Ways of Knowing

 

The World According to Sound

 

Season 2, Episode 8

 

The Ethics of Technology

 

[sound of car starting]

 

Chris Hoff: About one in 50 Americans has some form of paralysis. Most of these cases come from spinal cord injuries, which most frequently happen in car accidents.

 

[sound of car horns]

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: Paralysis can mean anything from total loss of body control to the loss of the function of specific limbs. But there are emerging technologies offering hope — things that might one day be able to restore the use of a person’s arms or legs, and can even now allow a person to control a robotic arm just using their thoughts. They’re called brain-computer interfaces.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

Sara Goering: And they are about the size of a dime, maybe? Pretty small. They get implanted usually on the surface of somebody’s brain.

 

CH: Sara Goering, professor of philosophy at the 91̽��. She specializes in disability and bioethics.

 

SG: That requires a surgery, right? It requires a burr hole in the skull to get access to the surface of the brain. And from there it can read the electrical activity that is going on in a certain cortical region.

 

CH: People with severe injuries or impairments –– often those who have experienced strokes or are paralyzed –– can benefit the most from these brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. BCIs can help people who have lost the ability to speak, communicate again or those who can’t use their arms or legs learn to use robotic substitutes.

 

SG: BCI devices are things that are on or in the brain, and they’re reading neural activity, and then they’re using it to control something outside the body. So it’s a kind of reading out of the brain.

 

CH: Imagine squeezing your fist. When you have that thought, there’s a certain pattern of brain activity that occurs. BCIs can capture that pattern, and translate it into action. So if you have a robotic arm hooked up to a BCI, by merely imagining the phenomenon of squeezing your fist, you can make the robotic arm do just that.

 

SG: It’s a totally new way of interacting with the world because you’re not using your own musculature to use something, you’re using your brain and your concentration to control the robotic arm.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: The potential benefits of brain-computer interfaces to medical science are enormous. People who are completely or partially paralyzed could one day regain the use of their affected limbs, allowing them to walk again. If you have a neurodegenerative disease like ALS and you’ve lost your faculties of speech, BCIs can help. By merely thinking of the words, a BCI can be trained to decode them and then express those words with a computer generated voice.��

 

The ethical questions that brian computer computer interfaces bring up are also enormous — and they center around concepts of agency.

 

SG: These questions of agential responsibility are really deeply bound up with our sense of agency in the world and now we’re developing these devices that offer mediation on that agency. And not one that’s visible to us in the same way that cell phones or other things are. It becomes an embodied part of how we are in the world.

 

[instrumental music ends]

 

[sound of a group of people all talking at once]

 

CH: If I’m at a bar and I hit somebody in the face with my own hand, it’s pretty clear that I’m responsible for that. I am in control of my arm and hand. I have agency over my own body. But let’s say I got into an accident and I lost the use of my arms. So instead, I hit somebody in the face with a robotic arm that I’m controlling with a computer chip inside my head. Who’s to say whether I actually intended to hit him, or if something instead simply malfunctioned? The robotic arm isn’t even a part of my body — it’s physically detached from me. How responsible do I feel now?��

 

SG: People really quickly, we might say, incorporate that sense. It becomes part of them, so they think of themselves as having the robotic arm as part of them. They’re moving it, they’re responsible for it when it’s successful. And then when it’s not successful, they’re less inclined to take responsibility for that.

 

CH: In other words, I take responsibility when my robotic arm does something I like, but am less quick to do so when it does something I don’t like.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: Controlling a robotic arm or leg with your thoughts is one thing. Having a computer read those thoughts, and potentially share them with other people, is something else.

 

SG: When we think about a sense of agency, we’re often thinking about how we enact intentions in the world and how we move our bodies. I think part of what it is to be an agent is to have internal private space. And that becomes a much more publicly accessible thing when we have such devices. But generally, the things in my head, I decide when I’m going to share them.��

 

CH: With computer chips implanted in our brains, that could become increasingly more difficult. For Sara, it’s essential that the researchers and companies building BCIs ensure that the privacy of the person using it is incorruptible — that it’s impossible for anybody who doesn’t have permission to access their thoughts.����

 

SG: We’re all online, we put our banking, our social media, intimate thoughts we share. Those things are corruptible, hackable and then stuff we thought was private to us is shared. But if the thoughts that you haven’t even expressed, or the neural processing that you’re doing that’s running in the background that you haven’t even expressed in any way, that seems really worrisome. But then, if anybody can hack into that, right? Suddenly the movements that you are taking yourself to be making could be hackable. That seems horrifying to me.

 

CH: With corporate-owned computer chips implanted in someone’s head, the danger of them being abused is obvious. And that’s to say nothing of more pragmatic things. Like what happens if there’s a bug in the technology, or something malfunctions?

 

SG: Also let’s think, you have hardware put in your head that takes a surgery to get it there, takes a surgery to get it out of there. And hardware goes bad, leads go bad, electrodes — there’s scarring around them that doesn’t work anymore. And then what happens if the company goes under? There are lots of cases out there of people who are getting good benefits and the company, it’s not profitable and so it goes under.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SG: These are technologies that are really cool and exciting but can fundamentally alter the way we are in the world, and we should be thinking really carefully about those and what it means. I think there’s some good to be done from thinking about that very abstractly, as a philosopher or an STS person or something. But I think there’s a lot of value in really being on the ground with people who are developing them and the early users of them to understand what it’s like in practice. We can shape the way it goes by being part of that.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: To treat any new technology or innovation as an example of progress is clearly flawed. Brain-computer interfaces aren’t de facto good. Some aspects of them are extremely beneficial, others seem potentially nightmarish. The ethics of technology aims to uncover all the possible consequences of a new tech on human beings and society, and above all, to protect against the misuse of technology.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: Here’s five texts that’ll help you learn more about technology and ethics as a way of knowing.

 

“The Battle for Your Brain,” by Nita Farahany

 

CH: A book that navigates the complex legal and ethical dilemmas posed by modern neurotechnology.

 

“Bionic Pioneers,” by Jennifer French and James Cavuoto

 

CH: This tells the stories of 10 people with neurological disabilities who made the decision to use a neurotech device to treat their condition.

“Policy, Identity, and Neurotechnology,” edited by Veljko Dubljević and Allen Coin

 

CH: A volume that looks at the past, present and future of brain-computer interfaces��

 

“What is it like to use a BCI? – insights from an interview study with brain-computer interface users”

 

CH: A paper that explores the social and ethical implications of BCIs

 

“Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency”

 

An essay that treats the philosophical and legal ramifications of BCIs on our conceptions of agency and what it means for a human to “act.”

 

CREDITS

 

Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91̽��faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, Human Gazpacho, Graffiti Mechanism, Serge Quadrado, Bio Unit, and our friends, Matmos.

 

The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

 

END

 

 

Ways of Knowing

 

The World According to Sound

 

Season 2, Episode 7

 

Glitches

 

[sound of projector]

 

[20th Century Studios movie intro music plays]

 

Sam Harnett: It’s easy to take for granted all the machinery required for you to watch a movie — until something goes wrong.

 

[projector sounds and music stutter and skip]

 

SH: The projector jams. The sound gets out of sync. The frame becomes misaligned. Or if you’re at home: Your internet connection drops, your laptop dies, the movie’s buffering, the image freezes.��

 

Mal Ahern: When you experience that glitch, what you’re being reminded of is that there is this whole physical infrastructure that is supporting what we think of as this immateriality, we think of as this magic.

 

SH: Mal Ahern, professor of cinema and media studies at the 91̽��. For her, glitches are not something to be ignored, but studied. They’re clues that can help us uncover the inner workings of what is around us, lead us to new perspectives and hidden stories.

