Polishing the Jewel

I've been writing a thesis for a year and a half, and incubating it for at least 20 years. Now I have been given the final edits to deal with, and they will make it stronger and clearer. Part of what I am doing is creating an exploration of the semiotic possibilities of writing text using a word processor. We are years beyond the typewriter, but still trapped in that semiotic space. I want to move beyond barren black text on white pages with font choices treated as irrelevant.

I want to bring the semiotic choices of writing with a word processor more clearly into view; I think this is another dimension of reading text. There are words strung together, then there is the appearance of the text and what that adds to the meaning. There is a dimension beyond this, and that is when text and meaning move onto the computer screen and hyperlinking, audio, and moving images are added in. This is not the third dimension, but something that offers infinitely more choices and possibilities to the authors and readers. This blog is a tiny step in that direction, learning enough of how to manipulate HTML to choose the colours I want and adding the occasional hyperlink.

But before I move into that larger and more complex semiotic space, I must complete my artfully shaped study of how I got to where I am now, my thesis.

Hearts and Chocolate

Red everywhere and hearts. St. Valentine's Day must be approaching and the information is semiotically omnipresent. Why? Because it's a commercial holiday, a glorification of romantic love. Red for passion and hearts to signify love. And women's underwear to suggest sexuality, which is now read as central to Valentine's Day.

I have read that originally St. Valentine had nothing to do with sexuality and passion, that the love being referred to was compassion, that he gave his coat to a poor homeless person and froze to death himself. How come the semiotic meaning of St. Valentine has shifted so radically?

My first impulse is to blame big business and commercial interests, but I think the semiotic shift pre-dates that. Maybe I'm confusing it with another holiday, but didn't Shakespeare have a Valentine's Day song in one of his plays? I remember my shock when I realized what the lyrics, "Let in a maid that out a maid never departed more," meant, a sad or cynical lament for lost virginity. Not really romantic. No hearts, flowers, or chocolate, and just the scarlet of a "scarlet woman", or maybe the brownish red of virgin blood. The red roses of passion replacing the bloodless white roses of purity - symbolism is such a rich aspect of how we think and understand.

When I was younger I thought to be pure and objective in my thinking I had to excise corrupted and corrupting symbols from my heart-mind. Now I know that I can't do that. I can only look at them and see what they say to me and the others who surround me. Then, perhaps, I can define them slightly differently and shift their meaning somewhat.

It's just a day. It's just a commercial shill. It's just a story from church history. It's just a marker Shakespeare used to delineate the paradox of passion which often, sadly, lacks the "com" prefix. It's just an appeal covering a multitude of hungers, for the love that sees us, for the comfort and pleasure of the body that moves with and through the heart, for the sign that shows others that we are loved and lovable, for the sign that tells us that we are indeed lovable. How silly to make it important. How intensely inevitable its importance is.

Offer compassion to others.

Symbols and Meaning

We are a species who live through meaning. We use symbols to tie things, ideas, concepts, feelings etc. together. This means that; that means something else.There is a sound that matches a bunch of squiggles (called "letters") that "points to" something else. A sound symbol = a visual symbol = a "real" thing or feeling or concept, which may "stand for" something else which some of us may associate with something different again. This is how we communicate?!?

On CBC News tonight, a story about teaching infants who aren't deaf to sign because they can communicate through signing at 8 or 9 months, much before they can use their tongue and lips to enunciate words. Human children can use language before they can talk; they can sign at a very young age. Think of those months of frustration before we could get our parents and others to understand what we wanted, even though we had language tools.

There is some speculation that this early "languaging" can affect the brain and make kids smarter. The researcher warns that parents who take the trouble to learn and teach signing to their kids are also providing a rich environment otherwise. So the kids who were signed with at an early age having higher I.Q.s than the non-signing kids may simply be the result of having a richer environment and more parental attention.

What I find truly fascinating is how early and intense our need to use symbols for communicating is. Humans are the species who connect. We link. We construct meaning. We try to share meanings and symbols. We connect sounds with things to connect what we "think" with other humans. We connect in order to connect. Meaning is what we live for and through.

And it is never a simple one-to-one connection. There are tones, nuances, hidden links, and surprising new readings - because we can't read each other's minds. If we are both "coming from the same place" we may be able to communicate very thoroughly with very few words and/or signs. Vygotsky, I think, points out that couples who have long been together can sometimes know what their partners are thinking with almost no overt communication, but that is knowledge of the person and the situation more than "mind-reading."

