Wiki – Laboratoire Ex situ / René Audet

Référence : VAN DER WEEL, A Changing our textual minds, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011, 256 p.

Synthèse : Se focalisant sur l’épochée de la transition du texte analogue au texte digital, cet ouvrage introduit le concept de « docuverse » (emprunté à Ted Nelson) et apparaît toucher en grande partie, même si ce n’est pas directement, à l’expérientialité du livre en contexte numérique. À approcher.

Mots-clés : Textual universe, Text, Transition, Transmission, Digitization, History

Langue : Anglais

Format : Papier

Description existante : « Text has always been the chief vehicle for the inscription and dissemination of knowledge and culture. As more and more of our textual communication moves into the digital realm we have reached a crucial moment in the history of textual transmission. In many respects digital text looks deceptively like print. But beneath the surface of the screen, digital textuality obeys very different rules than printed text. The digital textual universe offers a wealth of new and exciting possibilities - but it also sets new rules for the writer's and reader's engagement with text. Changing our textual minds analyses the continuities and discontinuities in textual transmission as we move from a print paradigm into an increasingly digital world. It conceptualises the epochal transition from analogue to digital both in factual terms and in terms of its social significance. Centuries of reading and writing practice have made us Homo typographicus. Our entire way of disseminating knowledge and culture is firmly based on print culture. The need to come to grips with the shift to digital textuality in the early twenty-first century will literally change our minds. », trouvé sur http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719085550/, le 27 février 2017.

Compte rendu existant : BOYD, Jason, « In his discussion of digital textuality, van der Weel starts by reminding us that, despite the invention of computers as machines to perform numerical calculations (and which were never intended to process text), in today’s computers, text has a central and predominant place, from what computers are used for (e.g., email) to how they function (e.g., markup, programming languages). As a counterpart to the “Order of the Book,” the networked digital computer has created a “new kind of information space,” which van der Weel, borrowing a term coined by Ted Nelson, calls the “docuverse.” Van der Weel discusses the changes that the “docuverse” is making to our textual practices, from the “websurfing’” consumption of texts, to the instability of digital texts due to disappearance, invisibility of alteration, and technological degradation and obsolescence, and to the manipulability of digital interfaces on which we read text: “The conclusion seems inescapable that not only the technological characteristics of books and the digital medium but also their social consequences are indeed very different” (p. 192). Changing our textual minds is valuable for encapsulating the long history of textual transmission, from writing to digital text, and also for synthesizing the scholarship on this history and its social effects. While those well-versed in this history will perhaps find in the book nothing particularly new or ground-breaking, its admirable breadth and citations and references make it useful as a comprehensive introduction to the subject of what text has been, is, and may become. Thankfully, van der Weel eschews fevered pronouncements that the computer is creating either a heaven or a hell on earth. Pointing out that recurring predictions that new mediums will extinguish existing mediums are “never fulfilled” (p. 103), he cautiously offers in his conclusion some possible scenarios as to what the future might hold for the book and digital text and how this might change textual practices, while admitting that, while it is clear that significant medial change is occurring, it is impossible to predict where that change will lead. », trouvé sur http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/89/221, le 27 février 2017.