 

[sound of projector]

 

SH: Mal has spent years studying glitches in everything from printers to projectors. She’s traced the errors in movie projection, particularly in theaters. Over time, these errors tell a story of automation, labor and changing attitudes about quality and consistency. They show how we have come to accept a viewing experience on our digital devices that movie watchers in the past would have never tolerated.��

 

[sound of projector]

 

[cartoon music plays]

 

SH: Back in the 1940s, there were always two projectionists in a film booth: a lead projectionist, and the assistant, who was constantly watching to head off any errors before they happened. It was dangerous work. If you messed up, the film could even catch on fire.

 

MA: Film could even get stuck in the gate and melt right before the audience’s eyes.

 

SH: A two-person team wasn’t just necessary to prevent disasters, but for quality control. The pair could make sure the film stayed aligned, in focus, and lined up with the sound. A major part of the job was making sure that there was a seamless transition from one film reel to the next.

 

[sound of projector]

 

[cartoon music plays]

 

MA: If you talk to projectionists, even today, they’ll tell you a lot of their job is anticipating that kind of error before it happens. And a lot of them say it’s actually very sonic. They hear that something is about to go wrong before they see it, right? They hear some weird clicking or some weird lag, and they realize, “Oh, I’ve slipped a sprocket or the tension is off.”

 

[sound of projector]

 

SH: In the 1950s, the movie industry developed a variety of film that was far less flammable than nitrate. Once fires were less of a risk, theaters started cutting down from two projectionists to one.

 

MA: Fewer people are in the booth. And at first, projectionists really resisted this because they said it was going to compromise the quality of their projecting because there was somebody — the second projectionist — just watching the image on the screen the entire time while the lead projectionist was threading up the next projector.

 

[sound of projector threading]

 

SH: Despite resistance from projectionists, theaters continued to remove people from the booth. The reduction from two-person teams to one was just the beginning.

 

MA: That was a relatively minor change to what came later with the automation of projection booths.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: In the 1960s and ‘70s, theaters developed machinery and techniques to do things like automate switching reels and interlock projectors so one print could be shown on multiple screens. Theaters started growing from one screen to many: multiplexes.

 

MA: When you get to the multiplex, you have one projectionist often running, you know, five, six, eight, booths. Running from booth to booth. And that’s why film times are staggered the way they are in multiplexes — so that the projectionist can be there for the changeovers if they need to be, right? Or to load and unload the platters.

 

SH: With the switch to automation in multiplexes, there was a surge of errors — the kind of mistakes that any good projectionist would have caught.

 

MA: The exact same kind of thing ended up happening that projectionists warned of in their own publications in the 60s and 70s, which is that if you bring these automated technologies in, you’re going to see more of these errors. Out of focus, big jumps in volume, a jumpy transition, maybe a few seconds — or even a split section is noticeable enough — of just nothing, blank screen. I have a whole folder of local news reports, mostly in the 1980s actually, of people complaining about projectionist errors and poor film projection at multiplexes. A lot of local film critics in Long Island and suburban Michigan will say, “I went to see this movie and it was impossible to even follow it because the projection was so bad, not like in my day….” etc., etc.��

 

SH: Moviegoers were being subjected to the kinds of projection mishaps that an earlier audience would not have accepted — blurry pictures, misaligned frames, the image out of sync with the sound. These were the kind errors a good projectionist would head off before they ever happen.

 

MA: A lot of what they’re doing is trying to anticipate and correct machine errors. And if they’re not there, you see tons of errors on the screen, right? So those errors kind of tell us something about the changing working conditions of people who are working in movie theaters. They tell us about the changing technology of movie theaters. They tell us about the move from a single screen to a multiplex. And they tell us about what labor theorists call deskilling.

 

SH: The increasing amount of automation turned projectionists from more hands-on, skilled workers to machine minders.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: These errors also tell a story about the audience. Over time, viewers have accepted less and less agency over their experience at the theater. Because what choice did they have if there was a problem? Most likely now, there was no one in the booth.��

ƒ��

MA: If something goes wrong, people can’t just yell, “Focus!” They have to go out, go to the manager’s office, go to the teenager selling popcorn at the counter, and say, “This film image is messed up, the film’s stuck in the projector, the changeover never happened, the frame lines is in the middle of the screen, the volume is off, the focus is off.” You know, there’s a real delay in the capacity of somebody to go and take care of those issues.

 

SH: Before all the automation, there was always at least one if not two people up in the booth. But with the multiplexes, there was often no one behind the projector. You were at the mercy of the machine and subjected to whatever errors it happened to produce.

 

MA: And then it gets to the point probably where if the issues are minor enough, you don’t really think to complain. You just kind of look through them and get used to a different kind of image quality.

 

SH: This adjustment to lesser quality has continued. Now most people stream movies at home instead of going to the theaters to watch them. And at home, you are subject to a whole host of new errors and glitches — problems with your internet connection, streaming device, laptop, projector. Not to mention that we are watching films on much smaller screens with much poorer audio quality. If you do encounter some problem with your movie — it won’t load, your bandwidth suddenly can’t support decent quality, the picture gets out of sync with the sound, your operating system won’t run the streaming service — well, then, you are even farther from a human who could help you resolve this error. It’s now all just part of your movie-watching experience.

 

[sound of video glitching]

 

SH: Laptops, phones, televisions, home projectors, wireless routers, modems — these are just a fraction of the increasing amount of machinery and electronics that surround us.

 

[sound of video glitching]

 

SH: Much of it is deliberately designed to keep us from thinking about the way it works, to direct our focus on only what it produces or allows us to do. Mistakes are a way to see through that.��

 

[sound of projector glitching]

 

MA: When you see a little error, when you see a flaw in something, it almost feels more material. It reminds you that this is a made thing.��

 

SH: Because whenever something goes wrong — whenever we encounter an error or a glitch — it doesn’t come out of nowhere. There’s always a reason. It’s happening because of something real, something material and physical.

 

[sound of static]

 

SH: There’s a mechanical failure in a movie projector, an error typed in the code, a misaligned plate in a printing press, an electrical disturbance in a radio broadcast.

 

[computer sounds]��

 

SH: When you encounter an error, ask yourself: What does this tell me about how the machine works? How it’s designed? Who builds and operates it? What kind of content it encourages or discourages? What biases are inherent in its form? How is it influencing our perception of what we’re seeing, reading and hearing?

 

MA: That’s the kind of thing that you start thinking about when you see errors ‘cause you start thinking, why did that happen and also what wasn’t happening for that error to have taken place? And it also sometimes reveals how the machine works, right? Because it’s the human’s job to hide how the machine works. It’s the human’s job to make the machine look smart.

 

[sound of projector starting, stalling and restarting]

 

SH: It is especially easy today to forget the material nature of what surrounds us. The internet, smartphone apps, streaming movies, generative artificial intelligence. They might all seem like magic. But all these digital things are all dependent on physical stuff, made by humans, which can go wrong.��

 

[sound of stalled printer]

 

SH: And really, whenever we have a seamless experience with something produced by a machine, it isn’t because machines are perfect. Machines have errors all the time. It’s because humans are there to fix the mistake before anyone else sees it. They realign the plates of the printing press, service the engine of the automobile, tweak the algorithms of the generative AI program, adjust the focus of the projector.��

 

MA: The humans are always necessary to finish the machine labor.

 

SH: So really, with an error, you are not just getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a machine. You are also seeing the ways that humans have been automated out the process, leaving us to contend with the machine and its errors all on our own.

