a proximate interface

Translating Classroom

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 14:34:25 +0000

Bible on Screen - Kindle Bible

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 18:43:00 +0000

Of all the possible platforms I could select to explore bible as book in the digital age, I focus on Kindle because it is a familiar and ubiquitous platform that continues to try to perform as book in significant ways. Though Kindle and other ebook platforms offer a distinct change in a user’s relationship to a text, even the nomenclature of “ebook” and “Kindle book” demonstrate that these interfaces continue to imagine themselves in the category of book. Based on the definition of book I began with in the introduction, “a technology that involves the fastening together of discrete pieces of material to gather and set boundaries for a writing or collection of writings, which is primarily governed by the structure of the page,” Kindle is a book interface. Further, Kindle signals its ancestral relationship with the codex book in its predominant structuring of text in columns on discrete pages that are turned. So, as we have seen with other emerging technologies, Kindle books continue to enact the structures of its predecessors, while extending new affordances in interface.

The number of bibles available on Kindle is innumerable. Depending on the day, your location, your search habits, and your demographics, a web search for “Kindle bible” will return a different set of options. Already, in this kind of search, we are performing the probabilistic production of interface, because each search has the potential to produce something new based on different user variables and on the constantly emerging options for bible on the Kindle platform. From my particular location in the USA as a bible scholar who does a fair bit of web searching related to bible, one of the top search results when I pass a simple query of “Kindle bible” is a Kindle Book titled “The Bible - The Holy Bible Formatted for Your eReader.”¹ This title alone deserves some comment. First of all, the main title of the book is simply “The Bible” without any qualifications or further limitations or identifications. The subtitle offers a small amount more to distinguish this bible interface from the others available on Kindle.² This bible is a bible “Formatted for Your eReader.” Even in the title, this book is taking seriously the role of interface in the construction of this bible. In this title, there is no mention of version or author or date or language or oder of the text within. What is foregrounded is interface.

If you are willing to spend the $1.99 to purchase this bible interface and you read the “about this book” information, it becomes even more evident that this bible builds its unique identity on the expansion of non-linear access offered by the digital affordances of indexing, anchors, and search. Touch screen navigation, hyperlinked table of contents and chapter/verse markings, and a simplified search mechanism are all the ways this particular bible interface is advertised as unique. The only mention of the particularities of the content of the text inside is a simple statement that this Kindle bible “contains the complete old and new testaments…ASV Version.”³ Here we find the only language focused specifically on contents in the entire description and framing of this Kindle bible. Otherwise, this bible is defined by its interface affordances exclusively. The only mention of author or source of this Kindle bible is the grammatically redundant “ASV Version” fragment in the description, with American Standard listed as the author of the book. Following the author link for American Standard provided by Amazon leads to a blank profile with only this one bible in the list of related items. The American Standard Version is a public domain text of the bible published initially in 1901. There is a vast and interesting history to this English translation of the bible, but this Kindle bible pays no attention to this either in the advertising of the bible or in the bible’s introduction. We can see here a bible that is entirely focused on the use of it in interface, not on the content it contains.

Lest we imagine that the codex has been replaced entirely by this new interface, this Kindle bible uses the title page from a print codex bible as its “cover” art. Here we find a material representation of the palimpsestuous process of media translation, with an image of a print codex page representing the interface of a Kindle book designed to extend the non-linear access affordances introduced by the codex into new realms made possible by internet technologies.⁴ This Kindle bible takes seriously the possibilities of its use and does not assume user familiarity with affordances available in this digital interface, so with the most emphasized line in the description, this bible offers links to YouTube videos on how to use the bible.⁵ This may seem like a silly item to highlight in a bible, but it makes a fascinating point about the assumptions we have about users and codicies that are no longer operable in these emerging book interfaces. If content is just one part of interface, then these changes in modes of access will inevitably change the relationship between user and platform, thus will require new skills and new intuitions.

Proliferation of Interfaces

One of the most interesting developments in the media translation of bible from codex to Kindle is the ability to use this Kindle bible on an actual Kindle device, a laptop, an iPhone, an iPad, android devices, and the list gets larger every day. In a sense, what I have purchased from Amazon in this Kindle bible is permission to participate in a plethora of interfaces, increasing the surface area of this bible by providing multiple points of contact even at the platform level. This is one of the distinct differences between newer media interfaces of bible and the manuscript interfaces we have looked at previously. To own a manuscript is to have a singular material object with which a user relates. Certainly, there were variabilities in the encounter between user and platform in roll or codex interfaces based on historical period, social location, and cultural dynamics at any given time. Yet, in roll and codex interfaces, the material affordances were constant for a given book. A user could own more than one bible, but each bible was a distinct entity and did not require any other technology of access in order to interface with it.⁶ So, in order to participate in the interface that is this Kindle bible, I have to purchase the bible and I have to have access to Kindle Reader software, either in a web browser or as a downloaded application on my laptop or mobile device. As a user of this bible on an iPhone, I actually have at minimum three interfaces at play when I use this Kindle bible-the interface of the phone, the interface of the reader application, and the interface of the particular bible I am using. The overlapping interface possibilities available in my use of this Kindle bible on a computer or on my iPhone provides expansive points of contact with the book that can resist a user from settling into the monotony of mastering one consistent approach to the interface.

Collaboration and the Page

The ability of a user to choose which device to use to participate in the Kindle bible interface and to use different devices as part of the bible interface is just the beginning of the expanded role of the user in shaping the material aspects of the interface. Though users certainly had an impact on the material surfaces of the roll and codex interfaces through adaptations of the text and use in communal settings, the Kindle bible affords an entirely new scale of user participation in shaping the physical space of the interface. Users of roll and codex interfaces were confined by the physical dimensions and limits of the pages, finding space in the margins and between lines or even over text to collaboratively construct the interface. In this Kindle bible interface, the flexibility of the digital screen affords the user the ability to participate in things such as page dimensions, font size, color of background, and number of columns per page. This user participation in shaping the material character of the page enacts one of the collaborative affordances of the Kindle bible interface.

Though the notion of page is not intrinsically operative in the roll interface, we can easily imagine many limits of the page in a roll, such as a each columns as a page, each sheet of material as a page, or even the user’s wingspan as the boundaries of the roll page. In a codex interface, the page is clearly defined as one unit of material, be it papyrus, parchment or paper, demarcated by the fold and binding of sheets of material together. So, in Codex Sinaiticus, one sheet of parchment, folded at the middle and written on both sides, provides four pages with four columns of writing per page. In the Kindle interface, the operation of the page is a site of significant change in terms of user participation. Though not demanded by the technologies involved in providing a digital platform for the use of books, the Kindle interface has kept the codex page as its primary navigational structure. Much like turning the page of a codex, in the Kindle bible, a user is presented with one unit of text at a time and there are navigational aids to move forward or backward in a book, which corresponds to left and right horizontal movement respectively in English language books.

Though entirely unnecessary technologically, Kindle books pay homage to the codex page by maintaining the horizontal navigation through discrete units of text, which mimics the pages of paper or papyrus bound at a spine. This carrying on of the codex page in a technological framework that does not demand it resembles the continued use of a roll’s multiple columns of text on a single codex page, even though not the most efficient use of the emerging technology of the codex. In the browser Kindle interface, a user can use arrow keys on the keyboard or click the arrows provided in the pages to move either direction.⁷ On an iPhone or other touchscreen device, this navigation is enacted by a touch on the edge of the current page in the direction you want to move and a swipe. This swipe action is the closest physical motion to the familiar page turn of the codex. Some digital reading platforms such as iBooks actually programmed the swipe to visually emulate the turning of the codex page to carry this characteristic experience into these new media environments.

Kindle pages also have a header and footer that are consistent throughout. The page header keeps the title of the book present throughout the book and the footer provides a location indicator, which functions as a media translation of page numbers in a late codex interface. When Kindle first released its platform, all Kindle books used this location numbering as the means of locating a user within the space of the book sequentially. Due to market demands to have better crossover reference capabilities with print versions of the same book, Kindle introduced page numbers into their platform in 2011.⁸ Page numbers are not provided in our particular Kindle bible, because this particular Kindle bible has no interest in staying in sync with a print interface and because bible already has such regular internal reference markings provided by chapter and verse. Keeping the location number in the footer of the page throughout the book enables the user to have a sense of where they are located within the larger structure of the book. Better yet, the Kindle layer of the interface provides a location slider and percentage along with the raw location number to provide better visualization of a user’s position within a book. This slider visualization enacts a material media translation of the experience of holding a codex and feeling or seeing the different thicknesses of pages in the right hand and the left. In 2016 Kindle expanded this media translation of locating a user within the larger book with the introduction of a feature called Page Flip.⁹ With Page Flip, the user gets a slider and thumbnails of pages nearby to afford easy visualization of the macro location in the book and easy navigation elsewhere or back to the page from which the exploration began.

The use of location instead of page numbers as the primary indicator of position within a book highlights one of the important interface changes brought by the Kindle platform. In a print or manuscript codex, page size, font size, font type, margin size, page coloring are determined by the book producer and remain unchanged by the user. In this situation, where the materiality of the book determines the page dimensions and boundaries in a fixed and stable manner, regardless of use, it makes sense for page number to be a primary navigational reference aid. A Kindle book allows the user to participate much more in the material construction of the page. In a browser, with one menu click, the Kindle platform allows the user to select from five font sizes, five margin widths, and three text and background color combinations. Mobile Kindle interfaces allow the user to select font type and instead of margin size selection, mobile users can select spacing between lines. It is well established that things like color, font size, and spacing between lines has an impact on user interface and readability.¹⁰ Yet, for our purposes here, the important impact of this increased user participation in defining the materiality of the interface is that user defines the page instead of the material limits of the book. When using a Kindle bible on an iPhone, if a user turns the phone from portrait (phone held vertically) to landscape (phone held horizontally), the amount and organization of the content on the page changes. For example, if I am at the beginning of Ezra chapter 8 in the Kindle bible on my iPhone 7, in portrait mode, the current page holds the first 11 verses, but only 8 in landscape mode. If I were to change the font size or the spacing between lines, the page definition would change yet again. Though the page possibilities are not unlimited, the book is still bound in a sense, there is no doubt that users play a far greater role in constructing the material aspects of the page than previous book interfaces. This variability in the material aspects of the page is a major technological innovation and renders page numbers unnecessary, even nonsensical, in a Kindle book except for the need to have conversation about locations across interfaces. Yet, the page as a discrete unit of interface remains and has become a site of collaboration in the Kindle bible interface as users are invited to participate in constructing the dimensions of the page.

Annotation as Collaboration

The collaborative affordances of the Kindle bible interface do not stop at the user’s ability to shape the contours of the page. Whereas only trained scribes or authorized users of a roll or codex interface of bible in antiquity would have had the ability to annotate the text, every user of The Bible - The Holy Bible Formatted for Your eReader has the ability to participate in marking the interface. The Kindle bible provides two primary forms of annotation for any user participating in the interface, highlighting and notes. Any portion of the text can be highlighted, thus marked as important or interesting, and user notes can be added at any location in the text, as long as attached to some portion of the text of the bible. Users can also bookmark a location in the Kindle book, which functions like a dogeared page in a codex or a marginal notation in a roll that signals the special importance of a particular location in the text.¹¹ These notes, highlights and bookmarks signal a significant capacity for encouraging active participation in the reading process. In 1QIsa^a^ and Codex Sinaiticus, this kind of annotative activity was visible for all users to see, providing material indicators of the ongoing evolution of the interface. The presence of these interruptive marks from others contributed to the collaborative affordances of the roll and codex as well as to the anarchy of these interfaces, resisting the reduction to a singular and deterministic use. The default settings in the Kindle bible interface make annotations private for the individual user, which does not demand the same curious interruptive possibilities offered by the marginal activity in our ancient interface examples.

Despite the default tendencies of the Kindle interface toward a private and isolated annotative experience for each user, the Kindle bible interface does provide two collaborative annotative capacities that can contributed to a more anarchic interface by inviting other voices into the interface. First, the Kindle bible interface offers an option to turn on a feature called “Popular Highlights.” If enabled, this popular highlights feature will show a user passages in the book that have been marked as important or interesting by other users. A highlight is deemed popular if three or more distinct users mark the same passage and the interface will show the number of highlighters but not their identities nor any notes associated with the highlights. Though perhaps less informative than the persistent markings left on an ancient manuscript, with the popular highlights feature turned on, users of the Kindle interface are reminded that they are part of a community of users that may find different parts of the book important. As with many other parts of the Kindle bible interface, this contact with other voices is optional and can be turned off at any time, which can decrease the interruption possible in the Kindle interface.

A second collaborative annotative capacity afforded only when participating in the Kindle bible using one of Amazon’s Kindle Reader devices is the possibility of public notes. If a user chooses, they can change a setting in the Kindle bible interface to make all of their notes public instead of private. With public notes enabled, any other user following this user who has enabled these public notes in the Kindle bible will then see all of their notes and annotations made in the interface. Multiple users, from different parts of the world, can participate in this bible interface together, collaborating to construct the interface by marking its pages and anarchically resisting reduction of the interface to a static space with a singular voice. Unlike in the roll and codex, this collaborative capacity in the Kindle interface is elective and selective, making it less anarchic than the annotative lives of our older manuscript interfaces. Users of Codex Sinaiticus simply had to deal with the different voices and layers present in the interface, because these markings became a part of the singular material surface of the book that would confront every user. The Kindle bible interface operates as many material copies with the annotative markings as a separate layer of data, integrated into the interface for a seamless user experience, but not materially bound to the rest of the book in the same was as ink on parchment. The data surrounding these distinct copies of the Kindle bible can be connected through popular highlights and public notes, if a user so chooses, opening the interface up to the dynamic ambiguity of different voices. Yet, this resistance to consolidating the interface into a closed and deterministic system is not demanded to the same degree in the Kindle bible as it is in 1QIsa^a^ or Codex Sinaiticus.

On the other hand, the distinct layers of the text and user annotations in this Kindle bible offer a different kind of anarchic tendency in interface. As a user participates in the Kindle bible interface through highlights, notes, and bookmarks, these annotations are indexed in such a way that creates an entirely new and constantly emerging mechanism for navigating through the interface. Instead of being limited to the navigational structures built into the interface itself, such as book, chapter, and verse markings or location identifiers, the Kindle bible tracks the position of a user’s highlights and indexes each word in every note, which allows the user to move through the interface based on the traces of their participation. Our Kindle bible interface, The Bible - The Holy Bible Formatted for Your eReader, is impeccably structured to map the precise relationships between each part of the book, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation. Yet, in the Notebook view of the Kindle Reader app, the annotative participations of a user provide a way of aggregating bits of the book based on user contact points, thus breaking up the structured flow of the text and introducing new possible relationships as two highlights from different places in the book bump up against a user note asking a question about something in between them. This new and evolving structure offered in Notebook view reveals a collaborative affordance that interrupts the ability of the default Kindle book structures to determine the possible relationships available in this interface.

Exponentially Expanding Non-Linear Access

The indexing of user notes in this annotative affordance of the Kindle bible highlights one of the most important attributes of this particular interface, the search function. Much like we saw with Codex Sinaiticus, the combination of collectability and non-linear access provided an increase in surface area in the interface by affording fast access to many points of the interface while resisting the limitation to one way of interacting with the interface. Perhaps the most significant innovation offered by the Kindle book is the exponential expansion of this non-linear access through the search functionalities. As the introduction to The Bible: The Holy Bible Formatted for Your eReader highlights, one of the advantages of this bible interface is the ability to search for any word or passage in the text and find all mentions of it in the entire book. Many bible interfaces provide indexes of various types to help users find passages or portions of text that address a shared theme, person, time period or geographical location. The Kindle bible builds an index of all the words in the bible and allows users to search for any term and it will present a list of all occurrences of that term in the book. Adding to the complexity of this search capacity, as I mentioned above, this indexing of words in the bible includes the words of a user’s notes. So, the indexing process that builds the search capacity actually incorporates the markings of the user into the interface in ways that resemble the material markings of the scribes in 1QIsa^a^ or Codex Sinaiticus.

This giant leap in scale of non-linear access creates a radically high surface area interface where a user can engage with any single point of the book with a simple query. Using search as a navigational tool and organizing method in the Kindle bible also provides a vast number of possible arrangements of the bits of the text, resisting the ability to over determine the interface. No single user could exhaust all of the possible approaches to the interface, because the interface keeps expanding as the user participates. More significantly, search as a means of user participation in the interface demonstrates the anarchic affordances of this interface by allowing the text to be reorganized based on the search terms passed by the user, putting passages into contact in the search results display that may never have come into contact in a more traditional mode of access. These searches are creating new possibilities for encounter both between parts of the text and between user and book interface. Folding user annotations into the search results along with passages from the text of the book also challenges any dominance the “intended” book interface might have had over the user’s experience. The extraordinary advances in and integration of user participation and non-linear access provided by The Bible - The Holy Bible Formatted for Your eReader demonstrate an interface that is constantly evolving and emerging, though still mostly contained within the covers of a digitized codex.

Bible as Book

Looking backward and forward at bible as book, it is clear that the affordances of high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy are present in a roll bible used for communal reading from the 2nd century BCE, a codex bible used as an exemplar for copying from the 4th century CE, and a Kindle bible designed for use by contemporary readers on mobile devices, even if not for the same reasons and to the same degree. Bible as interface is not new and not an invention of our contemporary emerging technological landscape. In light of the anxieties often present during times of emerging technologies, it is important to note that these affordances are not limited to one kind of interface and not guaranteed in any particular interface. In any bible interface, users are part of producing the possibilities for high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy in use and for shaping the design of interface in these directions. Now that we have seen these affordances at work in book interfaces, we will look toward interfaces that are pushing bible beyond the book.

This could be a reinforcement of Timothy Beal’s suggestion in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Kindle location 61, that bible has become a cultural artifact that extends far beyond any sense of content to a cultural sensibility of “authoritative, univocal, practical, accessible, comprehensive, and exclusive.” Perhaps, including “The Holy Bible” in the subtitle of this particular Kindle book differentiates it in terms of content from other bibles, such as the Python Bible or the Golf Bible. Could this mean that “Holy” has become a synonym for Christian in common parlance?

From a user perspective, this seems like a failure of leveraging the possibilities of the platform. Yet, because Kindle books continue to perform the stability and fixicity of codex, meaning they do not allow updates like other interfaces might, this approach could afford providing better videos as they develop them or adding additional videos as issues arise with the interface. A more fitting strategy may have been to provide a link to a YouTube channel that could then be a dynamic library of support videos but with a durable link and landing space that could be provided in a stable interface such as a Kindle book.

This assumption is not transferable to the media literacies necessary for bible interface beyond book, which points again to the significance of this Kindle bible including YouTube instructional videos on how to use this bible.

This article demonstrates the continued influence of the codex on the design of the Kindle user interface.

http://a.co/grXmqZy, accessed on August 18, 2017. ↩
I am at a loss for why the word “Holy” is added to the subtitle of this book. ↩
See https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Holy-Formatted-Your-eReader-ebook/dp/B0032UYGE6 accessed on February 17, 2017. ↩
This use of a print codex page to signify the bible, rather than the titles of the writings in the bible, a list of characters and stories, or even some depiction of Christianity or God, shows how deeply embedded the identity of bible is in the print codex. ↩
Rather than using the affordance of linkability offered by the Kindle platform to deliver or embed these training videos in the book itself, for some reason the producers of this bible elected to provide a link to click to be emailed links to videos. ↩
Of course, we could speak of language as a technology required to access a roll or codex, but for our purposes here, we can assume language competence in the textual language in all of these interface examples. ↩
Further bothering the spatiality of navigation, both the up and the left arrow go backward in the book, while down and right move forward in the book. ↩
See https://www.wired.com/2011/02/amazon-adds-real-page-numbers-to-Kindle/ for an example of the kinds of pressures driving this demand for page numbers. ↩
See http://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazon-new-page-flip-navigation-tool-Kindle/ for an image, description, and video demonstrating this Page Flip feature. ↩
https://conversionxl.com/the-effects-of-typography-on-user-experience-conversions/ is a good starting place to begin exploring the impact of typography on reading in digital interfaces. ↩
Sharing is another affordance offered in the Kindle interface that provides opportunities for collaborative engagement between the interface user and others in their community who may or may not have access to the interface itself. ↩

Binding the Book - Codex Bible

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 18:25:00 +0000

The roll interface illustrated by 1QIsa^a^ was the dominant bible interface until near the turn of the first century of the common era, when a different technology for book begins to emerge, the codex. Codex is the antique technical term for book as we know it today. The definition offered by Roberts and Skeat in The Birth of the Codex, states that a codex is “a collection of sheets of any material, folded double and fastened together at the back or spine, and usually protected by covers.”¹ This is a helpful and precise definition, which highlights the material mashup that codex represents. The fastening of multiple writing surfaces together at one end so that the writing surfaces fold together, face to face, comes from the wooden tablets commonly used by the Romans in antiquity. This collection of wood frames filled with wax is where codex gets its name, with codae being Latin for wood.² In order to be of practical use for longer writings such as literature, poetry, or scripture, a shift was made to the same type of writing and reading surface as the roll, typically papyrus or parchment. So, the codex becomes a mashup of two writing and reading technologies at the time, the wax tablet and the roll. The main structural difference between roll and codex arises from the way in which sheets are attached together. Rather than gluing or stitching sheets together at an edge in sequence to make a long continuous roll, a codex is made by folding sheets into bundles called quires and then fastening one or more quires at one long edge. The bare minimum material needed to constitute a codex is more than one sheet of material and some kind of binding at the spine. This new interface, though carrying forward continuities with existing technologies, afforded new user relationships.³

Derived from its ancestors, the wax tablet, the leaf tablet⁴ and the notebook, the codex provided a number of potential technological advantages as compared to the roll. Numerous examples have been suggested, such as portability, capacity, and flexibility.⁵ For example, Martial’s late first century promotion of the new codex technology as a fitting format for a traveler’s collection of his poems or other literary classics confirms the accepted value of portability attributed to the codex in antiquity.⁶ Allowing for writing on both sides of the writing surface, the codex could hold more text per unit of material and thus smaller, more portable books could be produced. On the other hand, since the codex could theoretically bind an unlimited number of pages and both sides of these pages were used for writing, the codex could hold an increasing amount of text within one book. This tremendous capacity also allowed for increased collection of writings together in one volume. Yet, as we saw with the roll, the pragmatics of user interaction with interface placed some limit on the practical capacity of a single codex. The flexibility of the codex is confined mostly to the multiquire format, where the binding could be removed to facilitate rearrangement, addition, and subtraction of sections.

