Counting clevverness is what it wer."
-- Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
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