Live Tweeting

  With the conference season apparently in full swing, 'tis the season to be tweeting. Conference organisers these days give instructions as to what hashtags to use and what the social politenesses are for each occasion. These tweetstreams can be fun and useful for those of us not able to actually be there and who would like a few clues as to what is going on without having to wait for the conference papers to be published.
  However, it does seem that there needs to be some courses on Live Tweeting 101 in order for us all to get the best out of it. Academics have spent years learning how to put in all the necessary apparatus to make a paper have respectable street cred, but they have often not practised the art of extreme summary. It's a good thing to do. Makes you think about what the point is rather than just how much corroborative evidence needs to be piled on to justify an opinion.

Twitterer from BL Royal 12 C XIX, f.52v

  So, some tips from someone who likes to read these things - sometimes.

1. Limit tweets to one every 10, 15 or 20 minutes. That gives the tweeter the chance to work out what the main point is, and doesn't completely overwhelm the tweetee's inbox with a rolling cascade, preventing them from reading the rest of their day's tweets.
2. Use minimal hashtags so as to leave some space to say something.
3. Please don't use excessive acronyms and abbreviations. Keep it to short plain English sentences. If you try to cram in too much by abbreviating, it is too much trouble to the reader to try and unscramble what you are talking about.
4. Remember you are talking to people who are not listening to the paper. In group allusions are a turn off.
5. The final result should be a four sentence summary of the main point and purpose of the paper, not an on-the-fly scrambled analysis or attempted dialectic.

  I blushingly confess I have unfollowed a couple of people who had interesting things to say on subjects that fascinate me because the jumbled cascade of live tweeted commentary made me feel under siege. Hey, I like the concept of live tweeting, it just has to be done really well.
  Many years ago, before Twitter was invented, the family medievalist tried the, then new and scarey, concept of bulletin board tutorials in which participants had to put down very brief thoughts on the weekly topic. After the initial panic subsided (At that time some students had never used a bulletin board.), the students discovered that being forced into brevity made them clarify their thoughts marvellously. They actually began to enjoy the exercise. Maybe those conference papers should be tweeted in the first place.
  Now live historical tweeting - that is good fun. But I guess that involves planning and you can have it all typed out ready to cut and paste it into tweets at the appropriate moment. Listening analytically and typing simultaneously, while keeping within the bounds of Twitter, is a new skill for all of us.

Back, or Forward, to Hieroglyphics

  Many years ago when multimedia was a novelty and the world was young and innocent, twelve year old multimedia designers told us that the written word, in terms of alphabetic spelling, was going to become extinct. We were told that the more intuitive mode of communication for hypertext links and task initiation was in the use of graphic symbols; pictograms or ideograms, although young multimedia designers were unfamiliar with these terminologies. They called them graphic hot links back then.
   As a middle aged fogey back then, as opposed to the geriatric fogey that I am now, I begged to differ. After all, what is so intuitive about a quasi-3D button on a 2D screen and what is so intuitive about doing everything by pressing buttons anyway? My granddaughters would not understand this now, and their opposable thumbs are developing whole new skills and functions. I compromised and wrote captions on my buttons in my alphabetic dogmatism.
   Nonetheless, I fail to see what is so intuitive about a picture of a rabbit running across the bottom of the screen as a navigation symbol for the next page, or about a cartoon dog fetching items from a letterbox as an email link. Furthermore, the use of graphics shaped like electrical switches is not intuitive, it is merely utilising learned symbolic communication from older technology. Besides, I can never work out which is on or off anyway since they changed real switches from little levers that pointed up or down to rocker switches with a vertical line and a circle on them. These are ideograms in their own right, but not particularly intuitive.
   I think it was because the web started off as a text based medium that restored text links to respectability, even though it is now filled with everything that whistles and sings. Drop down menus had words on them, even if menu shortcut bars had symbols on them. We went back to believing in alphabetic writing for a while.
   I have noticed a recent return to graphic symbolism, but the symbols have become even more simplified and abstract. Gmail now has strange little monochrome graphics instead of headings that say "trash", "archive" or "label". I have to hover the mouse over them to make the words come up in order to know which is which. My antique Kindle (nearly a year old!) has real buttons which say "menu" and "home" and the like, while my husband's new one has buttons with strange little symbols which all look like little geometric grids, indistinguishable one from the other without a good light and reading glasses. We are going back to pictograms, but they do not have the essential characteristic of being readily distinguishable.
   Intriguingly, as technologies change, the pictograms themselves are becoming increasingly abstracted. The standard graphic symbol for "save", for example, is a picture of a floppy disk, which many younger users of computers may never have even seen. The pictogram of a floppy disk has transformed into an ideogram for saving a file to whatever medium is being used. The garbage can symbol for trash is well recognised, but I always used to panic when using a Macintosh because to eject a removable medium, you had to drag it to the trash. The learning part of my brain recognised this as merely a process, while the intuitive part always panicked that I was trashing the contents of the medium and my files would all disappear. Mind you, with Windows I had a mental problem with clicking the "start" button to turn it off, but they have fixed this now as the button has no misleading captions, just that annoying little quadripartite flag, which is neither informative nor intuitive but merely an arrogant brand recognition symbol. Is this simplifying onscreen communication, or making the language of the process more complex and subtle?
  On other technological gizmos, real live buttons are no longer the simple analogue for binary function that they used to be. Gadgets get smaller, so rather than fill up space with loads of buttons, a few buttons perform different functions when used in different combinations. To remember how to work these permutations and combinations we have to read the manual. Back to ye olde alphabetic writing again, and yet I remember when it was considered that operating manuals, whether for gadgets or computer software, should be quite unnecessary. The more graphic and intuitive it gets, the more we need the words. 
   Old books about writing put these various schemes on a timeline of increasing conceptual complexity; pictograms, ideograms then alphabetic writing. We are actually using a combination of all three today, which some would say is the death of proper writing, but I think may represent a whole new complex of mental decoding of symbolic language.
   So why am I rabbiting on about this stuff right now? Well, just to keep you amused and to deflect attention from the fact that updates to Medieval Writing may be a few weeks off yet, as we are in school holidays down here and that means extensive visits from granddaughters, and besides, I am just in the process of buying a new fishing kayak.

Whatever Happened to Shorthand?

You know how you are sitting around after dinner talking about one thing and the conversation wobbles off into something else. It started with reminiscences about how the education system used to be about several decades ago, and I recalled that girls who were not in the academic stream learned shorthand. Those who proved adept at it then went on to become secretaries, rather than humble typists.
Shorthand was gradually eroded away as a result of technological change. The first was the invention of the dictaphone machine, with execrable sound quality, but which allowed letters to be typed without the intervention of a shorthand transcription. The takeover of the workplace by the personal computer meant that the boss sometimes even typed his own letters, without the intervention of a secretary. Likewise, at meetings and seminars there is likely to be a mini-disk machine on the table rather than a person taking minutes. It seems like technological improvement, but the ability to edit and interpret the material being recorded is removed. Silly jokes, embarrassing remarks and offensive asides are all preserved for posterity along with the official record.
Shorthand was employed in the days of the Romans, in a form known as Tironian notes, which appears in manuscripts up to around the 10th century. During the later medieval period university students, legal recorders and others who had to write quickly from the spoken word employed very simplified scripts with numerous abbreviations. Shorthand has not, of course, entirely disappeared. It is making a big comeback in the new guise of SMS speak. Strangely enough, I do not recall anyone in my youth suggesting that the demise of language and literacy was at hand as a result of people using shorthand, which was simply regarded as a practical means to an end.
Does anyone out there still use shorthand?