Lecture et écriture du texte numérique

In Theories of the Text (Greetham 1999), D. C. Greetham begins by observing that the word “text” derives from the Latin texere, which means “to weave, join together, plait, braid” and therefore “to construct, fabricate, build, or compose.” “Text,” he goes on to say, “is thus both literal and concrete on the one hand – the physical woven text – and figurative and conceptual on the other: a work of art and both the technical and imaginative procedures whereby this work is brought forth.” (26) Text understood in this way covers a range of phenomena, from the most concrete and material aspects of expression to the most abstract and ideal aspects of content and meaning.

significant increases in signal intensity in additional regions controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

la “lecture industrielle” (lecture sur supports informatiques) demande davantage de compétences que la lecture sur papier

« La Singularité technologique est un concept, selon lequel, à partir d'un point hypothétique de son évolution technologique, la civilisation humaine sera dépassée par les machines – au-delà de ce point, le progrès n’est plus l’œuvre que d'intelligences artificielles, elles-mêmes en constante progression. Il induit des changements tels sur l'environnement que l’Homme d’avant la Singularité ne peut ni les appréhender ni les prédire de manière fiable. » Définition Wikipédia

l’extrême contemporain

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

Of course, it's probably not an either/or proposition. I want both: I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more.

by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming

In the 1950s, John Von Neumann was quoted as saying that “the ever accelerating progress of technology…gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

spoken language is an evolutionary adaptation, but written language, in every form from cuneiform to unicode, is a technology, so there’s no written mode that isn’t under some sway or other.

Kittler says the typewriter made Nietzsche’s work more aphoristic, but Nietzsche was always an aphoristic writer, so was this a perversion or a purification of his style?

“We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,”

“We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,”

Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?

Más información, menos conocimiento

Lo que significa, si él tiene razón, que la robotización de una humanidad organizada en función de la "inteligencia artificial" es imparable. A menos, claro, que un cataclismo nuclear, por obra de un accidente o una acción terrorista, nos regrese a las cavernas. Habría que empezar de nuevo, entonces, y a ver si esta segunda vez lo hacemos mejor.

I think Carr’s premises are correct:  the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.

there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading.

in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects

La machine à écrire et la machine à lire se sont rejointes, ont fusionné, même si elles se démultiplient en autant d'outils que de pratiques.

Les développements récents des neurosciences cognitives permettent maintenant d'envisa­ger de véritables programmes d'éducation de l'attention, renseignant sur ses limites et son bon usage. Dans cet univers de multitâche permanent, ce bon usage ne va plus de soi et il est peut-être temps d'envisager une véritable éducation de l'attention, notamment en milieu scolaire, qui prépare dès l'enfance à la vie connectée.

The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.

The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

I would like to see more attention paid to how you go from thinking something to making something. If I’m learning about numbers, how will that help me understand the financial situation that no one in the world seems to understand right now.

(p. 28) «Par grammatisation, on doit entendre le processus qui conduit à décrire et à outiller une langue sur la base des deux technologies qui sont encore aujourd’hui les piliers de notre savoir métalinguistique: la grammaire et le dictionnaire.» Sylvain Auroux, «Introduction. Le processus de grammatisation et ses enjeux», dans son Histoire des idées linguistiques, Tome 2, Liège, Mardaga, 1992, pp. 11-64

Deux théories s'affrontent en effet sur la différence entre perception consciente et non consciente. L'une, alimentée surtout par les études en IRM, prédit qu'il y a une sorte de continuité entre les deux types de traitement : le non-conscient correspondrait à l'activation des mêmes aires cérébrales que le conscient mais avec une intensité moindre. L'autre prédit qu'il existe au contraire une rupture. Nous avons déjà obtenu dans notre laboratoire des résultats allant dans le sens de cette deuxième théorie.

Nous avons trouvé que la perception consciente du deuxième mot dépend de la vitesse à laquelle est traité le premier. Nous avons identifié une différence dans la dynamique d'une onde appelée P300 correspondant à l'activité d'un réseau fronto-pariétal. Lorsque le sujet voit le deuxième mot, c'est que cette onde a été rapide pour le premier mot, avec un pic élevé très tôt. Mais, s'il ne voit pas le deuxième mot, l'onde P300 a été moins intense et plus longue pour le premier mot, et elle est carrément absente pour le deuxième mot. C'est donc que le traitement plus long de l'onde P300 pour le premier mot empêche le second d'être perçu.

What is a book, anyway? An examination of the EPUB 3 draft standard reveals that most of the differences between an EPUB book and a website boil down to one core difference: the book is self-contained.