When I highlight the text in a PDF, I’m only using a fraction of what the 1980s-era supercomputer in my laptop (or iPad, for that matter) can do. Why not use r-Apache or another solution to allow me to directly interact with the models in the text? Why not provide an animated or multi-dimensional representation of the data? Why not have deeply embedded links to archival documents (something I’ve tried to do in my own working papers) so that readers can browse the entirety of the memoranda I’m citing? Why not, in other words, have “journal” “articles” that work more like … the Web?
Paul Musgrave of Georgetown, visiting The Duck of Minerva, asks why computing metaphors remain resolutely analog.
This is the kind of stuff Amanda spends her days learning, writing, and thinking about. She recommends scholar and media theorist Freidrich A. Kittler’s “Protected Mode” for a deeper look into the trend toward user friendliness, icons’ increasing replacement of text, and the phenomenon of Protected Mode. Bonus points for reading it in the original German!