I agree with James O’Donnell, who suggests that the most valuable technological advantage provided by the codex is non-linear access to text.⁷ Non-linear access captures one of the fundamental technical differences between a roll and a codex book interface. The text of a roll has to be accessed in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, even if not all of the text is read. With a codex, access to a text can begin at any point without regard for what precedes or follows, and need not proceed in any sort of linear fashion. I prefer the language of non-linear access to describe this technological innovation over phrases such as “ease of reference” or “random access.” The phrase “ease of reference” does not adequately describe the fundamental transition in the user interface for text processing that accompanied the shift in technology from roll to codex and traditional reference aids did not become common, even in codices, until the fourth century C.E.⁸ Though random access was certainly possible with a codex, this seems like extreme language to describe the phenomenon. Reading and writing processes rarely involve or necessitate truly random access to a text.⁹ “Non-linear” terminology maintains the idea of user participation in interface and clearly describes one technological affordance brought about by the codex.

Thanks to the collaborative work of the British Library, Leipzig University Library, St. Catherine’s Monastery, and the National Library of Russia, we have the amazing ability to explore one particular example of bible as codex in Codex Sinaiticus.¹⁰ Understanding the irony in this project of using a digitized interface to discuss the parchment codex interface, I will focus here on the affordances of the ancient codex, not on the ways the website affords our interaction with it.¹¹

One of the great early bible codices, alongside Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, Codex Siniaticus is thought to be produced in the middle 300’s and contains a majority of what is today considered the Christian bible, with a few particularities and omissions.¹² Siniaticus is a parchment codex of substantial size with 400 leaves remaining of the estimated 730 that were in the full manuscript, totaling something near 1440 pages. The pages are large, measuring 15 by 13.5 inches and the writing is in four columns per page of uncial Greek in scripta continua.¹³ It is interesting to note the continuation of columnar writing that is carried over from the roll interface. The material interface of codex does nothing to suggest the need to write in multiple columns on a single page, which was a waste of expensive material. Writing all the way across the page would save space, allowing a codex to store more and cost less. Yet, the presence of the roll remains in the columns of the codex as an echo of the interface that preceded it.

Non-Linear Access and Collectability

Combining the new affordance of non-linear access with increased collective capacities, a codex like Sinaiticus introduces a new scale of surface area into book interfaces. In the roll interface, the mechanics of linear horizontal access with discrete vertical columns exposed one at a time created one kind of high surface area, such that a user might engage one column without having easy access to or awareness of another distant portion of the text. In a simplistic sense, chopping a long text into columns on a roll is akin to grinding up a coffee bean into coffee grounds, thus increasing the discrete surfaces of contact with the entity. Codex Sinaiticus, with four columns per page, thus 8 columns across when open, and an easy page turn away from any distant portion of text suggests a decreased surface area (more text in view at once, so less discrete, perhaps even less digital) as compared to 1QIsa^a^ from the perspective of a single open “page.” Yet, the ability to move back and forth across vast portions of text in a codex with a simple page turn, without the analog-like process of having to move through each portion of text to get there, provides an entirely different kind of discreteness that increases the possible points of entry and contact for the user and at a much faster pace. Even before the prevalence of reference aids in codex interfaces, if we combine the speed and disjunction of non-linear access with the collective capacities of a codex like Sinaiticus, we can see this high surface area at work, both demanding participation and interrupting a user’s ability to grasp the whole of the interface.

If a user was reading Luke 4 in Codex Sinaiticus and came across the passage we explored earlier, which details Jesus’s reading of Isaiah 61:1-2 in synagogue, the user could flip from folio 230 to folio 66 to see more of the context of Isaiah passage. It is the affordance of non-linear access that suggests a practical possibility of collecting these two writings together in one book interface. Even if the theoretical capacity of a roll book could hold enough text to contain both Isaiah and the Gospel of Luke, the linear access of the roll makes it entirely impractical to read from two distant places in a roll in a short period of time. A more common example of the high surface area afforded by the non-linear access and collectability of the codex interface would be a user comparing passages that describe similar events in more than one Gospel text. The presence of marginal markings in Codex Sinaiticus indicating discrete related pericopes in different gospel texts demonstrates the usefulness and evolution of this high surface area capacity as reference aids emerged in the margin to support the practice.¹⁴ On their own, the non-linear access and collective capacities of the codex might have facilitated lower surface area by privileging the access to the whole of a text. Yet, the interruptive process of non-linear access and the multiple voices made available in such a large collection lead to many potential contact points and many modes of access, which afford a high surface area that supports bible as interface irreducible to consumption.

Scripta Continua as Surface Area

Another characteristic of Codex Sinaiticus that contributes to high surface area in interface is the use of scripta continua. Scripta continua is writing that includes no spaces and no punctuation to identify word breaks or phrase endings. In Codex Sinaiticus, the scripta continua even continues across line breaks.¹⁵ The regular patterns of the Greek language allow for fairly predictable and consistent parsing of this uninterrupted string of characters, but there are inevitably places where the algorithms do not produce only one possible reading. As Gamble suggests, the absence of spaces and punctuation demands a participation from the reader that is unfamiliar even to an ancient book like 1QISa^a^.¹⁶ It might seem more appropriate to consider scripta continua as lower surface area since the text all runs together without spaces or punctuation to break the text into discrete bits. Yet, if we consider the use of an interface with scripta continua, it actually demands that the user engage each character as a discrete unit to determine where the word breaks and sense breaks need to be to read. So, the absence of spaces demands the reader to participate more actively in constructing the text as it is read. The ambiguity possible in this process of parsing word breaks, though far less frequent than a contemporary reader might imagine, resists a deterministic reading of the text. Thus, scripta continua enhances the high surface area of Codex Sinaiticus.

Collaborative Annotations

As stated by the curators of the Codex Sinaiticus project, one of the most interesting aspects of this ancient manuscript is the rich annotative life it betrays. Klaus Wachtel counts 23,000 places where the manuscript has been corrected, amounting to an average of 30 annotations per page.¹⁷ Like we saw on a much smaller scale in 1QIsa^a^, in these markings at the margins, we find a material performance of the affordance of collaboration in interface. Whether deemed as corrections, additions, theological guides, or reading indicators, these annotations demonstrate a participatory reading process that affords collaboration of users and the ongoing use and development of the interface over many centuries.¹⁸ With the roll interface, we found a significant collaborative capacity in the communal reading use. It has been tempting, given the close timing of Constantine’s request for “fifty copies of the divine Scriptures” in 330 and the likely production of Codex Sinaiticus in the fourth century, to imagine Codex Sinaiticus as one of the fifty bibles requested by Constantine to be used in the churches for instruction.¹⁹ Yet, as Gamble points out, the less than portable size of Sinaiticus, the lack of reading aids, and the multi-columnar scripta continua suggest that Codex Sinaiticus might not have been well suited for public reading and may have been commissioned for personal use.²⁰

Even if this magnificent manuscript was initially intended for private use, we see the affordance of collaboration of the interface at work in the unparalleled volume and diversity of annotations present in the book. Milne and Skeat as well as Jongkind provide detailed accounts of the layers of collaboration in making this interface what it has become.²¹ The Codex Sinaiticus Project website provides a nice summary of the kinds of activity present in the interface, which includes no fewer than three initial scribes, as many as nine revisors, three medieval marginal annotators, and arabic glosses.²² This amount of ongoing participation in the construction of Codex Sinaiticus from the forth century until the twelfth demonstrates the collaborative capacities of the interface and the ongoing emergence of the text. The layout of the pages of the manuscript afforded a great deal of space on all margins that could well be used for annotations. Yet, the vast majority of the markings of participation show up in the small spaces between letters and lines in the body of the text. As I noted in the 1QIsa^a^ interface, here again in Codex Sinaiticus, we have a persistent reminder of the evolving and participatory nature of this interface because the editorial marks remain in place together with the earlier versions of the text. The ongoing presence of earlier and later participations in the interface mimics the palimpsestuous relationship between the roll and codex we see in the persistence of multiple columns on a single page in Codex Sinaiticus. Having access to this antique form of revision control in Codex Sinaiticus, where we see the history of suggested changes offered in the margins by users of the codex illuminates the dynamic collaborative life of the book. This revision history is an ancient precursor to functionality provided by contemporary interfaces such as the show all markup option of the Track Changes functionality in Microsoft Word. Even the spatiality of these distant analogies of revision history share commonality as words are struck through in exchange for others, characters are marked as deleted on the line, and comments float in the margins.

Opening the Binding: Anarchy in Codex

The character of the revisions found in Codex Sinaiticus and the fact that most of the changes to the text do not fully erase earlier versions of the text also contribute to the anarchic affordance of this bible interface, resisting in a way the consolidating tendencies of the material makeup of the book. As a material construction, Codex Siniaticus is an archic container, embodying the dominance of a singular entity. This massive book is a crowning example of the exploitation of the collective and consolidating affordances of the codex technology. Bringing such a large collection of texts together in one volume, twenty nine early Christian writings and the whole of the Septuagint,²³ was entirely impractical for everyday use, but was a strong signal of the unity and totality of the Christian scriptures. It is hard not to imagine some cultural and cognitive correlation between the growing debates about what writings ought to be included in the authorized collection of Christian scriptures and this exquisite exemplar of codex as container. Though I find Robert Kraft’s suggestions of a relationship between growing Christian canon consciousness and the emergence of codex technology entirely compelling, I appreciate the wisdom of Gamble’s caution to avoid postulating any direct causal relationship between these two phenomena.²⁴ Regardless of the precise relationship between canon and codex, the ability to collect a large number of related writings in one volume, bound together at the spine, and protected by covers most definitely signals an arche of containment and consolidation into a unity as a material artifact.

Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that once a user opens Codex Sinaiticus, this icon of unity that hints at comprehensiveness and homogeneity affords anarchy through the irreducible polyvocality of the collection and the revision layers. A collection of writings as large as that included in Codex Sinaiticus that come from vastly different time periods and regions inevitably resists any consolidation into a single voice. Challenging the “impoverished” tendencies encouraged by the simplistic cultural iconicity of bible as the unified and comprehensive container of all meaningful knowledge, Timothy Beal points out that “The Bible is anything but univocal about anything. It is a cacophony of voices and perspectives, often in conflict with one another.²⁵ Beal, well aware of the social effects of media in general and the specific effect of print codices on the use of bible as interface, points to the disjunction between the all encompassing closure and unity suggested by the physical form of the codex and the several layers of difference enacted between the covers. A simple example of the anarchy of the collection is the inclusion of four gospel accounts that constantly offer differences to negotiate among themselves, resisting reduction to any singular account of the life, ministry, and death of Jesus.

Beyond the texts collected together in Codex Sinaiticus, the revision process also indicates an anarchy in this book interface. In his close attention to the character and quantity of textual emendations in Codex Sinaiticus, Klaus Wachtel points out that though there is a tendency to emend the text toward the Byzantine text family, a user is able to discern at least three texts at work at the same time in Sinaiticus, the work of the initial scribes, the systematic emendations of Corrector^a^ (C^a^) and the even later text of Corrector^b2^ (C^b2^), which works with both the initial text and the text of C^a^.²⁶ Again, because the process of revision in Codex Sinaiticus involved dots over letters or strikethroughs as deletions, rather than hard erasure or total replacement, much of the time, a user can still see the layers of evolution of the text and the direction of the changes does not always suggest a linear progression toward a stable text form.²⁷ A great example of this ongoing conflict of multiple voices in the revision layers resisting the closure of the interface to a single voice is what Wachtel refers to as the “bloody sweat” episode of Luke 22:43-44. This passage is one of three additions to the text of the New Testament often indicative of the more stable form of the text developed later in medieval times and known as the Byzantine text.²⁸ Looking at the last 10 rows of column 3 and the first line of column 4 on folio 244b of Codex Sinaiticus, we can see that the initial scribe included the bloody sweat passage and that an early corrector, identified as C^a^, used dots above the letters of the first line and then a more efficient dot marking at the beginning and end of each line, to signal the deletion of this passage from the text. In a palimpsestuous object lesson, these erasure dots then get erased by C^b2^, but not entirely, leaving a user of this codex with an explicit look at the anarchy of this interface in the ambiguity and polyvocality inscribed on its surfaces.²⁹

Before the stable consolidations of the medieval process of transliteration in the ninth century and the emergence of print in the fifteenth century, Codex Sinaiticus provides an example of codex bible that exhibits the affordances of high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy. Though the material characteristics of the bound volume afford instincts toward comprehensiveness, consolidation, and closure, the 800 years of participation in evolving the text betray bible as interface, a relationality that is irreducible to consumption.

Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1. It is instructive to compare the Wikipedia definition of book (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book) and the google definition of book (search for “define book” in google) with this codex definition from Roberts and Skeat. It is clear that in contemporary parlance, book and codex mean the same thing. This is more evidence that codex has come to dominate the contemporary imagination of book.

Even with this affordance of portability offered by the codex, this may not have been an important technological advance for bible in early antiquity, since the scriptures used by early Christians were largely still interfaced in roll.

It gets its name from the Mount Sinai monastery where the first portion of the remains were found. Though the relationship between the tablets at Mount Sinai in the biblical story of Moses bringing the commandments to the people and the codex that bears this mountain’s name is entirely accidental, I find great resonance between the cultural impact of these ancient stone tablets and the codex that is said to give us a window to the “original” text of the New Testament.

In the next chapter, I will take a closer look at the Codex Sinaiticus Project as a bible interface beyond book.

Wachtel provides a detailed analysis and bibliography for exploring the corrective strands in Sinaiticus. The outer page margins are massive, which may have contributed to the rich annotative life of the manuscript.

See Wachtel, “The Corrected,” 102-103 for further discussion of these variants in the early manuscript tradition.

Instead, Wachtel suggests that Codex Sinaiticus was more likely used as an important exemplar for further copying, not as a reading bible.

Colin H. ↩
Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, 11-12. ↩
The ancient helpdesk parody video that has circulated on YouTube provides a helpful, though hyperbolic, depiction of the assumptions we make about codex as a technology since we are so familiar with it. ↩
See Graham Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174, for a discussion of the leaf tablets found at Vindolanda. ↩
O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word, 54. ↩
Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, 24-25. ↩
James Joseph O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 54, says, “The history of medieval manuscripts is the history of the exploitation of the possibilities of the codex page.” ↩
Gamble, Books and Readers, 55-56, 63. ↩
More recent machine reading techniques such as those used in Natural Language Processing tasks such as topic modeling can involve access to text that approaches randomness. ↩
I have a particular affinity for this codex both because I have spent some time exploring the manuscript itself but also because of its name. ↩
The enactment of the Codex Sinaiticus project itself raises all kinds of interesting questions regarding bible as interface by combining digitization techniques, xml encoding, and web design to provide a collection of online interfaces to offer contact with this ancient codex interface. ↩
See “Content” in the Codex Sinaiticus Project, http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/content.aspx, accessed on August 20, 2017, for a detailed description of the contents of the codex. ↩
For a description of the physical characteristics of Codex Sinaiticus and its relationship to other early Christian codices, along with a robust bibliography for other conversation partners regarding the materiality of Codex Sinaiticus, see Harry Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus in Its Fourth Century Setting,” 3-5. ↩
See Parker, Introduction to New Testament Manuscripts, 315-16 and Jongkind, Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus, 109-120 for more information on the Eusebian apparatus in Codex Sinaiticus in particular. ↩
This continuation of scripta continua across line breaks is one reason Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus in Its Fourth Century Setting,” 11, suggests that Codex Sinaiticus was unlikely used as a cathedral bible for public reading in services. ↩
Gamble, Books and Readers, 203. ↩
Klaus Wachtel, “The Corrected New Testament Text of Codex Sinaiticus,” 97. ↩
Wachtel, “The Corrected New Testament Text,” 98, suggests three layers of corrections in the New Testament portion spanning from the forth to the twelfth centuries. ↩
Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus in Its Fourth Century Setting,” 7-12, summarizes the main arguments for this connection, primarily based on Skeat’s many articulations of the possibility. ↩
Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus,” 11. ↩
For extensive studies of the scribal activity in Codex Sinaiticus, see the classic work by Milne and Skeat, Scribes and Correctors, and more recently, Jongkind, Scribal Habits. ↩
For more details on this summary, see http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/project/transcription_detailed.aspx, accessed on August 20, 2017. ↩
Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus,” 4. ↩
Kraft, “The Codex and Canon Consciousness,” http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon, accessed on August 20, 2017, and Gamble, “Codex Sinaiticus,” 5, for a brief caution and reference to many works exploring the relationship in detail. ↩
Beal, Rise and Fall, Kindle location 2088-2089. ↩
Wachtel, “The Corrected,” 101. ↩
Wachtel, “The Corrected,” 104, says, “The development towards the stable medieval mainstream text form was neither homogeneous nor consistent.” ↩
The other two additions include the longer ending to the Gospel of Mark (Mark 16:9-20) and the story of the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). ↩
Wachtel, “The Corrected,” 99-100, helpfully points out that multiple layers of corrections like these and the myriad others that are even less cut and dry would make it very difficult for a public reader to make decisions during the process of reading the text aloud. ↩

Bible on a Roll

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 18:09:00 +0000

Before bible became Bible, it was book. Our concept of book has become so deeply entangled with the dominant book technology of nearly the last two millennia, the codex, that we forget book has not always been codex. Depending on how broadly we want to define book and its relationship to writing, we could imagine book going all the way back to cave walls and stone tablets. I won’t take us all the way down that road here to avoid the detours it might provide, but in the life of bible as book, it is at least important to consider the codex’s immediate technological ancestor, the roll.¹ We find roll books mentioned by authors in the ancient world and in the bible itself. βιβλιον is the Greek word often translated “book” in the Septuagint and the New Testament. Yet, this word for book that becomes the signifier for the cultural phenomenon of Christian scripture, and so much more, always refers to something otherwise than a codex in these ancient Greek texts, because the codex did not yet exist. Here are a few examples:²

LXX Exodus 24.17 - “And taking the book (το βιβλιον) of the covenant, he read it into the ears of the people and they said, ‘All things, which the Lord said, we will do and we will hear.’” LXX Nehemiah 8.8 - “And they read in the book (βιβλίω) of the law of God, and Ezra taught and ordered [them] in knowledge of the Lord, and the people understood when he read.” 2 Timothy 4.13 - “When you come, bring the cloak, which I left in Troas with Carpus, and the books (τα βιβλια), especially the parchments.”

In English translation, with our deep assumption of book as codex, it is easy to read these passages and picture these ancient readers holding a giant leather bound codex. Yet, such a thing did not even exist at the time of these writings.

Rolls were regularly used in early gatherings for worship in communities that came to be known as Jewish. As an example, the book mentioned in the gospel of Luke, from which Jesus read, was a roll. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal offers a detailed look at this scene in the Gospel of Luke and the way Jesus would have used the roll as an interface for reading.³ In an accident of history, the most complete biblical manuscript found in the caves of Qumran happens to be a roll book containing the biblical writing of Isaiah, which is the text from which Jesus reads in Luke 4. I will use this passage from the Gospel of Luke as a entry into exploring this ancient bible interface found at Qumran, 1QIsa^a^, otherwise known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. I will start with a close look at the description of the user involvement in this interface provided in Luke 4 followed by an evaluation of the possibility of affording high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy in 1QIsa^a^.

The pertinent portions of Luke 4 for our purposes are as follows:

And he went to Nazareth, where he was reared, and he went to synagogue on the day of Sabbath according to his custom, and he stood to read. And the roll (βιβλίον) of the prophet Isaiah was given to him and having unrolled the roll (τὸ βιβλίον), he found the place where it was written…and after closing the roll (τὸ βιβλίον) and giving it to the attendant, he sat down (Luke 4:16-17,20).⁴

The Great Isaiah Roll

Though many translations read βιβλίον as “book” in this passage as elsewhere in the bible, I have chosen to translate βιβλίον as roll to interrupt our contemporary tendency to imagine Jesus reading from a codex. In this episode, Jesus is not handed a leather bound King James bible, but a roll that likely operated much like the Isaiah roll found in cave one at Qumran. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a^) was one of the first seven manuscripts found at Qumran and is the largest and one of the most well preserved of the entire collection. This bible interface is such a treasure that it is on display at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.⁵ 1QIsa^a^ is approximately 24.5 feet long and was made from 17 sheets of parchment like material sewn together with linen thread. Stretched out, this scroll would be just shy of the width of the singles lines on a tennis court, so you can imagine how substantial this book interface might feel in a user’s hands.⁶ On these sutured together skins, the text is written in Hebrew in fifty four columns that encompass the entire text of the biblical writing of Isaiah.

In general, as an interface, the roll offers a two handed user experience when reading that combines the analog, a continuity, and the digital, discrete bits. The typical roll book consists of several sheets of papyrus or parchment, glued or stitched together from edge to edge, written on one side in columnar fashion and rolled up for easy storage and protection. To read, a user would use one hand to unroll in the direction of reading, right to left in Hebrew, left to write in Greek, and the other hand to reroll the used portions of the text. A more contemporary, but already out of date, technology that emulates the mechanics of a roll is a cassette tape or a reel to reel film. If you can imagine rolling the two spools of a cassette tape by hand and reading for text on the tape, that is similar to how users interfaced with the roll. In fact, some rolls had handles that functioned like spools to enable the user to more easily move back and forth through the book. Imagine the inefficiency and frustration in this interface. Once you get to the end of a roll book, a user has to unroll (or is it reroll?) all the way back to the beginning to read again. I can imagine an ancient library staffing a circulation station with aspiring student scribes or scholars, where their only task was to roll back books from end to beginning after they had been used by a patron. Perhaps one of the reasons we find author attribution and colophon at the end of ancient roll manuscripts is because users often did not rewind.

The columns of writing in a roll book effectively delineated what we would call pages today as a user would roll with both hands in concert until a single column or maybe a few columns of text were visible, they would read that column, and then would roll again when ready to move on. In this sense, roll as interface offered the user both a linear analog⁷ experience of rolling through the trajectory of a book along with a kind of digital processing of the discrete bits of text encountered column by column. Unlike an automated cassette tape, but much like the page turn of the codex, rolling to expose one or a few columns of text at a time breaks up the experience of a text, even if only for a second. This horizontal roll was not the only interface available for reading and writing used in antiquity, it was simply the preferred interface for longer texts and became the dominant roll book form for Israelite scriptures. Shorter decrees, contracts, and letters could be found in a vertical arrangement with the rolling mechanism the same as the horizontal roll, but in a different orientation and the writing was continuous along the roll, rather than being written in discrete columns. With the absence of the columnar interruptions, the vertical roll provided a more continuous reading experience for the user than the horizontal roll.⁸ Yet, if a user allowed for multiple columns to be in view at once when reading from a horizontal roll, it would be possible to time rolling over a first column while reading a second column to reveal a third column, and so on.

If we turn back to the scene portrayed in Luke 4, with a roll similar to 1QIsa^a^ in mind as the interface in which Jesus is participating when he reads this passage from Isaiah, what kind of affordances do we see at work? Though we know very little about the practice of reading in ancient synagogues,⁹ it is unlikley that Jesus had to unroll this large scroll from the beginning to reach the passage he reads from chapter 61 of Isaiah, which in 1QIsa^a^ is in column 49 of 54 on the third to last piece of parchment. Given the common cycle of readings, the typical use of readings from the prophets, and the presence of an attendant in synagogue practice, it seems more likely that Jesus was handed the roll already positioned toward the text of interest. So, we can imagine the attendant handing Jesus the roll with a large amount of material in the right hand and just the last few sheets rolled up in the left hand.¹⁰ Holding the bulk in his right hand, Jesus unrolls the roll a small amount to expose the column having the passage of interest, he reads a small portion, rolls the two ends back together, and hands the roll back to the attendant.¹¹

So, in our passage of interest here, after Jesus is handed the roll, he may have placed it on the reading table and then unrolled it as needed and read.

