Google

"What is a book?" This is the question the text starts of with and the question the text circles around, exploring the material basis of reading and writing. Parallel to the theoretical examination and anecdotal reference to the history of the written word, the author positions a post-apocalyptic fiction about the last reader.

Illustrations play a pivotal role in the culture of the book, which is shifting with the mass digitization of images and entire books in our digital age. For those who study and teach with book illustrations from the Renaissance to the early twenty-century, browsing for this type of visual primary source presents contextual difficulties. Problems range from the misattribution of illustrations to the inability to use the images altogether. 

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1234/Minding+the+Gap+for+Online+Book+Illustrations)However widely used by humanities scholars, Google Images may not be the optimal system for contextual image browsing. A Google search for images by a particular illustrator of English literature, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) for example, indicates how his illustrations have transformed from their material context in books to their online de-contextualization. A variety of contextual details tend to disappear, namely: the pictures’ places within the codex, the literary narrative and the pictorial sequence of images, as well as bibliographic data and the item’s physical location. Scholarship addressing humanities scholars’ image-based primary source needs has yet to narrow in on book illustrations. This gap in scholarship is surprising given the ongoing effort for libraries to digitize books, to generate online exhibitions, and to highlight illustrations from their collections. The way that illustrations from books continue to proliferate from their sources in libraries to their transformation on social media and on Google Images has made the phenomenon of de-contextualization worthy of inquiry. If Google-Image style browsing is less than ideal then: what are the optimal ways of presenting the illustrated book in context for humanities scholars––specifically for the sub-group of illustration searchers—in their online browsing? This information studies research minds the gap between the de-contextualized illustration à la Google and contextualized alternatives from the perspective of select humanities scholars. The data collected to fill in the understanding of the contextual gap comes from twelve interviews with scholars from art history. Interviewees responded to a series of image browsing scenarios, which centered around six main themes, involving: the illustration in relation to the form of the book, related images to a selected page, collection highlights, essential metadata, and bibliographic descriptions. Interviewees were then asked to respond to these scenarios by explaining what they found familiar and why, what they preferred and why, and what drawbacks they saw and why. This presentation showcases research highlights (research was conducted as part of the presenter’s information studies masters). Participants preferred the scenario that offered the illustrations in their two-page layouts to their cropped form. They also tended agree that the name and role of the illustrator is integral to the bare-bones bibliographic data for image use. More than subject and genre classification, the book’s two-page spread and artist’s name facilitates searchability and further research for art historians. However, rare books and special collections libraries in Canada are largely inconsistent with how they provide online access to book illustrations. The illustrator’s name and the form of the book are not a given in an online world that has separated textual literature from its visual sibling.

This paper will analyse Cayley and Howe’s project in order to discuss how reading and writing is configured by Google’s network machine. It will address Google as a primary example of a new interface industry and besides describing how it reads and writes us as readers, it will discuss whether and how we can read it. If Google (…) instrumentalizes and capitalises language as an interface industry, how can we read and write, what can we read and write and on which terms?

(source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

It's true, poets have been experimenting with producing writing (or simply writing, just writing of a sort not familiar to us - writing as input and writing as choosing) with the aid of digital computer algorithms since Max Bense and Theo Lutz first experimented with computer-generated writing in 1959. What is new and particular to the 21st century literary landscape is a revived interest in the underlying workings of algorithms, not just a concern with the surface-level effects and results that characterized much of the fascination in the 1970s and 1980s with computer-generated writing. With the ever-increasing power of algorithms, especially search engine algorithms that attempt not just to "know" us but to in fact anticipate and so shape our every desire, our passive acceptance of these algorithms necessarily means we cannot have any sense of the shape and scope of how they determine our access to information, let alone shape our sense of self which is increasingly driven by autocomplete, autocorrect, automata.

The "Googlization of Poetry," then, describes conceptual writing as an often overlooked aspect of electronic literature - my paper contends that the crucial contribution of conceptual writing as e-literature to contemporary poetry, poetics, and even media studies is an articulation of a 21st century media poetics. Building on the 20th century's computer-generated texts, conceptual writing gives us a poetics perfectly appropriate for our current cultural moment in that it implicitly acknowledges we are living not just in an era of the search engine algorithm but in an era of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "The Googlization of Everything." "Google has permeated our culture. That's what I mean by Googlization. It is a ubiquitous brand: Google is used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City." (2) In other words, when we search for data on the Web we are no longer "searching" - instead, we are "Googling." But Conceptual writers such as Bill Kennedy, Darren Wershler, and Tan Lin who experiment with/on Google are not simply pointing to its ubiquity - they are also implicitly questioning how it works, how it generates the results it does, and so how it sells ourselves back to us. Such writing is an acknowledgement of the materiality of language in the digital that goes deeper than a mere acknowledgement of the material size, shape, sound, texture of letters and words that characterizes much of twentieth-century bookbound, experimental poetry practices. Otherwise put, these writers take us beyond the 20th century avant garde's interest in the verbal/vocal/visual aspect of materiality to instead urge us to attend to the materiality of 21st century digital language production. They ask, what happens when we appropriate the role of Google for our own purposes rather than Google's? What happens when we wrest Google from itself and instead use it not only to find out things about us as a culture but to find out what Google is finding out about us?

In this sense, this cluster of Conceptual writing which both probes and is driven by the search engine in fact enacts a kind of study of software. Lev Manovich writes in Software Takes Command, "Software Studies has to investigate both the role of software in forming contemporary culture, and cultural, social, and economic forces that are shaping development of software itself." (5) And so if the search engine is currently one of the most powerful pieces of "cultural software," then, again, it's my sense that Conceptual writing's critique of Google ideally positions such writing as a mode of 21st century media poetics.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces is a media archeology of the interface. A critique of the "invisible" interface, the "magic" of iOS that "just works," Emerson analyzes how interfaces promote or occlude human agency in computational environments. Anti-telelogical in order to interrupt the "triumphalist" narratives of progress that can characterize much writing about media, Reading Writing Interfaces stages its four chapters and postscript ("The Googlization of Literature") as "ruptures" to emphasize failure as a key element of media development.