 

MA: What you’re seeing with the errors is you’re seeing human absence, which is a funny thing to see.��

[sound of projector whirring and crashing]

 

[sound of static]

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: Whenever something goes wrong, there’s always a reason. Errors, mistakes, glitches — these are all sites for inquiry. Learning how to spot and analyze these kinds of aberrations can help us understand the inner workings of what is around us and also how humans have been removed from a process by automation. This kind of analysis is especially vital in the digital age, a time where the material nature of things is increasingly hidden from us.��

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: Here are five sources that will help you learn more about analyzing glitches, and the history of film projection.��

 

“Glitch” by Sean Cubitt

 

SH: This essay is a great theoretical primer on glitches and their significance.

 

“The Glitch Moment(um)” by Rosa Menkman

 

SH: Artists like Rosa Menkmanhave made glitches the center of their work. This book is not only an introduction to glitch art, but also has theory behind the aesthetic nature of glitches.

 

“The Dying of the Light” by Peter Flynn

 

SH: A documentary film about the automation and digitization of film projection, and its consequences for projectionists and film quality.

 

“Cinema’s Automatisms and Industrial Automation” by Mal Ahern��

 

SH: In this essay, Mal lays out her research on automated media and error as evidence in pre-digital media.

 

“Duck Amuck”��

 

SH: This cartoon from the 1950s is a classic short that revolves entirely around film mishaps.

 

CREDITS

 

Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91̽��faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, Human Gazpacho, Graffiti Mechanism, Serge Quadrado, Bio Unit, and our friends, Matmos.

 

The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

 

END

 

Ways of Knowing

��

The World According to Sound

��

Season 2, Episode 6

��

Sound Studies

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

Siri voice: Here’s an answer from Wikipedia.org

 

Chris Hoff: This is the voice of Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.

 

Siri: A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones.

 

Hoff: It can read directions to you, play music, make phone calls, set alarms, send texts and answer any questions for you that you usually use Google for.

 

Sam Harnett: Siri, what’s Steph Curry’s free throw percentage?

 

Siri: Stephen Curry has a free throw percentage of 93.3 this season in the NBA.

 

CH: When Siri was introduced in 2011, the only American English voice available was a middle-aged white woman.

 

Siri: I didn’t get that, could you try again?

 

CH: Fourteen years later, a majority of virtual assistants still sound like white women.

 

[montage of female voice assistants speaking]

 

Golden Owens: Everyone sounds different. And you can learn a lot about a person from how they sound, but you can also learn a lot about a technology from how it sounds.��

 

CH: Golden Marie Owens, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the 91̽��.

 

GO: Why does she sound so robotic, or why does she sound like a white lady, or why does she sound like a lady in the first place? All of those things can lead to a much broader discovery into things like history, histories of sound and technology, they can lead you into a deeper discussion of race, they can lead you into a deeper discussion of identity and of what it means for things to be chosen deliberately.��

 

You know, it’s really interesting that the default voice for all of these virtual assistants, at least in the United States, it’s a white woman. That’s the standardized default voice unless you change it. Why? And just asking yourself that why can lead you into so many different directions and lead you down a pathway that you may not have expected to go down.

 

CH: One path it took Golden down led to an analysis of servitude in the U.S. After all, these virtual assistants are designed specifically for just that: to do things for us, to serve us. They’re essentially virtual servants. The history of servitude in the U.S. is a long one, and slavery plays a major part in it.��

 

GO: On the surface, it feels like something that’s a complete shift because we have these white women’s voices. But when we think about what it was historically that led to these ideas of what we want in a servant anyways, there was this idea of comfort, there was this idea of something you can have power and control over. In many ways, that also applies to whiteness, but it also is very haunted by ideas of Blackness. And so there’s a way that you can’t look at these intelligent assistants as service-providing entities without thinking about where the idea of service came from in the first place.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: Golden has studied how the way people interact with the white, female-sounding virtual assistants resembles the way people spoke to Black slaves. She began her research after watching how Amazon marketed its virtual assistant back in 2014.

 

GO: It was watching the very first commercial for the Amazon Echo and going, “Oh, there’s a weird comparison there.” For reference, it’s a commercial that is about a nuclear family, this white nuclear family, and this little girl is describing all the things that the Amazon Echo can do. It’s 2014, it’s brand new, and at the end she goes, “With all the things Echo can do, it’s really become part of the family.” And my brain immediately went, “That is very specific language.” Because that is language that has often been used to describe servants, especially Black servants, as “part of the family, just like one of the family,” type of thing.��

 

And that essentially sent me on a rabbit hole of like, how much else is Blackness intertwined with the way we think about these virtual assistants? Amazon’s design guide for years had these things that said: Be adaptable, be relatable, don’t talk too much, don’t talk too loud, respond to people how they wish to be responded to. All these very specific sort of guidelines for programmers that felt like master-servant language. They felt a lot like the sorts of codes that used to be for how to behave as a proper servant and how to behave as a proper employer. And so for me, it felt like there’s this intersection of Blackness and technology that is sort of being swept under the rug because they can help us out in our houses, they can help us out in our work, they can do things for us we don’t want to do, but even that has historical ties to why servants have existed and why slavery existed.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

CH: Choosing to make the voices of these virtual assistants sound like white women helps obscure those historical ties. Even though you are speaking with these virtual assistants in a similar way to servants of the past, they don’t sound like the servants of the past. They sound like something new, disconnected from the history of servitude. A white female voice has its own cultural associations. Not because of its objective qualities, but because of how the voice has been racialized. In America, the voice, like the physical characteristics of skin color, hair texture and facial features, was racialized during slavery. People identified and categorized each other based on sound just as much as appearance — and they still do today.

 

GO: How people sort of hear race ties back into a history of how voices have been racialized throughout history. And that really in the U.S. dates back to the Antebellum era when, Jennifer Lynn Stoever writes in her book “The Sonic Color Line,” that there were enslavers essentially that could no longer tell visibly the differences between themselves and their enslaved because of so much assault, basically, and so much race mixing. And so, the sort of workaround for what we can’t tell visually — who’s Black and who’s not — is we can tell sonically. So that’s when we started creating all these definitions of what made a Black voice and what made a white voice. And so the white voice was considered to be clear, calm, controlled, high, but also sort of low energy, in some ways. And Black voices were considered to be fast, loud, coarse, rough and more emotional than white voices.

 

CH: There is no way to design a voice for a digital technology that avoids biases about the way someone speaks. There is no such thing as a “neutral” voice. When designing a product, attention is obviously paid to how it works and what it looks like. But just as much thought goes into how the product should sound.��

 

GO: Sound is sort of designed to be something we don’t think about as much. Especially within a media studies standpoint, there’s a huge emphasis on the visual, which makes sense. We’ve got movies, we’ve got TV, we’ve got streaming. We’ve got all of these different things. We’ve got VR now. But the sonic and the visual are often working together in a very specific way. In some ways, you can’t fully understand the visual unless you also understand the sound.

 

CH: In our visually dominated culture, sound is often neglected. We are far less practiced at paying attention to what we hear as opposed to what we see. Sound studies aims to draw attention to this disparity, and recenter the importance of the auditory. Vision may be the hegemonic sense, but there is much to learn if we shift our focus to the ears instead of the eyes.

 

CH: Here’s five texts that will help you learn more about sound studies as a way of knowing.

 

“The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening,” by Jennifer Lynn Stoever

 

CH: Stover explores the relationship between race and sound in the U.S. For her, ideologies of white supremacy are dependent on what we hear –– not just what we see.

 

“How Do Voices Become Gendered,” by David Azul

 

CH: This essay challenges the assumption that the acoustic properties of the human voice are determined biologically.��

 

“The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music,” by Nina Sun Eidsheim

 

CH: Eidsheim studies singers Billie Holiday, Marian Anderson, and Jimmy Scott to show how listeners measure race through the vocal timbres of their voices.��

 

“Multivocality,” by Katherine Meizel

 

CH: Just like identity, vocality –– how one sounds –– is fluid. Meizel looks at singers throughout history who have reinvented their identities by engaging in what she calls “multivocality.”

