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Christopher Witmore |In addressing the question of what is really so new about ‘new media,’ Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media lays out five key principles which separate new media from old: (1) numerical representation; (2) modularity; (3) automation; (4) variability; and (5) transcoding. As Manovich contends, not every new medium obeys these principles. Rather he suggests that these principles ‘be considered not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization’ (2001, 27).
Numerical representation refers to how all new media are composed of digital code and, therefore, are subject to algorithmic manipulation (Manovich 2001, 27). Take, for example, the transformation of the photographic slides (taken with a 35 mm Canon EOS Elan 7 camera) into digital images. This transformation or ‘digitization,’ according to Manovich, involves the conversion of continuous data into discrete data, which are quantified. In the process of digitization as with scanning the slide, the image is first sampled at regular intervals (the intensity of which is dependent on resolution) into a grid of pixels. As this takes place, each pixel ‘is quantified, that is, it is assigned a numerical value drawn from a defined range (such as 0—255 in the case of an 8-bit greyscale image)’ (Manovich 2001, 28). Numerical quantification is a primary quality of new media.
Each numerical representation correlates to a discrete entity whether it is a pixel, polygon, character, script, etc. Manovich refers to this ‘fractal structure of new media’ as modularity (2001, 30). These discrete entities are assembled into larger ‘objects,’ as Manovich terms them, such as text files, JPEG images, movie clips or whatever, and yet they ‘continue to maintain their separate identity’ (2001, 30). This modularity allows someone to manipulate particular attributes, extract individual frames and reassemble them in different contexts. This modularity applies to new media ‘objects’ at various scales, from pixel or point to complex photographic collages. In GIS applications, for example, attributes assigned individual layers can be mapped as singular entities—roads, contour lines, architectural features, etc—or combined into aggregated maps of a landscape.
These first two principles facilitate Manovich’s third principle of automation. As with the mechanical production of an ‘image of nature’ in Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s camera of 1839, Manovich emphasizes the computer’s ability to automatically modify, for example, a photograph by manipulating its contrast, color or, indeed, removing noise. In this way, new media according to Manovich extract ‘human intentionality… from the creative process, at least in part’ (2001, 32). From a Canon 35mm to an Epson Perfection 3200 series flatbed scanner with a slide template the entire photographic and digitization process is automated so that human action seemingly occurs at the level of ‘point and click.’ This automation on the new media end extends to computer gaming, Internet search engines and so on. But in contrast to the immutability of a 35mm slide transferred to a paper-based publication via half-tone block, the digitized photograph is not fixed, but malleable; far from unchangeable, a new medium is very mutable.
This variability, which constitutes Manovich’s fourth principle, relies upon numerical representation and modularity and allows the digitized photograph to spawn many potential versions. Consider a 35mm slide photograph taken of a terrace line in the low light of the late afternoon (Figure 4.1). Mediators such as sun, cloud or tree cover are apparent in the detail of scene and help give us some indication of the time of day, the local conditions on the ground and the equipment enlisted or not (i.e. flash and perhaps shade screen). However, with the digitized photograph the contrast, brightness, color and other qualities of the image can be manipulated in such a way as to make it difficult to surmise such detail. While one gains a crisper image despite poor conditions on the ground through software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, one also looses other details which were manifested in the 35mm slide. What is more, digital photography and video rectify such conditions on the ground in the countryside, so that previous mediators in certain situations, shade-cloths to control sunlight, lighting or flash, and so on are, in many situations, dispensed with at the level of taking the picture. Images can be presented at various scales or combined into larger collages with a number of other photographs taken in sequence and automatically spliced so as to present the impression of seamlessness. Manovich’s principle of variability extends from such issues of content manipulation and scalability to database design and linkage.
Transcoding, Manovich’s fifth principle, is, as he suggests, the ‘most substantial consequence of the computerization of media’ (2001, 45). While all new media are on some level in effect ‘remediations’ of previous media by which, following Bolter and Grusin (1999) and as mentioned above, they call back to and replicate familiar paper-based modes of articulation, new media are also composed of dimensions such as ‘file size, file type, type of compression used, file format, and so on’ (Manovich 2001, 45-46). Returning to the example of the digital image, on one level a person sees a series of terrace lines with olive trees in the middleground and background, whereas on another level the image consists of a ‘machine-readable header, followed by numbers representing color values of its pixels’ (2001, 45). The former, for Manovich, belongs to the realm of human culture and meaning, whereas the latter occur at the level of ‘the computer’s own cosmogony’ (2001, 46). These two (seemingly) distinct dimensions or ‘layers’ characterize new media.
Manovich’s five principles provide a detailed starting point for working through the question, what is new about new media? Likewise I am interested in what new media can do for the articulation of the material world? This question not only connects to how will new media transform practices which developed in relation to paper-based scenographies, but also how will new media help to facilitate and mediate new archaeological practices? These are incredibly complex questions, which I begin to address with the examples presented in this dissertation. However, I would first like to ease in to them with a familiar example.
