In text indexing and other machine reading applications the term "bag of
words" is frequently used to underscore how processing algorithms often
represent text using a data structure (word histograms or weighted vectors)
where the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away. While
"bag of words" might well serve as a cautionary reminder to programmers of the
essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call to critically question the
efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the expression's use
seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would
go: Hey language: you're nothin' but a big BAG-OF-WORDS.
## Bag of words
In information retrieval and other so-called _machine-reading_ applications
(such as text indexing for web search engines) the term "bag of words" is used
to underscore how in the course of processing a text the original order of the
words in sentence form is stripped away. The resulting representation is then
a collection of each unique word used in the text, typically weighted by the
number of times the word occurs.
Bag of words, also known as word histograms or weighted term vectors, are a
standard part of the data engineer's toolkit. But why such a drastic
transformation? The utility of "bag of words" is in how it makes text amenable
to code, first in that it's very straightforward to implement the translation
from a text document to a bag of words representation. More significantly,
this transformation then opens up a wide collection of tools and techniques
for further transformation and analysis purposes. For instance, a number of
libraries available in the booming field of "data sciences" work with "high
dimension" vectors; bag of words is a way to transform a written document into
a mathematical vector where each "dimension" corresponds to the (relative)
quantity of each unique word. While physically unimaginable and abstract
(imagine each of Shakespeare's works as points in a 14 million dimensional
space), from a formal mathematical perspective, it's quite a comfortable idea,
and many complementary techniques (such as principle component analysis) exist
to reduce the resulting complexity.
What's striking about a bag of words representation, given is centrality in so
many text retrieval application is its irreversibility. Given a bag of words
representation of a text and faced with the task of producing the original
text would require in essence the "brain" of a writer to recompose sentences,
working with the patience of a devoted cryptogram puzzler to draw from the
precise stock of available words. While "bag of words" might well serve as a
cautionary reminder to programmers of the essential violence perpetrated to a
text and a call to critically question the efficacy of methods based on
subsequent transformations, the expressions use seems in practice more like a
badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would go: Hey language: you're
nothing but a big BAG-OF-WORDS. Following this spirit of the term, "bag of
words" celebrates a perfunctory step of "breaking" a text into a purer form
amenable to computation, to stripping language of its silly redundant
repetitions and foolishly contrived stylistic phrasings to reveal a purer
inner essence.
## Book of words
Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, first published in 1896 and republished in
various updated editions through the early 1900s, is an example of one of
several competing systems of telegraph code books. The idea was for both
senders and receivers of telegraph messages to use the books to translate
their messages into a sequence of code words which can then be sent for less
money as telegraph messages were paid by the word. In the front of the book, a
list of examples gives a sampling of how messages like: "Have bought for your
account 400 bales of cotton, March delivery, at 8.34" can be conveyed by a
telegram with the message "Ciotola, Delaboravi". In each case the reduction of
number of transmitted words is highlighted to underscore the efficacy of the
method. Like a dictionary or thesaurus, the book is primarily organized around
key words, such as _act_ , _advice_ , _affairs_ , _bags_ , _bail_ , and
_bales_ , under which exhaustive lists of useful phrases involving the
corresponding word are provided in the main pages of the volume. [1]
> [...] my focus in this chapter is on the inscription technology that grew
parasitically alongside the monopolistic pricing strategies of telegraph
companies: telegraph code books. Constructed under the bywords “economy,”
“secrecy,” and “simplicity,” telegraph code books matched phrases and words
with code letters or numbers. The idea was to use a single code word instead
of an entire phrase, thus saving money by serving as an information
compression technology. Generally economy won out over secrecy, but in
specialized cases, secrecy was also important.[2]
In Katherine Hayles' chapter devoted to telegraph code books she observes how:
> The interaction between code and language shows a steady movement away from
a human-centric view of code toward a machine-centric view, thus anticipating
the development of full-fledged machine codes with the digital computer. [3]
[](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016851.JPG)
Aspects of this transitional moment are apparent in a notice included
prominently inserted in the Lieber's code book:
> After July, 1904, all combinations of letters that do not exceed ten will
pass as one cipher word, provided that it is pronounceable, or that it is
taken from the following languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese or Latin -- International Telegraphic Conference, July 1903 [4]
Conforming to international conventions regulating telegraph communication at
that time, the stipulation that code words be actual words drawn from a
variety of European languages (many of Lieber's code words are indeed
arbitrary Dutch, German, and Spanish words) underscores this particular moment
of transition as reference to the human body in the form of "pronounceable"
speech from representative languages begins to yield to the inherent potential
for arbitrariness in digital representation.
