| Title: |
Handbook For a Theory Hobby: The Hobby-Horse is the Sawhorse of Theory |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Ulmer, Gregory L. |
| Abstract: |
"Handbook for a Theory Hobby" is a montage of borrowed images and quotations and it functions as an amateur's instruction manual for fun with theory. The manual plays through decaying models of thought beginning with a visual explanation of leaf rubbings. In this sense, it gives am impression of metaphors for thinking and memory. The manual is also a reading of Deleuze's and Guattari's chapter on rhizomatic thinking in A Thousand Plateaus. From that angle, the reader is asked to consider alternatives to alphabetic or book-centered thinking. The manual illustrates a potential botanical image which might replace the tree metaphor of dialectical thinking. By combining found fragments, this deceptively simple text explores how our culture represents thinking, memory, and learning.
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| Title: |
The ABC of Visual Theory |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Ray, Robert B. |
| Abstract: |
"The ABC of Visible Theory," an encyclopedic essay describing the interrelations between typography, language, and thought, connects the "paraphernalia of the text" with every cultural association which can be brought to bear on these practices. The essay uses historical, fictional, scientific, and other discourses to discuss electricity, font types, strategies, saints, books, journals, paintings, and article titles, language systems, ontology, names, technology, utopia, psychic states, newspapers, games, clichs, fictional animals, typescripts, rules, emotions, institutions, sociological categories, associations usually lay dormant in typographic effects and if we followed each and every association mentioned in this ABC, we would have to contend with the reservoir of our entire culture. By offering only one or two entries for each letter of the alphabet Visible Theory remains potential. The lay-out and design of this piece encourages comparison between entries and dissolves the apparent opposition between visual images and thinking. Just as each topic suggests a reservoir of cultural history, the over-all design and the lay-out of each individual entry connects to webs of associations.
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| Title: |
Decoder Process |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Sparling, Bonnie |
| Abstract: |
No abstract
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| Title: |
The Imperialism of Syntax |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Laiwan |
| Abstract: |
This intervention presents an alternative to the Western image of syntax; the two facing pages of Chinese characters literally mirror each other. They force the reader to notice the visual structure of language's lay-out. The usual invisibility of syntactical arrangement makes the dominant mode into a fixed, given, or "natural" progression of words on a page. The author demonstrates the beauty and power of alternatives and she literally reflects (thinks) on her Eastern arrangement: in the alternative merely backward or inverted? does the Eastern syntax function merely in relation to the dominant model? is the Eastern syntax a reversal of the dominant model? This is an intervention that offers a thinking-image of resistance.
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| Title: |
Condensed Article |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Ronell, Avital |
| Abstract: |
The "Condensed Article" explores the telephone's promise of immediate access to distant voices through the technological preservation and condensation of speech. The author calls up what spooks or haunts the structure of telephonics. By unraveling these encrypted connections the essay demonstrates and explains the relay/delay interference signal between confusion and certainty. In that sense, the essay connects telephonics to Bell. The story of Alexander Graham Bell from his early childhood to his invention of the telephone holds many clues to the repressed desires in the telephonic structure. But, rather than a biography, the author writes a "biophony," somewhere between empiricity and speculation. This speculation operates a party line between Heidegger's "What is Called Thinking," Abraham's and Torok's psychoanalysis of crypts, Jacques Derrida's desedimentation of "the death sentence" structure, and many other stations.
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| Title: |
A Writing of the Real |
Vol: 22.4 |
| Author(s): |
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie |
| Abstract: |
"The Writing of the Real" uses Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory to explore the "failure in representation, a hole in the middle of perception." The author thinks through the problems this hole presents: gaps, fadings, flickerings, and discontinuities in images and words. This hole or objet a cuts us to the quick, cuts certainties and consistencies, and points to a lack and loss in our knowledge, perceptions, and being. This objet a reminds us that wholeness in images, languages, or beings exists only in an Imaginary ordering of the world, and that any explanation of our system of thinking or visual design must include lack as a part of that system. Desire enters the field when we look at what we cannot bear to look at. But, this emergence of desire through the breaks in our epistemological ground loosens rigidities and opens up inventive attempts to re-present the object a as a writing of the Real.
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| Title: |
Literacy Literacy |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Kintgen, Eugene R. |
| Abstract: |
The term literacy has recently been extended into a number of different fields, the best known probably being 'computer literacy.' A consideration of the different historical senses of the term suggests why it was chosen for generalization, and detailed discussion of three cases--scientific literacy, visual literacy, and cultural literacy--indicates the semantic aspects of the term that are most important in the process of extension. In all three cases, despite the authors' attempts to use literacy in what I call its descriptive sense, as an indication of the ability to read and write, the evaluative sense of the term--the mastery of a body of (often traditional) knowledge--is the operative one.
