Text Processing

Invitation

This first Monday Reading will be dedicated to text processing. We will discuss concepts such as What You See Is What You Get (WISYWYG), the virtues of ascii, what the differences are between writing, language, code, formatting and markup, and how our keyboards perform. As a way to map the long-term legacies that are implied in each of our keystrokes, we will play with a Teletype Model 33, one of the most widespread computer interfaces in the 1960s.

Exercises

Exercise: Teletype Model 33 exploration. Tracking the pre-history of ASCII character encoding from the holes on a paper strip to our computers of today.
trace 60 years legacy of an ASCII ‘a’, physical-holes-to-digital-bits, the hexadecimal and the alphabetic, plain and rich text, the letter process and the word processor…

Texts

• Dennis Tenen, “Digital Formalisms” in: Computational poetics (2017)
• Matthew Fuller, “It looks like you are writing a letter” in: Behind the Blip (1999)
• Katherine Hayles, “Making Discrete and the Interpenetration of Code and Language” in: My Mother was a computer (2005)

Traces

• Etherpad notes
• Audio recording
• Images, files and other traces

External Links

• A.PASS website: https://apass.be/textprocessing/
• Edit this page: https://stuff2233.club/padlife/p/mondayreadings_01_text-processing

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