Surface Area: One Column at a Time

I suggested in the last chapter that the affordance of high surface area in an interface indicates many points of contact, which encourages participation through many potential points of participation and resists a user’s ability to master or control the whole interface. In a sense, the columnar organization of this roll interface, particularly when used to find and read a small bit as a part of a larger ritual gathering, provides high surface area. The demanding access technology of a roll, requiring two hands to negotiate the location of any one column of text requires a level of user participation that is unfamiliar to us, given both the nonlinear access afforded by the codex and even more so the one handed thumb swipe enabled by Kindle reader on an iPhone. Each column, when in focus, offers one point of contact with the interface and the small bit of text read by the user in this example of Luke 4 also offers simply one of many points of contact with this interface. Though the reader and the community gathered may have a sense of the whole text of Isaiah and even the whole of Hebrew scriptures, this interface event offers one small surface of contact from a large possibility set of surfaces of contact such as other passages, other columns, even other prophetic writings. In terms of the material interface of the roll, the discrete engagement of the user with one column (or even a few) at a time could actually resist the capacity to master the whole. In the episode of Luke 4, there is no attempt to contextualize the passage read aloud by reading the rest of the column or by explaining the location of this particular pericope in relation to the whole of Isaiah, it is simply offered as a bit, or even a sound byte. This offers us an important reminder about interface and the role of both platform and user in performing or producing interface. In its simple material form, requiring linear access to any piece of text by proceeding through the entire whole of the text, a roll book might seem to offer very low surface area. Yet, in use, attending to one column, even one line at a time, this interface becomes rather high surface area, demanding participation in framing the column and resisting the mastery of the whole by distancing the user from the parts of the text which are not visible or even easily accessible.

Communal Use: Affording Collaboration

There are two ways in which this roll interface demonstrates collaborative affordances. First, the details of the episode in Luke 4 suggest that it was common to have this roll interface passed around to different people to read. So, even though 1QIsa^a^ may have been rather large and cumbersome and may have only allowed for one user at a time, the involvement of multiple readers engaging the roll in this communal synagogue setting over the course of many customary gathering on the Sabbath suggests that the roll interface was used as a collaborative interface. The preparation of the roll by the attendant, the handing back and forth of the roll between the reader and the attendant, and the reading aloud for others to hear, all signal a collaborative endeavor facilitated in part by this bible interface.¹² In his description of the physical appearance and wear of 1QIsa^a^, Trever hints at the collaborative capacity of this roll interface, saying, “Clear evidence of the long use of the Isaiah scroll in ancient times can be seen on the back of it both in these repairs and in the much darkened area at the center where the hands of many readers held it.”¹³

For example, in the right hand margin of line five of column forty nine of 1QIsa^a^, which is the column from which Jesus would have read in Luke 4 if using 1QIsa^a^, we find a heavy horizontal line with a rounded triangle on top. This marking appears 5 other times in the manuscript. Line five contains the last bit of what we now call chapter 59 of Isaiah and the line contains blank space at the end to mark the transition in textual unit, as is customary throughout this manuscript. Even though Trever, “The Isaiah Scroll,” xvi, suggests that these markings were later additions to the text to mark passages for finding and reading, it seems equally as likely that these markings were used as guides for the writing of the text of this roll. From the user perspective in the synagogue example of roll interface, the passage transition is already marked by the space left blank at the end of the line, so it is unclear as to why an additional marking would be necessary to signal the reader. Emmanuel Tov, “Scribal Markings in the Texts from the Judean Dessert,” in Current Research and Technological Developments on the Dead Sea Scrolls, eds. Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 46-48, identifies this marking as a paragraphos sign, marking the division of the text into paragraphs, yet not distinguishing between original scribes, later scribes or readers.

In addition to this collaborative reading practice, the roll interface exemplified by 1QIsa^a^ signals a second collaborative capacity in the shared task of editing the text. As Trever notes, many of the emendations evidenced in 1QIsa^a^ look to be from the same hand as the scribe that wrote the body of the text.¹⁴ Yet, there is also evidence of other people participating in the emendation of the text by adding words or larger sections that were omitted by the initial scribe.¹⁵ In fact, on line twenty six of column forty nine of 1QIsa^a^, which contains the first verse of Isaiah 61 we hear read in the episode described in Luke 4, there is an example of this collaborative participation in the production of the text. In the spacing between lines, a different user has added a word just above the line where it seems a word was omitted. By the time 1QIsa^a^ was in use, in the last few centuries BCE, the text of Isaiah was rather well established. So, as users participated in this roll interface, they would easily have identified a missing word or phrase as compared to the established tradition of the text of Isaiah. In this particular case of column forty nine of 1QIsa^a^, the initial scribe left out sh’lächaniy, so another user simply added this word above the line right at the spot in the text where it would have been expected. The marginal spaces and the spacing between lines in this roll interface undoubtedly afforded both ease of reading and some protection of the text from weak points in the material of the manuscript that might develop around the stitching of the sheets. Yet, as we see evidenced all throughout the roll, these spaces become a vehicle for affording collaborative participation in the ongoing construction of the interface that is 1QIsa^a^.¹⁶

We can easily imagine the similarities between this collaborative affordance of 1QIsa^a^ and the notes we as teachers leave in the margins of our students’ papers, either with pencil on paper or with annotation bubbles and pointers on a PDF. More advanced interfaces for collaborative construction of a text have emerged in word processing technologies and cloud based document sharing and cooperative editing platforms like google docs. These emerging interfaces allow for a new scale of collaboration by working with a material canvas that allows both erasure and addition without leaving a noticeable trace of the collaboration at work and the ongoing process of making the book.¹⁷ One of the beauties of the constraints of interfaces like 1QISa^a^ is that the collaborative efforts to make the roll user friendly can not be hidden away in a differential file that only appears if a user is curious. Instead, these changes to the text in the spaces between the lines and marginal notations in the gutters are in plain view for every user of the interface to see, signaling that this book continues to morph and emerge through use.

Yet, in a Google Doc, this history of participation in the construction of the interface is tucked away neatly in a different screen so as not to clutter up the finished product of the document itself.

Hinting at Anarchy

In the previous chapter, I suggested that the third affordance of bible as interfaces is a tendency toward anarchy. Anarchy in interface “resists the closure or consolidation of use to any mechanistic determinism governed by original author, original version, or final form.”¹⁸ In one sense, the visible markings of users continuing to work on the text of Codex Sinaiticus resists closure of this interface to a pristine and fixed text. Yet, as was customary in the manuscript copying process of antiquity, many of the changes we see in this interface by the initial scribe and later users are attempts to “correct” the text to more closely resemble its exemplar or the accepted version of the text of Isaiah. Thus, in another sense, these collaborative markings exhibit archic tendencies, aligning the interface with some original source manuscript or an established proper form of the text it contains. Though 1QIsa^a^ may not exhibit many material properties signaling anarchic tendencies, the fact that users participated in this interface as a form of communal reading without explicit determinative guides in the interface itself to control or contain or close “the mysterious possibilities of exegesis”¹⁹ offered by reading a few lines from one column near the end of the book suggests the possibility of anarchy in use. The simple fact of inviting participants to read a small bit of text and allowing the listeners to make sense of that short reading as they found fit is a performance of anarchy.

The high surface area of the discrete columns, the collaboration of both communal reading and textual emendation, and the anarchy of expounding on a small excerpt read in the process of a customary ritual gathering suggest that 1QIsa^a^ has the potential to be an interface begging for participation and resisting reduction to consumption of content. It is important to note here, that for this roll bible interface, the communal reading use plays a major role in both demanding participation and resisting mastery, closure and determinism by involving many voices. We will see this combination of small bits and many voices remain as an important indicator of bible as interface.

In our reading of Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 22-23, in the previous chapter, we heard him call bible, the book of books and book par excellence. Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, explore the relationship between the rise of the codex to prominence and the emergence of bible as book in Christianity. More recently, the title to Christopher De Hamel’s beautiful book, “The Book: A History of the Bible,” signals the intimate and important historical and cultural relationship between bible and book.

Many different interfaces have these affordances, such as other literary and textual traditions, poetry (as Levinas suggested), audience interface in oral performance, communication technologies like email and SMS, etc.

I would start with William Blake’s plates depicting Moses with the tablets looking just like a codex.

There is an interesting textual variant in 4:17 with several important early witnesses (Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Washingtonianus) using ἀνοίξας instead of ἀναπτύξας for “opening” the roll. The 27th edition of the Nestle Aland critical edition marks this variant as a change from the choice made in the 25th edition, meaning the committee elected to include ἀνοίξας in the constructed text in the 25th edition and switched to ἀναπτύξας in the 27th edition. This decision was unchanged in the 28th edition of NA. The difference between these variants is not significant in terms of the overall reading of the passage, since the more generic ἀνοίξας when used in reference to a roll clearly indicates an “unrolling,” which is the meaning of the more specific ἀναπτύξας. Yet, in terms of interface, the more specific ἀναπτύξας is more helpful in indicating the particularities of the interface at work in this use of bible. So, I have translated with the constructed text, taking ἀναπτύξας as “having unrolled.” This translational choice is similar to that made in the NRSV, which reads, “He unrolled the scroll….”

This digital 1QISa^a^ interface interestingly has been designed to emulate the rolling of the scroll from right to left as a user moves through the interface, with the size of the rolls that would be in each hand changing to approximate a user’s position in the roll. For example, as you near the end of the text of Isaiah in this digital interface of 1QIsa^a^, the roll that would be in a user’s right hand is much larger than the roll in the left hand.

Trevor’s introduction to the Isaiah Scroll in Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark’s Monastery, vol. 1 (New Haven: The American Schools of Oriental Research, 1950), xiii-xviii.

The important point to make in all interface analysis is that rarely do we have a binary situation because interfaces as relationships afford more than one type of use.

Hegg deals explicitly with this passage from Luke on pp. 3-5.

These mysterious possibilities of exegesis are an example of Drucker’s articulation of interface as probabilistic production.

As a future project, I would like to come back to this point and explore the relationship between the two tablets of exodus and the evolution of bible as cultural icon as Timothy Beal describes in The Rise and Fall of the Bible. ↩
Translations my own. ↩
Beal, Rise and Fall, Kindle location 1245-1378. ↩
My translation from the Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament (SBLGNT). ↩
Thanks to the wonderful work of the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, 1QIsa^a^ is also available for viewing online in a digitized interface at http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah. ↩
For a detailed description of the physical characteristics of 1QIsa^a^, see John C. ↩
I would rather find other words to describe this difference rather than analog/digital. ↩
This vertical roll interface is akin to our contemporary relationship with reading on a web page and the act of moving around in these web pages is called “scrolling.” ↩
For an excellent summary and useful bibliography regarding the public reading of scripture in first century synagogues, see Tim Hegg, “The Public Reading of Scriptures in the 1st Century Synagogue,” TorahResource (2007), https://www.torahresource.com/EnglishArticles/TriennialCycle.pdf, accessed on August 11, 2017. ↩
Based on some archaeological evidence from later synagogues, Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 93-95, suggests that it may have been common to have a table in the center of the meeting space upon which these rolls were placed for reading. ↩
If 1QIsa^a^ is an indicator of the type of roll depicted in this scene in Luke 4, then the additional spacing left between the end of verse 60 and the beginning of verse 61 might have helped the user locate their position in the text in the absence of chapter and verse markings, with which we have become so familiar today. ↩
In the manuscript itself, there are some unusual markings in the margins that could have been used to help facilitate this kind of collaborative reading process described in Luke 4. ↩
Trever, “The Isaiah Scroll,” xv. ↩
Trever, “The Isaiah Scroll,” xv. ↩
As Trever, “The Isaiah Scroll,” xv, notes, to explore more about the identification of these collaborative partners in production of the ↩
For a discussion of and bibliography for the text of and scribal practices at work in 1QIsa^a^, see Emmanuel Tov, “The Text of Isaiah at Qumran” in Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible and Qumran: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). ↩
Google Docs does track all history of changes made to a document, including identifying the contributor, if known, instead of relying on handwriting differences or ink changes. ↩
See chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of anarchy in interface. ↩
This is one of the phrases Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 23 uses to describe bible as the book of books. ↩

Bibliarchic Chapter 1

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

CHAPTER 1: INTERFACE

Because books and reading have been so instrumental in the typical focus on exegesis and interpretation driving the study of religion and bible, it is helpful to have a different way to speak of the material practices that constitute the rich history of bible. Looking at bible in terms of users and interfaces instead of simply books and readers offers us four primary advantages. First, thinking of bible as interface rather than book can unsettle the unquestioned binding of bible and codex, which coincides with the dominant cultural reduction of book to codex. By looking back at the bible roll as an interface and forward to kindle reader as an interface for bible, we can imagine better what constitutes bible for users beyond our current limited conception of book. Second, a focus on bible as interface highlights the material affordances operative in different user relationships with bible that extend beyond typical modes of reading, such as annotation and illumination in margins, organizational schemes, and use of bible as artifact. Third, exploring bible as interface can challenge us to conceptualize bible through its use rather than reducing definitions of bible to the content it contains. Fourth, tracing moments in the history of bible as interface allows us to see the continuities and discontinuities involved in media transitions/translations brought on by emerging technologies. One of the key things to remember as we explore the many interfaces of bible throughout history is that these interfaces all borrow from each other and technological transitions are never total.

Why Interface?

As I mentioned in my introduction, one of the aims of this project is to focus our attention on the materiality of bible even beyond the book as we know it. This bent toward materiality stems from two main convictions that I bring to this work. First, I begin with the assumption that the material characteristics of the technologies we use shape our relationship with texts and with one another. Second, I affirm that the digital is decidedly material. A shift to talking about bible as interface foregrounds a user’s interaction with the particular material technologies of bible and connects the pre-digital materialities of bible, such as roll and codex, to a participatory construct and language that is ubiquitous in digital environments today.

Brent Plate has helped promote the importance of materiality in the study and practice of religion. More specifically, Plate calls students and scholars¹ of the study of religion to attend to the role of the senses in religion.² In his work with religion and the senses in A History of religion in 5 1/2 objects, Plate foregrounds the role and importance of material objects such as stones, drums, and bread by suggesting that “Religious people are not believers so much as technologists.”³ Rather than articulating a notion of religion absent of belief, Plate is simply suggesting that the craft of practicing religion entangled with material objects, what Plate calls “know-how” derived from the ancient Greek word techne, carries at least as much weight as what a religious person “knows” about what they are practicing.⁴ Plate hints toward the role of interface and users in religion when he defines technology as “human connections to and uses of natural and human-made materials… .”⁵ Though Plate is using an ancient and broad definition of technology to highlight the importance of material objects and their use without pointing toward specific examples of interfaces that we might call technological today, he is setting the stage within the material religion discourse for a more particular technological analysis of bible. Just as Plate argues for religion as technology irreducible to belief, I am arguing for bible as interface irreducible to text.

Bible as Irreducible to Text

James Watts was one of the founding members of the Iconic Books Project, which gathered together scholars from several disciplines to explore the role of books in history, society, culture, and religion beyond simply the interpretation of their texts within. This project continues presently as “The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts,” incidentally, with Brent Plate as their current president.⁶ If the semantic dimension of books relates primarily to the interpretations of the texts contained in books, then as the society name indicates, SCRIPT is decidedly focused on the non-textual dimensions of books. Iconic Books and SCRIPT have taken up Plate’s challenge to take materiality seriously in the history of books and their users. Through his work with the Iconic Books Project, Watts has articulated three dimensions of scripture, the semantic, the performative, and the iconic.⁷ The semantic dimension of scriptures focuses on the interpretation of, commentary on, and other appeals to the content of religious texts.⁸ Watts takes the time to note that both religious practitioners and scholars of religion have historically focused almost exclusively on this semantic dimension of scriptures.⁹ The performative dimension of scriptures pertains to the use of writings through practices of recitation, monumental inscriptions, music, and artistic expression.¹⁰ The iconic dimension of scriptures refers to the material forms and uses of these writings along with artistic renderings of these material expressions, such as the mosaics in Ravenna depicting the gospel writers with their scriptures.¹¹

With these three dimensions, Watts takes a similar approach to that of Plate, suggesting that scripture can not be reduced to the interpretation of texts just as religion can not be reduced to belief. Also like Plate, Watts turns to the materiality of books particularly in the iconic dimension to help interrupt these reductive trends. The concept of bible I have articulated for this project, the technologies that afford the use of Judeo-Christian sacred writings, is one example of the scripture produced through the ritualization of these dimensions outlined by Watts. Focusing on the readerly uses of bible as interface brings together the performative aspects of using these texts and the material aspects of the iconic dimension and continues to argue that bible is irreducible to the texts it contains and the interpretive practices of the semantic dimension. Framing bible in an interface theory that values both the performative and iconic aspects of books, while pushing our notions of materiality toward the digital and beyond book will provide a fruitful methodology for carrying the important emphasis on materiality championed by Plate and Watts into the emerging technological landscape in which bible finds itself. Now for a closer look at interface.

Interface as Irreducible to Consumption

At its most basic, interface denotes some kind of relationship of interaction between entities. With this generic definition, we can imagine countless examples in everyday life, such as the the relationship of interaction between my son and his dog, or the relationship between neurotransmitters and receptors in a chemical synapse in your brain, or the relationship between my fingers and the beautifully designed butterfly keyboard I am using right now to type this sentence. Though I find a great deal of beauty in the ubiquitous relationality this broad imagination of interface offers, we will need a narrower definition of interface as we consider the relationship between bible and users. Even a quick glance at a dictionary entry for “interface” will highlight its relationaility and its importance in the realm of technology.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has entries for “interface” as both a noun and a verb. Interestingly, both noun and verb entries in the OED figure Marshall McLuhan, of “medium is the message” fame, prominently as the first quotation in the non-scientific definitions of the term. In fact, the OED credits McLuhan as the first user of “interface” in the verbal form in a 1967 collaborative effort with Quentin Fiore.¹² This discussion of the OED may seem superfluous, given that I will not be using definitions from the OED as a starting point to form my own notions of interface. Yet, the OED provides both a historical backdrop for the term and academic credibility for the categories of the term’s use. In both parts of speech, the google search define algorithm and the freely available Oxford Dictionaries online include a specific definition related to computing for interface, which signals that the term has taken on special significance in the area of technology.¹³

The first noun definition in the OED is the scientific definition, which denotes the boundary between two portions or phases of matter.¹⁴ Though this earliest use of the term is not our primary focus here, it is worth noting that even this scientific definition foregrounds the irreducibility to consumption operative in interface. Whether the interface identifies a boundary surface (the OED actually uses the term “face” here) within the same substance or between substances, the interface signals the interaction of two entities without one being consumed by the other. So, even in these early technical uses of the idea of interface in the late nineteenth century, we can hear the relationality of interaction and the resistance to reduction at work in interface. A simple example like water in a pond shows the significance of a shift from speaking of just the surface of water to talking about the water/air interface. If we speak of just the surface of water, we focus only on the properties of water and its contained self relationality. Introducing the notion of interface here highlights the relationship water has with air, a different entity, both participating in the production of what we call the surface of water.¹⁵

As I mentioned above, the basic definition of “interface” as a noun is “A point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc. meet and interact.”¹⁶ This basic definition also encompasses the historical scientific definition if we add substances to the list of things that can meet and interact. Even though we often see the word “between” used with “interface,” such as “the interface between religion and science,” the simple definition of interface I have quoted above highlights that interface is a “point” or space or surface of meeting. This space of meeting is mutually constructed by the contact of the differing systems. Interface, in this sense, is not necessarily a space “between” two systems, but the space created by the entangled “interaction” of two systems. Since our definition states that systems must meet and interact, contact alone is not sufficient for interface, there must be some interaction among the systems.

These processes of interaction irreducible to consumption are maintained in the computing focused definition of interface, which is “A device or program enabling a user to communicate with a computer”¹⁷ or “a device or program for connecting two items of hardware or software so that they can be operated jointly or communicate with each other.”¹⁸ Here we see that interface has become a technical term in the technological realm to describe the piece of technology that is needed to allow two systems to meet and interact. Because of the difference between the modes of communication of a human user and a machine, an “interface” as a translation layer is needed to allow the entangled interaction of “interface.” Here in the computing definition of interface, we find the noun and verb operations of interface coming together to suggest a multilayered notion of interface that includes both the material bridge that affords interaction and the interaction itself.¹⁹ The operation of interface in this connection or communication between user and machine allows for a relationship between these entities without reducing one participant into the other.

Interface as Event

Johanna Drucker’s work draws our attention to the verbal character of interface. She argues that texts books are events not entities and that interface is a zone of encounter not a window through which we access content.²⁰ It was Drucker’s essay, “Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory,” that first led me to consider the notion of bible as interface.²¹ Drucker helpfully intertwines digital media studies explorations of interface design with humanities questions of subjectivity to provide a theoretical foundation for interface as a zone of encounter, not simply a piece of technology that connects two things. In an exemplary fashion, Drucker demonstrates a reflexive practice by stating her desire to explore the theory undergirding her own scholarly working environments at the cusp of a transition from print to other dominant media/interfaces. She writes,

The motivation here is simple. The authoring and reading environments for interpretative scholarly work are only just beginning to be designed in such a way that the linear, finite conventions of print media can be changed for the constellationary, distributed, multi-faceted modes of digital media…As this process develops, a challenge for humanists is to reflect on and articulate the theory of interface that underlies the design of our working environments.²²

Drucker shows her awareness of the shifts at work in the emerging digital media age and asks humanists to become a part of the process of constructing a theory to support the design of our reading and writing spaces as a counter balance to the often mechanistic principles at work in the software industry.²³ The mechanistic approaches to both design and to the user in the software world, which is a progression of the development of the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and the growing economic importance of Graphical User Interface (GUI), tends to over determine the relationship between machine and user such that the ambiguity of interaction is ignored.²⁴ Drucker challenges the consumer market tendency toward functional determinism in software design by connecting her idea of text as event with interface as a zone of encounter. Pointing back toward her work on texts as event, Drucker suggests that “attention to the specific relations between properties and affordances of electronic environments within a system of codependent relations of production [with subjects] will be the starting point for assumptions about interface as a space that supports interpretative events and acts of meaning production.”²⁵

Critiquing the “window” metaphor that is so prevalent in our understanding of interface, Drucker pushes us to imagine interface as an event, both a thing and a process, both noun and verb as we saw in our exploration of definitions above.²⁶ Drucker’s binary rhetoric of entity to event might suggest that she devalues the materiality or thingness or noun character of interface in order to highlight the productive process at work in event. Yet, if we look closely at her concept of event, we get a more material sense of what she is doing with interface as “not a thing.”²⁷ Drucker writes, “Probabilistic materiality conceives of a text as an event, rather than an entity. The event is the entire system of reader, aesthetic object and interpretation.”²⁸Much like we saw in Plate’s suggestion of religion as technology irreducible to belief,²⁹ here, Drucker’s interface as event entails entity without being reducible to it. Interface as event accounts for both the material conditions of the participants and the process of their interaction. The “entire system” of Drucker’s interface as event, which includes “reader, aesthetic object, and interpretation,” maps nicely onto Watts’s three dimensions of scripture, performative, iconic, and semantic, respectively.³⁰ Like Plate and Watts, Drucker resists a reductive approach that might conceptualize interface as simply a window to content and user as merely a mechanistic consumer. Interface as event always exceeds content and consumption.