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| Title: |
Speech and Writing in Poetry and Its Criticism |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Bradford, Richard |
| Abstract: |
This paper examines some of the ways in which literary criticism simultaneously exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. It argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading is employed to neutralize the spatial dynamics of poetic language and reduce the material identity of the text to the status of a transparent medium. This relationship between criticism and poetry is maintained from the Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth. The paper examines the tension between the aural and the visual in modernist theory and practice and contends that the appreciation of silent visual form has become one of the conventions of post modernist writing.
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| Title: |
Verbal and Visual Translation of Mayakovsky's and Lissitsky's For Reading Out Loud |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Lange, Martha Scotford |
| Abstract: |
Full understanding of visual poetry created by a linguistically different culture poses particular problems. Translations of selected poems from Vladimir Mayakovsky's For Reading Out Loud (1923) are presented here. In addition, an attempt is made at transposing the visual wordplays found in the original Cyrillic typography into the Roman alphabet. The English reader is able to enjoy the verbal/visual dexterity of El Lissitsky's typographic presentations of Mayakovsky's poems. Analysis of the design process and some historical background provides a context for fuller understanding of Lissitsky's innovative work.
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| Title: |
For Reading Out Loud in Context |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Bojko, Szymon; Lenk, Krzysztof |
| Abstract: |
Visible Language asked Szymon Bojko and Krzysztof Lenk to respond to Martha Lange's typographic translation of For Reading Out Loud. Lange and her students concentrated on the formal characteristics of the poems with regard to verbal and visual translation. While the mythic dimensions of Mayakovsky and Lissitzky do not encourage a critical look at their work, Bojko and Lenk share two requisite characteristics that make them credible respondents: they are design educators and Eastern Europeans with more immediate knowledge of the history and character of events to which For Reading Out Loud refers. Bojko and Lenk put the poems into a needed social and historical context by performing a content analysis and discussing the revolutionary nature of the poetic and typographic communication and the circumstances surrounding publication.
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| Title: |
Metadiscourse and the Recall of Modality Markers |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Vande, William J.; Allen Shoemaker, Allen |
| Abstract: |
Many studies of discourse and discourse processes assume that informative texts convey only propositional or referential meanings. This paper identifies and classifies several kinds of metadiscourse, which convey not propositional but textual or interpersonal meanings. In beginning to explore how the kinds of metadiscourse that convey interpersonal meanings affect readers, an immediate recall test on two informative paragraphs with some modality markers added to them was run. In the light of these results, some possible roles of modality markers in discourse processes are discussed.
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| Title: |
Typographic Cues As an Aid to Learning from Textbooks |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Garofalo, Karen M. |
| Abstract: |
Writers, editors, designers, and teachers all play important roles in developing students' abilities to comprehend, learn, and retain information. From primary grades through college, students are faced with increasing amounts of information in text books. As the information increases in quantity and complexity, the organization of the information plays a more important role in the student's ability to find and comprehend the important concepts. This investigation proposes a method to identify important categories of information within a particular subject area and rank these categories by importance creating a hierarchy of information. From this, a hierarchy of typographic cues is developed and matched to the hierarchy. The degree of typographic emphasis indicates position in the hierarchy. Tests show that typographic cues assigned to each rank aid the learning process, providing the number of cues is less than three. Understanding these principles and their potential applications will aid publishers and designers of textbooks to more effectively organize information.
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| Title: |
Meditation: Visual Transition as a Bridge Between Form and Meaning |
Vol: 22.3/4 |
| Author(s): |
Cavalier, Todd |
| Abstract: |
Transition is the process of changing from one state, form, activity, or place to another. It affects objects, events and phenomena, and is affected by them as well. As Hericlitus noted when he said "No man shall step in the same river twice," transition is described by the inexorable flow of space and time. It is the river as a continuum in which all things exist in perpetual change. Individual objects, events, and phenomena act as temporal intervals in its current. As a function of visual communication, the transition from one interval to another is a process of bonding one form to another, one identity to another in a deliberate composition. The transition from one element to another facilitates the identification of individual form and function. As such, transition is a bridge that connects separate elements in the formation of a system. It is the process of bridging separate forms and functions. It is a linking process that identifies a particular system and, when occurring sequentially, can function to give meaning to what we see.
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| Title: |
Visible Language in Speech Perception: Lipreading and Reading |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Massaro, Dominic W.; Cohen, Michael M.; Thompson, Laura A. |
| Abstract: |
Watching a speaker in face-to-face communication can influence what the perceiver hears the speaker saying. Faced with this influence of visible language on the perception of audible language, an interesting question is whether language would also influence audible speech perception. To test this possibility, subjects identified spoken syllables either while viewing the speaker's face or while reading a written syllable. In both conditions, subjects identified what they heard the speaker saying. Replicating previous studies, lipreading had a large influence on the identification. In contrast, reading a written syllable had a much smaller, but statistically significant effect. A fuzzy logical model of perception accounted for both the lipreading and reading contributions to speech perception. A model assuming that the reading contribution was due to a post-perceptual bias gave a poor description of the results. Although lipreading appears to be much more influential than reading, it remains a possibility that written language can contribute to our auditory experience of speech.
