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11. Large Scale Alternations
Let’s turn now to a different variety of animation, and a larger-scale alternation between the flatland of print and the 3D world of human behavior. “Animation” is not a word that usually comes to mind when we think about a scholarly book by a university professor, but here is one which certainly offers it. Prof. Marvin Minsky, the MIT mathematician, published his The Society of Mind in 1988 as a conventional codex book, but it was later issued in electronic format. The “E-Book” version was designed by the Voyager Co., its publisher, to be as close as possible in concept and feeling to a printed book. And yet notice the differences. First, look at the title page.
Here is a change from the printed book: animated 3D letters in color, with a Bach harpsichord accompaniment. And a new authorial presentation of self: Prof. Minsky peeks up, Kilroy-like, from the corner of the screen. And, it turns out, he is plays the harpsichord accompaniment as well. We then proceed to the Prologue. On the right, conventional text, right out of the book. In the left margin, a magic box. Click it and out pops the author, to give you an informal commentary on his book.
Click the magic box in another place and we are invited into Prof. Minsky’s living room. We can pan around the room and various crucial items will light up as we pass over them, indicating that Prof. Minsky is commenting on them, much as he might if we were his guest.
This living room panorama constitutes what, in classical rhetoric, was called a “memory theater.” An orator, when he had to memorize a complex argument, would associate its basic parts with various elements in a well-known physical location, often the room or forum in which he was to speak. The visual memory thus aided the conceptual memory. Concepts were equated with specific physical locations. So here, the living room is turned into a domestic memory theater, with various parts of it coming alive with the “arguments” stored beneath it.
What’s going on in this new reading experience?
First of all, nothing goes on that alters the printed text. It is there just as in the book. No changes.
Second, sound. A musical greeting from the author’s harpsichord welcomes the reader.
Third, motion in 3D space. The title page puts letters into a 3D dynamic space, making us notice the regular printed space as what, after all, it always is, flat and fixed.
Fourth, two elements vital to live human communication but absent in print, voice and gesture, return. The author walks around in the margin, waving his arms like a typical professor in full lecture mode. Gesture is fundamental to how we communicate, a continual counterpoint to how we speak. Gestures come in a stylized repertoire, culture-specific in many cases but not in all (the well-known “universal gestures”). They also declare our personality, some of us waving a lot and others a little, some dynamically, some anemically. Classical rhetoric had already in ancient Greece codified these gestures and taught them as a fundamental part of a public speaker’s education. This repertoire lasted, as a recognized learnable code, for both professional speaker and professional actor, through the eighteenth century.
When written text left out this element of communication, a significant act of expressive self-denial was passed. When text was regularly read aloud, performed rather than read silently, as it was until after the Middle Ages, this omission could be rectified. But ever since reading fell silent, composition teachers like me have had to talk about things like “shape,” “rhythm,” and “emphasis” in printed prose to try somehow to create in the printed text a pale simulacrum of gesture.