What telegraph code books do is remind us of is the relation of language in
general to economy. Whether they may be economies of memory, attention, costs
paid to a telecommunicatons company, or in terms of computer processing time
or storage space, encoding language or knowledge in any form of writing is a
form of shorthand and always involves an interplay with what one expects to
perform or "get out" of the resulting encoding.
> Along with the invention of telegraphic codes comes a paradox that John
Guillory has noted: code can be used both to clarify and occlude. Among the
sedimented structures in the technological unconscious is the dream of a
universal language. Uniting the world in networks of communication that
flashed faster than ever before, telegraphy was particularly suited to the
idea that intercultural communication could become almost effortless. In this
utopian vision, the effects of continuous reciprocal causality expand to
global proportions capable of radically transforming the conditions of human
life. That these dreams were never realized seems, in retrospect, inevitable.
[5]
Far from providing a universal system of encoding messages in the English
language, Lieber's code is quite clearly designed for the particular needs and
conditions of its use. In addition to the phrases ordered by keywords, the
book includes a number of tables of terms for specialized use. One table lists
a set of words used to describe all possible permutations of numeric grades of
coffee (Choliam = 3,4, Choliambos = 3,4,5, Choliba = 4,5, etc.); another table
lists pairs of code words to express the respective daily rise or fall of the
price of coffee at the port of Le Havre in increments of a quarter of a Franc
per 50 kilos ("Chirriado = prices have advanced 1 1/4 francs"). From an
archaeological perspective, the Lieber's code book reveals a cross section of
the needs and desires of early 20th century business communication between the
United States and its trading partners.
The advertisements lining the Liebers Code book further situate its use and
that of commercial telegraphy. Among the many advertisements for banking and
law services, office equipment, and alcohol are several ads for gun powder and
explosives, drilling equipment and metallurgic services all with specific
applications to mining. Extending telegraphy's formative role for ship-to-
shore and ship-to-ship communication for reasons of safety, commercial
telegraphy extended this network of communication to include those parties
coordinating the "raw materials" being mined, grown, or otherwise extracted
from overseas sources and shipped back for sale.
## "Raw data now!"
From [La ville intelligente - Ville de la connaissance](/wiki/index.php?title
=La_ville_intelligente_-_Ville_de_la_connaissance "La ville intelligente -
Ville de la connaissance"):
Étant donné que les nouvelles formes modernistes et l'utilisation de matériaux
propageaient l'abondance d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet croyait en la
possibilité du langage comme modèle de « [données
brutes](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words") », le réduisant aux
informations essentielles et aux faits sans ambiguïté, tout en se débarrassant
de tous les éléments inefficaces et subjectifs.
From [The Smart City - City of Knowledge](/wiki/index.php?title
=The_Smart_City_-_City_of_Knowledge "The Smart City - City of Knowledge"):
As new modernist forms and use of materials propagated the abundance of
decorative elements, Otlet believed in the possibility of language as a model
of '[raw data](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words")', reducing
it to essential information and unambiguous facts, while removing all
inefficient assets of ambiguity or subjectivity.
> Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a beautiful website, but first give us the
unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have
to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can
you say "raw"?
>
> Audience: Raw.
>
> Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"?
>
> Audience: Data.
>
> TBL: Can you say "now"?
>
> Audience: Now!
>
> TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!
>
> [...]
>
> So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -- the people who think
it's a great idea. And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people
at TED who do things because -- even though there's not an immediate return on
the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has
done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does
things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called
linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. [6]
## Un/Structured
As graduate students at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page had an
early interest in producing "structured data" from the "unstructured" web. [7]
> The World Wide Web provides a vast source of information of almost all
types, ranging from DNA databases to resumes to lists of favorite restaurants.
However, this information is often scattered among many web servers and hosts,
using many different formats. If these chunks of information could be
extracted from the World Wide Web and integrated into a structured form, they
would form an unprecedented source of information. It would include the
largest international directory of people, the largest and most diverse
databases of products, the greatest bibliography of academic works, and many
other useful resources. [...]