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| Title: |
Tracing Lip Movements: Making Speech Visible |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Campbell, Ruth |
| Abstract: |
Lipreading cannot deliver the phonetic structure of a spoken language very effectively; for no phenomena can be unambiguously identified from lip-pattern alone. Nevertheless, under some circumstances, speech that is not heard, but just seen by lipmovements on a speaker's face, can be understood and recalled verbatim. Moreover, under some conditions, heard speech that is different from that which is seen to be spoken, seems to 'fuse' to produce a different speech percept (The McGurk Effect). These paradoxical aspects of lipreading and the constraints on the conditions under which lipreading can be helpful or can 'fuse' with heard speech are hard to accommodate within some theories of auditory speech perception. An interactive activation account is offered in which lipreading is considered to provide a phonetic feature--that of seen mouth opening and closing--to the speech analysis system. While such a feature appears to be necessary to account for these effects, it is not yet clear whether such a single seen phonetic feature may be sufficient for effective integration of seen and heard speech in all circumstances.
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| Title: |
Cross-Model Effects in Repetition Priming: A Comparison of Lipread Graphic and Heard Stimuli |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Dodd, Barbara; Oerlemans, Michael; Ray Robinson, Ray |
| Abstract: |
A series of experiments investigated the processing of lipread information, as compared to that of heard and read stimuli, using the repetition priming paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that lipread priming facilitated the semantic categorization of lipread words to the same extent as that found for auditory prime, auditory test, and graphic prime, graphic test conditions. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 measured the effects of cross-modal priming. Lipreading primes by both auditory and graphic processing, and is primed by both. While auditory priming did not speed the processing of graphic stimuli, graphic priming facilitated the semantic categorization of heard words. A tenative explanation of the findings is offered: lipreading provides incomplete information about words, and thus there is a need to access stored linguistic knowledge to 'fill in' missing features, allowing identification of the stimulus.
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| Title: |
Perception of Facial Movements in Early Infancy: Some Reflections in Relation to Speech Perception |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Vinter, Annie |
| Abstract: |
Some aspects of the literature dedicated to the study of perception of facial features and movements by infants are examined. More particularly, we try to analyze the kind of visual information infants can process at different ages, and how this may be linked to their developing speech perception. Empirical data related to imitation of facial movements, to prespeech activity, to lip-reading ability and auditory-visual integration are reviewed. These data show that the ability of young infants to encode face features and process facial information undergoes a complex development in the first year of life. In the final part of this paper, we discuss briefly the relationships between face perception processes and visual speech perception within a developmental and cognitive framework. A central concern in this discussion is related to the "segmentation" problem, i.e., to the nature of the unit of perception used when speech is processed.
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| Title: |
Reading the Speech of Digital Lips: Motives and Method for Audio-Visual Speech Synthesis |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Storey, Darryl; Roberts, Martin |
| Abstract: |
The widespread practice of lipreading among the hearing impaired has, for a number of years, stimulated research into the feasibility of transmitting visible images of articulation to accompany acoustically conveyed speech, in those circumstances where visual reinforcement of the speech signal is typically lacking. Although there already exists several systems which, exploiting computer graphics, are capable of generating animated images of articulation while allowing for eventual audio/visual synchrony, each is open to criticism on the grounds of its perceptual inadequacy and/or cost. This paper offers a brief review of these initiatives to date and describes the recent development of a relatively simple, effective, and hence economical method of audio/visual speech synthesis.
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| Title: |
Speaking with Two Sides of the Mouth |
Vol: 22.1 |
| Author(s): |
Graves, Roger E.; Potter, Susan M. |
| Abstract: |
Differences while speaking from the two sides of the mouth are both visible and audible. Careful observation has shown that the right side of the mouth typically opens wider and moves more during speech. This visible asymmetry reveals the underlying physiology in which expression of speech is controlled primarily by the left side of the brain. Since the left side of the brain has better control of the right side mouth muscles, an asymmetry favoring the activity of the muscles of the right side results during articulation of speech sounds. In contrast, more equal activity from the left side of the mouth can be seen during emotional expression, prosodic expression, and signing which reveals a greater role of the right side of the brain during these latter types of expression. There are also audible manifestations of the physiological asymmetries. In a new study, subjects were required to speak from only one side of the mouth. Better quality of articulation was audible from the right side for most subjects
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