When asked to think about content
and containers for this week’s blog post I got to thinking about Professor
Galey’s discussion of the importance of browsers, specifically browser
interfaces and design and their relation to the future of the book. Browser
applications seemed to me to be one of the most significant containers there are
for digital texts, especially those that are read online. However, the other
day I was confronted with another view of internet technology that made me
question not only the browser as container, but the languages and standards
upon which the browser and other internet software are based.
How do
internet communication standards (character set standards) affect the content
on the internet? It’s simple – by dictating what can and cannot be represented through
these accepted standards. In their chapter “ASCII Imperialism” Daniel Pargman and
Jacob Palme talk about such examples. The example that got me interested in
reading their article (and a quick thanks to Matt Ratto for bringing this up in
my culture and technology class) was the example of the Swedish Municipality of
Hörby and their move online. Instead of being able to
retain their name (Hörby) for their municipality’s URL, the municipality had
to settle for www.horby.se. Pargman and Palme
break down the meaning of this new name, and the implications of the change.
While the suffix “by” refers to “village” in Swedish, the first part of the
word, without the appropriate accents, takes on a whole new meaning,
specifically “adultery” or” fornication” (177). In the opening words of Pargman
and Palme themselves: “Poor Hörnby”
(177).
The title of the chapter, “ASCII Imperialism”
highlights the bias among decision makers that privileges English language, or
English-speaking internet users over those who speak other languages. Without
getting into the nitty-gritty of how internet standards, particularly character
set standards, are created and implemented, I want to emphasize how the content-container
relationship works. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange),
which was the first dominant character set standards for the internet, was
created in the US in the 1970’s and includes a bias towards English Language (184-185).
Though new character standards have since replaced ASCII, these standards build
off the work of ASCII, and some programs (specifically older email programs) will
still have difficulty processing specific non-English characters.
What this makes us ask is, is there such thing as a “seamless
world of content”? How do internet character
set standards such as those discussed by Pargman and Palme affect the ways we
read digital texts? Another question may be – how does it affect our ability to
locate text’s in other languages? Do search engines also include these kinds of
bias?
While it is interesting to think about where the line
between content and container gets blurred, it may be equally important to
investigate the sometimes unseen effects a container has on its content. This
investigation is particularly important when the container privileges specific
content and/or audiences without stating these biases. Just as Galey talks
about all design being political in “The Enkindling Reciter” (citing Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts
Have Politics?”), Pargman and Palme make it pretty clear that internet standard
design can also be read as a political act (178). In particular, they see it as one which “excludes
small-up-and –coming actors that do not have the resources to participate in
(international) standardization work” (197). These kinds of exclusions necessarily tend to isolate
those who present difference (such as unique languages). For this reason, it is
important for us to take that look “behind the scenes”, and not just at the
software that displays our texts, but at the standards on which this software
is built.
References
Galey, Alan. "The Enkindling Reciter:
E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination." Book History 15 (2012): 210-47.
Pargman, Daniel and Jacob Palme. “ASCII
Imperialism.” In Standards and their
Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday
Life, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, 177-199. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009.
Winner, Langdon. "Do Artifacts Have
Politics?" Daedalus 109(1)
(1980): 121-136.
I often take for granted the preference placed on the English-speaking world and how something so seemingly simple as the absence of an accent can completely alter the meaning of a word, and in this case, can impact the identity of a municipality. From your example I can certainly see how the effect of this partiality to the English language in an online container becomes a very political act indeed.
ReplyDeleteYour discussion also reminded me of one we often had in the Knowledge Organization class last year wherein trying to develop these universal systems for cataloguing, particularly the FRBR project initiated by IFLA to be translated into a variety of Asian and European languages, we realized the biases towards the Western system. In the same way as Hörby , library catalogues often do not favour a variety of languages, which results in this tension between content and container.