Provoking Probabilistic Production

Moving more explicitly toward book as interface, near the end of her exhortation to humanities scholars to take seriously the task of building a theory of interface, Drucker reminds us that book has always been an interface.

Clearly those with rich experience of book culture perceive the dynamic properties usually attributed to new media already active and present within the older forms, and rightly so. The book is no more self-identical, static, or fixed, than any other artifact that provokes a constitutive reading or response. Strict binarisms and technophilic exuberance lend themselves to exaggerated inaccuracies and hyperbolic rhetorical claims-charming in their own way, but perhaps not so useful for actual design. Many points of continuity exist between print and digitally networked artifacts and these don’t have to depend on the seductive, special-effects, images of frictionless manipulation in holographic information spaces that will supposedly enable our lives in some fantasmatic future. Books, after all, are structured environments that provoke a reading that is probabilistic, not mechanistic, and the text or work is produced as an event, not an entity.³¹

I quote Drucker here at length for two reasons. First, I have at times been prone to and accused of the charming “strict binarisms and technophilic exuberance” Drucker cautions of here. Though I have found hyperbolic rhetoric useful at times to unsettle our unquestioned assumptions about media, I want to be exceedingly clear that, with Drucker, I am not interested in propagating some old/new hierarchical dichotomy between well established book technologies such as the codex and emerging interfaces that push us as users beyond our current imagination of books. This is why I introduced material media translation at the outset of this project as a way to focus our analysis on the continuities and discontinuities of the material interfaces of bible throughout history. Each emerging technology is a translation of what came before it, carrying forward some characteristics of its predecessors, while providing some new affordances.

Second, this passage from Drucker begins and ends with a reminder that book has always been an interface. As the materiality of this interface shifts, we will undoubtedly learn from previous forms as we explore the affordances of emerging technologies. The last full sentence of this passage captures nicely the importance of understanding book as interface. To paraphrase in alliterative fashion, Drucker suggests that a book is an interface that provokes probabilistic production through the reading event.³² Let’s look closely at each of these p-words in reverse order, production, probabilistic, and provokes.

Production

Reading is production. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is important to remember that in any medium, a book is not simply a container of information to be ingested by a reader. The materialities and cultural contexts of both book and user entangle to produce the possibility for meaning in a reading act. Each encounter between book and user has the potential to offer something different, because reading is a production of meaning contingent upon the particularities of the encounter and its participants. If I read Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being in a hard bound print monograph as an undergraduate student in the early 2000’s while sitting in the library at a small liberal arts college in Colorado, this will produce something different than my reading of the same text on a computer screen in a continuous scroll text editor as a late stage doctoral student in my house at the dawn of a Trump presidency. Though the “content” or the words of the text may remain identical in both of these cases, the readings simply can not remain the same. These two reading events are moments in the ongoing making that is my reading of Otherwise Than Being. In this sense, perhaps it would be more useful to talk about reading with a book rather than the reading of a book to help unsettle our typical notions of reading as consumption. Reading with a book points toward book as interface, where user and platform are entangled in an emergent relationality that can not be reduced to consumption.

Drucker continues to pound home her constructivist approach to both subject and text by reiterating that a text or work is produced in the encounter facilitated by the book. This is another way of stating that book is not simply a window or a container through which we access and consume a text. Rather, book is a space that begs an encounter between user and the structured environment of the technologies and more. Drucker’s foregrounding of reading as production rather than simple consumption of a text performs the problematization of the production/consumption binary in Michel de Certeau’s work, The Practice of Everyday Life.³³

De Certeau’s explorations of ‘the practice of everyday life’ respect the deep concerns about commodification so well articulated by many materialist critiques of culture, yet questions the often accompanying low view of mass culture and pessimism concerning the everyman. De Certeau restores some poetic dignity to the masses by reframing consumption as production, giving each person in each moment an agency in the meaning making endeavor.

As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices.³⁴

I am not explicitly taking up the power dynamics de Certeau so beautifully explores in this work. Yet, his consistent challenge of the production/consumption binary without erasing the role of the structures or the participation of the “consumer” reinforces our approach here of book as interface that provokes production. De Certeau also helpfully highlights that book as interface does not necessarily erase the operations of book as container. The container attributes of book remain as a part of the material structures that constitute the potential productive space of the interface. A theory of interface can resist the reduction of book to container and user to simple viewer without the need to eradicate the container aspects of book or the viewer aspects of user.

De Certeau uses reading as one of his examples of “everyday practices that produce without capitalizing.”³⁵ He notes the often assumed writing-reading binary as a specific example of the production-consumption binary, but articulates a notion of reading that can not be reduced to this dichotomy. Reading is a “silent production,” “a play of spaces,” “an ‘art’ which is anything but passive.”³⁶ Reading as everyday practice is a poiesis, a making, within structured constraints that resists the production-consumption binary and thus offers a notion of reading as interface.

Probabilistic

In her essay titled “Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,” Drucker expounds in much more detail her use of the term probabilistic as it relates to reading interfaces.

Probabilistic materiality conceives of a text as an event, rather than an entity. The event is the entire system of reader, aesthetic object and interpretation – but in that set of relations, the text is constituted anew each time. Like weather produced in a system around a landmass, the shape of the reading has a codependent relation to the structure from which it arises. Probability is not free play. It is constrained play, with outcomes calculable in accord with the complexity of the system and range of variable factors, and their combinatoric and transformative relations over time. A text is a highly complex system, containing a host of thermal sinks and basics of attraction.³⁷

We can tell even in her interface theory that probabilistic is an alternative to mechanistic for Drucker in her analysis of the shortcomings of interface design as driven by the software development world.³⁸ Here, in this passage from “Entity to Event,” with its strange alignment (I will include an image of the passage or try to format similiarly in Word to demonstrate her play with alignment), we can see her ability to both show and tell the role of materiality in the reading event. The basic distinction between the mechanistic and the probabilistic for Drucker is that the former attempts to present a user with an entity to consume, while the latter presents the user with a set of possibilities that condition a reading event that will inevitably be new every time. This set of constrained possibilities in the probabilistic production of interface sounds a great deal like the emergent properties of affordance I mentioned in the introduction. Affordances are the set of real or perceived use possibilities offered by the material design of an interface in relationship to a particular user and context. As McGrenere and Ho demonstrate, there is a lot of debate and extension around this definition.³⁹ For our purposes in this section on interfaces, the importance of pointing toward affordances is to remind us that there are material properties of an interface that present a set of possible uses to a user.

With such concepts in mind, we see the page, book, print, or screen space of text and image quite differently from the usual static presentation of thing, and see it instead as an active, dynamic field of forces and energies in dynamic suspension, acting on each other and within a frame of constraint, to produce the conditions a reader is provoked by in the constitutive act of reading that makes the text. Again I come back to the central premise that a text, work of art, aesthetic expression is an event not an entity. The material existence serves as a provocation, set of clues and cues for a performance of the text.⁴⁰

Rather than simply presenting a user with an entity to consume, a probabilistic materiality of interface provokes production of both text and user in the practice of reading. Let’s look more closely at the provocation of interface, which Drucker suggests is related to the cues and clues an interface offers for the performance of a text.

Provoke

With Watts and De Certeau, I begin with the assumption that reading is a material act of production, no matter what the medium. Whether with an ancient papyrus roll, a medieval illuminated manuscript, a print codex, a computer screen, or a mobile phone, reading is an act shaped by both the materialities of the medium and the user.⁴¹ Yet, I want to push us to consider the materialities of the so called “virtual” – digital technologies, computers, the internet, social media, mobile devices, the cloud, artificial intelligence, etc..⁴² These technologies too have materialities that shape the encounters they afford and the idea of interface can help us stay attentive to the materiality of reading as use in the age of the internet.

Drucker celebrates the material provocation of reading interfaces. A codex doesn’t simply lay passive on the shelf waiting to be opened and penetrated by the reader. The materiality of the book as interface participates in and provokes a reading event. A page from a book in Kindle reader on my iPhone, which gives me as user all kinds of power over the page, provokes a possible set of reading tactics, even if not entirely determinative. A print codex, with its bound spine, uniform page size, consistent font, and covers offers a user a different set of possible encounters. Neither of these interfaces, codex or Kindle reader on an iPhone are simply containers of information. Book as container just waits to be consumed, book as interface provokes encounter. This provocation reminds us that platform is an active participant as structured environment in the relationality that is interface.

Proximity as Optics

One of the strategies Drucker offers for pursuing a theory of interface as relationality irreducible to consumption is to foreground the role of the subject in interface.⁴³ One structure of subjectivity that provides a useful optics for our consideration of bible as interface is the notion of proximity in Emmanuel Levinas. Though the term proximity is often used as a simple synonym for physical closeness in human relationship, Levinas articulates a notion of proximity that problematizes the reduction of relationality to nearness in space and provides an optics for human relationship that is not reducible to consumption. Injecting our theory of interface with an optics of proximity also reminds us that any discussion of bible as interface involves a community of users engaging and encountering one another through participation in bible.

In drawing on Levinasian notions of subjectivity to inform my analysis of bible as interface, I am not attempting to articulate an alternative to the constructivist subject that animates Drucker’s idea of interface. Nor am I interested in suggesting that bible interfaces participate in the proximity that structures human subjectivity in a Levinasian phenomenology. Instead, the operations of proximity in the face to face encounter of Levinasian ethics offer us an optics or an apparatus for seeing interface as a relationality irreducible to consumption.⁴⁴ Rather than asking whether emerging technologies are ethical or whether ethical human relationship is possible in our present technological landscape, I will use proximity as a optics for exploring the affordances of bible in its many lives as interface. Levinas himself speaks and writes very little about technology explicitly,⁴⁵ but his negotiations of relationality that can not be reduced to spatial nearness or to consumption through his idea of proximity have a great deal to offer our discussions of interface.

In his last of Levinas’s major philosophical works, Otherwise Than Being, proximity blossoms as a problematization of the distance/nearness spatial binary. He writes, “for proximity is not a simply asymptotic approach of its ‘term.’ Its term is not an end. The more I answer the more I am responsible; the more I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged the further away I am.”⁴⁶ In this resistance to the asymptote as a metaphor for proximity, Levinas indicates concepts of relationality or even interface that are not derived simply from spatial contiguity or its lack. First and foremost, proximity is a sociality, a “relationship with,” not simply a physical closeness in space and time.⁴⁷ This “relationship with” is the core of interface as I have defined it, so we can already imagine proximity as a kind of interface. Proximity, which can not be reduced to physical or cognitive closeness,⁴⁸ is conceptualized with many other terms by Levinas, such as approach, contact, and responsibility. All of these terms connote a kind of engagement that is a process of being approached by a neighbor or a stranger that demands a response more than an intentionally willed choice to approach another and engage. This proximity demands participation before there is a choice.

Typically, the kind of encounter or relationality described here would involve a demand for an intimate knowledge of the other person to make the “relationship with” of proximity compelling. Yet, Levinas is exploring a relationality that is not dependent on such a knowledge, where approach as response precedes knowing. Here is where, oddly, distance plays a role in proximity. There are two distances at work in the discussion of proximity in Otherwise than Being. The first distance is the distance of sight or knowledge or what Levinas phrases as the incomplete objective genitive construction, “consciousness of… .”⁴⁹ This distance is simply the distance required for a subject to comprehend an object or for the eye to see an object. Levinasian proximity squeezes this distance by enacting a contact that precedes comprehension, an encounter that is blurry. While proximity in a Levinasian sense resists this distance of comprehension through an asymmetrical entanglement of sociality not reducible to understanding, another kind of distance emerges.⁵⁰ This second distance is another way of articulating the difference always at work in this encounter that is proximity.

Levinas calls this distance “a diachrony without a common present,” which suggests that proximity does not actually bring the two terms of this relationship or encounter or interface “together” in any reciprocal way in a shared appearance.⁵¹ This distance as diachrony or difference is not somehow an interruption of an original synchrony or sameness, to which a system is hoping to return. Rather, this distance in proximity is the ever expanding and insatiable demand by the other consistently troubles any attempts to consume the other. Levinas writes, “The subject is the more responsible the more it answers for, as though the distance between it and the other increased in the measure that proximity was increased.”⁵² This sounds a great deal like Levinas’s reflections on the asymptote metaphor we saw above, where he writes, “The more I answer the more I am responsible; the more I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged the further away I am.”⁵³ Here, the “further away” that indicates distance refers to the inexhaustibility of the responsibility operative in proximity. At no point, can one draw near enough through the approach of responsibility to master the needs of the other. Instead, as proximity enlarges through the relationality of response to the demand of the other in encounter, so does the inability to fulfill this demand and thus master or consume the other.

Interfacing Proximity

Levinas offers at least two hints in the direction of proximity as an optics for interface. First, as Sean Hand highlights so wonderfully in his analysis of Levinas’s evolving relationship with art, Levinas saw in Paul Celan’s poetry “a language of and for proximity.”⁵⁴ Hand writes, “Levinas’s appreciation of Celan, in contrast [with Heidegger on Hölderlin], emphasizes the poverty, inadequacy and non-radiance of a language, a language that therefore signifies proximity rather than mastery, and a being for the other rather than a world in being.”⁵⁵ Without delving into all of the details of a Levinasian philosophy of art or the ways in which poetry operates in language, we can see here in Hand’s comment and in Levinas’s own reflections on poetry that proximity can offer an optics for poetry that resists simple consumption and provokes probabilistic production in the interface between reader and poem. Thus, if proximity can provide an optics for poetry, proximity as optics can also inform the use and design of bible interfaces.⁵⁶

More specifically related to our questions of bible as interface, Levinas describes his own relationship with bible as book using language that sounds a great deal like his discussions of proximity. In a set of interviews conducted in 1981 on French radio with Philippe Nemo, transcribed in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas describes his relationship with bible and philosophical writings.⁵⁷ It was these very interviews that first stimulated my interest in the possibility of proximity as an optics for bible as interface. In the early discussions of the first interview, which is titled “Bible and Philosophy,” Levinas describes his view of bible as the “book of books,” saying, “It is that extraordinary presence of its characters, that ethical plenitude and its mysterious possibilities of exegesis which originally signified transcendence for me. And no less.”⁵⁸ The extraordinary presence of the biblical characters is not a celebration of the great cloud of witnesses in the biblical stories. Rather, these characters are the very letters of the text before they are assembled into words and phrases. These characters are present in ways that are beyond the ordinary, irreducible to the semiotic performance of their combinatorial effects.⁵⁹ The bible demands a response from its users, a participation that opens to “mysterious possibilities of exegesis.” Ethical plenitude refers not to an abundantly recurring theme of ethics in the content of the biblical writings, but to the inexhaustible resistance to simple consumption enacted in encounter with this book. As we saw in the structure of proximity, even as a user approaches in response, bible can never be contained and thus will always overflow any possible fixed and stable readings, demanding ever more response.

Proximity emerges for Levinas as a reflection on human subjectivity and a particular interface of two humans. Through his reflections on poetry as language and bible as book, we see the operations of proximity at work in a different kind of interface, that between reader and text. Without any attempt or desire to suggest an equivalence between the mechanisms or gravity of human-human interface and user-bible interface, this proximity which structures a relationality irreducible to consumption can provide an optics for bible as interface. Proximity as an optics also provides an apparatus for articulating interface that can not be reduced to simply the interaction and entanglement of user and technological platform. Proximity begs for us to push further to consider the human relational possibilities afforded by these bible interfaces for the larger community of users.

Tracing Affordances

With proximity as an optics, I will explore the possibility of bible as interface through the affordances of high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy. As discussed in the introduction, an affordances is a possible relationship between a user and a platform in interface.⁶⁰ Taking Drucker’s lead in remembering that books have always been interfaces, tracing affordances through several examples of bible as interface will help my analysis stay focused on the relationality made possible by the materialities at work in interface and can help highlight the continuities and discontinuities among the historical and emerging technologies involved.

Interfaces that afford high surface area have many possible points of contact between user and platform. The illustration I often use for high surface area is grinding coffee beans. The finer a coffee beans is ground, the more surface area that gets created for the water to contact and thus the water can draw more flavor from the bean. Interfaces affording high surface area provide expansive points of contact for the relationality of interface. The excessive possibilities for contact make it difficult for an interface to become overly deterministic because of the vast interactive possibilities. In a high surface area interface, a user would find it difficult to exhaust all possible encounters, thus resisting reduction to simple consumption. For example, watching a full length feature film straight through on YouTube is a fairly low surface area interface, since the user engages a continuous linear narrative that is taken in as a whole. On the other hand, searching YouTube for clips related to a recent election scandal can offer a high surface area interface through the many ways into the event offered by the search results.

Interfaces that afford collaboration provide possibilities for both participation in constructing the space of interface and chances for user interaction. Kindle reader on the iphone for example, affords several opportunities for the reader to participate in constructing the interface, such as choosing a font size or a background color for the page. Additionally, Kindle reader allows users to annotate and highlight as they use a book, which can create an entirely new navigation scheme through the material. We find a similar collaborative affordance in the marginalia so popular in medieval manuscripts. These Kindle annotations highlight another aspect of the collaborative capacities of interfaces, the communal process of use. Kindle reader allows users to share their annotations with others and users can enable a feature that will show popular highlights while reading through the book. This popular highlights feature is similar to checking out a book form the library and seeing the markings and highlights left by previous users. The Kindle reader example demonstrates the two layers of collaboration afforded by interfaces that provoke probabilistic production through a relationality irreducible to consumption. First, there is a relationality of participation in constructing the material aspects of the interface rather than simply consuming the content. Second, there is a relationality of community, using and making together not entirely on a user’s own terms.⁶¹

The third affordance of interfaces that we will look for is anarchy. Levinas himself speaks of proximity as anarchic, saying, “Proximity is thus anarchical, a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality.”⁶² It is the anarchy of proximity that first drew me to Levinas and it is the anarchy of proximity that offers bible an afterlife in our emerging media age with its proliferation of interfaces. Anarchy in the sense I use it here is something beyond disorder as another order and something significantly more complicated than the simple absence of a beginning or origin. Exploiting the koine semantic range of αρχη, which can mean beginning and reign, I hear the anarchic as that which is without the reign of an original.⁶³ Just as proximity resists any mastery or consumption of the other, anarchy in interface resists the closure or consolidation of use to any mechanistic determinism governed by original author, original version, or final form. Anarchy in interface constantly exceeds attempts by users to grasp and order the whole in a stable manner. The Talmudic page provides a beautiful example of anarchy in interface, even in the medium of print. The structure of the Talmudic page is very consistent, with Mishnah and Gemara down the center column and additional commentary around the page from there. Yet, the design of the page does not promote a reconstruction of any original meaning of the biblical text, the mishnah, or its commentary nor does it promote the reign of a single author or principle. Rather, the Talmudic page anarchically invites users to participate in the ongoing process of exploration and conversation.⁶⁴ Articulating this anarchic sensibility of the Talmud, Jacob Neusner writes, “Every Talmudic tractate–there are thirty-seven of them in the Babylonian Talmud–begins on page 2; there are no page 1s because there is no beginning. Wherever you start your study, you will feel you have joined a conversation which began long before you came along.”⁶⁵ Of course, every tractate does have a beginning, even if on page 2, and every user does start somewhere. The anarchy of the Talmudic page need not eradicate beginnings, or endings, in order to provide some proximate distance to resist the reign of these originary impulses. In interface, the affordance of anarchy facilitates a relationality between user and platform as well as among a community of users that is irreducible to consumption.

With these three affordances of interface in mind, high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy, we can now move toward looking at particular examples of bible as interface throughout its many manifestations in media history. I will first trace these affordances of bible as book through a roll bible, an ancient codex manuscript, and a kindle bible. Once we have seen the operations of these affordances in bible as book, I will explore the possible translations of high surface area, collaboration and anarchy into bible as interface in one attempt to move beyond the book through manuscript digitization, XML encoding, and web design. Finally, we will trace these affordances into interfaces that have pushed decidedly beyond the book, such as an XML digital bible library, a mobile bible app, and a bible application programming interfaces (APIs). Amidst the common fears and anxieties emerging as new technologies threaten the dominance of the book as our reading interface, attending to the affordances of bible as interface can help use of bible flourish beyond the book, while remaining deeply connected to the material history of bible.

