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FYI France : collective authors -- "Roger T. Pédauque"
A new book published by C&F éditions is intriguing as much for
its procedures as for its substance:
"Le Document : à la lumière du numérique" [="The Document,
in the Digital Era"] by Roger T. Pédauque (Caen : C&F
éditions, 2006) ISBN 2-915825-04-1 ; http://cfeditions.com.
The author, "Roger T. Pédauque", is a "collective name"...
Several folks contributed, here, and they did so largely online.
This is a new phenomenon for the Internet, although it is a
practice which has a long cultural history in France.
The substance of the book's discussion should be of interest to
anyone working in digital information -- or trying to, beneath
the increasing weight of "information overload" -- the document,
in light of the digital, what difference do the new media really make?
Jean-Michel Salaün and the many with whom he worked on this
project make interesting points, about documents and
documentation in the modern era. The book offers three
cooperatively-written essays:
"Pédauque 1" ; the document as form, sign, and medium ;
reformulations wrought by the digital era -- various
propositions regarding the various roles of documents,
from various points of view...
and,
"Pédauque 2" ; the text in play ; permanence, and the
transformations of the document -- how documents work,
the background, the text, the variorum edition idea and
its war with change, of Semantic Webs, of Mediation, and
of the ontology and "neutrality" of technique... aka is
there anything "wertfrei", about "the document"...
and, finally,
"Pédauque 3" ; the document in the Modern World --
deconstruction -- the meanings, and semiotics, of things
like "media", and differences "the digital" can make...
It is a bold undertaking. The writers here proceed systematically
through several of the leading issues of modern thought. Over 3
1/2 years, the at-least-175 researchers officially involved, "and
perhaps others", debated and discussed ideas which have
interested many of us.
The approach which emerges postulates "definitions", poses
questions about them, discusses them. In the discussion of texts,
the notable "OSI 7 Layer Model" interestingly re-emerges from its
past tangles with TCP/IP, in the 7-layered "cake" of the W3
Consortium's "Semantic Web", and "Basic English" works it way,
inexorably if painfully, towards "Global English".
The idea of Mediated text, too, is posed, the question being --
as it has been since Luther at least -- the cultural constraints,
and other baggage, which might accompany such "mediation"...
And the idea of change, particularly in the media -- now that we
have digitization, and we have made that electronic -- is
discussed in some detail. iPods, ebooks: are these "media" a new
form of "mediation"; is there a new "public space" to which they
appeal; is there a Darwinism, or something else, which is going
to govern documents and their use and their relations to their
users, in all of that?
Interesting questions... all the more interesting because of the
cooperative and relatively-unmediated nature of their discussion,
here, or at least of the claim to same...
For it is the procedure of this book -- of the individuals and
groups, who and which participated electronically, in the
formulation of the three texts, which became the documents
assembled in this printed medium artifact -- just being exact...
-- which is the most interesting thing to me personally, here.
There is a great deal of mere punditry available to be read now,
online and in print, on all of the subjects addressed in these
three texts. But in few places can one find true "discussion" of
them, yet: the ideas are too new, perhaps, and still are busy
"getting out there" -- this book and the online discussions which
preceded it are one of the first instances I myself have seen of
such ideas not just being put forward but truly being tossed back
and forth, by groups, and really being talked about.
If so... if the procedures followed really did do this...
Jean-Michel Salaün includes a fascinating appendix (p. 213) on
the methodology of the project:
"...the objective, of having the author here be a
collective pseudonym, was a double one. On the one hand,
to attenuate the cult of personality and the active
role-playing present in the scientific world... On the
other to build a community effort, of reflection upon
digital documents, which has not existed before and still
remains to be constructed, one with an inter-disciplinary
perspective..."
So it came down to the editing, maybe: over 60 people, says
Salaün, worked hard at this... and in his notes he offers the
URLs where the various versions and revisions may be found and
examined to prove this -- to prove that here, indeed, is the work
of, "un auteur collectif, fictif et numérique".
As Salaün says, the inter-disciplinary approach of this work is
one of its first advantages. Going beyond the individual pundits,
each of whom seems to be addressing no one else but herself or
himself alone, is an initial task in any such controversial and
ground-breaking effort.
"What is the impact of the latest technology upon our most
fundamental beliefs and cultural practices?..." : personal
opinions abound, but too few go any further than the expression
of merely individual views -- ideas are too new, individual
ignorance too profound -- so perhaps this is precisely the most
fertile ground, for the "collective wisdom" approach embodied in
"Roger T. Pédauque"...
At least since CP Snow's 1959 look at "The Two Cultures",
suspicion has lain heavily upon the modern tendency to
specialize: during the last century, academic disciplines which
had been "humanistic" only a century before became rigorously
"scientific", or at least they began to make that claim. Snow
wondered, scientist and fiction-writer that he simultaneously
was, whether the two tendencies would diverge and never meet again.
Wordsworth as far back as 1799 favored a more synthetic
approach, warning against analytics,
"...that false secondary power by which
In weakness we create distinctions, then
Believe our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made."
