Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 362.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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[1] From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024 (78)
[2] From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024 (32)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-12-30 14:59:38+00:00
From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024
Willard, hello.
On 30 Dec 2023, at 8:25, Humanist wrote:
> the question of whether, and if so when, the all-or-none nature
> of the binary signal matters, or when we make it matter. Perhaps this
> bundle of questions has faded from our minds, but I'm still teased by
> it, and so would like to ask for specific instances in which it does. An
> enormous amount of effort and ingenuity goes into making clean bunary
> signals
Every representation involves choices. A painting represents either a scene or
something more abstract; but even the most hyperrealist painting is necessarily
a selection of the affordances of the thing it is 'representing'. If we
subsequently digitise that painting, we make a further selection of what to
include or leave out.
We can frame those choices negatively or passively, as 'what do I leave out?',
and I might omit parts of the object from the representation deliberately, or
because I don't think them to be important, or even that I haven't noticed them.
And we can frame them positively or actively, as 'what do I include?', where I
select this or that as the key features I want to capture and work with. If I
were to digitise a painting, or text, I could anticipate lots of entertaining
and technical arguments about formats, colour gamuts, and metadata standards,
precisely because different people will make different choices about what is
_obviously_ the important set of features to retain. Perhaps it's
characteristic of the digital humanities to find the painting's metadata's
schema as interesting and thought-provoking as the painting.
With a binary signal, however, I think there's an additional thing. If you play
with electronics, and look, on an oscilloscope, at a digital component flipping
state, you quickly discover that there's an awful lot going on there, which
touches on much more of the circuit you're trying to debug than the mind (well,
than my mind) can comfortably accommodate. The overall circuit however, is
designed so that the electrical mess there is almost all ignorable, and if I
stand just a little bit further off, the bit-flip is all I can see. And that
means that I have a qualitatively different object to handle -- pace the
inclusion/exclusion remarks above, what I now have is neither lesser nor
greater, just different.
And that difference means I can apply different rules -- in this case boolean
logic -- which make no sense with the closer view. I would do the same thing if
I talked about 'genes' rather than strips of DNA molecules, or 'electrons' as
opposed to electrical current. Thus the key thing about the 'digitisation'
involved in seeing a flip-flop component (ie, a bi-stable thing) becoming a
_binary_ one, is not the newly-added binary-ness, but the major conceptual
reframing that it shares with 'gene' and 'electron', in opening up a different
logic.
I'm slightly struggling to find a non-science version of this. Project
Gutenberg's holdings have very little fidelity to the physical books they
originate from, beyond being a list of the same words in the same order. But
that brutal abstraction, repeated for thousands of books, opens up different
questions.
> switch. So we conceptualise a non-binary experience and so render it
> binary. Such plays out through many life-experiences. What about
> listening to digitally reproduced music? Some persist in hearing the
> difference between that and music experienced through analog equipment.
> The concert hall raises other questions. And so on and so forth.
One of the things that many digitisations aim to do, of course, is to reproduce
the analogue original. If I compare a digital recording of a concert with a
(analogue) magnetic tape one, or a printed-out digital photograph with a
chemical one, then I probably couldn't tell the difference; and any (non-insane-
audiophile) conversation about the difference might be about the difference in
experience between sharing a room with a performer versus a recording, and not
about the fidelity of the recording. Thus 'digitisation', here, seems to me to
have a significantly different valence from the 'binarising' sense above.
Best wishes,
Norman
--
Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-12-30 12:31:51+00:00
From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024
Hello Willard, hello everyone
your post reminds me of the old adage that the world is comprised of two
sorts of people:
those who believe in binary contrasts
and
those who don’t!
More seriously it seems to me that *some* people spend a lot of energy
constructing binaries and they find these helpful
Others less so.
Looking back at Levi Strauss's work on mythic structures in the Americas
it seems to work on the material he has but not to generalise as he
wants. Those sorts of structures are potential but not actualised in
many other systems of thought round the world.
And there's quite localised variation: in Cameroon where my research is
focused there are groups in the north where it works (See Nigel Barley's
symbolic structures) enabling equations between pots, skulls, iron
smelting, procreation and rain. But not that far away in the middle of
the country they don’t play those games.
best wishes for the season and the new year
david
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