 

“The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: how white people profit from identity politics,” by George Lipsitz

 

CH: A foundational work on the forces that encourage white people not only to keep the status quo, but to invest in structural forms of racial discrimination, or what Lipsitz calls “whiteness.”

 

CREDITS

 

Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91̽��faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, Human Gazpacho, Graffiti Mechanism, Serge Quadrado, Bio Unit, and our friends, Matmos.

 

The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

 

END

 

Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 5

Abstract Pattern Recognition … or, Mathematics

Sam Harnett: In any math class you take, regardless of the subject, you’ll probably spend most of your time doing the exact same thing: learning how to solve problems that someone else figured out a long time ago.

Jayadev Athreya: Every problem you work on, up to, basically through college, you know that someone knows the answer to it.

SH: Jayadev Athreya, professor of mMath and the comparative history of ideas, at the 91̽��.

JA: It would be like, for instance, if the only thing we did in English classes was only sort of regurgitate stuff that was already done. Never get a chance to write an essay. Never get a chance to express your own thoughts in a creative way. Or if in an art class, you only did paint by numbers. Or you only did music class, you were never allowed to play a piece of music until you played scales for 10, 20 years.

SH: These are examples from an essay about math education by Paul Lockhart. His point was that basics are valuable in math, just as they are in art and music. But so is creativity. You have to learn how to approach a problem in counterintuitive, novel ways. That’s what mathematicians spend their lives doing and to be good at it takes practice. Practice that Jayadev thinks should start far earlier in math education. So in his courses, Jayadav sometimes gives students problems that he doesn’t know the solution to or problems that no one has figured out yet.

JA: To be creative, you do have to have some kind of proficiency and build that. But I think what Lockhart and many mathematicians would argue is that you have to allow people a glimpse of the creative and a glimpse of the unknown, a glimpse of the fact that they can contribute something new to motivate them, to build that proficiency.

SH: He doesn’t expect students to solve the problems. It’s about freeing them to think more expansively, to search unexpected places for solutions.

JA: Mathematicians are actually very comfortable in a space of not knowing something, about being confused about things, about feeling like they are kind of at a loss. And math for a mathematician, doing math research, isn’t about, ‘Oh, I want to find the one right answer.’ It’s about trying to find the patterns that underlie, well, the world around us but also the worlds we create in mathematics.

[instrumental music plays]

SH: There is a common perception that math is the ultimate rational endeavor, even the opposite of creativity. It’s all about precision and calculation, being good at following rules. Again, this is what most people spend their time doing in math classes. That’s not how mathematicians like Jayadev think of it.

JA: So, one definition of math that I kind of like — of course it’s not perfect, no definition is — is mathematics is the language of abstract pattern recognition.

SH: Mathematicians are searching for patterns in whatever they’re studying, be it algebra, topology or number theory, and then trying to explain those patterns in an elegant and insightful way. To do that, they often turn to another thing that, like pattern recognition, may not feel very mathematical: metaphors.

JA: And the way you are often able to solve such a problem is to say, ‘Oh, what are the new patterns? Are there some deeper underlying patterns beyond the patterns we’ve observed?’ It’s to try to make a metaphor with some other piece of math or a piece of physics. And say, ‘Hey, these things kind of look like they fit together the same way these things fit together.’

SH: If you look back at major discoveries in the history of math, there are many examples where the revelation came from making a comparison or metaphor. Take calculus. It is built in part on the idea of treating a curve as if it was made up of an infinite number of tiny straight line segments. This comparison of two unlike things — a line and a curve — opened up a whole new way of understanding and calculating things.

JA: I think this is a really, really excellent way of thinking about mathematics. It’s a way of making these comparisons or these metaphors between things by observing their structures. So, it’s metaphors at kind of a structural — at a deep structural level.

[instrumental music ends]

SH: To people who say they can’t do math, Jayadev would point out that we are practicing finding patterns and using metaphors all the time.

JA: Everyone is recognizing patterns all the time, all right? This is what we do as humans. We are trying to create and recognize patterns.

SH: So many people who could be really good at math are driven away from it through math classes that present the subject just as memorization and repetition. Dull. Confining. Often punishing for those who tend to think more abstractly. Early on in education, there’s a tendency to divide kids into those who are good at art and the humanities, and those who are good at science and math. In some ways, math has much more in common with the humanities instead of the sciences, especially in terms of how problems are approached. In math, there isn’t the kind of testing that is essential to the scientific method.

JA: If you see us, we’re sitting with pieces of paper and notebooks and laptops and maybe some chalkboards. We don’t need million-dollar labs, and we’re doing stuff in our heads a lot of the time. We’re trying to find these patterns and tell compelling stories and develop compelling narratives about these patterns.

SH: And just like in the humanities, aesthetics are a major part of math. It’s not just about solving problems, but finding beautiful or elegant solutions.

JA: The adjectives that mathematicians will use about pieces of research are “beautiful” or “elegant.” Or sometimes they’ll be like, you know, I proved this but I don’t feel great about how it looked. I got to the end but I don’t like how I got there, so I’m still looking for a better way to get there. So, the aesthetics are something that are really important to us.

SH: The view that math is completely divorced from the humanities and creativity doesn’t just drive away people who don’t fit a certain profile. It also slows research and breakthroughs by discouraging approaches that don’t conform to a preconceived notion of what math is.

JA: One of the big things that we have to reckon with as a profession — that some of the humanities fields are way ahead of us on —, is reckoning with the role of power and the practice of mathematics: who gets to tell their stories, who gets to count as a mathematician and what counts as mathematics.

[instrumental music plays]

SH: Mathematical breakthroughs can come from all kinds of people working in all kinds of ways. A great example is the recent discovery of the “Einstein Tile.” For decades, mathematicians have been searching for a shape that could make an infinitely non-repeating pattern. This one shape could be used to tile a bathroom that stretched on forever, and would never repeat the same pattern. Many mathematicians had tried and failed to find this shape. Some believed it doesn’t exist. But in 2022, the problem was solved. A man named David Smith devised a 13-sided shape that looked from some angles like a goofy hat. Smith was not a professional mathematician, but a hobbyist. The 64-year- old had recently retired from working as a printing technician, and in his spare time, he liked to fool around with shapes, cutting them out of paper and messing around in a geometry computer program. That play led to the discovery of the famed “Einstein Tile” that had been eluding mathematicians for decades.

[instrumental music fades]

SH: Jayadev is a big proponent of messing around with pieces of paper. It was part of his process on a recent breakthrough of his own.

JA: The question that I worked on with my friends, one way we framed it is we called it the anti-social jogger program. Which is, if you live on one of these spaces of shapes with corners, like a cube, a. And you start at one of the corners — t,. There’s a house at each of the corners, let’s say — . Yyou start at one of the corners and you want to go for a run. But you’re grumpy in the morning, so you don’t want to see anyone else. You also, like, you can’t really think so you want to follow a straight path and come back home. If you’re on a sphere, it’s pretty easy to do this. No matter what direction you go in, if you go straight, you’re going to come back home.

SH: There are no corners to pass through, so you just run straight and you’ll end up back where you started. Jayadev and his colleagues wanted to see if it was possible on a dodecahedron, which has 12 pentagonal faces.

JA: With the dodecahedron, the question was actually open.

SH: No one had been able to prove it was possible or not. With all its faces and corners, the dodecahedron is a complex shape to try and navigate. Jayadev and his colleagues tried to take a different approach to a shape —– to simplify it down from three dimensions to two.

JA: How we thought about it is we kind of flattened everything out.

SH: Using pieces of paper, they experimented with different ways of cutting open and unfolding the dodecahedron. As they fooled around, they were reminded of a different area of math.