>
> **2.1 The Problem**
> Here we define our problem more formally:
> Let D be a large database of unstructured information such as the World
Wide Web [...] [8]
In a paper titled _Dynamic Data Mining_ Brin and Page situate their research
looking for _rules_ (statistical correlations) between words used in web
pages. The "baskets" they mention stem from the origins of "market basket"
techniques developed to find correlations between the items recorded in the
purchase receipts of supermarket customers. In their case, they deal with web
pages rather than shopping baskets, and words instead of purchases. In
transitioning to the much larger scale of the web, they describe the
usefulness of their research in terms of its computational economy, that is
the ability to tackle the scale of the web and still perform using
contemporary computing power completing its task in a reasonably short amount
of time.
> A traditional algorithm could not compute the large itemsets in the lifetime
of the universe. [...] Yet many data sets are difficult to mine because they
have many frequently occurring items, complex relationships between the items,
and a large number of items per basket. In this paper we experiment with word
usage in documents on the World Wide Web (see Section 4.2 for details about
this data set). This data set is fundamentally different from a supermarket
data set. Each document has roughly 150 distinct words on average, as compared
to roughly 10 items for cash register transactions. We restrict ourselves to a
subset of about 24 million documents from the web. This set of documents
contains over 14 million distinct words, with tens of thousands of them
occurring above a reasonable support threshold. Very many sets of these words
are highly correlated and occur often. [9]
## Un/Ordered
In programming, I've encountered a recurring "problem" that's quite
symptomatic. It goes something like this: you (the programmer) have managed to
cobble out a lovely "content management system" (either from scratch, or using
any number of helpful frameworks) where your user can enter some "items" into
a database, for instance to store bookmarks. After this ordered items are
automatically presented in list form (say on a web page). The author: It's
great, except... could this bookmark come before that one? The problem stems
from the fact that the database ordering (a core functionality provided by any
database) somehow applies a sorting logic that's almost but not quite right. A
typical example is the sorting of names where details (where to place a name
that starts with a Norwegian "Ø" for instance), are language-specific, and
when a mixture of languages occurs, no single ordering is necessarily
"correct". The (often) exascerbated programmer might hastily add an additional
database field so that each item can also have an "order" (perhaps in the form
of a date or some other kind of (alpha)numerical "sorting" value) to be used
to correctly order the resulting list. Now the author has a means, awkward and
indirect but workable, to control the order of the presented data on the start
page. But one might well ask, why not just edit the resulting listing as a
document? Not possible! Contemporary content management systems are based on a
data flow from a "pure" source of a database, through controlling code and
templates to produce a document as a result. The document isn't the data, it's
the end result of an irreversible process. This problem, in this and many
variants, is widespread and reveals an essential backwardness that a
particular "computer scientist" mindset relating to what constitutes "data"
and in particular it's relationship to order that makes what might be a
straightforward question of editing a document into an over-engineered
database.
Recently working with Nikolaos Vogiatzis whose research explores playful and
radically subjective alternatives to the list, Vogiatzis was struck by how
from the earliest specifications of HTML (still valid today) have separate
elements (OL and UL) for "ordered" and "unordered" lists.
> The representation of the list is not defined here, but a bulleted list for
unordered lists, and a sequence of numbered paragraphs for an ordered list
would be quite appropriate. Other possibilities for interactive display
include embedded scrollable browse panels. [10]
Vogiatzis' surprise lay in the idea of a list ever being considered
"unordered" (or in opposition to the language used in the specification, for
order to ever be considered "insignificant"). Indeed in its suggested
representation, still followed by modern web browsers, the only difference
between the two visually is that UL items are preceded by a bullet symbol,
while OL items are numbered.
The idea of ordering runs deep in programming practice where essentially
different data structures are employed depending on whether order is to be
maintained. The indexes of a "hash" table, for instance (also known as an
associative array), are ordered in an unpredictable way governed by a
representation's particular implementation. This data structure, extremely
prevalent in contemporary programming practice sacrifices order to offer other
kinds of efficiency (fast text-based retrieval for instance).
## Data mining
In announcing Google's impending data center in Mons, Belgian prime minister
Di Rupo invoked the link between the history of the mining industry in the
region and the present and future interest in "data mining" as practiced by IT
companies such as Google.
Whether speaking of bales of cotton, barrels of oil, or bags of words, what
links these subjects is the way in which the notion of "raw material" obscures
the labor and power structures employed to secure them. "Raw" is always
relative: "purity" depends on processes of "refinement" that typically carry
social/ecological impact.
