The Dead Media Notebook (87 page)

The word “Rune” itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon “Runa” meaning ‘mystery’, or ‘secret’. The origin of the word book, is disputed, but is generally thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon Root “bc”, or literally beech tree.

Most historians believe that sticks of beech were used to write upon with a pen or brush, some believe that the beech bark was stripped from the tree and used as a kind of paper.

If the etymology of the word “Write” is examined however, the Anglo-Saxon source word “Writan” in its earliest use means ‘to scratch’ and only later on does it come to mean writing as with a pen. It is no surprise that the majority of these tally sticks are made of beech, and that the Runes or secrets were scratched or “Writan” upon them. These sticks may therefore be the etymological precursor of the present day book.

Source: Diringer, David; The Book Before Printing; Dover Reprint 1982 Page, R I; Reading the past, Runes; University of California Press 1987 Elliott, R. W. V.; Runes; Manchester University Press; 1987

From Howard Fink

The caption on the photo says it all: Richard Thomas, the inventor, demonstrates his color lens mounted on a standard 35-mm. camera. By means of this lens, both movies and stills taken with ordinary film are reproduced in full color. Thomas used a set of lenses, “optical systems” to fold the path of the light, and four colored filters to produce four images in each frame of the film. He used red, green, blue, and violet filters.

This produced four channels of gray images on panchromatic film. Projecting the film through a similar lens created a full-color image. The registration was exact because his lens system was built with an accuracy of .0001.” Besides full-color movies available only an hour after exposure, (because of the ease in developing black-and-white film) Thomas proposed using different filters in projection to analyse military photos.

“By changing filter combinations, certain colors may be held back and others accentuated, thus enabling the viewer to spot enemy installations that are invisible to the eye and to other color processes.”

Source Popular Science, August 1944, pp196-199

From Dave Bruckmayr

Totenrotel: The word “Rotel” stems from the Latin and means “Roll”.

Originally it was understood as every wisdom printed on a pergament scroll. The special form “Totenrotel” developed out of a popular contract of praying assistance between monasteries of a holy order.

The most important news to medieval monks was news about the death of a brother. This kind of news was distributed on a special scroll called “Totenrotel”. Whenever a monk passed away his name was registered on the scroll to let other monasteries know for whom to pray.

The scroll was taped to a round wooden stick and carried by a “Rotelbote” from monastery to monastery. The scrolls could be rather long, some have been as long as ten meters.

The arrival of a “Rotelbote” was always a very special moment for the monks. It meant news, suspense and a pleasant change of the daily routine. The messenger was happily given food, wine and a place to sleep.

The ritual: After everybody was set at the big table, the abbot of the monastery would invite the “Rotelbote” to let them know who had died at the brotherly monasteries and whose souls needed their praying assistence.

The messenger would stand up, silence the audience, open the pergament scroll and start reading the names of the dead. He would tell details about their character and their life and death as monks. Everytime he was finished with a dead brother the monks would start a collective prayer for the soul of the passed away. This ritual could go on for quite a while depending on the number of dead monks on the “Totenrotel”.

When all the naming and praying was done, the messenger closed the scroll and gave it to the abbot. The abbot would then register his own dead monks on the pergament scroll and write down name and arrival date of the “Rotelbote”. Finally, on one of the following days the messenger would move on to the next monastery and there the ritual was repeated.

“Rotelboten” were not members of an holy order, they were secular people. No monk could be considered to work as a messenger beause their holy orders forced them to live secluded from the unholy” world and never to leave the monastery.

“Rotelboten” went on foot, by horse or coach.

Source: “The Medieval Totenrotel-Messenger, the Scrolling of a Webpage and the Proposal of the HyperScroll-Messenger” / Paper by Dave Bruckmayr / Prepared for the Popular Culture Association Conference 2000, New Orleans, USA, For more about “Totenroteln” see: “Totenroteln, Rotelboten, Rotelbilder des Benediktinerklosters zum heiligen Kreuz in Scheyern” Konrektor i. R. Werner Vitzthum, Singenbach Archiv fr Postgeschichte in Bayern, Deutschland

From Jennifer Godwin

Written in 1993, this page reviews of “commercially available software” for authoring hypertext.

