Readings for this week
- Bucholtz, Mary. “The Politics of Transcription.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 32, no. 10, 2000, pp. 1439–1465.
- Zawacki, Alexander J. “How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples.” Atlas Obscura, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shadows-from-the-walls-of-death-book.
- Searle, Steven. A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe, and East Asia. 6 Aug. 2004, http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html
Questions / Thoughts
- Information lives in not only words, but also intonation, utterance, facial expression, gestures and context. However, when these information are recorded and compressed into the form of text, how to keep a high fidelity of the information? How to convey those non-text based information into text?
Try my own transcription
Source: An interview with Patti Smith (Stockholm October 1976)
Length: 5:36 mins
Transcription
Question:
What does freedom mean to you?
Patti:
Freedom is inside of me. It means that I’m not hung up with like anybody’s idea of how I should be. You know, I’m out side (I’m outside) of society. I’m an artist. Rock and roll is my art. I’m the nigger of the universe and I’m free because I can leap up and scream. I can put my fist up in the air. I don’t give a shit, you know. I’m not afraid of death, you know. It’s like, you know. Yeah, I’m not afraid of anything except for (uhh) fear itself. I mean, that to me is the greatest thing to fear. It’s the fear itself collapse of the imagination. Otherwise, I feel pretty good.
My father was sort of a beatnik, and he believed in, the one thing my father believed more than anything else was the development of the country of the mind. He believed that the mind was a country and he had to develop it. You have to build and build and build and build the mind. That was his whole philosophy — is the development of the mind. My mother believed in the development of the heart. And I believed in the development of the hand. So we between the three of us: head, heart, hand. HHH, that’s good. Ivan.
Ivan:
Hi Patti.
Patti:
Radio Ethiopia
Question:
What does that mean?
Patti:
Radio Ethiopia is our new record, and it represents to us a naked field where in anyone can express themselves. It’s a free radio, you know, where the DJs, the people with the DJs.. When we perform Radio Ethiopia, I play guitar. I don’t know how to play guitar, but I just getting a perfect rhythm and I play, I don’t care. And the people are allowed to do as they wish. If it’s a really good show, there’s like a thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand people, fifty thousand minds, fifty thousand subconsciousness that I can dip into. I mean, the more people submit, and the more I submit, the greater show it’s going(gonna?) to be, the greater we’re going (gonna?) to be. I mean, I don’t like audiences that sit there and act cool like this. Because nothing is going to happen.
Question:
I think about liberation stuff, liberation of yourself that stuff. It’s like a huge liberation game, a lot of people are walking around saying how free they are, you know, saying all these dangerous sexy words to demonstrate..
Patti:
Yeah, but if you talk about anything too much, you know, if you spend too much time defining what you do, or telling people that you’re free or being defensive about your freedom obviously you’re not free, right. You know, it’s like anytime you have to push things down people’s throat. I mean, I don’t, I don’t try to seduce, I do what I do. Ten people come, ten million come, great. What I do, I believe in, you know. It’s like liberation and all those a lot of movements. Whether it was like beatniks, hippies, women’s lib, they’re all just new political structures, they’re all new dogma. They’re just to me as soon as.. We want to initiate change. But as soon as you get it, you structure your change as soon as you start writing pattern, as soon as you write some political order, write dogma. You’re right there with Catholicism. You’re right there with communism. Anything, anytime (when) you start stating, this this and this, rules and regulations, you’re no longer liberated, you’re just like a new political game, whether it’s religious, you know, spiritual whatever, social.
Question:
It’s all like the door saw break on through the other side.
Patti:
Yeah, and then after you break on through the other side, then you break on through the other side, and the other side, and the other side. And our point is that you can, you spend your whole life keep breaking on through. You can’t just break on through once and think, well, I’ve made it, I broke through. There’s a million membranes to break through. There’s a million places to go, you know, you move to another direction, another dimension — big deal. We went to the moon — big deal. We went to Mars — big deal. We keep moving and moving, and moving, and moving, you know. Mohammad went through seven heavens, big deal. I want to see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousand heaven. You know, it’s like, going through the other side, it’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million door aren’t enough. You have to go beyond, beyond one reflexion, beyond the mirror, beyond beyond.
Reflection