Stripping language of order is an act of "disembodiment", detaching it from
the acts of writing and reading. The shift from (human) reading to machine
reading involves a shift of responsibility from the individual human body to
the obscured responsibilities and seemingly inevitable forces of the
"machine", be it the machine of a market or the machine of an algorithm.
From [X = Y](/wiki/index.php?title=X_%3D_Y "X = Y"):
Still, it is reassuring to know that the products hold traces of the work,
that even with the progressive removal of human signs in automated processes,
the workers' presence never disappears completely. This presence is proof of
the materiality of information production, and becomes a sign of the economies
and paradigms of efficiency and profitability that are involved.
The computer scientists' view of textual content as "unstructured", be it in a
webpage or the OCR scanned pages of a book, reflect a negligence to the
processes and labor of writing, editing, design, layout, typesetting, and
eventually publishing, collecting and cataloging [11].
"Unstructured" to the computer scientist, means non-conformant to particular
forms of machine reading. "Structuring" then is a social process by which
particular (additional) conventions are agreed upon and employed. Computer
scientists often view text through the eyes of their particular reading
algorithm, and in the process (voluntarily) blind themselves to the work
practices which have produced and maintain these "resources".
Berners-Lee, in chastising his audience of web publishers to not only publish
online, but to release "unadulterated" data belies a lack of imagination in
considering how language is itself structured and a blindness to the need for
more than additional technical standards to connect to existing publishing
practices.
Last Revision: 2*08*2016
1. ↑ Benjamin Franklin Lieber, Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, 1896, New York;
2. ↑ Katherine Hayles, "Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human", How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, 2006
3. ↑ Hayles
4. ↑ Lieber's
5. ↑ Hayles
6. ↑ Tim Berners-Lee: The next web, TED Talk, February 2009
7. ↑ "Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception." from Brin's [Stanford webpage](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)
8. ↑ Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web, Sergey Brin, Proceedings of the WebDB Workshop at EDBT 1998,
9. ↑ Dynamic Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998; p. 2
10. ↑ Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): "Internet Draft", Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Connolly, June 1993,
11. ↑
_A talk given on the second day of the conference_ [Off the
Press](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/22-23-may-2014/program/) _held at
WORM, Rotterdam, on May 23, 2014. Also available
in[PDF](/images/2/28/Barok_2014_Communing_Texts.pdf "Barok 2014 Communing
Texts.pdf")._
I am going to talk about publishing in the humanities, including scanning
culture, and its unrealised potentials online. For this I will treat the
internet not only as a platform for storage and distribution but also as a
medium with its own specific means for reading and writing, and consider the
relevance of plain text and its various rendering formats, such as HTML, XML,
markdown, wikitext and TeX.
One of the main reasons why books today are downloaded and bookmarked but
hardly read is the fact that they may contain something relevant but they
begin at the beginning and end at the end; or at least we are used to treat
them in this way. E-book readers and browsers are equipped with fulltext
search functionality but the search for "how does the internet change the way
we read" doesn't yield anything interesting but the diversion of attention.
Whilst there are dozens of books written on this issue. When being insistent,
one easily ends up with a folder with dozens of other books, stucked with how
to read them. There is a plethora of books online, yet there are indeed mostly
machines reading them.
It is surely tempting to celebrate or to despise the age of artificial
intelligence, flat ontology and narrowing down the differences between humans
and machines, and to write books as if only for machines or return to the
analogue, but we may as well look back and reconsider the beauty of simple
linear reading of the age of print, not for nostalgia but for what we can
learn from it.
This perspective implies treating texts in their context, and particularly in
the way they commute, how they are brought in relations with one another, into
a community, by the mere act of writing, through a technique that have
developed over time into what we have came to call _referencing_. While in the
early days referring to texts was practised simply as verbal description of a
referred writing, over millenia it evolved into a technique with standardised
practices and styles, and accordingly: it gained _precision_. This precision
is however nothing machinic, since referring to particular passages in other
texts instead of texts as wholes is an act of comradeship because it spares
the reader time when locating the passage. It also makes apparent that it is
through contexts that the web of printed books has been woven. But even though
referencing in its precision has been meant to be very concrete, particularly
the advent of the web made apparent that it is instead _virtual_. And for the
reader, laborous to follow. The web has shown and taught us that a reference
from one document to another can be plastic. To follow a reference from a
printed book the reader has to stand up, walk down the street to a library,
pick up the referred volume, flip through its pages until the referred one is
found and then follow the text until the passage most probably implied in the
text is identified, while on the web the reader, _ideally_ , merely moves her
finger a few milimeters. To click or tap; the difference between the long way
and the short way is obviously the hyperlink. Of course, in the absence of the
short way, even scholars are used to follow the reference the long way only as
an exception: there was established an unwritten rule to write for readers who
are familiar with literature in the respective field (what in turn reproduces
disciplinarity of the reader and writer), while in the case of unfamiliarity
with referred passage the reader inducts its content by interpreting its
interpretation of the writer. The beauty of reading across references was
never fully realised. But now our question is, can we be so certain that this
practice is still necessary today?
