The folks over at if:book are blogging live from the Transliteracies conference. The first post includes a discussion by Alan Liu, laying the purpose of the project and some of the questions it intends to explore.
I’ve started a project (combining humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists) called Transliteracies to look into “online reading.” It’s my hypothesis that there are hidden complexities and intelligences in low-attention modes of browsing/surfing that we don’t yet know how to chart. Google, after all, is making a fortune for algorithms enacting this hypothesis. Or to cite a historical googler: Dr. Johnson, sage of the Age of Reason, was famous for “devouring” books just by browsing them instead of reading “cover to cover.”
John Cayley’s work often employs a technique he calls “transliteral morphing.” This is a letter-by-letter morphing that transitions from one text to another, much as graphical morphing moves points in space so as to transition from one image to another. riverIsland is composed of two loops of poems, one horizontal and one vertical, and the reader can use on-screen arrows or QuicktimeVR movies in order to trigger movement along these loops. When the reader indicates that a move should be made from one poem to another, the appropriate transliteral morph is performed by the computer. See the