‘Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking,’ reads the translation from one of Nietzsche’s typed letters (Kittler 1990, 196). As with the old paper-based forms of documentation and utensils—notebooks, drawing boards, pens, rulers, etc—the instruments associated with the new media of digital inscription—keyboards, console screens, writing software, and so on—also have a stake in archaeological knowledge production. In building upon Manovich’s thesis with a reflexivity extended to incorporate the action of the non-humans into the archaeological collective, I wish to briefly consider some of the differences between digital and more traditional technologies in what is perhaps the most guarded steps in the archaeological chain of transformation—the writing process itself.
Computers are largely enrolled today for their writing software (cf. Boast 2002, 570). In this way, every archaeologist is familiar with the modularity of new media as manifest through basic cut and paste operations of ideas, images and other inscriptions (‘data’) in their texts. Ideas, once digitally inscribed (digitized), are readymade in various ‘files’ (a remediated technology) and instantaneously available to be reshuffled within a text or redeposited in new narratives. The ease and plasticity of these operations greatly quickens our productive capacity and widens our range of circulation. But they also transform our modes of engagement with the process of articulation and thus, ideas. The modularity of paragraphs, sentences, phrases and words in the digital document has obfuscated the once familiar activity of physical transcription necessary with the typewriter.
As such, we may contrast the cut and paste operations of digital media to the more linear process of inscription using a typewriter. With the latter, ideas must be transcribed from one page to another through the activity of typing. Of course the engagement with a typewriter often came as the final step of a long process of articulation that took place with pen and notepaper, nevertheless as a mode of transcription the exchange between the handwritten page of the notebook and typed page constituted a process where it was necessary for the author (in absence of a typist) to work through a text letter for letter, word for word, detail for detail. Thus, it provided a context for further intellectual engagement that was mediated by the necessary physical activity of transcription. Preparation was necessary for such focused rearticulation, or entire documents might have to be retyped. With the immediacy and malleability of digital media in the process of inscription, the once familiar engagements involved in the transcription of ideas that were mediated by a typewriter are no longer involved in the archaeological process. This act of delegation has freed up our once constricted engagements with the fine edge of the typed text as mediated by a typewriter. Many now, for the most part, engage with ideas at the typed digital page. Mistakes are not to be feared at this point.
I do not wish to claim that forms of digital writing facilitate superficiality. This is not an exegesis on the dualistic illusion of surface verses depth, rather I wish to emphasize how the articulation of ideas is connected to the mode of engagement (referring to the ideas laid out in Chapter 3, different propositions equal different articulations). We tend to forget, often because of the remediative qualities of the computer (it calls back to those previous forms of mediation), such discrepancies in the ways the former modes of inscription had a stake in our knowledge production (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). For example, the ‘desktop’ of the computer, the ‘file folders’, ‘pages’, etc. present themselves as refashioned versions of the classic forms of such media associated with the typewriter. Moreover, the setup of the common keyboard has not changed since the 1888 congress in Toronto agreed to the standardised Q W E R…V B N M letter key configuration we type on today (Kittler 1990, 194). Still, they are fundamentally different.
Indeed, with digital media some have argued, ‘instead of a hierarchically organized world, it unfolds a world of lateral connections, of crossings and networkings, as well as rhizomatic proliferations and transformations. Changeability dominates in place of stability… possibility instead of actuality’ (Welsch 1997: 176). The degree to which this is welcomed as a good thing varies depending on the author (cf. Hodder 1999, 178-187). With digital media any text can be reshuffled, recombined, and redeployed with much greater speed, but what other, perhaps subtle, benefits are filtered away?
This comparative discussion has highlighted some of the subtle differences between the instruments associated with paper-based and new media. One lesson of this discrepancy is the value of reiteration. The ease of reinserting ready-at-hand articulations of thought and other inscriptions into new documents should be counterbalanced with a process of deep reiteration and reinscription thus aiding in the further reworking and refinement of those ideas. Such activity is actually facilitated through other modes of digital articulation such as collaborative authoring systems (social software).
What follows is not so much a focus on how 19th century scenographic modes are remediated within digital media as much as how new media can be recruited in different modes of engagement with regards to the material world. Gathered together in 19th century scenographies were qualities such as immutability, mobility, legibility, fungiblity, verifiability, repeatability and optical consistency. Archaeology has maintained these nineteenth century scenographies in remediated modes while at the same time opening them up to more mutable and malleable potentials. In all, we remain predominately on the end of ‘legible specificity’ of the media spectrum (recall from the discussion of media in the Chapter 3) in our mediations of the material world. What can new media do for manifesting material presence, complexity, and ambiguity? It is toward this question that the remaining discussion of the modes of engagement developed in this dissertation is oriented.
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