The systems include:

DOS: Dart, Folio VIEWS, HyperPad, HyperShell, HyperTies, HyperWriter!, Knowledge Pro, LinkWay, Orpheus

Windows: FrameMaker, Guide, Knowledge Pro, PLUS, SmarText, ToolBook, Windows Help Compiler

Apple: FrameMaker, Guide, HyperCard, PLUS, Storyspace

Source:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0140.html
[2015 note: This web page is still alive]

From Paul Nasenbeny

NASA TECHNOLOGY COULD SAVE VANISHING NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES

The most up-to-the-minute language-instruction technology, used in the space program, may come to the rescue of some venerable old languages and cultures. Native American educators are looking at technology from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, in their efforts to preserve and teach their peoples’ languages.

Johnson’s Language Education Center, one of the largest and most advanced of its kind, teaches astronauts, Russian cosmonauts and others English, Russian and Japanese. Vernon Finley and Johnny Arlee, language instructors at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Indian Reservation at Pablo, in northwestern Montana, recently visited the language center. Arlee teaches the Salish Cultural Leadership Program at the college. The program’s goal is to pass cultural leadership on to future generations by developing leaders to replace the elders.

“Most who still speak the Salish language are elders,” said Arlee, who at 59 is among the youngest of the fewer than 100 who still speak their native Salish language. Finley, 46, teaches Kootenai.

“While there have been language preservation efforts, they have not produced many fluent speakers,” said Finley.

“Unfortunately, the Kootenai are even fewer in number than the Salish, with fewer elders to speak and teach the language.” Both cultures view language fluency as a vital part of the development of future leaders. The teachers’ visit to Johnson verified that they are moving in the right direction. Although they are concerned that they must produce many of their own materials, the center provides models that they can use in developing their tools.

“I believe the two visitors have seen technology and methodology that will help them teach and preserve their languages. It was a very productive visit, “ said Tony Vanchu, director of the Language Education Center.

Source: NASA press release

From Julian Dibbell

Long-time list subscribers may remember the early experiment in interactive television called Winky-Dink and You. Many months after that was posted, I was contacted by the daughter of one of the show’s creators, who put me in touch with her father. My interview with him, along with a patch or two of my original note to this list, formed the basis of the following essay.

WINKY-DINK IN THE WASTELAND

THERE’S A RUMOR going around—you may have heard it—that television as we know it is soon to be swept up and utterly transfigured by some digital-age thing they’re calling interactivity. Pay it no mind. Television has always been interactive, and if you doubt that, just consider the list of the “Top 2000 Best Things About Television” compiled not long ago by the good people at cable’s TVLand channel.

The list meticulously ranks shows, characters, commercials, genres, catch phrases, theme songs, clich√∞s, news events, and other televisual phenomena, barely distinguishing between world-historic moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall (the 1,409
^th
best thing) and such crumbs of nostalgia as the “little dot of light when turning off old sets” (1,289
^th
). You may argue with the rankings—did the top-rated series, for instance, have to be I Love Lucy? Was Andy Warhol’s guest appearance on The Love Boat (950
^th
) really a lesser thing than the phrase “I’d like to buy a vowel” (543
^rd
)? But in its general approach the list gets its subject dead right: This is definitively how we make sense of TV. Not by attending to the coherence of the individual work, as with novels or paintings or films, but by dipping into the flow—pulling out some floating bauble now and then, some fragment that catches our eye but doesn’t quite signify until we set it amid the bricolage of other fragments we’ve assembled in our heart’s vitrine. TV would mean nothing without the active, organizing affections of its viewers; we shape it at least as much as it shapes us.