It is unfortunate that I can not simply say students of the study of religion here and have it obviously refer to scholars as well. Yet, perhaps this is pertinent to the difficulty of Plate’s task in challenging the trends of reducing the study of religion to textual analysis. If scholarship has become more about production than about learning, what incentive does an established scholar of the study of religion have to experiment with new approaches? ↩
At several points in his book, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects, Plate cleverly articulates his aim with the turn of phrase, “bringing the spiritual to its senses.” See p. 19-22 for some examples. ↩
Plate, 5 1/2 Objects, 22. In a personal conversation with Jeffrey Mahan, he mentioned that in teaching Plate’s methodologies, some students assume Plate is articulating a notion of religion that is absent of God or belief. I can see how this quote could be taken in such a binary or exclusionary fashion, even if not necessarily Plate’s intention. For our purposes here, I will use language of religion as technology, which is irreducible to belief, in order to dethrone the role of belief in the study and practice of religion without a need to eradicate it as a part of religious phenomena. ↩
Plate, 5 1/2 Objects, 22. ↩
Plate, 5 1/2 Objects, 22. As Hutchings notes in “Augmented graves and virtual Bibles,” 88, Plate’s approach is closely connected to the physicality of the human senses and often doesn’t explicitly deal with the materialities of the digital. With Hutchings, I am taking a more technical (pun intended) approach to technology than Plate by focusing on what we more readily imagine as technological platforms for accessing Judeo-Christian sacred texts through books, websites, mobile devices, and APIs. Yet, Plate signals his attention to the religious ramifications of the extended materialities of emerging technologies in his treatment of media in the skinscape of religion and his articulation of the soul as technology. In 5 1/2 Objects, 23, Plate writes, “Religion in a high-tech, media-saturated, global-economic age is as reliant on objects as it is in smaller scale societies.” ↩
For more information on the Iconic Books Project and SCRIPT, see http://jameswwatts.net/iconicbooks/ and http://script-site.net/, respectively. James Watts happens to host the Iconic Books Project website under his own web domain, he is the main contributor to the Iconic Books Project Blog, and he is the current treasurer of SCRIPT. ↩
Watts, “Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” 6. Watts finds these three dimensions in all books, not just scriptures. Scripture emerges from the degree to which a community ritualizes these dimensions. ↩
Watts, “Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” 6-7. ↩
In More than Belief, Manuel Vasquez provides a practice based approach to challenge the textualism, the focus on the interpretation of texts, that has dominated the study of religion and biblical studies at the expense of a careful attention to the role of the senses in relationship to the material objects of the world as constituting the theory and practice of religion. ↩
Watts, “Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” 7. ↩
Watts, “Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” 7-8. As a reminder, Watts’s thesis has to do with the ritualization of these three dimensions as the production of scripture and he finds these dimensions in all books. The meaning of the words, the performance of reading, and the materiality of the book always matter. ↩
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). ↩
If I were working with a medium other than print here, I would embed the results from my google search for “define ‘interface.’” The google search algorithm for definitions draws on many sources to provide a quick look at the main definitions of a term, its etymology, its frequency over time, and gives you the ability to translate the term into other languages. Due to the demands and customs of the print genre and related citation tendencies, I have chosen to reference a combination of OED and other useful definitions, particularly because the OED entries for this term are vastly outdated. Given my experience with this particular word, “interface,” I can’t help but question the subtitle of the OED online, which is “The definitive record of the English language.” The google define algorithm results for “interface” can be found by running a google search on “define interface” and the Oxford Dictionaries Online free version entry can be found at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/interface. ↩
“interface, n.”. OED Online. December 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.du.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/97747?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=QjGVLf& (accessed December 21, 2016). ↩
Would it be useful to add a note on skinscape here as an analogy or even just a basic mention of how this example of water and air producing the interface together is similar to conceptions of the performative and iconic dimensions of bible? ↩
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/interface ↩
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/interface ↩
google “define interface” ↩
The verbal definitions of interface are simply “to interact with” or “to connect with.” Link to the Oxford Online Dictionaries. The simplicity of these verbal forms and my brevity in addressing them are not indicative of the importance I place on the verbal aspect of interface. Yet, our difficult task here is to explore bible as interface without reducing interface to any one of these definitions at the expense of the other. ↩
Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory,” Culture Machine 12, no. 0 (February 18, 2011), https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/434, and “Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,” Parallax 15, no. 4 (November 1, 2009): 7–17. ↩
It was actually a combination of Drucker’s essay and my conversations with Timothy Beal about “bible as media” at the 2014 Nida School of Translation Studies, where Beal was Nida Professor. ↩
Drucker, “Interface Theory,” 2. ↩
Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 1-2. ↩
Drucker, “Interface Theory,” 1. ↩
Drucker, “Interface Theory,” 3. ↩
Drucker, “Interface Theory,” 9. ↩
Drucker, “Interface Theory,” 7-8. ↩
Drucker, “Entity to Event,” 8. ↩
Plate, 5 1/2 Objects, 22. ↩
Watts, “Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” 6. ↩
Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 18. ↩
Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 18. ↩
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Some have used the language of “prosumer” or “prosumption” to indicate this blurring of production and consumption. Introduced by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave CITATION, the use of prosumption langauge has resurfaced in relation to web technologies in the work of George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson (CITATION). ↩
de Certeau, Practice, xviii. ↩
de Certeau, Practice, xx. ↩
de Certeau, Practice, xxi-xxii. ↩
Johanna Drucker, ‘Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,’ Parallax 15, no. 4 (2009): 8. ↩
Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 10. ↩
See McGrenere and Ho, “Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept,” 1, for a brief history of the use of the term. ↩
Drucker, ‘Entity to Event,’ 14. Again we see similarities with Watt’s three dimensions of scripture as the interpretive act is about making semantic meaning in the performance of reading as constrained by the materiality of the space of the event of encounter between user and book. ↩
I am aware of the limitations of talking about medium and user as distinct entities and the ease with which we might slip into simple subject/object binaries here. One of the difficult tasks of this project is to challenge these dichotomies in so far as they encourage a subject consuming object model of reading. Perhaps the emerging discussions of object oriented ontology could provide an interesting conversation partner with interface theory. Imagining both medium and user as objects that have properties and methods they bring to an encounter could help emphasize the entangled production of reading as process model I am advocating for here. ↩
Drucker, “Entity to Event,” 7, also challenges the material movement to consider more thoughtfully the materiality of the virtual, pointing back to the Abrahamic traditions of mapping matter to flesh. ↩
For an introduction to the role of different philosophical notions of subjectivity and the role of ethics in interface, see Lucas Introna, “Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/.] ↩
The term optics appears four times in Totality and Infinity on p. 23, 29, 78, and 174. The most often noted articulation of this idea in Levinas is his phrase, “ethics is an optics.” An optic is an apparatus for seeing or a necessary precursor for the ability to see. For Levinas, the ethical encounter of the face, otherwise stated as one’s infinite responsibility for the other, is not governed by vision or knowledge or intentionality of the typical sort. Instead, this ethical encounter provides the apparatus for the very possibility of seeing, knowing, and willing. This is how I mean proximity as an optics, as an apparatus for the possibility of interface as relationality irreducible to consumption. ↩
As Richard Cohen, Ethics and Cybernetics, 28, notes, the most pivotal chapter of Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, which is titled “Substitution,” offers a fitting mention of proximity in relationship to terminology we often find in discussions of technology, such as “circulation of information” and “resolved into ‘images.’ After introducing the shortcomings associated with placing consciousness qua knowledge at the foundation of humanness, Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 101, articulates an alternative, saying, “In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking in language contact and sensibility, behind the circulation of information it becomes, we have endeavored to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into “images” or be exposed in a theme. It is the relationship with what is not disproportionate to the arche in thematization, but incommensurable with it, with what does not derive its identity from the kerygmatic logos, and blocks all schematism.” ↩
Levinas, OTB, 94. ↩
Levinas, OTB, 17, writes, “It figures as what is near in a proximity that counts as sociality, which ‘excites’ by its pure and simple proximity.” ↩
Levinas, OTB, 48, writes, “An analysis that starts with proximity, irreducible to consciousness of…, and describable, if possible, as an inversion of its intentionality, will recognize this responsibility to be a substitution.” ↩
Levinas, OTB, 90. ↩
Levinas, OTB, 90, writes, “Proximity, suppression of the distance that consciousness of… involves, opens the distance of a diachrony without a common present, where difference is the past that cannot be caught up with, an unimaginable future, the non-representable status of the neighbor behind which I am late and obsessed by the neighbor. This difference is my non-indifference to the other. Proximity is a disturbance of the rememberable time.” ↩
Levinas, OTB, 90. ↩
OTB, 139-40. I would argue that Levinas unhelpfully uses proximity as a synonym for nearness in this passage, since proximity is the dual operation of increasing distance and nearness. ↩
Levinas, OTB, 94. ↩
Levinas, “Being and the Other: On Paul Celan,” 17, writes, “A language of and for proximity–more ancient than that of the ‘truth of Being’ (which it probably bears and supports), the first of languages–response preceding question, responsibility to the neighbor–, making possible through its ‘for the other’ the whole miracle of giving.” ↩
Hand, Emmanuel Levinas, 77. ↩
Levinas, OTB, 192 n. 10, makes another explicit claim for the relationship between poetry and proximity in his discussion of obsession, writing, “But is not the poetry of the world prior to the truth of things, and inseparable from what is proximity par excellence, that of a neighbor, or of the proximity of the neighbor par excellence.” ↩
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). ↩
Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 23. ↩
In his reflections on revelation in the Jewish tradition, Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 132, suggests, “It is by going back to the Hebrew text from the translations, vulnerable as they may be, that the strange or mysterious ambiguity or polysemy authorized by the Hebrew syntax is revealed: words coexist rather than immediately being co-ordinated or subordinated with and to one another, contrary to what is predominant in the languages that are said to be developed or functional. This coexistence of words before and irreducible to their coordination is the extraordinary presence of the characters of the bible. ↩
Tracing bible as interface through several different time periods and technological instantiations also highlights the comparative and remediation foci of David Morgan’s methodology of material analysis in the study of religion. Morgan articulates nine foci in three areas that can facilitate the academic study of religion through material objects and our interaction with them. For more details, see Morgan, “Material Analysis and the Study of Religion,” in Materiality and the Study of Relgion eds. Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2017), 24. ↩
Wikipedia offers another good example of collaborative capacities, where a user can participate in crafting an entry with a team of people from around the globe without any previous “knowledge” or who these partners are. Now, Wikipedia does not necessarily demand participation in the same way that the encounter with the other does in Levinasian subjectivity, because a user can simply take in the content of the page. Yet, again, the possibility of collaboration both in building the entry with strangers and sharing bits of it with others, as an affordance, has the potential to shape a disposition toward response-ability in human-human interface. ↩
Levinas, OTB, 101. ↩
Despite the semantic negation built into the word an-archy, I am uninterested in arguing for the absence of original. In my early attempts to articulate this anarchy in the realm of translation studies through a talk titled “From Murder to Anarchy” at the Nida School of Translation Studies 2014, I fear I had fallen into the trap of archaizing the anarchic by arguing for the eradication of the notion of original in the process of translation. The conversations with translators who have spent their lives caring for and working with both biblical and literary texts taught me that we needn’t eschew the presence, value, and operation of an original or source text in the process of translation in order to question said original’s governance over the validity or even methodology of a translation. We can always construct an original given a particular data set and time frame. Instead of eradicating any notion of original, I am asking us to consider a kind of reading, a mode of making, that operates without the reign of an original. In this vein, anarchy becomes one mechanism for the probabilistic production offered by interfaces that we discussed in chapter 1. ↩
Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 5, points toward this anarchic sensibility of the Talmudic page, writing, “The pages of the Talmud, mischevious, laconic in their ironic or dry formulations, but in love with the possible, register an oral tradition and a teaching which came to be written down accidentally. It is important to bring them back to their life of dialog or polemic in which multiple, though not arbitrary, meanings arise and buzz in each saying. These Talmudic pages seek contradiction and expect of a reader freedom, invention and boldness.” ↩
Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud: A Teaching Book, 170. Joel Luri Grishaver, Talmud with Training Wheels, 13, points out that though Nuesner touches on a truth of Talmudic interface, tractates begin on page 2 also because page 1 was reserved materially for the title page. ↩

Bibliarchic Introduction

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATING BOOK

In early summer of 2013, on the heels of a week long seminar experimenting with new modes and media beyond print for training manuals with a group of bible translators from all over the world with the Nida Institute, I had the privilege of visiting Ravenna, Italy. The coincidence of reading Lev Manovich’s The Langauge of New Media, talking about the constitutive role of translation in the life of bible, and encountering the proliferation of books in the mosaics of Ravenna planted the seed for this project.¹ Several years before this, I had already become interested in the role of transforming book technologies on the cultural imagination of bible in antiquity. Yet, Ravenna put this curiosity into pictures in ways I had yet to imagine. As many have experienced, Ravenna is full of fantastic and vivid early depictions of Christian scenes in mosaic form from the 5th and 6th centuries of the common era. What surprised me as I began my reluctant tour through the ancient tourist sites was the prevalence of books in these early art forms. In fact, there were books everywhere, from the rolls in the hands of the saints around the baptismal font to the famous gospel cabinet in the funerary room. In the context of this discussion about bible as interface and the emergence of codex as a new book technology, there is one particular depiction of a gospel writer in the cathedral of San Vitale that highlights the co-presence of roll and codex in the interface repertoire of ancient bible users.² This particular set of mosaics is dated to the 6th century and the wall depicts all four gospel writers with their typical animal signs. The mosaic of Matthew depicts him sitting near a writing desk with a codex in his lap and a basket of rolls near the foot of the desk. Even as late as the 6th century, when codex has become the dominant reading and writing interface for most users of the world, high Christian iconography is entirely comfortable depicting the use of both roll and codex in the composition of their sacred writings. Bible may be inextricably bound to book, but these images expanded my conception of both bible and book.

Bible As Interface

Much like the situation depicted in the mosaics of Ravenna, the book is again undergoing a major technological transition as print wanes in its dominance and the internet and mobile devices transform our reading and writing technologies. With the entangled histories of bible and book, our emerging media age and its transformation of book technologies forces us to imagine bible as something beyond the book.³ The connections between the major technological transition from roll to codex in antiquity and the contemporary move toward the internet and mobile technologies as reading platforms encourage us to consider bible as an interface that affords an entanglement of nearness and distance through high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies. I suggest bible as interface here to remind us that bible is more than a container of content to be consumed by a reader and can no longer be reduced to a book. Rather, bible as interface is a space constructed by the dynamic interplay of the material dispositions of the technological platform and the participation of the interested user. Animated by a Levinasian optic of proximity, an ongoing entanglement of nearness and distance, I will explore the many contact points of high surface area, the interruptive processes of collaborative capacities, and the irreducibility to a single original text or single proper use in anarchic tendencies through a media specific analysis of bible from ancient roll to digital API.

Locating Within the Conversation

Robert Kraft was an early pioneer in these questions about the relationship between our present technological transition from print to internet and the shift from scroll to codex in antiquity. Focused particularly on the notion of canon, Kraft articulated the possible impacts at work in these somewhat analagous transitions, worlds apart in terms of history and culture, saying “For many years now, I have wondered whether the technological change from the scroll format to the large-scale codex influenced, at least in some situations, perceptions about ‘the bible,’ and especially the extent to which the classical Christian concept of a closed or exclusive ‘canon’ of scripture depended on that development.”⁴ As early Christian writers worked to translate their literary craft from roll books to codex form, Kraft used his own experimentation with a barely emerging writing/reading technology, the internet, to explore how technological changes might have impacted a reader or writer’s relationship to books and text. In the piece quoted above, we can see the attempts to translate print structures such as footnotes into the internet “page.”⁵

Using simple notation such as “—” to separate between a paragraph and the related notes, “===” to separate between notes and the next paragraph, and “\#/” to designate a note, Kraft attempted to translate familiar print structures into the continuous scrolled “page” of the internet. Without discrete page divisions with footers at the bottom of each page, as we would find in a print publication, Kraft invented a similar structure to keep the familiar construct of notes in his text. Though this notation was no longer demanded by the web writing platform chosen by Kraft, much like multiple vertical columns were unnecessary on a codex page, Kraft worked hard to translate structures familiar to print readers into this new environment of the web page. His performance of the difficulties and possibilities of this new medium provided an object lesson for the theoretical questions he posed about the relationship between book technologies and users of books.⁶ It is the both/and of Kraft’s approach that is most instructive for me both practically and theoretically. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, all new media contain their predecessors, so it is no surprise that print artifacts such as pages and footnotes remain even in this web environment used by Kraft.⁷ Kraft also explored new terrain in the process of academic publication by producing his writing in a new form without having to eradicate or cease to participate in more traditional print forms of scholarly production. I continue in the line of questioning pioneered by Kraft, still wondering how the evolving material interfaces of bible, the technologies of bible as book, might “[affect our] perceptions about ‘texts,’ ‘books,’ ‘reading,’ and the like… .”⁸

Digital Materiality

Following in the footsteps of Kraft, I was hoping to both describe and perform the thesis that throughout its rich media history, bible has been an interface that provokes probabilistic production through the affordances of high surface area, anarchy, and collaboration. Yet, due to the confines of the dissertation genre, I will limit my explorations to the telling of this thesis and the description of interfaces rather than the construction of interfaces that experimentally embody these material affordances in emerging media environments.⁹ Beyond simply articulating a sustained argument in support of this thesis and handling several artifacts to demonstrate the operation of these affordances in the life of bible from antiquity to the present, this project will do some additional work through three specific aims.¹⁰ First, a sustained attention to the details of several bible artifacts, physical and digital, will highlight the materiality of bible and the participation of users in this materiality. I have introduced a few terms here that deserve further reflection, “materiality,” and “digital.” By materiality or material, I am signaling a focus on the moving parts and structures that make up the spaces of interaction between bibles and users, such as the size of a viewing area for a given bible manuscript or a bible on screen. I do not intend the term “material” to limit our discourse to the raw materials that make up a given interface, such as papyrus, parchment, silicon, and electricity, though these items do play a role. Instead, a focus on the materiality of bible here intends to highlight the characteristics and attributes of bible that are not reducible to the texts of and about bible or the predominant textual analysis typical of most biblical scholarship.¹¹ The texts of bible and their possibilities of meaning are not irrelevant to this study, but they are not center stage. The materiality at work in this project fits best the first aspect of Plate’s expansive definition of material religion, “bodies meet objects,” with a distinct focus on the properties and structures of bible as object that shapes the possibilities for user participation in interface with these objects.¹² Groups such as the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) and the Institute for Signifying Scriptures paved the way in considering new methodologies in the materiality of the books that many religions call sacred, but little was done in those conversations to push this material analysis into the emerging materialities of computing and the internet.¹³ This study extends the discourse on the materiality of religious books, particularly the bible, into the emerging material landscapes of the digital.

With this approach to materiality, dethroning text as the primary focus of analysis and foregrounding the objects that constitute bible, it is easy then to see how we might develop a more thoughtful exploration of the materiality of the digital as Johanna Drucker has called for in her work on interface theory for the humanities.¹⁴ The term digital has come to represent a massive discourse that begins with the basic distinction between continuous (analog) and discrete (binary) phenomenon, particularly in reference to the binary machine language that is the basis for most forms of computing today. Yet, regardless of any meaningful distinction between continuous and discrete, digital has come to represent all things related to computing, the internet, and in a sense, anything that has a screen as its primary interface.¹⁵ With this broad concept of the digital in mind, when I speak of the materiality of the digital, I mean the attributes and structures of platforms, devices, programs, and other objects that shape the spaces of user activity in the world of computing. Careful attention to these digital materialities are as important for a critical study of bible as are the material structures of an ancient roll or a codex manuscript.

Grounding Emerging Anxieties

A second aim of this study is to offer an alternative to the pervasive anxieties surrounding emerging technologies such as internet reading and bibles on screens. Jeffrey Siker’s recent book Liquid Scriptures brings to bible in particular a growing anxiety about books on screens and a nostalgia for well ingrained modes of reading and knowing fostered by the likes of Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle.¹⁶ Most certainly, we need to attend to the social effects of any emerging technology, both positive and negative, and I applaud Siker, Carr and Turkle for challenging our culture’s tendency to uncritically embrace emerging technologies. Yet, rather than simply lamenting the loss of a particular way of relating to books and bible, looking for enduring affordances that connect older familiar technologies to emerging platforms can help build capacities in users to participate in new interfaces in meaningful ways even as they may helpfully challenge the value of more traditional uses. I will use three related approaches to help offer an alternative perspective to the common resistance to so called “new” technologies. First, whenever possible, I will refer to emerging technologies instead of new technologies or new media.¹⁷ The language of new and old sets up a potentially dichotomous relationship between technologies that can lend itself to overly simplistic hierarchical evaluations. Focusing on the ongoing emergence of technologies signals both that each iteration of a technology is somehow connected to what came before it and that this process of technological evolution is never finished.

Material Media Translation

Second, to support this focus on emergence, I propose a palimpsestuous notion of “material media translation” to describe the relationship between technologies as they emerge. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan points us toward the cracks in the reign of print, that illustrious descendant of the codex, in the face of an emerging electronic age. McLuhan reminds us that technologies (media) are extensions of ourselves and that the message of every medium is its effect on our social relations.¹⁸ Instead of focusing on the content delivered and consumed by any new technology, McLuhan emphasizes the impact of technologies on human relationship with the world and one another through a “change of scale.” He writes,

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.¹⁹

Here, McLuhan challenges our binary tendencies between new and old and suggests that emerging technologies build upon existing technologies and bring a change in speed, size, or pattern, etc., which connects existing technologies with those that are emerging. For example, it is precisely this change in existing processes we find in the amplification of non-linear access from the emergence of the codex to the ubiquity of internet search. McLuhan suggests that the content of every “new” medium is another existing medium.²⁰ Just as the codex performed the multiple columns per page of a scroll, so internet search performs and amplifies the print index. I refer to this phenomenon of media building upon and containing its predecessors as material media translation. The language of translation is helpful here because it signals that all media transformations involve a negotiation between new and old with inevitable loss and gain. I use the phrase “material media” to qualify this translation to differentiate this process from the common process of translation of texts into other forms of media such as sound and film. In material media translation, it is the materiality of the technological interface that is translated, not simply its “content,” whatever that might entail.

In our book technology tradition itself, we have a material metaphor for this process of material media translation, the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been written on, erased, and then written on again. In normal use, a palimpsest may seem like a new manuscript, showing few or no hints of its previous life and use. Yet, upon closer examination, the erasure of the previous writing is never complete and continues to shape the space of the manuscript, even if unnoticed by the typical user. The instructive part of palimpsest for material media translation is that no technology begins on a blank page and even if a new technology may seem to stand on its own, the echoes of its predecessors always lurk. In our analysis of emerging technologies related to bible, each “new” technology writes over an existing technology (or many technologies) with only partial erasure. Thus, material media translation enacts a kind of palimpsest. For example, though the codex erases the linear scrolling access of the roll, it retains the multiple vertical columnar structure even though not demanded by the structure of the codex page. Below is an image of a page from Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus,²¹ a fifth century manuscript of biblical texts in Greek, washed and written over in the 12th century with Greek translations of the fourth century Syriac writings of Ephrem the Syrian. This beautiful material enactment of palimpsest, two column miniscule Greek translations of Syriac over single column uncial Greek biblical texts, illustrates the process of emerging technology building upon existing structures to make something new without completely erasing what preceded it.

Figure 1: Image of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 1v²²

Affordances

Third, to highlight the palimpsestuous nature of material media translation of bible from various book technologies to platforms that push beyond book, I will focus on a particular technology’s affordances. Affordances as a concept were first introduced in 1977 by James J. Gibson, a perceptual psychologist, to describe the possible interactions with an agent made possible by an particular environment.²³ An important aspect of Gibson’s invention of affordances is their relational nature. An affordance is a possible relationship between the physical properties of a “surface” and an organism encountering that surface.²⁴ Take for example, a reader using a codex as a surface or environment, as Gibson calls it. The physical properties of a codex include flexible pages bound together on one long side with a cover on the front and back. These pages have writing on them. On one level, this codex affords reading for the reader. More specifically, the codex affords non-linear access to text for a reader because of the physical properties of binding on one side and flexible pages instead of being rolled up in one long sheet from one end to the other as in a roll.