JA: What we realized was this was actually connected to something all of us had worked on before, which was something like playing Pac-Mman.

[Pac-Mman noises play]

JA: If you go off the right side of the screen, you come out the left. If you go off the top of the screen, you come up the bottom.

SH: It’s as if the left and right of the square are connected, as are the top and bottom.

[Pac-Mman noises fade]

JA: If you imagine the screen just like a piece of paper, it’s like if the left and right de sides are glued, you get a tube. And if you glue the top and bottom, it looks like a doughnutnut. That’s called a torus. If you do this with more complicated shapes, you get more complicated surfaces. And it turns out, by making a connection to these kinds of surfaces, we were able to solve our original problem.

SH: Jayadev and his colleagues applied this gluing of sides idea to their flattened dodecahedron. That allowed them to devise a search query in a computer geometry program, which crunched through all the different possible pathways. The search showed them the answer is yes —, it is possible to be an anti-social jogger on a dodecahedron. There isn’t just one running path that satisfies the conditions, but at least 31.

JA: This was this combination of abstract math, abstract geometry, a procedure called unfolding and then a really serious, deep computer search. So it brought together a bunch of different pieces of math. I don’t think we would’ve been able to do this problem a 100 years ago. It was posed 100 years ago by a couple of German mathematiciansmathematics. But we literally have both the math and computational technology to do it. It was incredibly fun because it brought together lots of sophisticated ideas, and in the end, the theorem —– we could just draw something on a piece of paper.

[instrumental music plays]

SH: Math, like the humanities, requires one to learn how to identify patterns, and then come up with a compelling story about them. There is creativity both in how one searches for patterns, but also how one explains and communicates about them. It’s an endeavor that often requires mathematicians to draw on the power of comparison, of metaphor.

SH: Here are five sources that will help you learn more about abstract pattern recognition in mathematics as a way of knowing.

“A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart

SH: A seminal critique of the way math is taught and the possible alternatives.

“Mathematics as Medicine” by Edward Doolittle

SH: In this essay, Doolittle recounts his experience in mathematics as a Mohawk Indian and the relationship between Indigenous thought and contemporary math.

“Weapons of Math Destruction,” by Cathy O’Neil

SH: A book about how big data is increasing inequality and threatening democracy … which shows the danger when we don’t think critically about how we approach problems, especially when numbers are involved.

Piper Harron’s Ph.D. thesis on the Lattice Shapes of Rings of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields

SH: In her Ph.D. thesis, Harron combined mathematics and narrative in quite unusual ways.

“Mathematicians Report New Discovery About the Dodecahedron”

SH: An article in Quanta Magazine about the work Jayadev Athreya and his colleagues did on the dodecahedron.

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretive interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. Music provided by Ketsa, Nuisance, and our friends, Matmos. The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 3

�ұ�’e��

[instrumental music plays]

Sam Harnett: In the middle of the fourth century CE, the kingdom of Aksum was one of the most powerful empires in the world. Centered in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, it stretched from Sudan across the Red Sea to Yemen. Its location on the Red Sea allowed it to have a monopoly on the trade route between Rome and India. It played a major role in the histories of Egypt, Persia and Rome, as well as the early days of Christianity and Islam. Aksum left an extensive written record of its accomplishments, but that record was long overlooked by Classics scholars in part because of the language it was written in: the ancient African language of �ұ�’e��.

[background music continues]

[Hamza Zafer reading �ұ�’e��]

SH: Like Latin, �ұ�’e�� is rarely spoken today. It survives as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches. But in the fourth century, it was the language of the Aksum empire.

[Zafer reading Aksum inscription in �ұ�’e��]

SH: This is an account of how the Aksum conquered its neighbors and expanded. It is being read in �ұ�’e�� by Hamza Zafer, a professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures.

[Zafer continues reading in �ұ�’e��]

SH: The inscription was chiseled onto a giant slab of stone in the center of Aksum. It’s one of countless stone slabs, or stellae, that Aksum kings erected during the height of the empire. Over a hundred still stand in the center of modern day Aksum in Northern Ethiopia. These stones had the deeds of the kingdom written not just in �ұ�’e��, but also Ancient Greek and Sabiac. Like the Rosetta Stone that helped decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics, these other languages helped give insights into �ұ�’e��.

[Zafer continues reading in �ұ�’e��]

Hamza Zafer: It’s actually telling you about — primarily it’s an inscription celebrating a particular conquest. That tends to be most of the inscriptions from this particular period.

SH: For Professor Zafer, the Aksumite Empire is just one of many threads of history and culture that this language brings to life.

HZ: I have been teaching �ұ�’e�� for many years. I’m not from Ethiopia or Eritrea. I am from Pakistan. But I have been drawn to the language for a number of reasons, one of them being my own desire to bring into the fray languages of the Global South — classical languages of the Global South — which also includes languages from places like Pakistan.

SH: Hamza’s interest in �ұ�’e�� began with his desire to better understand the Quran. He wanted to know how different cultures and languages influenced the writing of this sixth century text, and how that writing reflected the world that produced it.

HZ: There’s a lot of Syriac and Aramiac and Hebrew and even Greek influence in the language of the Quran. It’s a text from the sixth century in Western Arabia. It was a confluence of different cultures. But one language that was a part of the Quran’s language that I didn’t have easy access to at the time when I was doing my doctoral is �ұ�’e��, classical Ethiopic, so really that’s where it started. It started with this curiosity because I was trying to have an expansive view of how the language of the Quran reflects its cultural world.

SH: The Quran is filled with vocabulary drawn from �ұ�’e��. Knowing this language allows for a richer understanding of the text — the history and culture that it draws on.

[instrumental background music plays]

Hamza’s study of �ұ�’e�� led him to more and more fascinating texts. The Aksumite inscriptions. Early versions of Bible stories. Letters detailing the coming of Islam. Poetry, historical records, religious texts. He became entranced with the language itself — its phonetics and beauty. Soon he was focused directly on studying �ұ�’e��.

HZ: It’s the same type of reason that one would study Greek or Latin or Sanskrit or Arabic. It’s like an insight into the past, into the premodern world.

SH: Through �ұ�’e��, the view of world history is quite different from what one sees through other classical languages like Latin and Greek. It provides a countervailing narrative to a Eurocentric perspective on world history.

HZ: Studying a language like �ұ�’e�� will fundamentally change your notion of the way history has gone. Because so much of the way we have understood history, of course, is through a colonial, a postcolonial heritage, which places Europe at the top. But studying a language like �ұ�’e�� opens you up to another world, opens you up to another set of possibilities about where knowledge comes from. It can be both an intellectual and also maybe a political act. We’re still at such an embryonic stage in the study of �ұ�’e��. I imagine 20, 30, 50 years down the line, maybe it’s not going to be so odd or unusual to study a language like �ұ�’e��. But right now, of course, because we’re still very much in an era where the idea is that knowledge comes from Europe and the North, it seems to be an outlier. But it is not an outlier. It is a language that has a 2000 year history.

SH: In most Classics departments, Greek and Latin are still the only two languages that are studied.

HZ: There are numerous other languages like �ұ�’e�� that belong to what we call now the Global South, that are these classical traditions. Investigations of these languages tell us that there are these other trajectories of thought; there are other hierarchies of knowledge that are possible. So part of the attraction of studying �ұ�’e�� is that it opens you up to understanding different connections. You understand that Africa and India, Africa and Arabia, Africa and Europe had these other types of connections and other types of movements of ideas, movements of thought. There were producers of culture, producers of intellectual traditions within Africa whose ideas spread widely, and this was the medium through which they travelled.