Interaction, in other words, lies at the heart of television as a cultural form—and always has. And if you’re still not convinced, then I’ll ask you to consider one last aspect of the TVLand Top 2000, an item that can be found just three notches above Tyne Daly and eleven below the phrase “Book ‘ em Danno.” I refer, of course, to the 1,388
^th
best thing about television: the classic, underrecognized children’s program Winky-Dink and You.

FIRST BROADCAST ON CBS from 1953 to 1957, and later revived for a season or two of syndication in 1969, the highly rated Winky-Dink was the earliest experiment in explicitly interactive television—and given the subsequent competition, from Warner Brothers’ mid-seventies QUBE flop to the still-tentative WebTV of today, it remains by far the most successful.

Its success is all the more impressive for the fact that the enabling technology was approximately as sophisticated as a stone hand ax. Packaged as a “Winky-Dink Magic Television Kit” and sold through the mail at fifty cents a pop (later also marketed through toy stores in a deluxe $2.50 edition), the core elements were a transparent sheet of blue-green plastic, a box of crayons, and a rag. The plastic sheet clung to the television screen, allowing viewers to draw directly on the TV image, erasing with the cloth. And draw they did. Winky-Dink, an adventurous cartoon boy with a dog named Woofer, invariably got himself into jams involving pirates, floods, sharks, and other mortal dangers, and invariably the only way out was for the boys and girls at home to draw him a ladder, or a rocket ship, or a bridge across some gaping chasm. Typically, the show climaxed with a secret message, a block-letter word transmitted in two parts—half the strokes first (just the diagonals, say), and then the other half—so that only viewers who had traced both sets of lines in crayon would know what the secret was.

“That killed the little bastards,” recalls Edwin Brit Wyckoff, chuckling. Together with the late Harry W. Prichett, his mentor and longtime business partner, Wyckoff created Winky-Dink, and he would like the record to show it, since he has often seen his invention carelessly credited to the show’s host and producer, Jack Barry. Barry, of course, went on to better-known, though hardly better, things: as host-producer of the fifties game show Twenty-One, he was at the heart of the contestant-coaching scandal later dramatized in the movie Quiz Show. Postscandal, Barry spent several years in the exile of Canadian television, returning to something like redemption later in life with the long-running Joker’s Wild. But he probably rued till his death the day CBS canceled the original Winky-Dink, his first and finest hour in the mass-cultural spotlight.

For Wyckoff, though, the dream never died, and he markets it still. Five years ago, he and Prichett licensed the rights to a Nashville production company, planning to bring Winky back to broadcast TV and into the multimedia age, with CD-ROMs, a Web site, and streaming video in the works. So far, all that’s really come of the deal is a half-hour pilot, available for $9.99 on videocassette—with a Magic Television Kit—from online toy suppliers Bennysmart. Harry Prichett was still actively involved in the project when he died last February, lauded in his New York Times obituary for the brilliance of Winky-Dink but still shy of the kind of recognition one last revival might have won him.

Wyckoff presses on, however, buoyed in part by the conviction that media culture has at last caught up with his and Prichett’s innovation.

“With all immodesty, Winky-Dink was seminal,” he says, and in a sense he’s right. Where early television in general failed to understand itself as anything but a medium of the masses, Winky-Dink showed from the start that viewers felt a deeply personal connection to the medium, a connection that the right technology could easily exploit. Long before the niche markets of cable brought the phrase “I want my MTV” into the lexicon, and even longer before the rampantly personalizing Internet littered the media landscape with MyYahoos, MyMP3s, and other such monuments to self-regard, viewers already had the inchoate but deeply held feeling that some little part of the broadcast flow was their own, and Winky-Dink literally gave them a way to get their hands on it.

By latter-day definitions, of course, the show’s interactivity was essentially bogus: Some young viewers, for instance, were dismayed to discover that when they failed to draw that rope bridge in time, Winky walked across the chasm anyway. But, for most, the illusion sufficed—and spurred them to a far greater level of activity than the one-click pizza ordering dreamt of in most digital-TV philosophies.