A cybertext is any oral, written, mental, or machine-generated language act
viewed from within cybernetics, the study of communication and control in living
organisms and machines, a theory invented by the American mathematician Norbert
Wiener (1894-1964). We author cybertexts by steering or governing their making
according to the persistent feedback we receive from all those who observe them.
Insofar as computing humanists use software to analyze both literary works and
machine-made texts like concordances, they may be said to owe something to
cybernetics. Our analytic programs simulate part or all of the messaging and
feedback process, some acting as creators, others as reader-listeners or noisy
channels. The basis for our software is ultimately how language cognition works.
Given that we create most of our own oral and written utterances
unselfconsciously, we first encounter them as strangers and observers, not as
authors; and our observation always begins with modelling the sense data we have
received from ourselves. These mental models act as feedback and help shape the
next sentences we make. Cybertextual cycles, each an unselfconscious utterance
and a partially conscious modelling and response to it, steer our composition
even if no one but ourselves is present to reply to what we utter.
I propose
that cybertextual cycles, enacted in cognition, partly shape the idiolect or
personal style exhibited by the texts we make. We use text-analysis tools today
to detect the idiosyncratic patterns of flat, atemporal documents, but all
texts, being cybertextual, unfold in time. An author's silent feedback to his
own utterings pulses wave-like in the emerging text, but how can these
characteristic waves, that is, the cybertextual style, be recovered from flat
documents? Usability software offers some tools for this purpose, as do
keyloggers, protocol analysis, and word-processing programs. One way to advance
text-analysis methodology in a post-concordancer age is to investigate
cybertextual style by recording and analyzing the behaviour of living authors as
they write. Usability software like Morae, because it externalizes working memory, can
capture the tic-tocs of cognitive style.