theo|digital

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 3: Two Wordbooks

Anyone who has done some study of  historical documents in English notices right away that words are not spelled the way we expect them to be. In  fact, sometimes they’re almost unrecognizable.

This is the page of a very early dictionary, a new idea in 1604. It was compiled and published by Robert Cowdrey—a obstinate Village priest (or so James Gleick describes him).  The purpose of the dictionary was education so that the poor could better understand words in Scripture and sermons, he says.

But this is also a good example of how spelling wasn’t a thing.  It’s not just what you would assume: that certain words have evolved over time.  This is true, but the spelling issue has more to do with the concept not even existing. The written word was best described as stored sound or an MP3 recording (this is my way of speaking, not Geick’s here).  The verb “to spell” originally simply meant to speak aloud (think Harry Potter). And just as our pronunciation can vary slightly as we speak with no consequence, so the spelling of the same word might vary in the same early printed text.

For instance, the title page of Cowdrey’s first edition of this dictionary read:

(* fol. A1r *)

ATable Alphabeticall, con-
teyning and teaching the true
writing, and vnderstanding of hard
vsuall English wordes, borrowed from
the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine,
or French. &c.

With the interpretation thereof by
plaine English words, gathered for the benefit &
helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other
vnskilfull persons. 

Because “words” sounds the same either way, it didn’t matter much how the letters were laid out, even when compiling a dictionary. You’ll notice on this image of the 1613 edition, this had changed so that the spelling matched. The effect of the printing press was that spelling began to be noticed.

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 2: The Persistence of the Word (There Is No Dictionary in the Mind)

This just keeps getting better!  I was tickled (yep) to see that the second chapter of The Information begins with a quote from possibly my favorite media-ecologist-theologian:  Walter Ong (posts).  The St. Louis University Jesuit professor is perplexingly less well-known than Marshall McLuhan, yet he informs my own thought in significant ways.  His writings from the 60s and 70s apply nearly perfectly to, say, Facebook chat.

Gleick gives a great introduction to Professor Ong and his study of human thought before writing (oral culture), and echoes the famous quote of Socrates about how writing will destroy our memories:

For this invention will produce forgetfullness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixer not of memory, but of reminding, and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

(sidenote: this common complaint about the internet in modern life was refreshed again last month in this study.)

So we enter the history of writing:  pictographs and ideographs, the origin of the alphabet, and how writing froze in time previously fluid poetry and thought:  like the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Writing was a way of abstracting thought into it’s own thing, separate from us.

And writing changed the way we think, apply logic, and categorize. It, in fact, created the idea of categorization, and of beginning, middle, and end.  It allowed symbols.  (for bible nerds, it’s why λογος /logos can mean both “word” and “reason”).

Oh, and there’s a great section on Babylonian mathematics. In Cunieform.  Sexagesimal. (base 60!)

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 1: Drums That Talk (When a Code Is Not a Code)

Studying the history of communications technologies, you commonly read that the electric telegraph is a singularly important milestone; especially, it marks the first time that human communications could travel faster than a human. Some exceptions are typically noted (light signals in Paris, bonfires in ancient Greece), but these were limited in their influence until Morse Code appears in the 1840s America.

In his first chapter, James Gleick effectively demonstrates yet another example where Western history has made major misses. African talking drums, poetic and complex, transmitted messages over hundreds of miles without a physical messenger.  And this well before American soil was dubbed such.

Europeans were in Africa for centuries, but the “talking drums” weren’t well understood until a 24-year-old missionary named James Carrington settled on the Upper Congo in 1914.

One day he made an improptu trip to the small town of Yaongama and was surprised to find a teacher, medical assistant, and church members already assembled for his arrival.  They had heard the drums, the explained.

Carrington spends his life in Africa, and becomes an expert at the talking drums, publishing The Talking Drums of Africa in 1949.  His knowledge shows us why Westerns couldn’t comprehend the information. The drums, high and low, relied on the same tonal language attributes that most African languages and Chinese Mandarin do—and most Western languages do not.  In this case, high pitched drums meant high pitch in speech, and vice versa.

But the high and low drums couldn’t express consonants or vowels, only the tones. Just as English speakers can understand sentences like this,

if u cn rd ths
u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa!

African drum listeners could use the context to fill in the the missing information. This lead to creativity and error correction of the drummers, who would recite poems or longer stories to remove the ambuguity.

Drummers would not say, “Come back home,” but rather:

Make your feet come back the way they went,
make your legs come back the way they went,
plant your feet and your legs below,
in the village which belongs to us.

My newest I-Get-Giddy reading project is James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. The 2011 book is a hefty 526 pages (yeah, I should have got the Kindle Edition) and so instead of a review, I hope to blog through chapters at a time. This is probably a better approach in any case, seeing my recent history with balancing life and good reading has been pretty, well, unbalanced. But here’s to continuing to try.

Prologue

“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

It’s not like information just appeared in the world of radio and computers, writes Glieck. It’s the fundamental building block of the universe. “If you want to understand life,” quoting Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels or oozes, think about information technology.”. Biology and physics and economics are all really IT.

But you’ve got to begin somewhere, and our Prologue starts in 1948, where Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon writes a paper introducing the Bit—a unit for measuring information “as though there were such a thing, measurable and quantifiable,” writes Glieck. In fact, Shannon doesn’t use the newer word “information,” instead using the term “intelligence” as in “transmission of intelligence.” “Information” doesn’t yet have the digital-influence definition denoted today.  Another new word—transistor—is chosen in the same year by a vote of Bell scientists. It’s a hybrid of “varistor” and “transconductance”

And it’ll change the world.

But the first chapter will be about African talking drums. Sweet.