SH: Up until recently, the only reason European and American scholars studied �ұ�’e�� was because of its importance in the history of Christianity. The Empire of Aksum converted to Christianity shortly after Rome in the fourth century, and �ұ�’e�� was the language of Ethiopian Christianity. Some of the oldest surviving Bible texts are in �ұ�’e��.

HZ: So this is the first chapter of the Book of Jonah.

[Zafer reads the Book of Jonah in �ұ�’e��]

SH: The story is similar to the version that survived in Ancient Greek, but not quite the same. For instance, in the �ұ�’e�� version, God is referred to in a totally different way. Instead of being named, he is called “The Lord of the Land,” which is a much older way of referring to a deity.

[Zafer continues reading the Book of Jonah in �ұ�’e��]

SH: Scholars have pored over these kinds of differences to help get more insight on the history of early Christian stories. But that has often been where the study of �ұ�’e�� has stopped.

HZ: The challenge now is to center �ұ�’e�� in our study rather than to think of it only in relation to the North, only in relation to the Mediterranean world, but rather to understand it on its own account, on its own basis as a literary corpus, a premodern literary corpus that connects the Indian ocean world to the Eastern Mediterranean world, but also has a local universe connecting Arabia and Africa.

SH: Like any classical language, �ұ�’e�� provides a different lens, a different way of thinking about the world. You don’t need some objective or goal to get a lot out of studying it.

HZ: Students are disincentivized from taking any courses that don’t have an immediate business use in a sense. I think taking a classical language, any classical language — a European, an African, an Asian classical language — is a way to side step that a little bit, to do something purely for the intellectual pleasure of opening this other world.

[background music begins]

HZ: For me, just the study of a classical language in itself as an intellectual exercise is really, really important for critical understanding. It teaches you historicity. Something that seems so immovable, so natural like a language — when you study a premodern language that has such a long history like �ұ�’e��, you understand that language changes, which is a very important thing to understand. Language changes so the way people conceive thoughts. The way people construct thought changes. Secondly, this is not something that has a direct, immediate use. But it kind of opens you up — like time travel — it opens you up to this whole other universe of culture, of language, of thought, of belief.

CH: Here are five texts that’ll help you learn more about publishing culture and the digital humanities as a way of knowing.
“The Throne of Adulis,” by Glen Bowersock

A vivid reconstruction of the conflict between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs in the sixth century. This story is only possible to tell now because of a marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis that was covered with �ұ�’e�� inscriptions.

“The Garima Gospels,” by Judith McKenzie

The earliest surviving Ethiopian gospel books capture the phonetic beauty and poetry of �ұ�’e��. They also provide insight into the history of the Aksumite kingdom and early Christianity.

“The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages,” by François-Xavier Fauvelle

A historical account of the Middle Ages focused on Africa, where the work of artists and thinkers in places like Ghana, Nubia and Zimbabwe reverberated beyond the edges of the continent.

“The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space,” by Alexis Wick

A critical, far-reaching history of the Red Sea that makes a deeper argument about how Eurocentrism has left us with a partial and distorted view of the world.

“Decolonizing the Mind,” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

This collection of essays examines how language shapes national culture, history and identity; and presents a vision for linguistic decolonization.

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. Music provided by Ketsa, Nuisance, and our friends, Matmos. The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

END

Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 1

Paratext

Sam Harnett: Unlike most professors of literature, the primary focus for Richard Watts is not the text itself, but everything else around it: the paratext.

Richard Watts: It’s essentially everything that surrounds the text proper: the book cover, titles, chapter headings, author photos, author bios, blurbs, little paper inserts that describe the prizes the text has won, if those happened after the text was published.Everything that turns the text into a book. This is a pretty unexamined part, or aspect, of the circulation of literature.

SH: Rich is a professor of French at the 91̽��.

RW: What’s most important of all of this is mediation. Paratext allows you to see how the information and the narratives that we receive don’t come to us by happenstance. They don’t come to us uninterpreted, or without a frame. Everything we receive has some kind of accompanying discourse. We are always already preconditioned to receive text in a particular way. You can extend the kind of reflections that Marshall McLuhan makes: The medium is the message.

SH: Often paratext is part of an attempt to make a book more enticing or palatable to a particular target audience. In doing so, it does what Rich calls “pre-interpretive work.” Decisions have already been made about what a text means and how readers should think and feel about it. The paratext is constructed to urge readers to accept those predetermined interpretations.

RW: The text is being predigested for a readership or for an audience, with the idea of sanding off the sharpest corners and just making it a little more palatable, making it a little more domestic, and therefore recognizable to the target audience whatever the medium may be — whether it’s literature or cinema or some other medium.

SH: Most of the time, we are totally unaware of the paratext and the effect it’s having on us.

RW: We don’t think about it much. We think of it in maybe a functional way. It indicates who wrote the book, what the title is. There’s the publisher’s colophon. There’s copyright information. This is in a way what allows you to come to the text. And it also is a space where what you could call pre-interpretive work takes place. Whether you engage consciously the paratext or not, there is a kind of disposition toward the text that gets created by the paratext.

SH: The different elements of paratext one could analyze are vast. You could consider the font, book size, paper weight and color, price, how it is categorized at libraries, marketed at bookstores, analyzed by literary critics, summarized online. Everything from the material qualities and design of the text to the environment and context you encounter it in.

RW: I am interested in the stories that these mediations tell over time, right? What do they tell us about how we understand others, how we understand ourselves? How much is literature bound up with politics, economies, national self-understandings?

[instrumental music plays]

SH: Paratext doesn’t just apply to literature, but to any media: movies, TV, film, newspapers and even beyond that. One could think about paratext in everyday life: the way a present is wrapped, the clothes one chooses to wear, the tone of a person’s voice when they talk to you. We are constantly trying to pre-interpret ­— trying to control or at least influence what those around us will think and feel about whatever it is we’re presenting to them.

RW: I think that this kind of work extends well beyond the study of literature. This is about understanding mediation’s effect? on our lives in a more general way. I think a lot about mediation. I think a lot about translation. The paratext translates the text for a readership. It makes it legible even if it is some sense or understood to be illegible, hard to access, hard to understand, foreign, other, different, whatever it is. I think that we are surrounded by phenomena of translation and are not very alert to them, right? There are all sorts of ways in which we come to information, but this information has already been passed through a kind of filter. That filter constitutes some kind of translation.

[instrumental music fades]

[voice reads the poem “Notebook to a Return to the Native Land” begins]

[recording fades]

SH: This poem is what sparked Rich’s interest in the paratext. It’s titled “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.” It was written by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire [Aye-ME Says-AIR]. This is an excerpt of the poem being read at Césaire’s funeral.

[reading of the poem “Notebook to a Return to the Native Land” continues]

SH: This was part of a 1948 anthology of poems by writers from former French colonies, who were just starting to be published for the first time in Paris. Rich encountered it in his first semester of graduate school. It had a preface written by one of the most famous writers in France at the time.

RW: Jean-Paul Sartre.

SH: This was a big deal.

RW: Sartre was, in the post-war period, France’s most exportable intellectual commodity.

SH: It was an immediate stamp of approval. Something that would make French readers curious to buy and read the anthology.

RW: These paratextual elements and especially prefaces by well-known metropolitan French writers were absolutely determinate in the creation of a new literary field, which came to be known as francophone literature, or francophone colonial literature, or francophone postcolonial literature.

[instrumental music begins]

SH: In his preface, Sartre wrote the most about Césaire’s poem. He called Césaire the future of militant poetry. As Rich began studying the poem and preface, he remembered he’d actually seen the whole anthology somewhere before.

RW: It rang a bell

SH: It had been on the shelf in the house he grew up in. It wasn’t a coincidence. By the 1980s, this poem had become part of the canon of French literature taught in the United States. And Rich’s father had been a high school French teacher.