Donald Norman brought Gibson’s notion of affordances into the world of human-computer interface design and focused the concept on those actions “perceived” as possible or likely by a user of an interface by combining the operations of affordances, signifiers, and constraints.²⁵ Rather than exploring any action made possible by the relationship between the physical properties of an environment and the capacities of a user, Norman focused more on the possible uses that would make sense to a user when encountering an interface.²⁶ Understandably, Norman is focused on intuitive and useful interface design, with primarily the designer in mind and wanting to facilitate affordances that are readily apparent to a user. One of the reasons I will stay closer to the more generic notion of affordances offered by Gibson as we discuss bible as interface is to distance our discussion from the singular intent of the “appropriate” or “proper” use of a technology as determined by the designer.²⁷ The concept of affordances will allow us to discuss the possible relationships between bible and user across several different technological environments.²⁸

Suggesting New Capacities

A third aim operative in this exploration of bible as interface is to demonstrate new capacities and new literacies demanded of biblical scholars to critically study bible as our technological landscape shifts. Here I am inspired by the work of John Miles Foley’s Pathways Project,²⁹ the Academic Book of the Future Project,³⁰ and the ongoing work of the Experimental Humanities @ Iliff working group.³¹ As bible interfaces proliferate in a technological landscape that prioritizes the production of more interfaces though APIs and other programming frameworks, my close handling of emerging bible interfaces beyond the book points toward new languages, new tools, and new mechanisms of close reading that will need to become a part of training biblical scholars of tomorrow. Learning basic skills in emerging technologies such as Python, XML, JavaScript, and APIs will give scholars powerful tools to further analyze and ask new questions of the antique data set with which they have worked for centuries. Without these literacies, the careful critical edge of biblical scholarship will decline as bible exceeds the boundaries of book as we know it. In this study, I only begin to signal the kinds of capacities we will need to continue to explore the rich life of bible and its use. More than articulating a specific set of tools necessary for an emerging generation of biblical scholars, I hope to practice a process of inquiry that can be expanded and adapted as quickly as the technologies with which we work.

Defining Bible

One last definition is in order before I provide a basic roadmap for where we are headed in the rest of the project and that definition is of bible. At its basic etymological and translational roots, bible means book. When referring to sacred writings, the neuter plural of βιβλιον was most often used, τα βιβλια, which slowly transitioned to a feminine singular in Latin, which is where we get the singular “bible” referring to the collection of Christian sacred writings.³² From its roots, bible is a material artifact even at the linguistic level, being related to the papyrus material from which roll books were made in antiquity. Before we ever get bible as collection of sacred writings or as generic authoritative work, we have bible as book technology. Though etymology does not determine the meaning of words, this historical entanglement of form and content in the construction of the word “bible” already anticipates the work we are doing here regarding bible as more than the content it might contain.³³ With a nod to this technological etymology, when I use the term bible in this project, I am referring to the technologies that afford the use of Judeo-Christian sacred writings. I refer to “use” of sacred writings to signal that there are many uses of bible beyond simply reading, but my analysis here will be primarily focused on readerly type uses, even if some of the emerging bible interfaces we consider might challenge our conceptions and boundaries of reading. Though the important distinctions between conceptions and use of bible in the different Judaisms and Christianities that emerge from antiquity are absolutely worth considering, I will save that work for future explorations and will make no claims about the content boundaries of these sacred collections.

Making a Path

Though some terms remain to be more fully explicated in the coming portions of the study, such as interface and proximity, we have enough of a background now to articulate the plan for what follows. With the help of Johanna Drucker’s work on interface theory and the Humanities, I will begin with a look at interface as a way of interrupting the reduction of bible to the content it contains and direct our attention to the relationship of user and platform in the construction of bible as a space of encounter that provokes probabilistic production. Having a working notion of bible as interface, I will then use the idea of proximity in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of human subjectivity as an optic to argue for bible as an interface that affords an entanglement of nearness and distance through high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies. The remaining chapters will trace this entanglement of nearness and distance as evidenced by high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies through the bible interfaces of roll, codex, Kindle, web, extensible markup language (XML), mobile app, and application programming interface (API). All along the way, we will see the material media translation at work in these emerging interfaces, which will foreground the materiality of each of the interfaces and the capacities necessary to critically engage them.

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). ↩
For our purposes here, the larger category of book denotes a technology that involves the fastening together of discrete pieces of material to gather and set boundaries for a writing or collection of writings, which is primarily governed by the structure of the page. This broad definition of book encompasses roll books, palm leaf books, codicies, and Kindle books. A codex is one particular book technology that uniformly folds pieces of material, usually papyrus, parchment, or paper of some sort, and fastens these folded bundles together at one edge to form a spine. See Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, 1, for a discussion of this definition, where they add “usually protected by covers.” Because of the codex’s predominance as a book technology since as early as the fifth century C.E., in today’s parlance, book and codex are used interchangably. ↩
Here again, given the broader definition of book I put forth above, bible beyond book suggests something more than simply bible beyond codex, even though codex has come to dominate our cultural imagination of book. ↩
Robert Kraft, “The Codex and Canon Consciousness,” http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon, accessed on April 24, 2017. ↩
Even the fact that we call web objects pages suggests the durable presence of the codex and print on our media sensibilities. Yet, as Walter Ong noted in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 133, there is a secondary orality at work in the “scrolling” we use to navigate these “pages” of the internet. The language we use to talk about emerging technologies provides a strong reminder of the palimpsestuous nature of media translation. ↩
This draft electronic writing eventually gets published in print as chapter 14 in Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). ↩
Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 10. ↩
Robert Kraft, “The Codex and Canon Consciousness,” http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon, accessed on April 24, 2017. ↩
Early experiments in the construction of interfaces as a part of this project can be found at http://aproximatebible.postach.io. Though largely hidden to the reader, I am still taking Kraft’s lead in small ways by composing my dissertation in a syntax developed for web writing called markdown (https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, accessed on June 10, 2017) and then converting markdown to Word document formatting using a command line document converter called pandoc (http://pandoc.org/, accessed on June 10, 2017). ↩
Thanks to Benjamin Peters for demonstrating this helpful structure of combining a single thesis with multiple aims. ↩
My approach to materiality as a challenge to the dominant textualism of both biblical scholarship and the study of religion has been formed by S. Brent Plate’s development of methodologies in material religion in works such as “The Skin of Religion : Aesthetic Mediations of the Sacred,” Cross Currents 62, no. 2 (June 2012): 162–80 and A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) as well as Manuel Vasquez’s explorations of the limits of textualism in More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩
Plate, Key Terms in Material Religion, iv. ↩
See http://script-site.net/ and http://iconicbooks.blogspot.com/, accessed on June 11, 2017 for more information on SCRIPT. The Institute for Signifying Scriptures can be found at http://www.signifyingscriptures.org/, accessed on June 11, 2017. ↩
Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013). ↩
See Gregory Grieve, “Digital” in , Key Terms in Material Religion, ed. S. Brent Plate (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 58-60, for an example of the digital being more about computing than any sense of discreteness that would be perceivable by users. ↩
Jeffrey S. Siker, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World (Fortress Press, 2017). Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2010). Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2016). ↩
Media and new media are vastly expansive terms that can encompass things such as technologies, art, books, and even bodies. Understanding that it is a drastic reduction, I will use media and technology interchangably in this study. For excellent examples of considering the connection of emerging technologies to the technologies that gave rise to them, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002) and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). ↩
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7-8, writes, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” ↩
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. ↩
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. ↩
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8470433r ↩
Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 1v view 15, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8470433r/f15.item taken from the iOS app Gallica by Bibliothèque nationale de France https://appsto.re/us/FhPFH.i. ↩
James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. Robert Shaw and John D Bransford (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum ass., 1977) and later expanded in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York, N.Y.: Psychology Press, 2015). ↩
Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 125, writes, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” A critical piece of Gibson’s theory is the relational nature of affordances and the way affordances problematize any binary between subject and object. An affordance is not simply a property of an object or of a subject, it is a possible relationship of encounter between participants in the encounter. We will see that this notion of affordance has affinity with the operations of interface. ↩
Norman 2013, 145. ↩
In the first chapter of the revised and expanded edition of The Design of Everyday Things, 12, Norman tells the story of his relationship with Gibson and their fundamental disagreements about the interpretive role of the brain in the relationship between agents and objects. Norman is clear about his indebtedness to Gibson and the important contribution Gibson made to helping designers pay more attention to the information offered by the physical world. ↩
In Norman’s definiton of signifer, The Design of Everyday Things, 14, we can see this emphasis on the proper at work. He says, “For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a user.” This signifer as indicator of “appropriate behavior” is different than an affordance, which is a possible relationship between a surface and an agent, a platform and a user. Norman does allow for accidental or unintentional signifiers, yet, his emphasis on understandability as connected to the communication of “appropriate behavior” could lead toward design governed by determining mechanistic consumption rather than provoking probabilistic production. ↩
My approach of tracing the affordance of proximity across many bible interfaces throughout history is informed by N. Katherine Hayles’s “Media Specific Analysis” methodology demonstrated in “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (March 20, 2004): 67–90. ↩
http://www.pathwaysproject.org/, accessed on June 12, 2017 and John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). ↩
https://academicbookfuture.org/, accessed on June 12, 2017 and Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner, eds., The Academic Book of the Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). ↩
http://library.iliff.edu/humanities/, accessed on June 12, 2017. ↩
LSJ, s.v. “βιβλιον” and Michael D. Coogan, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75. ↩
See Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983) for more details on the role of bible in the rise of the codex, Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) for the role of the codex in the emergence of Christian reading practices, and Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible : The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) for the role of emerging media transitions in our cultural imagination of bible. ↩

Affording Proximity 2.1

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 03:57:13 +0000

For a history of changes incorporated here, see Chapter 2 History on GitHub.

Now that we have established interface and user as useful ways to talk about books and reading in our emerging technological landscape, I will move on to explore the value of one particular affordance in interface based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and particularly his notion of proximity. Pushing proximity beyond its typical connotation of simple physical closeness, I will argue for interfaces that afford both nearness as response-ability and distance as resistance to mastery. This expansion and entanglement of nearness and distance in proximity can help us imagine bible as interface amidst the familiar anxiety of changing notions of nearness and distance as new technologies emerge.

Throughout the history of technological change, one of the consistent questions that arises is how to deal with the expanding affordance of nearness offered by new technologies. Nearness in the context of interface typically suggests a spatial or relational contiguity that facilitates easier access to resources or easier exchange of information. Transportation technologies like horses, automobiles, and airplanes effectively increased nearness by decreasing the energy and time required to travel across large distances. Communication technologies such as the telephone, email, and mobile devices have expanded nearness by increasing our ability to communicate across vast distances in short time spans with increasing amounts and types of data. In the realm of bible interfaces, the Codex Sinaiticus Project web interface has brought me as a user much nearer to this 4th century manuscript. First of all, this project brings together fragments of the manuscript into one space of encounter from four different libraries around the world. Instead of traveling to the British Library, the Library of the University of Leipzig, the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, and the Holy Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai to encounter all of the extant portions of this important codex, I can browse them all from a single web interface on my computer no matter where I am in the world. This aggregation of artifacts into one interface is one form of nearness afforded by digitization of manuscripts and internet technologies.

In addition to the collecting of fragments, the Codex Sinaiticus Project website provides high resolution digital images with easy zoom capabilities, transcriptions, english translations, and physical descriptions of each leaf of each quire that is extant. Due to the lighting techniques used to capture the digital images of the manuscript and the zoom capabilities, this interface of the manuscript can offer a user a closer or nearer look at some of the details of the material manuscript that would even be possible handling the manuscript sitting in the reading room of the British Library. Without a doubt, this web interface of Codex Sinaiticus increases nearness by allowing many more people to engage this historic book with ease and by highlighting details of the manuscript that may escape a user participating in other interfaces of the manuscript. In light of the immense benefits provided by this nearness to Codex Sinaiticus, it is also without question a different encounter with the manuscript than turning the fragile pages with sterile gloves in a climate controlled reading room at the University of Leipzig. As my colleague Danny Yencich reminded me in a discussion of the digital materiality of the Codex Sinaiticus project, this web interface does not provide a user is an encounter with the spine, covers and binding of this book. Yencich rightfully asks, “Are such paratexts really so unimportant for the study of this book?”¹ There are undoubtedly other significant changes in the way we study and imagine this fantastic book in this alternative material interface. What do we lose not experiencing the sound and smell of the page turns or in foregoing the process of turning pages at all? Does the granular access to one leaf at a time shape a different conception of the whole codex and the relationship between the fragments?

Growing Anxieties

Similar questions and concerns about the growing affordance of nearness are prevalent in the contemporary debates about the impact of internet, social media, and mobile technologies on human cognition and human relationship. Sherry Turkle has become a prominent public voice in discussions of technology and its social effect, as evidenced in the impressive attention captured by her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.² I first encountered Turkle’s work while engaging a Richard Cohen article, “Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections,” (Cohen 2000) in my struggle with face to face language in online education.³ Using her work from 1995, Life on the Screen,⁴ Cohen offers Turkle as an example of media scholars who champion the advantages of cybernetics and internet communication technologies for redefining subjectivities in the direction of post-modern notions of multiplicity and instability.⁵

Turkle’s more recent work has shifted focus from this earlier celebration of the fragmented self to a serious anxiety about the effects of robotics and mobile devices on our social capacities as humans (Turkle 2011; Turkle 2015).⁶ Two minutes into a 2015 NPR interview titled ‘Making the Case For Face to Face in an Era of Digital Conversation,’⁷ Turkle suggests that “face to face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do, it’s where we learn to put ourselves in the place of the other.” For many, this phrase, “face to face,” as Turkle uses it has come to represent “real” human interaction as opposed to a weak simulation or even cheap imitation that happens through internet media. In a sense, we could describe Turkle’s concerns as the growing tendency people have to choose one kind of nearness, a thin nearness, over a more “real” and valuable nearness of the so called “face to face.” Stated another way, Turkle warns us of the detrimental effects (greater distance) on personal relationship and intimacy brought about by the ever expanding nearness to information and connection provided by mobile devices and internet technologies. Her provocative suggestion of the negative impact of a mobile phone on the table during an interview is a perfect illustration of this interplay of nearness and distance. The nearness afforded by the mobile phone introduces some distance between the two people sitting in the radio studio together, and this exchange is a net loss in Turkle’s estimation.

Turning more specifically to books and users, Nicholas Carr has been a consistent voice of concern over the increasing nearness of internet reading interfaces. In his more current work, The Glass Cage and Utopia is Creepy, Carr continues to provide a useful voice challenging assumptions that the growing ubiquity of internet and computer technologies have a positive impact on human lives.⁸ The book that put Carr on the map, though, was a book specifically about reading and the internet titled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.⁹ In this book, Carr’s argument is basically that the distractive hyperlinking affordances of internet reading interfaces is rewiring the human brain to think more shallowly. Carr’s attention to the neuroplasticity of the human brain even in adults and the impact of interface use on the shaping of brain pathways provides an excellent example of the material entanglement that operates in interface. Human brains designed internet reading platforms and these interfaces are now participating in the design of the human brain. Yet, rather than simply pointing to the differences emerging in neural pathways that seem connected to reading on the internet, Carr laments the waning of the codex interface and identifies these new dispositions and brain wirings as “shallow.”¹⁰

Carr actually begins his entire analysis with a look back to McLuhan’s most famous book, Understanding Media, and his most well know aphorism, “the medium is the message.”¹¹ Although he clearly respects the prescience and value of McLuhan’s work, even using McLuhan’s own language as the subtitle for his prologue, Carr immediately betrays an underlying fear of change and nostalgic anxiety as he emphasizes McLuhan’s polemic against the neutralists without any attention given to McLuhan’s celebration of art and social reorganization in the retribalization made possible by the collapse of time and space brought on by electric technology.¹² While Carr gives no attention to this part of McLuhan’s discussion of electric technology, I can’t help but hear echoes of McLuhan’s global village when I read Clay Shirky’s assessment of the internet age in Cognitive Surplus, which offers a stark and compelling counterpoint to Carr’s pessimism.¹³ Carr leverages McLuhan’s clever and incisive claims about the power of technology in shaping human culture, but all the while operates with a sense that the dangers of digital technology are inevitably fatal. Though McLuhan is exceedingly clear on the risks of technological change and advancement, the tone of Understanding Media strikes me as loaded with potential and possibility, whereas even Carr’s title spells doom.

The anxiety that drives Carr’s argument in The Shallows stems from a loss of the distance provided by the print codex interface. Internet technologies afford increasing nearness with an always expanding set of possible things to engage, such that users can no longer focus in a sustained manner on a singular, linear text. On the contrary, a codex affords a more singular nearness in interface, with covers to mark what is in and what is out typically with some measure of linear progression from beginning to end. In Carr’s imagination, the codex provides a focused and contained nearness that creates a distance from all other things, which in turns facilitates a deep thinking that is more valuable than the shallowness afforded by the internet. Long durations of time and the concept of depth are also forms of distance and Carr finds these affordances of distance in the codex interface. For Carr, the growing ubiquity of internet reading interfaces afford a nearness of multiple foci, shorter durations, and lack of depth that have a decidedly negative impact on human learning and knowledge.¹⁴

Nothing New

In his long historical run up to the current media situation of the internet, Carr reminds readers that the anxiety around changes in technology and its impact on the human brain are not at all new. In the 4th century before the common era, as the technology of an alphabet began to take root, writing emerged as a new technology for communication and learning. Following the lead of Walter Ong’s analysis of Plato is his work Orality and Literacy, Carr points to what seems to be a negative view of writing in Phaedrus and more positive views on literacy in The Republic.¹⁵ Ong and Carr reference the well trodden passage from Phaedrus that communicates a worry about the impact of writing on memory, since writing affords easy reference to a content set outside the memory of an individual.¹⁶ Undoubtedly, these reflections on an entirely different time period of major technological transition provide a helpful reminder that these anxieties about emerging technologies are not a new phenomenon. Further reflections on this anxious passage from Phaedrus in conversation with other mentions of writing in the Platonic corpus point less to a concern about the difference between internal and external memory technologies and more toward a worry about the impact of writing on dynamic dialog. Lane Wilkinson’s analysis of the views on writing in Phaedrus¹⁷ points toward a passage shortly following the anxious bit about memory, where Socrates says to Phaedrus,

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.¹⁸

One way to frame this concern is as an anxiety about the increasing nearness or availability of a written text to a user and the corresponding distancing of the speaker or author. If, as Wilkinson suggests, the primary value operative for Plato is dialog, then writing provided an interface in antiquity that afforded a new kind of nearness to words and ideas that threatened the participation in dialog. Susan Dobra points to a short passage in the “Seventh Letter” that highlights this again, where Plato says, “that is why no intelligent man will ever dare to commit his thoughts to words, still less to words that cannot be changed, as is the case with what is expressed in written characters.”¹⁹ As both Wilkinson and Dobra highlight so nicely, it is the fixicity of written text that affords an irresponsible nearness for the reader in exchange for the dynamics of dialog. This concern about the impact of increasing nearness provided by new technologies, particularly the effects it might have on the ambiguity and dynamics of dialog sound similar to Drucker’s questioning of the mechanistic determinism of contemporary interface theories operative in the software world. In a sense, both Plato and Drucker are advocating for a nearness of the subject over the nearness of content.

Dealing with Distance

In a much nearer time period, Martin Heidegger delivered a set of lectures just after the second world war addressing the changes in nearness and distance brought about by the rise of mechanical technologies.²⁰ These lectures, know as the Bremen lectures, occurred in Bremen in 1949 as Heidegger’s first public address after the war ended. He begins the lecture series with a clear statement of the issue he is confronting, saying, “All distances in time and space are shrinking.”²¹ The rest of the lecture series explores the changing relationship between distance and nearness with the rise of modern technologies such as airplanes, radio, film, and television.²² Heidegger frames his concern in terms of distance not nearness, because he will redefine nearness as something exceeding the spatial and relational closeness we have been exploring thus far. Distance, for Heidegger remains spatial or relational, while nearness comes to signify an intimate encounter related to truth, which experiences the “actuality” of a thing, and technology does not offer this even as it collapses the distance of space and time.²³ In a subtle twist of the more well known title of the expanded version of lecture two, “The Question Concerning Technology,” the concern in these questions about technology is what happens to the possibility of nearness as difference when technologies afford a kind of distancelessness?²⁴ Heidegger will go on to articulate the essence of technology as the process that renders all being, humans and nature included, as distanceless without nearness.²⁵ He begins the second lecture saying, “All mastery of distances brings no nearness at all.”²⁶ Though the language is a bit different, the distancelessness that has Heidegger bothered is a historically located version of the anxiety we saw about the affordance of nearness in Plato, Turkle, and Carr.

Also interested in the impact of these changes in scale of nearness and distance brought on by technologies, another thinker, Roger Silverstone, more recently has taken up this question about distance in relation to internet technologies and cyberspace. Advocating for what he calls “proper distance” as a framework for the possibility of ethics in internet communication technologies, Silverstone argues for the necessity to resist the tendency toward the distancelessness and overnearness possible in emerging technologies as highlighted by Heidegger’s anxieties we have just seen.²⁷ Silverstone offers two important directives in our consideration of nearness and distance in interface. First, challenging the common exhuberance about the possibilities for connection and communication provided by the internet as a kind of nearness, Silverstone champions the value of distance as irreducible difference or even the insistent interruption of connection afforded by internet communication technologies.²⁸ Second, Silverstone signals the usefulness of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of proximity as a way to consider the difficult tension of contact and separation necessary to afford ethical human relationship in electronically mediated spaces.²⁹ Taking Silverstone’s lead in his helpful corrective to the focus simply on nearness in emerging technologies, I too find Levinasian proximity a valuable framework for exploring even human-machine interface as a constant negotiation of nearness and distance in what can be imagined as contact without grasp.

Proximity: Contact Without Grasp

This philosophical notion of subjectivity in Levinas, proximity, can operate explicitly as an affordance offered in interface beyond the human-human ethical encounter. Rather than asking whether emerging technologies are ethical or whether ethical human relationship is possible in our present technological landscape,³⁰ I will use the operations of proximity in Levinasian philosophy as a model for exploring the nearness and distance afforded by bible in its many lives as interface. Levinas himself speaks and writes very little about technology explicitly,³¹ but his negotiations of nearness and distance in human relationship through his idea of proximity have a great deal to offer our discussions of interface.

Proximity as a different approach to human relationship than ontology or being blossoms in the last of Levinas’s large phiosophical works, Otherwise Than Being (OTB).³² Proximity emerges in OTB as an approach that increases the nearness of responsibility and at the same time increases the distance from mastery. Immediately, we can see here that proximity is not a synonym for nearness and that nearness is no longer simply the opposite of distance. Proximity becomes a problematization of the distance/nearness spatial binary, where both nearness and distance are redefined and enhanced in a process of “approach” that demands responsibility and resists mastery. Levinas writes, “for proximity is not a simply asymptotic approach of its ‘term.’ Its term is not an end. The more I answer the more I am responsible; the more I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged the further away I am.”³³

In this resistance to the asymptote as a metaphor for proximity, Levinas indicates concepts of nearness and distance that are not derived simply from spatial contiguity or its lack. First and foremost, proximity is near as sociality, a “relationship with,” not simply a physical closeness in space and time.³⁴ This “relationship with” is the core of interface as we have defined it in chapter one with the help of Johnna Drucker, so we can already imagine proximity as a kind of interface. The nearness of this proximity, which can not be reduced to physical or cognitive closeness,³⁵ is conceptualized with many other terms by Levinas, such as approach, contact, and responsibility. All of these terms connote a kind of engagement that is a process of being approached by a neighbor or a stranger that demands a response (response-ability) more than an intentionally willed choice to approach another and engage. This nearness in proximity demands participation before there is a choice. In a simple sense, the nearness of proximity describes as a process (approach) of encounter (contact) that demands participation (responsibility).

