Cyber - Project - Cyber-Text Technologies: Presenting the Future of the Past

Cyber-Text Technologies: Presenting the Future of the Past

Cyber Text Technologies will ascertain from a small but detailed set of case studies to what extent all forms of human communication might be not only systematic, but also effectively skeumorphic, unconsciously emulative, and to an extent formulaically replicative. We aim to investigate through machine learning that employs refined and targeted modeling whether or not specific conventions and identifiable trends characterize every text technology from Cuneiform to Snapchat. Since text technological transformation is constant and cyclical, it is a definitive goal of this project to attempt to project into the future the ways in which these trends will manifest themselves in the development of new information systems and forms of communication from Virtual Reality to Incorporeal Technologies.

Publications:
Treharne, E. 2017. Manuscript Production. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. 1–7.

Researchers

https://english.stanford.edu/people/elaine-treharne

Elaine Treharne

Director of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)

Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and by courtesy, of German Studies

My main research interests are in Early British manuscripts--their intentionality, materiality, functionality and value. I have published widely in this area over the last twenty years, focusing most specifically on religious poetry and prose, and manuscripts dating from c. 1020 to c. 1220. My current projects focus on the book as object together with the long History of Text Technologies from the earliest times (c. 60,000BCE) to the present day. I research the hapticity and phenomenology of the Medieval book, and will be publishing The Phenomenal Book,500-1200based on this work. This research also extends to a more modern period of the Medieval, and to the work of artists, including William Morris, Edward Johnston, Philip Lee Warner, Eric Gill and David Jones, and I'll be publishing on these figures in The Aesthetic Book: Arts and Crafts to Modernismeventually. I have completed work on Salisbury's early medieval manuscripts for the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimileseries, and I am now planning a longer-term research project on Salisbury books and documents, entitled Collective Memories in Salisbury Cathedral Library and Archives, 1200 to 1600,which will explore this exceptional collection of early textual materials still held in situ. I'm also working on a new (short) book focused on Medieval Materiality and Culture, provisionally called Invisible Thingsand I am beginning work on borders and boundaries in Early Medieval Britain, building on research developing out of an article I published on this area.

https://profiles.stanford.edu/ronald-egan

Ronald Egan

Confucius Institute Professor of Sinology

Research areas include traditional Chinese poetry, aesthetics, literary culture, social history, storytelling, and the relations between the literary and visual arts. Current project include a study of Hong Mai's *Yijian zhi* (12th c.), a translation of the complete poetry and prose of Li Qingzhao, and inscriptions of Tang poetry on paintings of the Ming-Qing period.