The concepts, insights and techniques of composing eTexts included in this text rise from an understanding of language as it is used in this age of connected computers. This text describes what a writer of texts in this computer age should be thinking about and how she/he can be working to produce texts faster, better and more powerfully. To provide you with some background to my thinking about all of this, please let me walk you through the foundation ideas that have informed this text. All of this thinking is an extension of a study completed over ten years towards the awarding of a PhD. You can read further about these principles by visiting the Technacy Info site. Here are the key underpinnings for a fuller understanding of what “Build eTexts Faster and Better using Rapid Text Construction Techniques is about.
Language
Until a large scale and worldwide network came into place, all language was either one of two forms: spoken or written. Speaking is the oldest form of language used by people around campfires to orally record the history of clans, to pass on the wisdom of the elders and to recite the genealogies so that young people had a sense of where they fitted into the world. However, in Egyptian times, spoken records were not permanent enough to handle commerce that was growing a more international momentum. So, written records became more or less a standard form of recording the commercial activities of the nations. Historians of the time also composed documents, on parchment and clay, to record the momentous events of their time.
Writing as a dominant form of communication did not take a major hold until the time of Plato, however, due to the strength of the oral mode of communication and also due to the fact that writing technologies were not really well developed until just prior to his time. At this time, Plato, being schooled in writing and writing technologies identified that other people were different; he was beginning to lose ‘his mind’his way of orally thinking now that he was spending so much time with this literate way of remembering, learning, writing and thinking. The move from oracy to literacy was substantial and has not yet been a universal attainment of humankind. In this century we have perhaps the largest number of people that are literate than have ever been so, however, there are still millions of people who are not literate.
Every human speaks and listens. Not every human has adopted reading and writing, although it is the aim of most every society to produce human beings to read and write. Literacy is seen as a necessity for people to move forward in our world, to develop their fullest potential. Now, however, with the introduction of a worldwide large-scale network, there is a new form of human communication. The dichotomy of speaking and writing has now been added to and transformed so that human language now is not just about oracy and literacy but also now the technologies centering around a computer connected to the Internet. To develop and grow and to have a powerful voice in this age people now need also to be Technate. Added to oracy and literacy a person needs to communicate using skills of technacy. This means that added to spoken language, and written language there is now electronic language which is composed and decoded on computers for use on computers and is published by computers and transmitted by computers around the world for use in a totally computer environment.
Technacy
In literate activity there are two basic skills: reading and writing. Technacy is far more complex in reach and encompasses four basic skills: operating, composing, simulating and programming. These sets of skills are a highly complex range of skills which it is unlikely that any one person would ever need to command all of the skills. Rather, the range of skills demonstrated by any one person may be highly specialized centering around one or two of the four main skills. Already we see this happening in IT departments where there are maintenance personnel who specialize in operating the machinery, those who simulate and program and those in business who operate and compose.
This book is about building systems in electronic language. A system is a meaning generating environment constructed from two or more interactive programs, that share at least files, and which can be used to build structures for information sharing. This involves the skills of:
• operating programs,
• composing objects and files,
• simulating large information products such as websites, ebooks and other large texts.
Orate and literate activity shares a common study that identifies the structure of language in use. The study of grammar is a study that analyses clauses, identifying the range of potential meaning structures that are available to the speaker or writer in constructing language. Grammar identifies the ways people can get things done through exploiting the meaning options that are available in the language. Electronic Language requires a different study than Grammar to understand how this language is structured. The study of Synthesis provides us with a grammar-like view as to the options of meaning making that are available when a human is composing electronic language texts.
Electronic language is a meta-language that is primarily about embedding all other forms of language in meaning systems for use in the totally electronic environment. What can we say in electronic language? We can say most anything that can be said in spoken language, written language combined with graphic communication and packaged into bundles that can be apprehended on the internet. At the level of system we can make meanings, using the meta-language of electronic textualisation, that center on what we can do, shall do and intend to do with text, graphics, and recordings. This is a language of simulation that also involves composing and programming.
Synthesis
Synthesis is the resource, similar to grammar in written and spoken language, for computing meanings; it centrally identifies the way to get things done through exploiting the meaning options that are available in the language. Just as grammar primarily considers the structure of a clause and its various components, synthesis considers a system and its components, programs (files objects and active units) and instructions. Each of these components are defined as:
1. Instruction
An instruction is a command or an action that is pre-written to form a program, and also includes the command or action that a computer user must issue in order to direct a program to perform a job. There are therefore instructions that are programmed and there are instructions that are added by the user at the time of operation. Altogether, a series of instructions combined together form a program.
2. Program
A program is composed of instructions that are pre-programmed, as well as added by a user at the time of operation. Several programs that are combined together to get a job done form a system. Programs can be subdivided into files, objects and active units. Files are the devices that are stored on a disk and fed into active memory that are a record of the pre-programmed instructions, and also may involve instructions issued by the operator in this session or in previous sessions. Files are composed of objects and objects are composed of active units.
3. System
A system is composed of a series of programs that are combined in a particular way to share files between those programs to get a specific job done as specified by the composer. For example, the three programs PersonalBrain 2.01, MS Word and Adobe Acrobat can be combined into a system. Through a composer adding instructions to these programs, files can be created, defined in .RTF (Rich Text Format), and stored in PersonalBrain, combined in MS Word in specific ways, and a file issued for conversion into .PDF (Personal Document Format) for display as a eBook in Adobe Acrobat Reader. A specific system would include the actual instructions to be added to a program suite, a definition of how the programs are to be used to compose files, and how those composed files are used to build a particular information product.
In spoken and written language, we test any language we see or hear by comparing this language with other models we see and hear. We often say, “Oh that is not grammatical” meaning that it does not follow the options or resources available in grammar. When we work with Synthesis, the driving need is not to be grammatical but to be efficient. The overriding social requirement of computing devices is that we get jobs done efficiently, meaning faster, better and cheaper. That is, faster for the human who has a cost of operation and not necessarily faster for the computer; the computer may take processing time far beyond the processing time of a human, but since the human can do other things, the overall effect is for greater human efficiency. However, the ultimate in synthesis is where both human and computer are empowered to get a task done that is hugely efficient meaning that both human and computer can get a job done faster, better and cheaper.
An Example of a System
The following diagram outlines a particular system designed to create re-useable text elements and provide an automated updating system for production of ebooks. The objective of this system is to build ebook-text efficiently, meaning that an entire book can be produced with as little time as possible of human time and computer time as possible and obtain an extraordinary result.
With specific instructions an operator can form a range of files in PersonalBrain that can be combined to form a document in MS Word and then converted to form a .PDF document for use in Adobe Acrobat. Since the instructions used by the operator compose the text in a particular way, the following is possible:
Operator InstructionsFiles
1. Each of the files in PersonalBrain can be updated and automatically the subsequent files in the system can be updated;
2. The files in PersonalBrain can be re-combined into different order to form a different document in MS Word and Adobe Acrobat;
3. A subset of all available files can be combined to form a new MS Word Document and subsequently form a different Adobe Acrobat Document;
4. Files in PersonalBrain can be combined with files in other Brains to form a new document in MS Word and then compose a new Adobe Acrobat document;
5. The Brain composed with these files can be published for other people to use those files in a similar manner to compose new texts.
This book
In this book, the instructions, program actions, resulting files and overall system operation that is described is a system designed by its composer using the principles of synthesis to achieve an efficient result in generating ebook text. This is an analysis of a particular system operating on the author’s computer for production of this and other eTexts; additional examples are also taken from other synthetic projects devised by the author to illustrate additional potentialities in the range of technate activity.