Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

I've been fascinated by the Canadian zombie movie Pontypool. I went through and transcribed the parts about the infection of language.

---

Dr. Mendez (about the infection of another character): "That's it, he is gone. He is just a crude radio signal, seeking.

... dialogue

Mendez: No ... it can't be, it can't be. It's viral, that much is clear. But not of the blood, not of the air, not on or even in our bodies. It is here.

Grant: Where?

Mendez: It is in words. Not all words, not all speaking, but in some. Some words are infected. And it spreads out when the contaminated word is spoken. Ohhhh. We are witnessing the emergence of a new arrangement for life ... and our language is its host. It could have sprung spontaneously out of a perception. If it found its way into language it could leap into reality itself, changing everything. It may be boundless. It may be a God bug.

Grant: OK, Dr. Mendez. Look, I don't even believe in UFOs, so I ... I've got to stop you there with that God bug thing.

Mendez: Well that is very sensible because UFOs don't exist. But I assure you, there is a monster loose and it is bouncing through our language, frantically trying to keep its host alive.

Grant: Is this transmission itself ... um ...

Mendez: No, no, no, no. If the bug enters us, it does not enter by making contact with our eardrum. It enters us when we hear the word and we understand it. Understand?

It is when the word is understood that the virus takes hold. And it copies itself in our understanding.

Grant: Should we be ... talking about this?

Sydney: What are we talking about?

Grant: Should we be talking at all?

Mendez: Well, to be safe, no, probably not. Talking is risky, and well, talk radio is high risk. And so ... we should stop.

Grant: But, we need to tell people about this. People need to know. We have to get this out.

Mendez: Well it's your call Mr Mazzy. But let's just hope that your getting out there doesn't destroy your world.



======================
Grant: "He (Dr. Mendes) said that understanding copies the virus.

...

How do you not understand something? How do you take a word and make it strange?

...

If not understanding a word disinfects it? ..."

Sydney: "You kill the word that's killing you."



=================
Grant Mazzy on air: "you have to stop understanding what you are saying. Stop understanding what you are saying."

Sydney Briar to Grant: "you're making sense. If you say 'don't understand it' it defeats the purpose"

(Announcement from outside in French which is subtitled in English), "Sydney Briar! Stop the broadcast! Stop the broadcast! The man who is speaking is sick."

Grant Mazzy: "The sky is a person. Laughter is walking ..."

...

(Sound of gunfire outside)

Sydney: "Shit ... they're killing people ..."

Grant on air: "Stop killing people ... Just listen to me. Listen to me."

(Silence)

Sydney: "Everyone's dead."

Grant on air: "You're just killing scared people. It's what you always do. You are killing scared people. You are like dogs. You smell fear and you pounce. Well, what the fuck happened today folks? Someone took a buzzsaw to your middle and they pulled out a wheeling devil and they spilled it right across your anthill. But you know what folks? We were never making sense. We were never making sense.

And today, today, when armageddon leaches out into your good, good mornings, you know what? It's just another day. Another day in Pontypool. The sun came up; you did what you did yesterday, and its exactly what you will do tomorrow.

Today's news folks ... Today's late-breaking, developing, just-across-my-desk news story is this. It's not the end of the world folks. It's just the end of the day. This is Grant Mazzy for CLSY Radio Nowhere. And I'm still here you cock-suckers.

(Announcement from outside in French with English subtitles), "10 ... 9 ... 8 ... "

(Screen goes black then to titles.)

We had a conversation as we were reviewing the Introduction about why this is a hybrid work that includes (as imagined) a printed book of the text. Some of the answers we came up with are:

• Print is easier to read and this would be especially true for the more theoretical chapters.
• Print would let us involve a print designer and take advantage of the medium to do some things that are more difficult on lineA line is the string of text limited by the width of a page. Lines are often used in tokenization, and may contain parts of one or more sentences. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is a complete sentence and occurs on one line. By contrast, "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread." spans three sentences and four lines. Return to Glossary..
• Print would let us show how text analysis tools can be used to take something through to a print outcome, which is, afterall, one of the theses of the work.
• Print archives better. Who knows what will happen to the site over the long term. It is useful to have an accessible print record. Print is stable and has its own coherence.
• Print can be a way in for some people. It is easy to skim and read away from the screen - it thus can serve as an introduction to the field.
• In print we can gather the reflections that are drawn from the analysis, but don't depend on it to render. The print version should be what is of interest beyond our implementation.

Right now the book title is "The Rhetoric of Text Analysis" - is that the right title? Do we want to emphasize Agile Interpretation?

What do we do with the original Experiments page? http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/ExperimentsInTextAnalysis

Do we bring them over to Hermeneuti.ca so that everything is together? I recommend:

• We want to be open about the background notes and so on
• We don't want to overburden the reader with too much stuff
• We should therefore have the notes on Hermeneuti.ca organized with the experiments
• Each note should have an Editorial Note at the beginning
• Possibly we should include editorial notes in the text. We could use italics for these.

 

 

I think the introduction is done, at least until the rest is written and we have to rewrite it. It should do a better job now of describing what is in hermeneuti.ca and how to use/read it. You will note I committ us to various things like:

• A section on How to Contribute Comments or Responses - the idea is that people could write academic comments/responses for review.
• A section on How to Contribute Recipes or Development - the idea is that people could contribute recipes or work on the code.
• A section on How to Contribute Essays - so people could point us to, or contribute interactive essays.

What do you think abou that?

Time for a second read.

I'm wondering about the title of the book as I don't like "The Rhetoric of Text Analysis". I do like starting with "Hermeneuti.ca", but what should the best subtitle be?

I cleaned up most of the embedded tools in Now Analyze That, including a call to the distribution chart in Voyeur. The last step will be to see if the new Voyeur Links tool can be inserted in the place of the visual collocator, though we may want to keep a static image there to show a certain layout of the words tha couldn't be achieved with a single call.

There's now a stub page for the Recipes – now I have to start filling them in...

How to integrate recipes into the project.

1. We add a section to the whole for recipes.
2. We write an introduction that explains what they are, how to use them and how they were developed.
3. We move the ones over from tada that are relevant. Ultimately we should move them all over.
4. We need to give Shawn Day credit as a author or co-author. We need to thank SSHRC.
5. We will then create footnotes in the examples, like "Now Analyze That" that link to relevant recipes. We could also go the other way around.
6. Ultimately we could add references to other works to the recipes.

We need to be consistent with our use of "hermeneuti.ca". Here is what I propose:

• Hermeneuti.ca (capitalized "H") refers to the project as a whole
• hermeneuti.ca (lower case "h") refers to the web site
• hermeneutica (either case) refers to "theoretical things" in general, but should be avoided without contextIn text analysis, context refers to the text surrounding a string of characters, which may be as short as a word or as long as a paragraph. Context is particularly important when generating a concordance for a string. Return to Glossary.

Some issues I'm having with the system:

• If I have a bib in a footnote (fn) the text of the footnote after the bib gets truncated.
• The style of the bib needs tweaking - see the missing space in 1 before the book title.
• The search isn't working for the site.
• There should be a link to the bibliography somewhere high up.

1. 1.