Cybertextuality and Text Analysis

A cybertext is any oral, written, mental, or
machine-generated language act viewed from within
cybernetics, the study of communication and control in living
organisms and machines, a theory invented by the American
mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964). We author
cybertexts by steering or governing their making according to
the persistent feedback we receive from all those who observe
them. Insofar as computing humanists use software to analyze
both literary works and machine-made texts like concordances,
they may be said to owe something to cybernetics. Our analytic
programs simulate part or all of the messaging and feedback
process, some acting as creators, others as reader-listeners or
noisy channels. The basis for our software is ultimately how
language cognition works. Given that we create most of our
own oral and written utterances unselfconsciously, we first
encounter them as strangers and observers, not as authors; and
our observation always begins with modelling the sense data
we have received from ourselves. These mental models act as
feedback and help shape the next sentences we make.
Cybertextual cycles, each an unselfconscious utterance and a
partially conscious modelling and response to it, steer our
composition even if no one but ourselves is present to reply to
what we utter.
I propose that cybertextual cycles, enacted in cognition, partly
shape the idiolect or personal style exhibited by the texts we
make. We use text-analysis tools today to detect the
idiosyncratic patterns of flat, atemporal documents, but all texts,
being cybertextual, unfold in time. An author's silent feedback
to his own utterings pulses wave-like in the emerging text, but
how can these characteristic waves, that is, the cybertextual
style, be recovered from flat documents? Usability software
offers some tools for this purpose, as do keyloggers, protocol
analysis, and word-processing programs. One way to advance
text-analysis methodology in a post-concordancer age is to
investigate cybertextual style by recording and analyzing the
behaviour of living authors as they write. Usability software
like Morae, because it externalizes working memory, can
capture the tic-tocs of cognitive style.
Bibliography
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997.
Baddeley, Alan. "Working Memory and Language: An
Overview." Journal of Communication Disorders 36.3 (2003):
228-66.
Galison, Peter. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener
and the Cybernetic Vision." Critical Inquiry 21 (1994):
677-99.
Haraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,
Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Socialist
Review 80 (1985): 65-108.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2002.
Lancashire, Ian. "Cybertextuality." TEXT Technology 13.1
(May 2005).
Lancashire, Ian. "Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary
Imagination." A Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities.
Oxford: Blackwell's, 2004.
Lieberman, Philip. Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain:
The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Masani, R.P. Norbert Wiener 1894-1964. Basel: Birkhäuser,
1990.
Miller, G.A. "The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus Two:
Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information."
Psychological Review 63 (1956): 89-97.
Morae. Okemos, MI: TechSmith, 2004. Accessed 2004-05-27.
<http://www.techsmith.com/default.asp>
Olson, David R. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and
Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Pierce, John R. An Introduction to Information Theory:
Symbols, Signals & Noise. 2nd edition. New York: Dover, 1980.
Poeppel, David, and Gregory Hickok. "Towards a New
Functional Anatomy of Language." Cognition 11 (2004): 1-12.
Smith, John B., Dana Kay Smith, and Eileen Kupstas.
"Automated Protocol Analysis." Human-computer Interaction
8 (1993): 101-45. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd edition. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1961.
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society. 2nd edition. New York: Hearst, 1967