Post-modernism, as I understand it, is fascinated by how we create meaning, how we communicate. The first book that really helped me understand how people use language was Word Play by Peter Farb, and what I remember most clearly is his example of how an authority figure could use language to demean to hold power. When someone implicitly "defines the situation" they rule. The "other" is ruled by the assumptions established.

Two people, angry at each other - Who is the aggressor? The one who tells about how the other hurt her feelings, or the other who is surprised by the accusations which don't match her memory of what happened? Is it simply a misunderstanding or is the one presenting herself as the victim of the other making a rather nasty power play? Who is the aggressor, the one who labels the other as an aggressor or the accuser? One signals innocence, and the other is the screen on which she projects her malevolence.

"She doth protest too much."

Symbols and interpretation = meaning, which causes actions which create more use of symbols and continuing interpretations, which all adds up to stories and plots.

Shifting Semiosis

Just in case you were wondering my title means and why I chose to use it - here's some info.

I've just spent a couple of years studying arts-based educational research, narrative inquiry, postmodern thought, and the pedagogical use of technology. Great fun, and fascinating. Part of what I discovered was that the visual aspect of text, and the visuals with text were increasingly a significant part of what readers desired, and what technology gives us the capacity to produce. With word-processing I can use all different styles and sizes of font, in all kinds of colours, plus I can easily find and/or adapt and/or create images to add. Great on paper, even more intense on the screen.

Over many years I had kept hearing/reading the word "semiotic" and wasn't sure what it meant. I did my usual research, and just tried to guess the meaning from the context. At one point I think I even looked it up. - http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=semiotic

It seemed to be important to all those academics who talk in code, but I got my first real grasp of the meaning when someone told me that reading a person's clothes and appearance was using semiotics to understand what they were saying about who they are.

In the late Sixties, early Seventies, long hair on young guys meant they were hippies and therefore girls could trust them. By the end of the Seventies, the semiotics had shifted, and long hair on guys usually meant they were greasers or bikers, and only foolish girls would risk trusting them. We don't wear uniforms, but we do wear costumes that identify us. Look at a teen's clothes and you can figure out their taste in music, usually.

Well it's the same with the appearance of text on the page and screen. Font style and size and colour say something to readers before they actually start reading the words. Readers have expectations and are starting to establish their interpretation of the meaning of the text before they decode even one word. Here's an example; just glance but don't read what follows. What is it?

she looks, listens, but doesn't see
and doesn't feel. She trusts whispers,
and ignores my eyes.

i can't change another's heart,
or open her eyes.

Did you say or think "poem?" You made that judgment simply from the layout of the words. You made a rhetorical recognition and oriented yourself to continue reading through that lens.

Back to "Shifting Semiosis." I believe that our world culture is undergoing a profound perceptual shift. Photography, film, and recorded sound have changed how we perceive. Sight and sound are no longer either "real" and "present" in a "natural" way. Now they can be shaped, altered deliberately, artistically, to have an impact on how we understand the world to be. Writing in a black font gave words a virtually invisible embodiment, and "objective" power, now shaped images and manipulated sound have that power. If we want to be able to "see" and "hear" as clearly as possible when standing in an embodied position, we have to learn how to see what we see and hear what we hear.

By using the capacities of the word processor (and printers), we can play with the appearance of text. This is good because it's a small way to help ourselves and our readers "read" with more awareness. Or so I believe.

In this era while our semiosis is shifting, playing with text and the appearance of text is a way to stay alive to the changes in how we use and read signs to play with meaning.

Sometimes What You See Isn't What Others Get!

So yesterday I had some time to spare at the school where I study, as opposed to the school where I teach. So I decided to work on my blog in their computer lab. The only Macs they had were OS 9 or whatever you call the OS before OS X, but they were pretty colours. I sat down at one of the hot pink ones and opened Netscape, but it was a really old Netscape, one with a lighthouse and something curling around it as an icon. I ignored that and got myself to the "Create New Post" area and began writing.

I'm still getting used to writing knowing that although no one seems to be looking at my blog, people might, and what do I want to be public about. And yesterday I had a strange keyboard, and even though it's still QWERTY, my fingers aren't as intuitive. So I was making strange on about two levels, but I wrote and enjoyed it.

The screen didn't have the bold, italics, link, and spell check icons that exist on my up-to-date Netscape at home, but I figured I can manage without them by using my limited HTML and my own double-checking of my spelling. That was okay. And it was okay that I was writing in a field with a different font and different coloured-font than would appear on the screen. I've learned to be used to that. But what I didn't expect, especially as I had been extolling my design choices, was that the screen would look very different than what I saw on my home screen.

