N is for the Nautical, Bureaucratic Books of Thomas H. Raddall

Research and Development: The Institution and the Contractor

The administrative production of knowledge into digital transference. 

Digitization circa 2011. 

I have considered the relationship between the institution and the contractor. The reason for this being a recent read of The Nymph and the Lamp in lieu of the relatively recent anniversary of the 3-D release of Titanic. While audiences glommed at the wreckage of the metallic hull shattering in more than one visual dimension, I mused over the vocabulary in The Nymph and the Lamp. While the screenplay for Titanic has considerable, smashing detail to the dialog of the workers of the ships at the turn of the 20th Century, this element has long fascinated many readers. For example, Melville honed much of his texts to the sounds of life on the rapturously unpredictable ocean. The difference between a read of Moby Dick and, say, The Nymph and the Lamp is that I imagine the latter text hasn't been endlessly glossed with edits for the textbooks of American schoolchildren.

Perhaps, this is owing to the biographical detail of the writer, Thomas H. Raddall, a Briton born in school itself. Raddall was born in Hythe England at the British Army School of Musketry in 1903. The culture of the school was such that modern writer John Atkins discussed it in Black Powder, a journal of regalia and information for the studies of the Muzzle Loaders Association of Great Britain. He noticed that the attendants of this organization left with a particular understanding of military thought, implying that the cadets learned a considerable deal about weaponry. The school served the purpose of testing and experimenting with military equipment, which would then later be adopted by the military. Before Raddall's birth near or in this compound, the place reportedly was no longer used to fend of attacks of the French army. The temporality was focused upon the Minie bullet, an expanding bullet actually invented by a French citizen. Stereotypes of conflict aside, Atkins said that he school was built in 1853 and was "brought about by two majors developments in the design of the military rifle and the bullet" (35).

According to the Black Powder article or Atkins himself, the town viewed the inhabitants as a spectacle of the population. Atkins remarked that "the barracks in Hythe itself were used by the school staff, having been built to house 'military lunatics' in 1842... but no mention is made to what happened to them (35).  One of the children of these perceived fanatics was, of course, Thomas Raddall. His life-long involvement in the Canadian military and his work as a writer challenges the notion that the military is devoid of occupational theoretics. Much of the vocabulary in Raddall's piece reflects an end-user understanding of war devices and consistent inlay about military life. In this essay, I would hazard that the jargon in this text rings with unprecedented reverberations.

Of late, I have been preoccupied with a recent read of The Nymph and the Lamp. Thomas H. Raddall's work reached me in a tattered copy in, of all places, the recesses of a building owned by the government postal service. The work itself reminded me more of a modernist version of Thomas Pynchon, as if it were one in which the sparks and centrifuges tempered themselves out into remote sequences about nature. Instead of talking about the Pacific northeast, you could juxtapose American structuralism in remote military spaces with Pynchon's jots about electric pine trees. In conjunction with the release of Titanic, this vocabulary about ships would be pertinent to overall comprehension about military jingo as distributed by an author with a pizazz for the institutional life.

I ping to some of this terminology shortly.

The definition of these terms likely reflect nautical slang from the turn of the last century used by Ballard in the composition of the text. However, the entire course of a person's vocabulary cannot be uniquely contributed to an individual profession. Despite the fact that patois-like dialogs formulate and flourish in relation to machinery, anthropological linguists cannot necessarily be capable of constituting that environment as the single habitat. A body of users with different native languages approach objects in the visual sphere. The spontaneous development of piecemeal reference is fashioned as each unique user attempts to describe the object in different ways while connecting to common linguistic understandings or conceding to the creation of language through nonverbal agreements. The evolution of nautical language, surely, has its own architecture.

Regardless of these potential discrepancies, I have collated a short list of interpretive terms to reach the search engines. Some have been deduced from contextual inquiry and cannot be found in other dictionaries.

• bollard: 1. The part of the ship that you use to tie lines to in order to moor a ship. 
• bitt: 1. Same as "bollard." 
• fo'c'sles: 1. This is the kind of word that has been warped in an abbreviation for "forecastle. 2. Might refer to the bunks of sailors or spots near the front of the ship. 
• the sea-ice: 
• jingbang: 1. Everything 2. Synonym to "the whole kit and caboodle." 
• Marina (n): 1. In this case, the name of Raddall's island. 2. Jocose Spanish term for "sailor."
• The Labrador Drift: 1. Part of the current off the coast of Greenland that pushes ice south, likely responsible for the position of the ice encountered by the Titanic. 

viewfinder toys

Politician Tom McMillin (R-Rochester Hills) introduced a bill that called for the drug-testing of CEOs.

Spangler, Todd. 2012. Drug tests for CEOs? Why not? Detroit Free Press, April 1, News + Views section, Midwest edition.