The web silently brought about a way to _implement_ the plasticity of this
pointing although it has not been realised as the legacy of referencing as we
know it from print. Today, when linking a text and having a particular passage
in mind, and even describing it in detail, the majority of links physically
point merely to the beginning of the text. Hyperlinks are linking documents as
wholes by default and the use of anchors in texts has been hardly thought of
as a _requirement_ to enable precise linking.
If we look at popular online journalism and its use of hyperlinks within the
text body we may claim that rarely someone can afford to read all those linked
articles, not even talking about hundreds of pages long reports and the like
and if something is wrong, it would get corrected via comments anyway. On the
internet, the writer is meant to be in more immediate feedback with the
reader. But not always readers are keen to comment and not always they are
allowed to. We may be easily driven to forget that quoting half of the
sentence is never quoting a full sentence, and if there ought to be the entire
quote, its source text in its whole length would need to be quoted. Think of
the quote _information wants to be free_ , which is rarely quoted with its
wider context taken into account. Even factoids, numbers, can be carbon-quoted
but if taken out of the context their meaning can be shaped significantly. The
reason for aversion to follow a reference may well be that we are usually
pointed to begin reading another text from its beginning.
While this is exactly where the practices of linking as on the web and
referencing as in scholarly work may benefit from one another. The question is
_how_ to bring them closer together.
An approach I am going to propose requires a conceptual leap to something we
have not been taught.
For centuries, the primary format of the text has been the page, a vessel, a
medium, a frame containing text embedded between straight, less or more
explicit, horizontal and vertical borders. Even before the material of the
page such as papyrus and paper appeared, the text was already contained in
lines and columns, a structure which we have learnt to perceive as a grid. The
idea of the grid allows us to view text as being structured in lines and
pages, that are in turn in hand if something is to be referred to. Pages are
counted as the distance from the beginning of the book, and lines as the
distance from the beginning of the page. It is not surprising because it is in
accord with inherent quality of its material medium -- a sheet of paper has a
shape which in turn shapes a body of a text. This tradition goes as far as to
the Ancient times and the bookroll in which we indeed find textual grids.
[](/File:Papyrus_of_Plato_Phaedrus.jpg)
A crucial difference between print and digital is that text files such as HTML
documents nor markdown documents nor database-driven texts did inherit this
quality. Their containers are simply not structured into pages, precisely
because of the nature of their materiality as media. Files are written on
memory drives in scattered chunks, beginning at point A and ending at point B
of a drive, continuing from C until D, and so on. Where does each of these
chunks start is ultimately independent from what it contains.
Forensic archaeologists would confirm that when a portion of a text survives,
in the case of ASCII documents it is not a page here and page there, or the
first half of the book, but textual blocks from completely arbitrary places of
the document.
This may sound unrelated to how we, humans, structure our writing in HTML
documents, emails, Office documents, even computer code, but it is a reminder
that we structure them for habitual (interfaces are rectangular) and cultural
(human-readability) reasons rather then for a technical necessity that would
stem from material properties of the medium. This distinction is apparent for
example in HTML, XML, wikitext and TeX documents with their content being both
stored on the physical drive and treated when rendered for reading interfaces
as single flow of text, and the same goes for other texts when treated with
automatic line-break setting turned off. Because line-breaks and spaces and
everything else is merely a number corresponding to a symbol in character set.
So how to address a section in this kind of document? An option offers itself
-- how computers do, or rather how we made them do it -- as a position of the
beginning of the section in the array, in one long line. It would mean to
treat the text document not in its grid-like format but as line, which merely
adapts to properties of its display when rendered. As it is nicely implied in
the animated logo of this event and as we know it from EPUBs for example.
In the case of 'reference-linking' we can refer to a passage by including the
information about its beginning and length determined by the character
position within the text (in analogy to _pp._ operator used for printed
publications) as well as the text version information (in printed texts served
by edition and date of publication). So what is common in printed text as the
page information is here replaced by the character position range and version.
