A Carnival of Words: The Dictionary of Words in the Wild and Public Textuality
Note This is an abstract that is in preparation so it is a work in progress. It is being prepared for Digital Humanities 2008.
Geoffrey Rockwell, McMaster University
Willard McCarty?, King's College London
Eleni Pantou-Kikkou, King's College London
Andrew MacDonald?, McMaster University
Introduction
The
Dictionary of Words in the Wild is an experiment in social textuality. The Dictionary is a social image site where users can upload pictures of words taken "in the wild" and tag them so they are organized alphabetically as an online visual dictionary. Currently the Dictionary has 2227 images of 3198 unique words and 24 user accounts. The images uploaded and tagged are of text, usually single words or phrases, that appear outside of print in the everyday environment. Images uploaded include pictures of signs, body tatoos, garbage, posters, graffiti, labels, church displays, gravestones, plastic bags, clothing, art, labels, and other sights. The site is structured with an application programming interface to encourage
In this paper we will,
- Give a tour through the online social site and its API,
- Discuss public textuality in a preliminary way, and
- Conclude with a road map of where this could go.
Outline of the Dictionary
The following is a narrative of the demonstration part of the presentation.
The Dictionary was developed with Ruby on Rails by Andrew
MacDonald? with support from the
TAPoR project under the direction of Geoffrey Rockwell. Lian Yan also worked on the programming. Users can get a free account in order to start uploading images. (We discovered once the project was visible for a few months that spambots were automatically creating accounts so we have introduced a CAPTCHAlike graphical challenge-response feature to weed out false accounts.)
When you upload a picture you are given the opportunity to crop it and are prompted to provide a list of words that appear in the text. You can also provide a brief description or discussion of the word image.
Once uploaded the image is filed in a database and the interface allows you to access the images in different ways:
- You can click on a letter and browse images with words starting with that letter. An image with "On" and "Off" will be filed twice, though at present the label is the first word tagged.
- You can search for a word and see the images that have been tagged with that word.
- You can type in a phrase and get a sequence of images.
The API allows the user to create other processes or text toys that can query the dictionary and get back an XML file with the URLs for word images like:
<phrase>
<word href="href_for_image">Word</word>
<word>Word_with_no_image</word>
</phrase>
One of the goals of the project is to support mashups that use the dictionary for new projects. This is where the Dictionary is different than other such projects, many of which use Flickr to pull images of letters or words. We will demonstrate two such projects.
Theoretical Discussion
The Dictionary is an
exploratory project designed to encourage the gathering of images of words in the wild. As such it did not start with a theory of text that it set out to illustrate. Rather, in its simplicity, it encourages participants to document public textuality as they perceive it. It is meant to provoke reflection or image-ination about words as we encounter them outside of literature. Therefore we will discuss the gaze of the project as a series of provocations.
Exploring the importance of Dictionary of Words in the Wild for the study of language: One of the basic aims of this project is to study how language acts as a semiotic system materially placed in the real word. In order to interpret this multidimensional, ‘semiotic’ role of language, our analysis focuses on how dictionary users perceive different signs and attribute meanings to words by referring to these signs. It will be argued that -through this kind of visual dictionary- users can interact and play with language by using visual artifacts (photos, images, graffiti etc) to express and define the meaning/s of words (in other words, the change of 'status': from 'image viewer' to 'meaning producer'). Also, emphasis will be placed in discussing -with specific examples from our data - what seems to be the most frequent (till now) way dictionary users choose to create ‘visual’ word meanings.
Other Projects Like the Dictionary
First, the Dictionary is one of a number of projects that use the internet to share images of textuality. For example,
Typography Kicks Ass: Flickr Bold Italic is Flash toy that displays messages left by people using letters from Flickr.
The London Evening Standard Headline Generator from thesurrealist.co.uk generates headlines from a
Flickr set of images of headlines.
IllegalSigns.ca tracks illegal billboards in Toronto and has a
Clickable Illegal Signs Map that uses Google Maps. On Flickr one can find sets like
Its Only Words of images of texts.
What all these projects have in common is the photographic gaze that captures words or phrases in a context whether for aesthetic purposes or advocacy purposes. The Dictionary is no different, it is meant to provoke reflection on the wild context of text as it is encountered on the street.
Exploratory Computing
Second, it is an exploratory project. The exploratory character of the project is that it is pre-theoretical in the sense of not starting from a formal theory of text. Instead it encourages the gathering of images of a phenomenon such that we can, later, develop a theory of public textuality or, to use Willard
McCarthy?'s term, model the phenomenon with computing. If you participate by taking your digital camera out onto the street you orient yourself to thinking about text before the gaze of the camera and, inevitably, struggle to capture with an image the richness of what can be seen. As such the project is a photographic exploration, though not one designed to necessarily gather aesthetically pleasing images.
Wild Words
Is there such a thing as a wild word? The very title of the project suggests a distinction between text as it appears in print that is removed from context and words in the wild of the lived environment. As we have found in gathering, the distinction doesn't begin to describe the variety of ways text appears in passing. Is the title of a book on its spine taken in poor light conditions inside a house a wild text? What does the image say about where and who took that picture? The project calls for a more systematic ethnography of textuality and its everyday occurence, but would it be possible to develop a panoptic topology of the appearance of the legible in everyday life, if even just for one person?
Where this going
The success of the project lies in how the participants push the simple assumptions encoded in the structure. The project would have failed had no one contributed, but with contributions come exceptions to every design choice. The types of text contributors want to collect and formally tag has led to the specification of a series of improvements that are being implemented with the support of
TAPoR and SSHRC. The paper will conclude with some images and the future directions they have provoked:
- We need to parse phrases so that we remove punctuation. For example, "faith," won't find the image for "faith".
- We need to allow implicit words to be entered with parentheses where the word doesn't appear, but is implicit. An example would be http://tapor1-dev.mcmaster.ca/~dictwordwild/show/694 which is filed under "Average" even though the word doesn't appear.
- We need to allow short phrasal verbs and compounds to be entered with quotation marks so they are filed as one item. An example would be "come up" or "happy days".
- We need to allow images of longer passages to identified as "Sentences in the Sticks", "Phrases in the Fields" or "Paragraphs in the Pastures". These would not be filed under individual words, but the full text could be searched.
- We need to allow people to control capitalization so that, for example, "ER" (which stands for "Emergency Room") is not rendered as "Er".
- We need to let people add tags that are not words so images can be sorted according to categories like "Graffiti" or "Billboard".
- The Dictionary is a social site, it needs to support comments so users can comment on the images of others.
Bibliography
Davis, H. and Walton, P. (1983):
Language, Image, Media, Blackwell, Oxford.
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (1996):
Reading images: the grammar of visual design, Routledge, London.
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001):
Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication, Arnold, London.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2003):
Discourses in Places: Language in the material world, Routledge, London.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005):
Introducing social semiotics, Routledge, London.
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GeoffreyRockwell - 31 Oct 2007