The title background was much smaller and an ugly tone of the colour. There was no side frame and the links were messily displayed below all my entries. The font was different, and the width of the text, something I want to be no wider than the text in a normal-sized hard-covered book, went all across the screen. It looked ugly and amateurish. I was so disappointed.

I am assuming that the old version of Netscape was the source of the problem. What I don't understand is why the school where I study hadn't updated their version. Afterall, it can be downloaded for free. I don't know enough technically to understand if they can't because of the old OS, which does cost money to update, or because no one ever sits down and does the downloading.

I guess I'm spoiled where I teach because our laptops are kept at least up to the next to the most recent versions of software, so I'm used to a fairly current workspace. And maybe I should count my blessings and be grateful. It is so much easier to learn in an up-to-date environment with support easily accessible.

Aesthetic Learning

So I spent hours last night playing with my blog. I changed templates a couple of times, then when I settled on one that kept my text relatively narrow, within the glance range for reading, I changed all the colours. That was fun and I love the result. I used QuickColor - http://kohaistyle.com/scripts/quickcolor/ - to find and chose harmonizing colours. I'll probably do it again in a few days. Maybe move from purples to reds, and gain more control over altering the code in the template. It's all fun.

So colour is really important to me, and text-breaks, so that the screen looks readable, not like a massive brick wall to be loosened and decoded. And font, too. Is this font too big? Does it make what I'm writing look childish? I want to be readable and respected, taken seriously. I realize I'm already challenging that by writing in dark purple, but I love the colour and it's dark enough to be pass for "dark" rather than "purple." Many people "read" purple semiotically and subconsciously see i t as revealling something about the character of the writer.

Do you?

Have you figured out anything about who I am?

• gender;
  
• age;
  
• economic status;
  
• educational level;
  
• nationality;
  
• computer knowledge; and/or
  
• character?
  

What do you base those assumptions on? Can you identify where you find the clues?

That's it for today, on a computer in the school lab, on an unfamiliar computer platform.

How Visual is Text, and Why?

So I sucessfully changed my blog's colour. Does it say more? Is it more me? I think so.

I'm using this blog as a learning project and each day hope to both post and make new changes in the appearance and/or functionality of the blog. I have never liked orange and even the amber shades don't really appeal to me. I have always, and I mean always, going back to at least being four years old, loved many of the purple shades. The one I chose I find aesthetically satisfying. Plus there's the satisfaction of finally figuring out where in the template to add in the right numbers to get what I wanted.

I am not from the technical end of learning the computer; HTML is not a natural language for me. I am from the communication and aesthetic crowd, and I only learn what technical stuff I have to be able to do what I want. My one advantage is that I have a good ability at seeing possibilities. Then I'm stuck with figuring out the technical aspects that I have to deal with and/or learn in order to achieve what I want. It's phenomenologically difficult.

I find code truly ugly and difficult to read; possibly being slightly dyslexic has added to this. However, from time to time I have tried to learn a little when I really wanted to do something and knew that there is a way, using HTML. For example, when I saw a fellow teacher (or "professor" as we were designated in one round of contract bargaining in my system) when I saw this fellow teacher use bullets in her WebCT postings, I was driven to learn the HTML for bullets. (I love bullets; they force information into such neat clear packages.)

Any techies out there are probably laughing at such a minor piece of learning, but hey, I'm honest and it was another little piece of knowhow acquired.

Anyway, to change the colour of my blog,

• I found out how to get to the code;
  
• I found out the RGB code for the colour I wanted;
  
• I tried out that code where I thought it belonged in the HTML, using cut and paste;
  
• I checked the preview to see if the colour of the title had worked; and
  
• I reversed the edit and then repeated that step until I got the title's colour changed.
  

A minor step (would the techies please stop laughing!) but it got me there, and made me feel happy, and, yes, smart.

Two-Handed Writing

I used to be a handwriter, squeezing out poems and plans, wishing I could type or get printed, but knowing that would never happen. Then I was pushed into learning about linguistics and how people learn to write and think about writing. At the same time, I decided to use the Bank Street Writer word pro myself so I could get used to it, and know enough about it to use with writing-phobic students. I discovered my own prose voice; I discovered writing my way.

Now I look at screens and pages and think about the text interface, and how appearance communicates and how images are increasingly central in our culture. I wonder when audio will be recognized. I wonder how all this affects education and, more importantly, learning.