Such a reference-link is more precise while addressing particular section of a
particular version of a document regardless of how it is rendered on an
interface.
It is a relatively simple idea and its implementation does not be seem to be
very hard, although I wonder why it has not been implemented already. I
discussed it with several people yesterday to find out there were indeed
already attempts in this direction. Adam Hyde pointed me to a proposal for
_fuzzy anchors_ presented on the blog of the Hypothes.is initiative last year,
which in order to overcome the need for versioning employs diff algorithms to
locate the referred section, although it is too complicated to be explained in
this setting.[1] Aaaarg has recently implemented in its PDF reader an option
to generate URLs for a particular point in the scanned document which itself
is a great improvement although it treats texts as images, thus being specific
to a particular scan of a book, and generated links are not public URLs.
Using the character position in references requires an agreement on how to
count. There are at least two options. One is to include all source code in
positioning, which means measuring the distance from the anchor such as the
beginning of the text, the beginning of the chapter, or the beginning of the
paragraph. The second option is to make a distinction between operators and
operands, and count only in operands. Here there are further options where to
make the line between them. We can consider as operands only characters with
phonetic properties -- letters, numbers and symbols, stripping the text from
operators that are there to shape sonic and visual rendering of the text such
as whitespaces, commas, periods, HTML and markdown and other tags so that we
are left with the body of the text to count in. This would mean to render
operators unreferrable and count as in _scriptio continua_.
_Scriptio continua_ is a very old example of the linear onedimensional
treatment of the text. Let's look again at the bookroll with Plato's writing.
Even though it is 'designed' into grids on a closer look it reveals the lack
of any other structural elements -- there are no spaces, commas, periods or
line-breaks, the text is merely one flow, one long line.
_Phaedrus_ was written in the fourth century BC (this copy comes from the
second century AD). Word and paragraph separators were reintroduced much
later, between the second and sixth century AD when rolls were gradually
transcribed into codices that were bound as pages and numbered (a dramatic
change in publishing comparable to digital changes today).[2]
'Reference-linking' has not been prominent in discussions about sharing books
online and I only came to realise its significance during my preparations for
this event. There is a tremendous amount of very old, recent and new texts
online but we haven't done much in opening them up to contextual reading. In
this there are publishers of all 'grounds' together.
We are equipped to treat the internet not only as repository and library but
to take into account its potentials of reading that have been hiding in front
of our very eyes. To expand the notion of hyperlink by taking into account
techniques of referencing and to expand the notion of referencing by realising
its plasticity which has always been imagined as if it is there. To mesh texts
with public URLs to enable entaglement of referencing and hyperlinks. Here,
open access gains its further relevance and importance.
Dušan Barok
_Written May 21-23, 2014, in Vienna and Rotterdam. Revised May 28, 2014._
Notes
1. ↑ Proposals for paragraph-based hyperlinking can be traced back to the work of Douglas Engelbart, and today there is a number of related ideas, some of which were implemented on a small scale: fuzzy anchoring, 1(http://hypothes.is/blog/fuzzy-anchoring/); purple numbers, 2(http://project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX_White_Paper_2008); robust anchors, 3(http://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/robust-anchors); _Emphasis_ , 4(http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source); and others 5(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier#Proposals). The dependence on structural elements such as paragraphs is one of their shortcoming making them not suitable for texts with longer paragraphs (e.g. Adorno's _Aesthetic Theory_ ), visual poetry or computer code; another is the requirement to store anchors along the text.
2. ↑ Works which happened not to be of interest at the time ceased to be copied and mostly disappeared. On the book roll and its gradual replacement by the codex see William A. Johnson, "The Ancient Book", in _The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology_ , ed. Roger S. Bagnall, Oxford, 2009, pp 256-281, 6(http://google.com/books?id=6GRcLuc124oC&pg=PA256).
Addendum (June 9)
Arie Altena wrote a [report from the
panel](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/2014/05/off-the-press-report-day-
ii/) published on the website of Digital Publishing Toolkit initiative,
followed by another [summary of the
talk](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/2014/05/dusan-barok-digital-imprint-
the-motion-of-publishing/) by Irina Enache.
The online repository Aaaaarg [has
introduced](http://twitter.com/aaaarg/status/474717492808413184) the
reference-link function in its document viewer, see [an
example](http://aaaaarg.fail/ref/60090008362c07ed5a312cda7d26ecb8#0.102).