Typically, the kind of nearness just discussed, a nearness of approach, would involve a demand for an intimate knowledge of the other person to make the “relationship with” of proximity compelling. Yet, Levinas is exploring a nearness that is not dependent on such a knowledge, where approach as response precedes knowing. Here is where distance plays a role in proximity. There are two distances at work in the discussion of proximity in Otherwise than Being. The first distance is the distance of sight or knowledge or what Levinas phrases as the incomplete objective genitive construction, “consciousness of… .”³⁶ This distance is simply the distance required for a subject to comprehend an object or for the eye to see an object. The nearness of proximity squeezes this distance by enacting a contact that precedes comprehension, an encounter that is blurry. While proximity in a Levinasian sense resists this distance of comprehension through a nearness of sociality not reducible to understanding, another kind of distance emerges.³⁷ This second distance is another way of articulating the difference always at work in this encounter that is proximity.

Levinas calls this distance “a diachrony without a common present,” which suggests that even the nearness at work in proximity does not actually bring the two terms of this relationship or encounter or interface “together” in any reciprocal way in a shared appearance.³⁸ This distance as diachrony or difference is not somehow an interruption of an original synchrony or sameness, to which a system is hoping to return. Rather, this distance as the ever expanding and insatiable demand by the other consistently troubles any attempts to master the needs of the other. Levinas writes, “The subject is the more responsible the more it answers for, as though the distance between it and the other increased in the measure that proximity was increased.”³⁹ This sounds a great deal like Levinas’s reflections on the asymptote metaphor we saw above, where he writes, “The more I answer the more I am responsible; the more I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged the further away I am.”⁴⁰ Here, the “further away” that indicates distance refers to the inexhaustibility of the responsibility operative in proximity. At no point, can one draw near enough through the approach of responsibility to master the needs of the other. Instead, as the nearness of proximity increases through response to the demand of the other as encounter, so does the inability to fulfill this demand and thus distance also increases. In short, this distance in proximity is resistance to mastery of the other by either exhausting the demand or returning to a originary synchrony of shared appearance. Proximate distance has no end or beginning, it is anarchic.

In this Levinasian reconstitution of human subjectivity, proximity is an expansion of both nearness and distance. Nearness is an involvement with the other that is characterized by a distance that resists mastery of the other. As the nearness of response-ability increases, so does the distance of one term’s ability to contain or define the other term in a deterministic and mechanistic manner.The interplay of this nearness and distance involved in the relationship that is proximity enacts both the proximity of contact and the ever ap-proximate response to the demand of the other, because it can never be mastered. This constant entanglement of nearness and distance brings together two other important terms used by Levinas in his explorations of OTB, disinterested non-indifference, which I have used as a synonym for proximity. Disinterested describes the difference of distance in dis-inter-esse, interrupting the need for a shared horizon of essence or sameness in order to participate in the relationship of proximity. Non-indifference communicates the engagement or nearness at work in the response-ability in the face of the demand of the other. So, disinterested non-indifference can be translated as distance nearness, both of which are attempts at articulating the operation of proximity as something otherwise than simple spatial contiguity.⁴¹

Interfacing Proximity

Can this notion of proximity in human-human interface articulated by Levinas be applied to human-machine interfaces in the context of use of bible? I think it can and Levinas offers at least two hints in this direction. First, as Sean Hand highlights so wonderfully in his analysis of Levinas’s evolving relationship with art, Levinas saw in Paul Celan’s poetry “a language of and for proximity.”⁴² Hand writes, “Levinas’s appreciation of Celan, in contrast [with Heidegger on Hölderlin], emphasizes the poverty, inadequacy and non-radiance of a language, a language that therefore signifies proximity rather than mastery, and a being for the other rather than a world in being.”⁴³ Without delving into all of the details of a Levinasian philosophy of art or the ways in which poetry operates in language, we can see here in Hand’s comment and in Levinas’s own reflections on poetry that the nearness and distance of proximity are possible in poetry. Thus, if poetry can be a language of and for proximity, then interface has the potential to operate as a space of and for proximity.⁴⁴

More specifically related to our questions of bible as a proximate interface, Levinas describes his own relationship with bible as book using language that sounds a great deal like his discussions of proximity. In a set of interviews conducted in 197? on French radio with Philippe Nemo, transcribed in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas describes his relationship with bible in language that sounds a great deal like the operations of proximity. It was these very interviews that first stimulated my interest in the possibility of bible as a proximate interface. In the early discussions of the first interview, which is titled “Bible and Philosophy,” Levinas describes his view of bible as the book of books, saying, “It is that extraordinary presence of its characters, that ethical plenitude and its mysterious possibilities of exegesis which originally signified transcendence for me. And no less.”⁴⁵ The “extraordinary presence” and “ethical plenitude” Levinas attributes to the bible can be read as synonyms for the nearness and distance of proximity, respectively.

The extraordinary presence of the biblical characters is not a celebration of the great cloud of witnesses in the biblical stories. Rather, these characters are the very letters of the text before they are assembled into words and phrases. These characters are present in ways that are beyond the ordinary, irreducible to the semiotic performance of their combinatorial effects.⁴⁶ The bible demands a response from its users, a participation that opens to “mysterious possibilities of exegesis.” This nearness of bible suppresses the distance of reading as simple consumption or cognition and begs for an interface of book and user that exceeds comprehension. Ethical plenitude refers not to an abundantly recurring theme of ethics in the content of the biblical writings, but to the inexhaustible resistance to mastery enacted in encounter with this book. As we saw in the distance of proximity, even as a user approaches in response, bible can never be contained and thus will always overflow any possible fixed and stable readings, demanding ever more response.

Proximity emerges for Levinas as a reflection on human subjectivity and a particular and proximate interface of two humans. Through his reflections on poetry as language and bible as book, we see the operations of proximity at work in a different kind of interface, that between reader and text. Without any attempt or desire to suggest an equivalence between the mechanisms or gravity of human-human interface and user-bible interface, this proximity which entangles nearness and distance can give us a way to think about bible as interface in light of the anxieties around technological change we see throughout history.

Affording Proximity

If the nearness in proximity is a kind of participatory encounter that demands a response and the distance of proximity inexhaustibly resists mastery of the system, what would it look like for an interface to afford the nearness and distance of proximity? As I said above, looking for affordances of proximity in interface may not enact all of the complex nuances of nearness and distance at work in the encounter with the other as articulated by Levinas. Yet, these ap-proximations of nearness and distance at work in the interfaces which are bible can condition users toward a disposition of proximity in human-human interface, just as bible first signaled transcendence for Levinas.⁴⁷

Interfaces that afford proximity exhibit high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies. The combination of these characteristics in interface enacts both the response-ability of nearness and the resistance to mastery of distance in proximity. As we begin to consider the characteristics of interface, it is important to remember that both interface and affordance are relational concepts that exceed the material properties of the platform and user involved. So, for example, suggesting that twitter affords proximity because of its incredibly high surface area of 500 million tweets per day⁴⁸ is less useful than finding proximity in the use of twitter to collaboratively share the location of family members and critically needed relief supplies during Hurricane Sandy on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the Fall of 2012. The platform of Twitter itself is not proximate, but Twitter can afford proximity in particular user interfaces.

Interfaces with high surface area have many possible points of contact between user and platform. The illustration I often use for high surface area is grinding coffee beans. The finer a coffee beans is ground, the more surface area that gets created for the water to contact and thus the water can draw more flavor from the bean. The expansive points of contact in high surface area interfaces afford the nearness of user interaction and participation as well as the distance of resisting mastery by making it impossible to touch all of the possible contact points. For example, watching a full length feature film straight through on Youtube is a fairly low surface area interface, since the user engages a continuous linear narrative that is taken in as a whole. On the other hand, searching YouTube for clips related to a recent election scandal can offer a high surface area interface through the many ways into the event offered by the search results.

The collaborative capacities of interfaces offer mechanisms for participation and contact in the process of constructing the space that is interface. Kindle reader on the iphone for example, affords several opportunities for the reader to participate in constructing the interface, such as choosing a font size or a background color for the page. Additionally, Kindle reader allows users to annotate and highlight as they use a book, which can create an entirely new navigation scheme through the material. We find a similar collaborative affordance in the marginalia so popular in medieval manuscripts. These Kindle annotations highlight another aspect of the collaborative capacities of interfaces, the communal process of use. Kindle reader allows users to share their annotations with others and users can enable a feature that will show popular highlights while reading through the book. This popular highlights feature is similar to checking out a book form the library and seeing the markings and highlights left by previous users. The Kindle reader example demonstrates the two layers of nearness operative in the collaborative capacities of proximate interfaces. First, there is a nearness of participation in constructing the material aspects of the interface and second, there is a nearness of community, using and making together not entirely on a user’s own terms.⁴⁹

The third characteristic of proximate interfaces that we will look for is a tendency toward anarchy. Levinas himself, speaks of proximity as anarchic, saying, “Proximity is thus anarchical, a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality.”⁵⁰ It is the anarchy of proximity that first drew me to Levinas and it is the anarchy of proximity that offers bible an afterlife in our emerging media age with its proliferation of interfaces. Anarchy in the sense I use it here is something beyond disorder as another order and something significantly more complicated than the simple absence of a beginning or origin. Exploiting the koine semantic range of αρχη, which can mean beginning and reign, I hear the anarchic as that which is without the reign of an original.⁵¹ Just as the distance at work in proximity resists any mastery of the other, anarchy in interface resists the closure or consolidation of use to any mechanistic determinism governed by original author, original version, or final form. Enacting the distance of proximity, anarchy in interface constantly exceeds attempts by users to grasp and order the whole in a stable manner. The Talmudic page provides a beautiful example of anarchy in interface, even in the medium of print. The structure of the Talmudic page is very consistent, with Mishnah and Gemara down the center column and additional commentary around the page from there. Yet, the design of the page does not promote a reconstruction of any original meaning of the biblical text, the mishnah, or its commentary nor does it promote the reign of a single author or principle. Rather, the Talmudic page anarchically invites users to participate in the ongoing process of exploration and conversation.⁵² Articulating this anarchic sensibility of the Talmud, Jacob Neusner writes, “Every Talmudic tractate–there are thirty-seven of them in the Babylonian Talmud–begins on page 2; there are no page 1s because there is no beginning. Wherever you start your study, you will feel you have joined a conversation which began long before you came along.”⁵³ Of course, every tractate does have a beginning, even if on page 2, and every user does start somewhere. The anarchy of the Talmudic page need not eradicate beginnings, or endings, in order to provide some proximate distance to resist the reign of these originary impulses. In interface, a tendency toward anarchy resists mastery and thus provides the distance of proximity.

With these three characteristics of proximate interface in mind, surface area, collaboration, and anarchy, we can now move toward looking at the affordances of this proximity in bible as interface throughout its many manifestations in media history. I will first trace the possibilities of proximity in bible as book through an ancient bible manuscript, a critical print edition of bible, and a kindle bible. Once we have seen the operations of nearness and distance in bible as book, I will explore the possible translations of proximity into bible as interface beyond book through manuscript digitization, XML encoding, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Amidst the common fears and anxieties emerging as new technologies threaten the dominance of the codex as our reading interface, attending to the affordance of proximity in bible as interface can help use of bible flourish beyond the book.

For the full context of this conversation and quote from Yencich, see “Codex All the Way Down” at http://aproximatebible.postach.io/post/codex-all-the-way-down.↩
Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2015). For some samples of the attention this book has garnered, see https://storify.com/textpotential/turkle-face-to-face.↩
Richard A Cohen, “Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections,” Ethics and Information Technology 2, no. 1 (June 1, 2000): 27–35.↩
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014).↩
Cohen, “Ethics and Cybernetics,” 27 n. 2.↩
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2013). Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation.↩
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/26/443480452/making-the-case-for-face-to-face-in-an-era-of-digital-conversation↩
Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage - Automation and Us (New York: WW NORTON & CO, 2015) and Utopia is Creepy: And Other Provocations (New York: W W NORTON & CO, 2017).↩
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2010).↩
Carr, The Shallows, Kindle Locations 1984-1986, writes, “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.↩
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 7.↩
McLuhan’s idea of the “global village,” made popular in his earlier book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) encapsulates the retribalization process I mention here.↩
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age* (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).↩
Carr, The Shallows, Kindle locations 2812-2814, writes, “What that ancient Roman craftsman wove together when he created the first codex is unstitched. The quiet that was ‘part of the meaning’ of the codex is sacrificed as well. Surrounding every page or snippet of text on Google Book Search is a welter of links, tools, tabs, and ads, each eagerly angling for a share of the reader’s fragmented attention.”↩
Carr, The Shallows, Kindle location 953-1016.↩
Phaedrus 275b; Ong, Orality and Literacy, 78-81.↩
https://senseandreference.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/reading-writing-and-what-plato-really-thought/ .↩
Phaedrus 275d-e↩
Seventh Letter 343; http://www.csuchico.edu/phil/sdobra_mat/platopaper.html.↩
The more well know essay by Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (QCT) is a revised version of the second lecture of this four part lecture series Heidegger gave in Bremen in 1949. Mark Blitz, “Understanding Heidegger on Technology,” The New Atlantis, Winter 2014, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/understanding-heidegger-on-technology, provides a useful exploration of the relationship of QCT to the Bremen lectures and to the larger themes in Heidegger’s work.↩
Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3.↩
Heidegger, Bremen Lectures, 3↩
Heiegger, Bremen Lectures, 19, writes, “When we think the thing as thing, then we protect the essence of the thing in the region from where it essences. Thinging is the nearning of world. Nearing is the essence of nearness. Insofar as we protect the thing as thing, we dwell in nearness. The nearing of nearness is the authentic and sole dimension of the mirror-play of the world.”↩
Heidegger, Bremen Lectures, 4.↩
For a more exhaustive study of Heidegger’s thinking and writing on technology, Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), offers a thorough contextualization and critique of Heidegger’s views.↩
Heidegger, Bremen Lectures, 23.↩
Roger Silverstone, “Proper Distance: Toward an Ethics for Cyberspace,” in Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains, ed. Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 469–90.↩
Silverstone, “Proper Distance,” 470, 483.↩
Silverstone, “Proper Distance,” 474-75.↩
See Lucas Introna, “Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/, for an introduction to these kinds of questions.↩
As Richard Cohen, Ethics and Cybernetics, 28, notes, the most pivotal chapter of Levinas’s Otherwise than Being, which is titled “Substitution,” offers a fitting mention of proximity in relationship to terminology we often find in discussions of technology, such as “circulation of information” and “resolved into ‘images.’ After introducing the shortcomings associated with placing consciousness qua knowledge at the foundation of humanness, Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 101, articulates an alternative, saying, “In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking in language contact and sensibility, behind the circulation of information it becomes, we have endeavored to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into ”images” or be exposed in a theme. It is the relationship with what is not disproportionate to the arche in thematization, but incommensurable with it, with what does not derive its identity from the kerygmatic logos, and blocks all schematism.”↩
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 16-17, writes, “Everywhere proximity is conceived ontologically, that is, as a limit or complement to the accomplishment of the adventure of essence, which consists in persisting in essence and unfolding immanence, in remaining in an ego, in identity. Proximity remains a distance diminished, an exteriority conjured. The present study sets out to not conceive proximity in function of being.”↩
Levinas, OTB, 94.↩
Levinas, OTB, 17, writes, “It figures as what is near in a proximity that counts as sociality, which ‘excites’ by its pure and simple proximity.”↩
Levinas, OTB, 48, writes, “An analysis that starts with proximity, irreducible to consciousness of…, and describable, if possible, as an inversion of its intentionality, will recognize this responsibility to be a substitution.”↩
Levinas, OTB, 90.↩
Levinas, OTB, 90, writes, “Proximity, suppression of the distance that consciousness of… involves, opens the distance of a diachrony without a common present, where difference is the past that cannot be caught up with, an unimaginable future, the non-representable status of the neighbor behind which I am late and obsessed by the neighbor. This difference is my non-indifference to the other. Proximity is a disturbance of the rememberable time.”↩
Levinas, OTB, 90.↩
OTB, 139-40. I would argue that Levinas unhelpfully uses proximity as a synonym for nearness in this passage, since proximity is the dual operation of increasing distance and nearness.↩
Levinas, OTB, 94.↩
Levinas, OTB, 139-141.↩
Levinas, “Being and the Other: On Paul Celan,” 17, writes, “A language of and for proximity–more ancient than that of the ‘truth of Being’ (which it probably bears and supports), the first of languages–response preceding question, responsibility to the neighbor–, making possible through its ‘for the other’ the whole miracle of giving.”↩
Hand, Emmanuel Levinas, 77.↩
Levinas, OTB, 192 n. 10, makes another explicit claim for the relationship between poetry and proximity in his discussion of obsession, writing, “But is not the poetry of the world prior to the truth of things, and inseparable from what is proximity par excellence, that of a neighbor, or of the proximity of the neighbor par excellence.”↩
Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 23.↩
In his reflections on revelation in the Jewish tradition, Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 132, suggests, “It is by going back to the Hebrew text from the translations, vulnerable as they may be, that the strange or mysterious ambiguity or polysemy authorized by the Hebrew syntax is revealed: words coexist rather than immediately being co-ordinated or subordinated with and to one another, contrary to what is predominant in the languages that are said to be developed or functional. This coexistence of words before and irreducible to their coordination is the extraordinary presence of the characters of the bible.↩
See above, Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 23.↩
See http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/ for a running counter of tweets sent each day.↩
Wikipedia offers another good example of collaborative capacities, where a user can participate in crafting an entry with a team of people from around the globe without any previous “knowledge” or who these partners are. Now, Wikipedia does not necessarily demand participation in the same way that the encounter with the other does in Levinasian subjectivity, because a user can simply take in the content of the page. Yet, again, the possibility of collaboration both in building the entry with strangers and sharing bits of it with others, as an affordance, has the potential to shape a disposition toward response-ability in human-human interface.↩
Levinas, OTB, 101.↩
Despite the semantic negation built into the word an-archy, I am uninterested in arguing for the absence of original. In my early attempts to articulate this anarchy in the realm of translation studies through a talk titled “From Murder to Anarchy” at the Nida School of Translation Studies 2014, I fear I had fallen into the trap of archaizing the anarchic by arguing for the eradication of the notion of original in the process of translation. The conversations with translators who have spent their lives caring for and working with both biblical and literary texts taught me that we needn’t eschew the presence, value, and operation of an original or source text in the process of translation in order to question said original’s governance over the validity or even methodology of a translation. We can always construct an original given a particular data set and time frame. Instead of eradicating any notion of original, I am asking us to consider a kind of reading, a mode of making, that operates without the reign of an original. In this vein, anarchy becomes one mechanism for the probabilistic production offered by interfaces that we discussed in chapter 1.↩
Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 5, points toward this anarchic sensibility of the Talmudic page, writing, “The pages of the Talmud, mischevious, laconic in their ironic or dry formulations, but in love with the possible, register an oral tradition and a teaching which came to be written down accidentally. It is important to bring them back to their life of dialog or polemic in which multiple, though not arbitrary, meanings arise and buzz in each saying. These Talmudic pages seek contradiction and expect of a reader freedom, invention and boldness.”↩
Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud: A Teaching Book, 170. Joel Luri Grishaver, Talmud with Training Wheels, 13, points out that though Nuesner touches on a truth of Talmudic interface, tractates begin on page 2 also because page 1 was reserved materially for the title page.↩

neuroplasticity, proximity, and neutrality

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 16:27:28 +0000

The greatest contribution of Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows comes from his use of neuroscience to contest any neutralist argument that technologies are neutral tools that only attain value, good or bad, when and how they are used by human agents. Following in the trajectory of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Carr’s discussion of human neuroplasticity and the role communication technologies can play in this plasticity offers a strong critique of the neutralist position.

Lest we imagine the neutralist position as a naive and uncritical approach, I’ll briefly draw our attention to Richard Cohen’s affirmation of the ethical neutrality of cybernetics in his article, “Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections.” Demonstrating the complexity of the issue, Cohen begins with two opposing evaluations of the ethical possibilities of internet communication technologies, Turkle’s poststructuralist championing of cybernetic’s potential to destabilize and emphasize difference and Introna’s condemnation of these same technologies for irremediably mediating his idea of Levinasian face-to-face ethical encounter.¹ Cohen actually accuses both Turkle and Introna of giving too much power to information technology and its role in shaping the human person.² Leveraging the Levinasian concept of proximity, which imagines human encounter as irreducible to the data transfer we often call knowledge or consciousness, Cohen argues that internet communication technologies are neutral with respect to the human person because they simply facilitate information processing, not human sensibility.³ Computers simply can not participate in human proximity, which for Levinas and Cohen constitutes ethics, good and bad, and the human person. Thus, cybernetics remain neutral until taken up by human agents in the process of proximity.

I appreciate Cohen’s attention to the dangers and possibility of internet communication technologies and their relationship to difference and the human person. That thoughtful scholars like Turkle and Introna can reach such different conclusions when critically exploring the same cultural phenomenon, cybernetics, suggests a complexity that deserves analysis. Much like the data processed through the cybernetic infrastructure of the net, the information processed through our neural pathways does not define the human person in its entirety, particularly in the ethical encounter. Yet, internet technologies have at least two effects on proximity as Cohen and Levinas imagine it. Carr convincingly shows that technology can and does shape the trajectories of human neuroplasticity in significant ways. Even if I agree that human selfhood is infinitely irreducible to cognition or consciousness, this does not necessitate the extreme eradication of cognition or knowledge or information processing from having a role in constructing the sensibility and proximity that constitute human encounter. So, in one sense, Cohen’s warning to Turkle and Introna can be seen as one of degree, not kind. One need not take a neutralist stance toward technology to challenge the degree to which some scholars and philosophers allow technologies to determine the human person. Holding Carr and Cohen together, it seems entirely possible, even likely, that the wires of the internet and the wires of the brain both shape and are shaped by the sensibility of human proximity.

Cohen also highlights a decentering of spatiotemporal proximity. Here again, ideas of entanglement can help. Quantum entanglement asks us to reimagine proximity much like Levinas does. For Levinas, proximity, even the face of the other is not primarily characterized by the phenomenology of perceptual encounter, though it is that in part. Proximity denotes an intersubjective relation that resists the consumptive and homogenizing tendencies of perception and categorical knowledge. Thus, two people in relationship without one subsuming or absorbing the other. In this case, proximity need not be limited to nearness in time or space, but a nearness of relationship with an irreducible distance/difference, thus always proximate and always distinct.

