The primacy of the word

It came to my attention during a recent conversation with Dr. Alison Langmead that while I will be exploring text-based works as part of my project, some people in my class will be examining images! What?! How will that even work?

At its heart, or at least as I understand it, one of the goals of this project is about finding meaning outside of traditional, quantitative datasets. It's about learning to think of nontraditional sources - books, newspapers, letters from the Copyright Office - as data (or capta, as Johanna Drucker might prefer).

You'll note there that what came to my mind as plumbable resources - things that carry and communicate meaning - are text-based. This is because I am cardinally oriented to language as being the bearer of meaning. While I know that all language is at its most fundamental entirely arbitrary and I know that the meaning of words change over time (see also: "literally"), I immediately understand that words communicate meaning. They are they direct symbols of meaning (aren't they?).

Images, in my mind, are not. Images are a step removed, in that they are depictions that require words to be translated. "Cheeseburger" has a meaning. But in order to infer one of the things that the image to the right is communicating, I must first translate it from the image to the word "cheeseburger" and then from the word to its meaning.

Wix Media

I understand that it is now possible for a computer to "see" that image and determine that it depicts a cheeseburger. But does it see lettuce? Overconsumption? America?

Often, I feel like Grandpa Simpson, railing against the malleable meaning of the word "literally" and hollering in general reference to Johanna Drucker that words are more efficient communicators than images. But when I get to feeling that way, I know I'm just wrong. I know that there are things that I don't understand, and I know that my ignorance is showing.

So I will own it here:

• I have no idea what it's like to think in pictures, as I understand some people do.

• I immediately set to converting my data from image (PDF) to text (currently .txt) because I can't think of meaning without thinking of words.

• I have no sense of what technologies exist that might be able to see "America" in a picture of a cheeseburger.

• I am preemptively grateful to my colleagues in DSAM 3000 for helping me understand how digital tools and methods can be deployed to make meaning from images.

Fox Media LLC

Work Referenced:

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 005, no. 1 (March 10, 2011). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.