(The Two-Part Prelude)
-- when we come to any set of very new ideas, then, such as those
presented to us now by our very new Digital Era, an approach more
"holistic" than normal may be necessary -- one more
all-encompassing, at any rate, than our traditional science has
been. The collective-wisdom approach of a project such as that of
"Roger T. Pédauque" represents this need, perhaps...
Perhaps using the new digital media themselves -- thus ensuring
at least that those contributing to and discussing such ideas are
familiar personally with the new techniques -- then subjecting
that to more traditional "editorial" procedures, and finally
producing here a traditional-format "printed" book for the
convenient use of those who may or may not be familiar, is the
best way to broach and discuss these subjects. As vs. hiding the
discussion in some academic nook where only the "elect" with
access thereto may gain entrance, and a hearing.
If the goal here is to maximize access and inter-disciplinarity,
as stated, then the novel "procedures" adopted would seem to
favor that: that way lies success -- traditions may not work.
But Michel Melot describes the greatest risk in all of this well,
in his Préface to the book: there he thoughtfully warns (p. 14),
"The economy of the media has replaced the economy of the
message. Tools for reconfiguration, motorized research,
access for whomever, all are being sold. But we have a
new situation forcing us to think outside of the mold.
"On the one hand a global medium spanning all geographic
frontiers, all linguistic frontiers (with Unicode the
machine can read all that is written), but not our
economic and social frontiers, which are the real
frontiers; on the other, a medium which draws its
advantage from its abilities at atomization, at the
breaking-up of things into insignificant bits.
"One hopes, then, that this radical normalization of
communication is to become a universal language. But this
language is mute, and until it can be made to speak it is
Babel which we are reconstructing."
So there are several books, here.
* There are the texts of Jean-Michel Salaün and his collaborators,
assembled and presented as the work of their "auteur collectif,
fictif et numérique", "Roger T. Pédauque". The idea of collective
and anonymous / pseudonymous authorship is not new in France:
throughout French history, any time there has been controversy
or, as here, novelty -- one thinks of the famous pamphlets and
tracts and feuilletons of political and religious controversy,
and of the journals and encyclopédies of philosophic and
scientific advance -- such "collective pseudonym" presentation
has been resorted to, and has turned out to be a very useful
technique. Here once again, then, France is proposing the
approach, to subjects which are "new": the use of the technique
in this instance being perhaps less notable than the need for it
-- so we are in a burst of creativity, maybe, or even perhaps as
Melot suggests an emergency, and we have need for new approaches.
* The book also presents the striking graphics of Nicolas Taffin
-- "avec la complicité de Zuzana Licko... et de Jim Lyles" --
in-tune with the text, as book graphics not always are, and
innovative and evocative in their own right. Familiar portraits,
but ingeniously depicted here in the QWERTY / "ASCII-art"
characters of our own Digital Era keyboards, portraits of the
Ur-text architects of our new digital synthesis: Wittgenstein,
Tim Berners-Lee, Diderot, and -- on the book cover -- one "Johann
Gensfleich, dit Gutenberg".
* In addition to texts and graphics, though, the book -- the
entire effort -- presents, too, the notion of collectivity, of
"collective name", "collective authorship", "collective
pseudonym", "collective wisdom" -- of the effort being made to
break down traditional barriers and to enlist the assistance and
the opinions of many, many more among us than ever before...
Note:
Wikipedia does all this too: imperfectly, although fabulously
successfully -- 1.5 million "articles", now, and millions upon
millions, too many to count, of daily users logging in from all
over the planet... And modern scientific research does the same,
with its "publish or perish" and "peer review" processes, which
have blossomed into great globalized industrialized publishing
efforts, since the more modest early years of the French and
British "academies" and "learned societies", all now fully and
emphatically "online", some even "in realtime"... The general
idea being to broaden discussion, in tackling a new or very
difficult subject, even at some risk of depth: although "science"
has the depth but becomes too narrow in its "disciplines" -- and
Wikipedia sacrifices depth to breadth, too often still...
But how else can this effort to broaden discussion be made, and
made better? By using the new digital media as "Roger T. Pédauque"
has here, perhaps... Examination of this methodology, and
consideration of its contribution to the result, ought to be the
obligation of every student of information science and of any
interested researcher. There is much frustrated effort under way
in any lab or think-tank, nowadays, which might benefit from a
reading of this book, studying both its procedure and its substance.
Mitchell Kapor coined the term which best expresses the general
concept: "massively distributed collaboration" --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_distributed_collaboration
-- how else, to avoid the insularity of our technical and
scientific discussions, and the limitations of the "puny
boundaries" we have inherited from others, to consider some of
the more global ramifications of our brave new digital world?
Or we could just "let it happen", and then per Melot's warning
risk ending up with Babel. Of course that might be interesting...
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
ps. Recently we've re-pulverized the old one, just downstream
from Baghdad, for neither the first nor the last time I suppose:
in our current era of Universal Language fantasies, though,
perhaps we need to commemorate it, instead -- or we "shall be
condemned to repeat it", as Acton's saying goes...
--oOo--
FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916
*
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