Just as Levinasian proximity deemphasizes spatiotemporal nearness and highlights difference in the meaningful relationship between two people, so quantum entanglement demonstrates that spatiotemporal nearness is not a necessary condition for meaningful and ongoing relationship between particles. Once two quantum systems interact, even after separated at large distances, these systems can exhibit ongoing influence on the properties and behavior of one another.⁴ Much like McLuhan imagined nearly 50 years ago, internet communication technologies too have collapsed time and space in some ways as constraints on human encounter, with just the same tension between nearness and difference entangled in Levinas’s idea of proximity. If technology shapes the way humans imagine and construct space and time, how does this not have a significant impact on human sensibility? Here, I agree with Carr’s critique of the neutralists. Technologies are far from neutral, participating in the shaping of the plasticity of our brains and the entanglement of human proximity.

Next post, I’ll take a brief look at Carr’s helpful use of maps and clocks as examples of technologies that impact the way we imagine the world in significant ways.

Richard A. Cohen, “Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections,” Ethics and Information Technology 2 (2000): 27. ↩
Cohen, “Ethics and Cybernetics,” 28. ↩
Cohen, “Ethics and Cybernetics,” 35. ↩
See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Quantum Entanglement and Information,” where Schrödinger is quoted saying, “When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled.” ↩

chapter 1 - interface

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:00:24 +0000

face to face

Why would I suggest that bible or book could be thought of as an interface? Often, we associate interface with digital technologies. Human Computer Interface (HCI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) have become major area of study and discourse in the world of software design. Yet, the word ‘face’ has come to signify human interaction unmediated by digital technologies in the common phrase ‘face to face.’ There is a great deal of discussion these days about the different values of online/virtual/digital interaction and the so-called ‘face to face.’ For example, Sherry Turkle has become a prominent public voice in discussions of technology and its social effect, as evidenced in the impressive attention captured by her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. I first encountered Turkle’s work while engaging a Richard Cohen article, ’Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections,’ in my struggle with the face to face language in online education. Using her work from 1995, Life on the Screen, Cohen offers Turkle as an example of media scholars who champion the advantages of cybernetics and internet communication technologies for redefining subjectivities in the direction of post-modern notions of multiplicity and instability (Cohen, ‘Ethics and Cybernetics,’ 27, n. 2).

Turkle’s more recent work (e.g. Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation) has shifted focus from this earlier celebration of the fragmented self to a serious anxiety about the effects of robotics and mobile devices on our social capacities as humans. Two minutes into a 2015 NPR interview titled ’Making the Case For Face to Face in an Era of Digital Conversation,’ Turkle suggests that ‘face to face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do, it’s where we learn to put ourselves in the place of the other.’ For many, this phrase, ‘face to face,’ as Turkle uses it has come to represent ‘real’ human interaction as opposed to a weak simulation or even cheap imitation that happens through internet media.

Part of why the language of interface compels me is because it can unsettle this binary between digital interfaces and this ‘face to face’ advocated by Turkle. Conversation over the coffee table and exchanges on Twitter can both be understood as interface and both are mediated by technologies if we understand language as a technology. So, this term, ‘interface,’ pushes beyond any digital/analog or virtual/real dichotomies and demands that we think about interface design in whatever media we find ourselves using. In a way, we could imagine ‘interface,’ the intersection of faces, as a useful translation of the phrase ‘face to face.’

If we look at the basic uses of ‘interface’ in the English language, we can see the strong indication of interaction and connection as well as the prevalent use in the computing arena.

(Google Search, ’interface definition’)

Here in these definitions, we can see that the ‘face to face’ championed by Turkle and others can easily fit into the notion of interface as ‘a point where two subjects meet or interact.’ When I take up the language of interface, I am not limiting our conversation to digital technologies that afford human interaction with machines. I hope to explore interface as a broader category for spaces of encounter that include many forms of media and mediation.

zone of encounter

Johanna Drucker offers an approach to interface that fits well with this idea of spaces of encounter. In her essay, ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory,’ Drucker helpfully intertwines digital media studies explorations of interface design with humanities questions of subjectivity. In an exemplary fashion, Drucker demonstrates a reflexive practice by stating her desire to explore the theory undergirding her own scholarly working environments at the cusp of a transition from print to other dominant media/interfaces.

(Drucker, ’Interface Theory’, 2)

Drucker shows her awareness of the shifts at work in the emerging digital media age and asks us as humanists to become a part of the process of constructing a theory to support the design of our reading and writing spaces as a counter balance to the often mechanistic principles at work in software design (Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 1-2). I see this project as contributing to these efforts and I am grateful for the challenge from Drucker and others. As she looks to GIS, social networking, and visualization for hints of new possibilities, we may even look back into print technologies (e.g. Talmudic page) for some suggestions toward interface design that might afford a bible textual apparatus that is ‘constellationary, distributed, and multi-faceted.’

Combining graphical reading analysis, frame analysis, and a constructivist model of subjectivity, Drucker gives us a view of interface as more of a theatre than a window (Drucker, ’Interface Theory’, 9).

(Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 9)

Instead of a thing, interface is a zone of encounter. So, if we turn toward books and reading more specifically, ’Interface is what we read and how we read combined through engagement’ (Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 9). This is a critical point in the relationship of bible and/as media. If an interface involves both what we read and how we read, the design of the book technologies we use when reading shapes the reading performance and meaning made as much as the content. Reading bible in a codex is a different zone of encounter than reading bible on an iPhone, thus, both the book and the reader are constituted differently in these two interfaces. This means that the transitions from scroll to codex and codex to internet are not simply new ways of reading the same content. Rather, bible and reader are both transformed in the new space of encounter made possible by these different interfaces.

Another way to state the importance of interface in the reading process is to suggest that the structures of a particular book technology ARE information, not merely a means of access to information. This is another way of bothering the dichotomy between form and content or medium and message. In this interface as zone of encounter, medium and message are so inextricably entangled that attempting to tease them apart is futile. Drucker highlights this well, saying,

(Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 10)

In this example, the ‘page’ (interesting that this structure of page persists into the internet ecosystem. Perhaps more evidence of the palimpsestuous nature of media translations) is not simply a window through which a user accesses data. Rather, the page is a part of the data and the data, in part, structures the page. So, with a codex, the space of the page is part of the data of the text, not simply a delivery mechanism. The shift from zone to space in Drucker’s language here, particularly a space that is something other than a space ‘between,’ surfaces a potential contact between interface and thirdspace in Edward Soja.

interface as thirdspace

Drucker is mostly focused on scholarly reading and writing practices and the role of the human subject in the construction of these spaces. If interface is a space of encounter, but something more than simply a space between, then we can imagine resonances between Drucker’s interface theory and Edward Soja’s notion of thirdspace. Interface as space can push beyond the intersection of two systems toward creating spaces that Foster emergence. As I mentioned earlier, the term ‘interface’ has the potential to challenge the binary struggle between both the virtual (digital) and real (face to face) and the what and the how of reading practice. One of the most important operations of thirdspace for Soja is to challenge any form of cultural inquiry that reduces to binaries, so Druker’s interface is already participating in a value of thirdspace. In fact, the subtitle of Soja’s Thirdspace holds together the terms of this virtual/real binary by exploring ‘real–and–imagined places.’

Soja builds off of Henri Lefebvre’s work in Production of Space to suggest an important role for spatiality in the process of cultural meaning making. Soja begins his introduction with a focus on participatory construction of space which sounds like the practice of interface in Drucker:

(Soja, Thirdspace, 1)

This idea that we are “intrinsically spatial beings” is one example of Drucker’s suggestion of a constructivist subjectivity. For both Soja and Drucker it is not simply that we together construct space but also that spaces construct us as we construct spaces. Soja’s mention of social consequences here makes me think of Marsh McLuhan’s famous adage that the medium is the message. Though often misunderstood as reductionist or absolutist, McLuhan is simply suggesting that the message of any medium is its social effect not the content it contains (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8). Both Soja and Drucker do us a favor to remind us that our materiality which can be called media or can be called spatiality has a significant impact on our sociality. This is precisely what I hear McLuhan saying in the medium is the message.

As we have seen, Drucker’s notion of interface already challenges binaries and encourages a more spatial and material and constructed notion of both media and the subject. So, why add thirdspace into the mix? What Soja’a thirdspace ads to our emerging theory of interface is his approach of ‘thirding as Othering,’ which practices an infinite preference for an alternative when faced with a binary choice (Soja, ’Afterword,’ 1421). This explicit and intentional methodology of surfacing multiplicity when faced with a binary may not guide interface design or theory like it does Soja’s cultural critique. Yet, what I hear in Lefebvre’s il y a toujour l’Autre and in Soja’s thirding-as-Othering is a disposition toward emergence of the chaotic kind, alternatives that challenge established categories and resist closed analysis without a need to eradicate these categories. Interface as thirdspace pushes the multiplicity Drucker encourages in her framing of interface toward a property of emergence in interface that will always overflow our analysis. Drucker says,

Drucker resists the strictly functional and mechanistic theories of interface design and asks humanists to imagine something more variable and responsive to the particularities of the people and the spaces involved in interface. Interface as thirdspace suggests that even these combinatorial particularities do not produce the total set of possibilities, ‘there is always an-Other.’

interface as translation

??? – with Piotr Blumczynski’s new book Ubiquitous Translation and the focus on the WHAT and HOW, I feel like I could link the WHAT and HOW of reading in Drucker to the WHAT and HOW of translation and suggest that interface is a kind of translational event. In a sense then, we have at least two kinds of translations going on with bible, a material media translation of book from print codex to mobile phone as well as the translational act that is interface.

book as interface

So, we have moved from the mechanistic idea of interface as a thing through which we view data, to a constructivist interface as a zone of encounter that constitutes a space and a subject, finally to a spatial interface as thirdspace with a disposition toward interruptive emergence. The important strand that follows this trajectory is the continued challenge to any compartmentalization of what and how we read. Just as interface is not simply a thing we look through, a book is not just a container for content. A book is an invitation to an encounter in the practice of reading and the materiality of this encounter has as much to tell us about meaning as the stories we read.

Near the end of her exhortation to humanities scholars to take seriously the task of building a theory of interface, Drucker reminds us that book has always been an interface.

(Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 18)

I quote Drucker here at length for two reasons. First, I have at times been prone to and accused of the charming ‘strict binarisms and technophilic exuberance’ Drucker cautions of here. Though I have found hyperbolic rhetoric useful at times to unsettle our unquestioned assumptions about media, I want to be exceedingly clear that, with Drucker, I am not interested in propagating some old/new hierarchical dichotomy between codex and emerging book technologies. This is why I began with material media translation as a palimpsest in my introduction. Each emerging book technology is a translation of what came before it, a writing over that never fully replicates and only partially erases.

Second, this passage from Drucker begins and ends with a reminder that book has always been an interface. As the materiality of this interface shifts, we will undoubtedly learn from previous forms as we explore the affordances of emerging technologies. The last full sentence of this passage captures nicely the importance of understanding book as interface. To paraphrase in alliterative fashion, Drucker suggests that a book is an interface that provokes probabilistic production through the reading event (Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 18). Let’s look closely at each of these p-words in reverse order, production, probabilistic, and provokes.

production

Drucker continues to pound home her constructivist approach to both subject and text by reiterating that a text or work is produced in the encounter facilitated by the book. This is another way of stating that book is not simply a window or a container through which we access and consume a text. Rather, book is a space (is it too reductionist to correlate space and ‘a structured environment’ in Drucker?) that begs an encounter between reader and the structured environment of the interface and more. Drucker’s foregrounding of reading as production rather than simple consumption of a text reminds me of the problematization of the production/consumption binary in Michel de Certeau’s work, The Practice of Everyday Life.

(Rendall translating de Certeau, Practice, xviii)

I am not explicitly taking up the power dynamics de Certeau so beautifully explores in this work. Yet, his consistent challenge of the production/consumption binary without erasing the role of the structures or the participation of the ‘consumer’ reinforces our approach here of book as interface that provokes production. De Certeau also helpfully reminds me that book as interface does not necessarily erase the operations of book as container. The container attributes of book remain as a part of the material structures that constitute the potential productive space of the interface.

De Certeau uses reading as one of his examples of “everyday practices that produce without capitalizing” (Rendall translating de Certeau, Practice, xx). He notes the often assumed writing-reading binary as a specific example of the production-consumption binary, but articulates a notion of reading that can not be reduced to this dichotomy. Reading is a “silent production” (xxi), “a play of spaces” (xxi), “an ‘art’ which is anything but passive” (xxii), and most poingnantly, reading “transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a mo-ment by a transient” (xxi). Reading as everyday practice is a poiesis, a making, within structured constraints that resists the production-consumption binary and thus offers a notion of reading as encounter that produces both the reader and the text.

probabilistic

In an essay titled ‘Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,’ Drucker expounds in much more detail her use of the term probabilistic as it relates to reading interfaces.

(Drucker, ‘Entity to Event,’ 8)

We can tell even in ‘Interface Theory,’ that probabilistic is an alternative to mechanistic for Drucker in her analysis of the shortcomings of interface design as driven by the software development world (Drucker, ‘Interface Theory,’ 10). Here, in this passage from ‘Entity to Event,’ with its strange alignment, we can see her ability to both show and tell the role of materiality in the reading event. This claim of event rather than entity is parallel to my suggestion that book as interface is an encounter not just a container. The basic distinction between the mechanistic and the probabilistic for Drucker is that the former attempts to present a user with an entity to consume, while the latter presents the reader with a set of possibilities that condition at reading event that will inevitably be new every time.

(Drucker, ‘Entity to Event,’ 14)

This points back, in a way, to the interruptive emergence we found in Soja’s notion of thirdspace and begs a further discussion about the role of complexity theory in Drucker’s concept of interface as event.

MORE ON COMPLEXITY, PROBABILITY, AND EMERGENCE.

Rather than simply presenting a user with an entity to consume, a probabilistic materiality of interface provokes production of both text and subject in the practice of reading. Let’s look more closely at the provocation of interface, which Drucker suggests is related to the cues and clues an interface offers for the performance of a text.

provoke

I love that Drucker celebrates the provocation of reading interfaces. A codex doesn’t simply lay passive on the shelf waiting to be opened and penetrated by the reader. The materiality of the book as interface participates in and even provokes a reading event. A page from a book in Amazon reader on my iPhone, which gives me as reader all kinds of power over the page, provokes a possibility set of reading tactics, even if not entirely determinative. Book as container just waits to be consumed, book as interface provokes encounter.

This provocation reminds us that interface is an active participant as structured environment in the production of meaning that is a reading event. One way to talk about the material dispositions of an interface is through affordances. Affordances are the set of real or perceived use possibilities offered by the material design of an interface in relationship to a particular user and context. The history of the term affordance is well established, beginning with James J. Gibson in the field of psychology and brought into the realm of HCI through Donald Norman’s book The Psychology of Everyday Things, which is charmingly known as POET.

See McGrenere and Ho, ’Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept,’ 1, for a brief history of the use of the term.

(Norman, POET, 9)

This is what Norman offers as a definition of affordance. As McGrenere and Ho demonstrate, there is a lot of debate and extension around this definition. For our purposes, the importance of affordance is that there are material properties of an interface that present a possibility set of uses to a reader. This is different than affordances ‘determining’ the reading event or even the total set of possibilities for use. Here, I prefer to reach back to Gibson’s use of affordance in that he defines affordance realtionally. MORE…

Affordances as a set of possibilities in a given field remind me of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Contrast the set of structures/possibilities in interface affordance to the structuring structures that present a subject with a possibility set in a field. Neither are determinative for practice, but they do shape the space significantly. MORE…

pathways

pathways project Thankfully, we already have some compelling and instructive examples of people trying to design book as interface in our emerging media age. John Miles Foley’s pathways project offers an amazing example of exploring book as interface that provokes probabilistic production in the reading process. The Pathways Project explores the analogies between oral tradition (oAgora) and the internet (eAgora) in their shared challenge to the operations of print media (tAgora). The Pathways Project is full of insights and limits, both of which can provide useful launching places for our experiments here with book as interface.
future of academic book In her essay, Drucker makes some hints toward what we might find in emerging scholarly interpretive reading interfaces. There is a movement afoot that is gently and gradually trying to take seriously this call to imagine the academic book as interface in our emerging media landscape. The Future of the Academic Book project began as a collaborative project…Though I have had a hard time seeing how the FOAB project has interrupted the established dispositions of print and codex to allow the possibilities of emerging technologies, the community of discourse that has fostered this movement has most definitely demonstrated a desire for and commitment to a constructivist and collaborative process. Their patience and respect for tradition could create the necessary space for translation of the deeply ingrained material sensibilities embedded in the culture of the academic book. I hope to incorporate the innovative spirit and the patient wisdom of both Drucker and the FOAB project as we push toward imagining bible as interface.

We now have a model of book as interface that provokes probabilistic production in the practice of reading and some examples of design in this direction. In the next chapter, I will advocate for one particular affordance in our design of bible as interface, anarchy.

introduction - translating book

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 14:11:11 +0000

Book is undergoing a major media transition as print wanes in its dominance and the internet and mobile devices transform our reading habits. With the ever entangled histories of bible and book, this emerging media age and its transformation of reading practices begs us to imagine bible as an anarchic interface, a space of contact where meaning is produced without the reign of an original.

Thinking of bible as an interface rather than simply as a container for content will allow us to explore the possibilities of emerging technologies to translate and transform enduring traditions of bible reading into the coming media age without succumbing to the temptations of typical media binaries of new and old, good and bad. As we consider the design of book interfaces that provoke probabilistic production in the practice of reading, I will advocate for attention to an affordance of anarchy that dethrones the governing role of a singular original without eradicating useful historical relations. Bible reading communities throughout history have provided some models for this anarchic interface and can provide important guidance and wisdom as we explore emerging media capacities for our relationship with books.

Building on Johanna Drucker’s work with interface theory and the Humanities, I will begin with a look at interface as a way of interrupting the container notion of book and suggesting a greater focus on relationality and reading practices in our discussion of media transitions and reading interface design. Then, based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will argue for an anarchic relationality that ought to shape our interface design toward creative encounter that resists emerging media dispositions toward consumption. With the possibility and value of anarchic interface established, I will then suggest ways to pursue bible as anarchic interface in our emerging media age. A look back at the performance of anarchic interface on the Talmudic page and in illuminated medieval manuscripts will inform our both the theory and design of our interfaces. Finally, I will beckon us forward by offering two experiments that highlight the challenges and possibilities of anarchic interface design and will offer some possibilities in light of the pervasive anxiety about human relationship and reading practices in today’s media environment.

Before we get started into our exploration of interface, why even bother with these questions of bible, book, and technology?

emergence of a medium

From the birth of the codex to the fall of the bible, medium has mattered in the life of bible both in its necessary entanglement with content and in its significant social effects. In The Birth of the Codex, Roberts and Skeat give us a careful look at the storied material history of the technology that has come to dominate our cultural idea of book, the codex. Nearly half of the pages of their own codex are devoted to the role of early Christian practices of scripture in the rise of the codex to prominence as a book technology, with this bold claim emerging from their analysis of the manuscript data (p. 42):

Acknowledging the difficulty of firmly establishing the ‘biblical’ category and signaling their sensitivity to the narrow provenance of manuscript evidence, all in Egypt, Roberts and Skeat still resoundingly suggest that bible as book begins exclusively as a papyrus codex. Newer manuscript evidence and different approaches to categories have challenged the ‘always’ of this conclusion. Yet, the strangeness of this early Christian preference for codex has been reinforced by many more recent explorations of this evidence.

Give some examples…

In a book that deeply shaped my own ideas about the adoption of codex technology by Christians, Books and Readers, Harry Gamble focuses more on the readerly use of early Christian texts than on their literary production. Though he may differ in his conclusions from Roberts and Skeat, there is little doubt that bible played a part in the emergence of a new interface. Gamble suggests, “SOMETHING HERE ABOUT XIAN use and emergence of codex.”

add a note about other perspectives on role of bible in codex development - Gamble, Hurtado, etc. Offer p.oxy 1075 and nongbri article as an example.

In my own work on the book as a technology for scripture in antiquity, I found a combination of Gamble, Epp, and O’Donnell provided a compelling picture of

twilight of an icon

The first chapter of Timothy Beal’s book The Rise and Fall of the Bible is titled ‘The End of the Word as we Know It,’ and he feels fine (kindle location 371).

The cultural iconicity of ‘the Bible’ as ‘the Book of books’ that is undergoing deconstruction is the bible as authoritative, univocal, practical, accessible, comprehensive, and exclusive (Beal, Rise and Fall, kindle location 121-122). As Beal also notes, it is not a coincidence that this transformation of the bible as cultural icon coincides with a major cultural translation of the book as a medium (Rise and Fall, kindle location 1161). Just as in antiquity, bible played a role in the emergence of a new book technology, so today, bible as book is entangled in a media transition from the reign of print to a proliferation of interfaces in our emerging media age.

medium matters

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan points us toward the cracks in the reign of print, that illustrious descendent of the codex, in the face of an emerging electronic age. McLuhan reminds us that technologies (media) are extensions of ourselves and that the message of every medium is its effect on our social relations (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7-8).

Beyond the obvious and important entanglement of form and content, McLuhan emphasizes the impact of technologies on human relationship with the world and one another through a ‘change of scale’ not simply a newness of kind (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8).

Here, McLuhan challenges our binary tendencies between new and old and suggests that media emerge as a change in ‘existing processes’ that inevitably have social consequences. It is precisely this change in existing processes we find in the amplification of non-linear access from the emergence of the codex to the ubiquity of digital search. McLuhan suggests that the content of every ‘new’ medium is another existing medium (Understanding Media, 8). Just as the codex performed the multiple columns per page of a scroll, so internet search performs and amplifies the print index. I refer to this phenomenon of media building upon and containing its predecessors as material media translation. The language of translation is helpful here because it signals that all media transformations involve a negotiation between new and old with inevitable loss and gain. I use the phrase ‘material media’ to qualify this translation to differentiate this process from the common process of translation of texts into other forms of media such as sound and film. In material media translation, it is the materiality of the interface of the medium that is translated, not simply its ‘content,’ whatever that might entail.

My favorite material metaphor for this process of material media translation is a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written on, erased, and then written on again. With each new medium writing over an existing medium (or many media) with only partial erasure, material media translation enacts a kind of palimpsest. Below is an image of a page from Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a fifth century manuscript of biblical texts in Greek, washed and written over in the 12th century with Greek translations of the fourth century Syriac writings of Ephrem the Syrian (the wikipedia entry on Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is excellent and provides significant references for a deeper look at the manuscript). This beautiful material enactment of palimpsest, two column miniscule Greek translations of Syriac over single column uncial Greek biblical texts, illustrates marvelously the process of emerging media building upon exisuggest anything to us about the process of translation itself?

(Image of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 1v (view 15) taken from iOS app Gallica by Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

In light of this process of material media translation as palimpsest, remembering bible’s rich media history will provide a helpful context and data for imagining how bible might be practiced as interface amidst the changing reading dispositions of our emerging media age. The material media translation of book from manuscript page to mobile screen already has and will continue to shape our reading practices. Focusing on book as interface, a space for encounter, will highlight the importance of the materiality of these interfaces in producing our reading practices.