RW: This poem had been on the reading list for the AP exam, the Advanced Placement exam, in French.

SH: In the 1980s, this poem by a Martinican writer was arguably more read and revered in the U.S. than it was in France. A big part of the reason was that it had been endorsed by Sartre, who in the U.S. was one of the most well-known and studied French writers.

[instrumental music fades]

RW: I came to reflect on the fact that this text existed in our home. It existed in circulation in anglophone context and francophone context in part because of Sartre’s preface. So all of this got me thinking about the role of prefaces specifically and the paratext in general.

SH: Rich decided to write his dissertation on the way that paratext, like the Sartre preface, influenced francophone literature.

RW: I then spent 18 months at the French National Library digging up all kinds of obscure, unknown, virtually vanished, invisible text — as well as some very popular ones — to study how they were presented to a French-language readership.

SH: What he discovered is not too surprising.

RW: Almost all this literature passed through Paris, and as a result it passed through the kind of aesthetic and political filter that is the Paris publishing world. How do you make this literature resonate to a French readership? You often do so through the old tools of exoticization and currying to pre-existing markets for a certain kind of understanding of the ethnic other. These are sort of the logics that are at play, and that you see again in book covers, in prefaces.

SH: If you look at paratext going back to the first publications in the 30s and 40s, you can clearly see the colonial power dynamics at play. On the one hand, the publishing industry in Paris is using the paratext to try and sell this new literature to the public while at the same time making sure to undercut it and distance it from literature produced in France.

RW: So, you see it more in the early history that I was just describing. You see it more in prefaces. In the 1930s, many colonial administrators were the patrons of this new emerging literature from West Africa and the Caribbean and the Maghreb, to a certain extent. In those prefaces, they very explicitly say, “We are responsible for the products you’re seeing here.” In one line, they trumpet their intellectual conquests, as they call them. And then in the next line, they say, “But of course, this is not literature exactly as we understand it. It’s more documentary. It has this ethnographic quality.” So, it’s both admitting these works into the cannon and at the same time saying they don’t quite make it.

SH: A recurring set of tropes began to show up in the paratext. How the books are prefaced, blurbed, and the cover art — which often portrayed stereotypical ideas readers in France had about former colonies. Some of these tropes are still used today by Parisian publishers.

RW: Typically, in the second print run in the kind of cheaper paperback edition that they allow the kind of id of the publishing industry to become visible. And it’s there that you get palm trees, straw hats — just everything that conjures up a particular image of the past of the past of the Caribbean, even if the work is oriented toward the present, toward contemporary issues.

SH: Whether or not we choose to pay attention to this kind of paratext, it’s communicating to us, pre-interpreting and pre-digesting whatever is in the text itself. Perhaps it’s working to introduce us to something new, something we wouldn’t have decided to engage with otherwise. But it also could be seeding our minds with a whole host of biases and stereotypes. Rich says the solution is not to try and evade paratext, which is not even possible. But instead to teach ourselves to be aware of it and to attempt to understand how it is working on us.

RW: There can be no such thing as an unmediated text. And two, for me the real action is in the mediation. That’s what interests me. That’s where I think we can begin to understand how it is we relate to others, how it is we relate to ourselves.

SH: The paratext is anything outside of the text, from the material aspects and design to the way the book is marketed, reviewed and read. All media has paratext, things outside of the actual content that influence our understanding and experience of it. You can never totally get around paratext, only learn how to be aware of it and try to understand how it is working on you.

SH: Here are five sources that will help you learn more about paratext and colonial French literature.

Paratexts: “Thresholds of interpretation,” by Gérard Genette

SH: Genette was a big influence on Richard Watts. This book is one of the seminal works in the whole field of paratext.

“Translation and Paratexts,” by Kathryn Batchelor

SH: Batchelor is another major figure in the field. Her book looks more particularly at the role of paratext on translation

“The Digital Griotte: Bessora’s Para/Textual Discourses on Identity Politics and Neocolonialism in Contemporary France,” by Claire Mouflard

SH: An article about the writer Bessora and how her text, and paratext, critique neocolonialism in France today.

“Politics and Paratext: On Translating Arwa Salih’s al-Mubtasarun,” by Samah Selim

SH: An example of the role of paratext and translation in a different cultural context: Egypt in the 1990s.

“Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World,” by Richard Watts

SH: Watts turned that dissertation project he began after encountering Césaire’s poem into this book.

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽��. Music provided by Ketsa, Aldous Ichnite, Nuisance and our friends, Matmos.

The World according to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

END

Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 1

Digital Humanities

[poetry reading begins]

Chris Hoff: British modernist literature is dominated by a few names: William Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.

[reading continues]

CH: The story goes that these were the most important, famous poets of their time. And they’ve continued to be revered through the decades. But there were a host of other writers at the time who were also famous, but whose work was never part of the canon.

[reading of Tagore begins]

Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.

CH: This is Rabindranath [ruh BIN druh noth] Tagore [tuh GORE].

[reading of Tagore continues]

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of a hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

CH: And this is Sarojini [ser OH juh knee] Naidu [NAI doo]

[reading of Naidu begins]

When from my cheek I lift my veil
The roses turn with envy pale
and from their pierced hearts rich with pain
send for their fragrances like a wail

Or if perchance one perfumed tress
Be loosened to the wind’s caress
The honeyed hyacinths complain
and languish in a sweet distress

[reading of Naidu fades]

CH: Tagore actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first Asian person to have ever done so. And Naidu was a political activist and poet, known throughout India by the nickname Gandhi gave her, “The Nightingale of India.” Yet their work is largely unknown in the West.

Anna Preus: I had gotten deep into a Ph.D program focusing on the early 20th century and no one had ever mentioned her name to me.

CH: Anna Preus, professor of English and data science at the 91̽��.

AP: The received narratives about British modernism rely on a history of judgements by middle- and upper-class British and American men for the most part. You hear the same group of people talked about often: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot. We finally got a woman in there with Virginia Woolf in like the 70s and 80s, but she wasn’t always included. And yet there are all these other authors whose work has not been included in those received understanding of modernism.

CH: It’s a familiar idea: talented writers, thinkers and artists who have been marginalized based on their ethnicities and identities. The narrative is that they weren’t the most popular or revered in their time, and therefore weren’t included in the canon.

AP: That has resulted in the situation where they can sometimes be framed as less influential than they actually were, in my opinion, to not only literary cultures of Anglophone literature in South Asia or the Caribbean, but also to what we might refer to as British Modernism, capital B and capital M.

CH: But it turns out this narrative is not true. Writers like Naidu and Tagore were actually quite successful in their time. That fact becomes completely clear once you look at the data.

[reading of data begins]

CH: This is publishing data from colonial poets in the early 20th century in Great Britain. Anna pored over all this data for her research.

[reading of data continues]

CH: The number of times non-British authors were published was enormous, which convinced Anna that colonial authors like Naidu and Tagore were just as popular as their contemporaries in Eliot, Pound and Yeats. This means that the decision to exclude them from the canon was not because they were unknown or marginal. It was a conscious decision not to include these influential writers and to prioritize white, male authors like Eliot and Pound. To prove that these writers were popular in their time, Anna wanted to find out how many times the most well-known Indian authors were published in Britain. But getting at this information was tricky.

Publishing data is notoriously patchy. If the records exist at all, they could be stored away in some archive or library, perhaps not even labeled or easily accessible to the public.

AP: A few decades ago, a few institutions started digitizing historical text en masse. The English Catalogue of Books happens to be one of those texts that Google digitized. So, what we had when we started working on this with a team was all these kinds of PDFs, just static PDFs, and then plain text files with an endless stream of garbled, plain text. So we had to try to split that up so we could get usable data on each of the books published each year that we could both search and analyze computationally.

