The art and science of digital books on line
(Re-)Digitalisation of books – what is new and what is old about that?
On the art and science of "(Digital) books on line" by D.G. Perendia,
Bookery Gallerie, London, July-Aug. 2021
G. Perendia PhD©
Are then “(Digital) Books on line” just a conceptual pun? We talk a lot these days of digitalisation of books or business sectors, and even an era of digitalisation, of world going digital, etc. The etymological origin of the word "digital" is the Latin word "digitus", finger, and really refers to our initial numbering methods based on our (usually) ten fingers initially expressing natural numerals 1-10 - the one from which, once introducing zero “0” and the so called Arab-numerals, we derived our written decimal numbering system based on ten different numerals (0-9).
One could then even say we went "digital" as long back as the times when we started using fingers for counting, and that probably precedes both writing and even civilisations. However, in recent times from the mid 20th C, we are talking of digitalisation in a few contexts. One is expressing the analogue (i.e. continuous, e.g. audio) electronic signals into a sequence of numbers after their discretization (i.e., segmenting their levels and representing them by a sequence of limited number of their discrete levels only). Another is "translating" texts and books in form of numbers. Both of those are most often then expressed in the binary form of just two numerals, 0s and 1s, i.e., using a binary numbering system aiming (usually) to be used in an electronic form for their transfers, manipulations or storage (i.e. telecoms, computers, and, disks and/or memory stick respectively). But the term digitised is not necessary implying electronic form or medium of their representation and use.
On the other hand we can extend the term "digital" onto other numbering systems, some of which are also used in electronic digital representations, telecommunications and processing. For example, telecommunication systems sometimes us so-called digital Quadratic Amplitude Modulation (QAM) with four, sixteen (16-QAM) or higher, 32, 64 and 128-QAM with bases of 32, 64 and 128 distinct, discrete state-values respectively, each representing equally many distinct digits/letters.
We also sometimes use the so-called hexadecimal numbering system (with base sixteen) which uses a combination of ten numerals and the first six letters of the alphabet to express its sixteen distinct numerals: 0-9, A-F. For example, hexadecimal number F represents 15 in the decimal numbering system.
We can however, then extend this logic further and ask: what are then numerals of the numbering systems base of, e.g., 46, 64 or 128, and the likely answers are immediately there too. E.g.:
a) 46: 0-9 A-Z;
b) 64: 0-9 A-Z a-z "," "."; etc.
For example, in he times of the antiquity it was rather common to reduce use of letters to capitals only, (e.g. in the Ancient Greece and Rome), whilst Hebrew continued such practice till nowadays. We can very likely express many 17th-19th C texts (incl. possibly even those of Shakespeare) using just the above 64 different characters, with those other, additional punctuation signs absent.
It is also not, then, at all surprising that in the times of antiquity of the electronic computer systems, such as the 1970s IBM and Digital DEC ones were, and so to reduce both the memory and processing requirements, their designers provisioned for use of only single case letters. The base of the their representation was reduced to only 64 different characters (expressed in 6-bit binary "bytes"). They did so to be able to use any additional digit-characters for the special signs of punctuation, currencies and mathematical operations, then deemed more operationally more efficient than using of the other case of the letters. And, one of the most noticeable difference between them was their significant "ideological opposition". The then later-comers, DEC and the UNIX middle-ware systems providers, then both provided their clients for use of only the lower-case letters, and that being in an almost ideological opposition to the then "CAPITAL-ist" (I.e., the capital letters use only) oriented IBM's own main-frame "design policies".
We can see how we can, now, come to the main hypothesis of this text: the most books written using different alphabets, a limited and usually fixed number of distinct, discrete signs, are already in their digital existence ever since introduction of the alphabets way back in the antiquity.
That is, most of hand-written or printed texts, actual numbers and words in notebooks and printed books, or in business contracts and exchange accounting records, are already, broadly speaking, expressed as numbers, using a fixed number of distinct discrete signs consisting of numeric digits, letters of an alphabet and additional (e.g. punctuation) signs. And, the total number of distinct signs used represent the bases of those numeric systems.
Then, the main difference between different languages is that they use different basic letter-signs and/or different numbers of basic letters, the distinct discrete sound representations. and thus, different numeric bases. There are, for example, 26 basic letters (x2 for lower-case and capitals) and additional signs for English, but more or less for some other (e.g. some having e.g. 30 base letters etc.) or even significantly more, like Japanese Katakana and Hiragana writing systems. Most of the western languages using variations of the Latin alphabet and their additional signs can be expressed as using 128 different distinct characters, thus, with a numeric system base 128 (or 2^7, as 7-bit binary sets). One representation of a 128 character set is is the so called ASCII standard character set see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII).
Some languages, where tonality and accentuation adds significantly to the meaning, they use additional accentuation punctuations (e.g. French having difference between e, é, è and ê). Those accentuated basic characters could, and probably should, be seen as additional characters in their own right, thus, extensions to the numeric base of, e.g. twenty-six present in English. However, they rarely bring-about the full representation of the tonal and emotional informative richness of the speech they aim to represent.
We can, however, then also see how even antique philosophers could claim already that written texts are inadequate, over-reduced representations of our continuous speech sounds. That is, the spoken words expressed in letter characters (and other punctuation signs) are only lossy discretization, thus approximations (and a lossy-compression) of those spoken, more or less continuous tone language sounds. And, as many philosophers have ever since antiquity already argued, the writing is (therefore) almost always no more than a very rough simplification, almost a derision of our, usually by sounds and tone variations, informationally and emotionally enriched thoughts and spoken sentences. Some consequently then also argue similarly, that the (binary) electronic digital display representation of the books are also approximations if not derisions of the tactile and physical experience of reading books printed on paper, already in a digital form but that of a much higher order.
We should, therefore, probably refer more precisely to this modernisation if not even 5th technological revolution, as "electronic binarisation" or "binary electronic re-digitalization" or "... translation..." of books and texts rather than using an over-reaching, a bit general simplistic term "digitalisation" (or "digitisation") of books and textual materials as a part of the 20th and 21st century modernisation.
And, is then this series of art-works based mostly just a conceptual wordplay, a pun or not? For start, the conceptualist puns are (usually) not just wordplays or puns and most of them contain rich denotations and significant metaphors for enriching our understanding of the artists message and the world around us. But, it was, nevertheless, my artistic intuition and creation of those book-art pieces that only then led me on the path to this, we could say, rationale of a scientific revelation and hypothesis, a reflection on writing and language pragmatics, and not the other way around.
G. Perendia PhD©, London, 24th July 2021
(in the memory of D.V., 1956 - 24th July 1974)