M is for Mechanisms

In keeping with the nod to Benjamin arcades project, the theme continues with acrostic-type entries populating the area between negative space. This post discusses the letter "M," pending the peer-review of the next portion of the e-book essay by members of the computer science department at the University of Michigan.

After considering writing a Thought-Catalog-type piece along the lines of "Money," a popular "M" as those behind NACPCS organizations could attest, the decision not to write on this topic reflected a type of political censorship. In the summer of 2010, the USSF fair was held in Detroit and, while thousands of activists flooded the Wayne State campus, life in Detroit continued as usual. The green consumer stores sold Peaberry coffee while luxury cars got their rear windows smashed on Jefferson. One car alarm bleated in scales of sharp while we walked past. Someone relatively wise from this city once told me, "Don't talk about money or we'll fight." "M" might not be about money, but a bit on public policies about money for public workers, briefly.

New employees of the USPS are currently hired in as temporary employees without benefits, in concurrence with the trending of private organizations hiring temps at cost. The Radio Paper notes that blogger Bryan Bradford was likely sacked for his work chronicling his experience as a postal worker. Bradford and other cases of blogotics remind us to focus on the literal webs, the maintenance of webs, and Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms as the topic of discussion in this arcadian entrance.

Matthew Kirschenbaum's work, Mechanisms, has a unique place in the historiography of the hypertext. Kirschenbaum wrote considerably about the types of machines and software that supported the hypertexts, mainly contributing to the crafting of the theory on the formalism of this media. The links become 401s. Acid rain erases the script on the imposts along the arch of Hadrian.

In Kirschenbaum's preface, one of his first references has already dissolved into an unmaintained hyperlink. Part of this area of scholarship involves ambiguity in scholarship, the kind that drives high schools teachers insane. In high school and even higher education, despite the proliferation of authors and editors contributing to Wikipedia, wary teachers shy away from allowing someone to quote it as an encyclopedic reference. Distrust still exists regarding digital texts and research compendium.

When meeting with NYC Teaching Fellows, The Radio Paper was still surprised to not get a call back after carefully lecturing that the digital sphere is a viable source from which a student can extract valuable, not to mention accurate information.

II.

I spoke in Washington Irving High School earlier this month and presented to a group of four to six prospective teachers (along with two certified teachers). I said that Wikipedia was not unlike the World Books of old, the high-res encyclopedias crafted by the publishing industry. I narrated how Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched the site in January 2001 and that "Wikipedia" came from the Hawaiian word "wiki" (quick) and the English word "encyclopedia."

I asked whether they'd ever been responsible for writing on the topic of this subject or new media. I suggested that my students in my theoretical English class would not only be allowed to cite this, but encouraged to do so after teaching everyone in the small circle how to make a log-in, what happens to Wikipedia articles in processing, and how the editorial process works.

Clear rain dripped down the side of the bricks on the high school. It spurted out of the mouths of the gargoyles on the side of the building. If "Jullian Assange: Hero or Villain" was still the extent of the conversation most people were having on digital literacy, if the volume of my voice was still the main focal point of any review on my potential candidacy, then the effort was as wasted as the plastic Starbucks cups wafting in the sewer. Someone asked me what I knew about horseback riding. Someone else dropped pizza near my foot. It slid into a puddle.

II.

A coffee shop outside of the rain away, before the occupiers returned to the square, I dug up some information for the next sequence of letters, including "M." While I read over the material for Mechanisms, I was struck by how one of the first citations was dissolving. I looked at this hyperlink for one of the sources on Ain't It Cool News and found the article no longer existed on the topic of a hypertext. Not only any hypertext, but this was about a type of software-discus-book called, Agrippa, and penned/scripted by Gibson.

Gibson had written a poem that was "treated with photosensitive chemicals that caused the images to gradually face from view once... exposed to light" and the poem "was encrypted so as to allow only a single reading from the disk... a 20-minute experience" (Kirshenbaum ix). Basically, this writer wrote a poem on a disk that came in a black box and it disappeared after a session. One can picture an app that contained a scrolling text, then it fades into vacuous space.

Much like the disappearing text of Agrippa, this topic was originally documented on Ain't It Cool News and concurrently remains out of the sphere of digital publication. It was, luckily, quoted in the preface to Mechanisms. This work was pointed out to me by a professor at NYU who made issuance that the volume was a seminal text in the academic field of the digital humanities. On the site, a 2000 interview of the author said that the text itself might not even exist.

He quoted Gibson as having said, "'[I]t's kind of an interesting question today as to whether or not any of these were ever really made. I don't have one... I've seen a photograph of one which I suspect to be either a forgery or a kind of dummy prototype that these guys in New York produced, and I don't know which" (Kirshenbaum X).

And, now, the even this February 2000 interview no longer exists.