Cybertextuality and Text Analysis Ian Lancashire Marked up by Martin Holmes

Marked up to be included in the on the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference Website. Received too late to be included in the Abstracts book.

Email from author to PGL, 25/05/05.

 plenary cybertextuality text analysis language cognition MDH: Created from email source 27 May 2005. MDH: Entered corrections from author 27 May 2005. MDH: Fixed spelling error in Norbert Wiener's surname in biblio 7 June 2005. Cybertextuality and Text Analysis Ian Lancashire
ian.lancashire@utoronto.ca
University of Toronto

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.
Bibliography Espen J. Aarseth Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London 1997 Alan Baddeley Working Memory and Language: An Overview Journal of Communication Disorders 36.3 228-66 2003 Peter Galison The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision Critical Inquiry 21 677-99 1994 Donna Haraway A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s Socialist Review 80 65-108 1985 N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics Chicago University of Chicago Press 1999 N. Katherine Hayles Writing Machines Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press 2002 Ian Lancashire Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination Susan Schreibman Ray Siemens John Unsworth A Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities Blackwell's Oxford 2004 Ian Lancashire Cybertextuality TEXT Technology 13.1 May 2005 Philip Lieberman Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain: The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mass. 2000 R.P. Masani Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 Birkhäuser Basel 1990 G.A. Miller The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information Psychological Review 63 89-97 1956 <name reg="Morae">Morae</name> TechSmith Okemos, MI 2004 David R. Olson The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1994 John R. Pierce An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals & Noise 2nd edition Dover New York 1980 David Poeppel Gregory Hickok Towards a New Functional Anatomy of Language Cognition 11 1-12 2004 John B. Smith Dana Kay Smith Eileen Kupstas Automated Protocol Analysis Human-computer Interaction 8 101-45 1993 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine 2nd edition MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. 1961 Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society 2nd edition Hearst New York 1967