Direction?

Idea.

So I'm trying to find some way to connect orality, literacy, and the Digital Humanities. Up until this point, I've been thinking from a literate point of view and treating the orality as something separate. If not separate then only connected to literacy and then literacy is only connected to the DH. But check this out:

This video is done by the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Apparently the British made up the rules for acronyms, because they're obviously allowed to break them. Anyway, I've been watching these videos for awhile now (God bless StumbleUpon) and I'm always completely engaged by them.

Before I talk about the content, I want to give some direction for future posts... This is a perfect example of exactly what the Digital Humanities can offer. The way RSA handles their videos is brilliant. It is combining a great combination of audio and visual stimuli to keep the reader engaged. But instead of just a video of someone talking about certain topics (interesting in its own right), they have utilized the ability that art has to grab people. It is almost like watching a story unfold before your eyes and it makes me wonder just how effective entire conferences would be if all the speakers doodled their ideas while they spoke.

My point is that this clip has captured oral, literate, visual, and (through the power of Youtube) digital aspects all in one fell swoop. Now I've been able to replace my view that orality, literacy and the Digital Humanities are connected by a one way street with the idea that there is a highway connecting them all and wrapping back around again.

The video is a portion of a longer presentation by Steven Pinker at a RSA conference. He is discussing his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and I think what he says here about innuendos ties into my previous post about the signifier and the signified.

In the same way that the word "tree" evokes a mental image of, not ONE particular tree but the embodiment of "tree" as it manifests itself through your memories, so do certain innuendos work to create his definition of mutual knowledge. The fact that I can say/write "tree" and you immediately have an image of a tree in your head while I have a tree in my head is a form of mutual knowledge. However, the fact that we are not picturing the same tree leaves the entire definition of "tree" to some arguable degree of subjectivity.

The presentation doesn't deal with semiotics as much as it does the infinite nature of language. Depending on the language used (Pinker's direct or indirect language) there could be a limitless number of translations that a person could come up in reaction to a certain statement, question, or phrase. This is a beautiful part of language in the same way that it can lead to that sort of awkward situation when you ask your boss to have a beer or as that scene Pinker discusses in When Harry Met Sally.

Connection. In the oral tradition-- that is in a culture that relies entirely on oral communication for history, stories, etc.-- there is a transfer of that subjectivity from generation to generation. By that I mean that the same story is never told twice because the listeners hear the story and reinterpret it in their own ways. There is a good example of this in the Anansi stories that originated in Africa and traveled to the Caribbean. Variations of the stories already existed in Africa, but they changed even more once they arrived in the Caribbean. It's like playing the game where someone in the room whispers a sentence in the next person's ear and it travels around the room. Once the sentence goes all the way around, it often doesn't even resemble the original sentence.

More to come later. I'm trying to go somewhere with this.