CH: This was no small task.

AP: There are years of work in just trying to take a PDF and turn it into a usable, correct list of books published at the time. And it’s digital humanities in part because of that process, of trying to transform a historical text — this publishing catalog — into a spreadsheet where people could see, for example, what the most popular publisher of 1913 was. Getting from Point A to Point B has involved a lot of different steps for trying to transform historical text but has also involved larger scale collaboration.

CH: Once Anna got all that publishing data into a spreadsheet, she could start asking some deeper questions.

AP: For me, particularly, I am interested in how the British publishing industry was a key institution in British imperialism. I was very interested in getting at this data to see what works were being published, especially in relation to British imperial projects. That’s why I am interested in 1902 to 1922. That’s the peak period of British imperialism in terms of land conquest.

[data reading begins]

CH: There are lots of books published about South Asia, but not so many literary texts by South Asian authors. There ended up being more than Anna thought. She combed through the data and established about 2,000 English-language texts by authors like Naidu, Tagore and others. Some Asian authors were prolific.

AP: Totally. It’s definitely caused me to shift my perspective. When I was initially looking at the data and I was in library databases looking at the number of works published by Tagore and Yeats, I saw that Tagore had doubled the library record to Yeats in at least the information I pulled. Even to me, I was like that’s striking. I’ve heard so much about Yeats.

[instrumental music begins]

CH: She started noticing something else. Another part of the story of why these writers had been excluded from the canon: Their work had been misclassified. Many works of poetry by these prominent South Asian writers were not published under the heading “poetry.” Instead, publishers labeled them as songs. Naidu’s poetry –– the readings we heard at the beginning of this piece –– are from a book titled “The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India.”

AP: Each of these authors’ first publications were so heavily, generically, associated with song. I was like, “What’s going on?” These authors are quite different, their poetry is quite different. It’s poetry. It keeps being called song. This was true for other writers all across the British colonies. I had this sort of sense that these works were being labeled as songs to associate them with oral cultures, with forms of oral literature and potentially to represent them not as necessarily literary text, high-elevated poetry or verse.

CH: It was happening not only to authors from Britain’s distant colonies, but also to those from the British Isles and Ireland.

AP: I found a ton of poetry books labeled as songs. So England, when it looked back at its own poetic history, found the kind of origins of poetry in these collectively produced ballads. They wrote a lot about that kind of poetic development in the places they colonized in the British Isles — so Wales, Ireland, Scotland. You see a lot of books of Welsh ballads, Scottish ballads, all talking about this early collective poetic culture. And so for me, that really seems like part of the reason authors like Naidu are not considered modernists is because from the beginning, they were associated with the old, and this earlier form of poetry, rather than the experimental, avant garde or boundary-pushing, or poetry of the now that you see some authors like T.S. Eliott sort of being marketed as

CH: For Anna, relegating these colonial authors to a more primitive style of poetry was no accident. And to prove it, she connected the texts of these South Asian authors with larger data sets. She could have done all this work without the aid of data analysis, but collecting this amount of information and making sense of it could take up the entire lifetime of one scholar. Digital tools can cut through a lot of the grunt work.

AP: Absolutely. If you wanted to do that for 1912, you would be reading through a 400-page publishing catalog that has 70 entries per page, and writing down each time a publisher was mentioned and then adding them up. So you’re absolutely right. What this allows us to do is break up the text, so essentially we have a column in the spreadsheet that’s publisher and then count so we don’t have to do that by hand.

CH: Instead, Anna and her team can get these results in a matter of days, which gets at a core aspect of her work: collaboration. All the tools you need are pretty easy to come by. As long as you have some coding skills, everything else –– the texts, the processing programs, and really all you need is a laptop –– it’s all basically free. But for Anna, she’s had staff members and both graduate and undergraduate colleagues helping her for years — all with a range of technical skills. This, she says, isn’t typical for humanities research, and it certainly doesn’t happen at many institutions.

In the end, though, this kind of humanistic work is not just about data. It’s about combining the work of studying primary sources, like a poem, with data analysis.

AP: The story comes from going back and forth between the books and the data. I don’t think the story comes through in the data alone. I don’t think it comes through in individual books alone. For me, it’s a constant back and forth of going to the data, looking at all these books, then seeing which of these books I can access, actually reading them, seeing how they’re marketed, what tropes are being called up, and then going back to the data and then seeing if that comes through more broadly. So it’s always this back-and-forth process.

CH: Anna Preus works in the more recent tradition of the digital humanities. It’s about applying the analysis of large sets of data in fields that aren’t typically known for using such methods, like English, philosophy or comparative literature. Using digital tools to study humanistic material allows access to the humanities that would otherwise not be possible.

CH: Here are five texts that’ll help you learn more about publishing culture and the digital humanities as a way of knowing.

“A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History,” by Katherine Bode

CH: This book uses the world’s largest collection of mass-digitized newspapers to understand how Anglophone fiction in the 19th century traveled around the world.

“Debates in the Digital Humanities,” edited by Matthew Gould and Lauren Klein

CH: A state of the digital humanities union, so to speak — at least as of 2023. This collection of essays highlights the major questions, problems,and practical knowledge of the field.

“New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and
Pedagogy,” by Roopika Risam

CH: Risam’s book examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence.

“Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace,” by Sarah Brouillette.

CH: A book about the relationship between postcolonial authors and the international marketplace where their work is published.

“In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India,” by Priya Joshi

CH: Joshi explores how Indian writers of the English novel indigenized the once-imperial form and put it to their own uses.

CREDITS

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. Thanks to Casey Miner and Ben Trefny for their voice work. Music provided by Ketsa, Serge Quadrado, Graffiti Mechanism, Oootini, and our friends, Matmos.

Ways of Knowing��

The World According to Sound��

Episode Eight��

Translation��

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[Nina Simone sings “Ne Me Quitte Pas”]��

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Ne me quitte pas
Il faut oublier
Tout peut s’oublier
Qui s’enfuit déjà
Oublier le temps
Des malentendus
Et le temps perdu
À savoir comment��

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Chris Hoff: This is Nina Simone singing “Ne Me Quitte Pas” in 1965.��

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[Nina Simone continues to sing]��

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CH: It’s a cover. The original was written by Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel in 1959.��

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[Jacques Brel sings “Ne Me Quitte Pas”]��

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CH: Two versions of the same song, made at different times by different people in different cultures. The versions are similar, but clearly not the same. And it’s in that space between the two where interesting things start to emerge.��

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[Nina Simone and Jacques Brel sing “Ne Me Quitte Pas” simultaneously]��

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Maya Angela Smith: So, I love comparing Jacques Brel and Nina Simone because you have this French-speaking Belgian man and this English-speaking American woman. One is white, one is Black. So, they bring so many different identity markers to this, which in turn gets read differently by the audience.��

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CH: Maya Angela Smith is an Italian and French professor at the 91̽��.��

She’s writing a book that follows the journey of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” from the original through many covers and adaptations. She’s interested in showing how different versions of the same piece of art, in this case a song, can bring into focus cultural, social, and political narratives.  There’s this one performance by Nina Simone where the difference between her version and the original is particularly insightful.��

��

[Nina Simone sings “Ne Me Quitte Pas”]��

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CH: It’s December of 1971. Nina Simone is performing in Paris. She’s left the U.S. after getting blowback over her protest songs and role in the Civil Rights movement. She’s been studying French for years, in part to sing this song, which was written by one of her idols. Simone really wanted her French to be perfect, especially in front of this French crowd. But it wasn’t.��

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[Nina Simone sings]��

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MAS: So right there she says, “où il ne pleut pas,” where it doesn’t rain. But in fact she says, “il ne plus pas,” which is not standard French. Many people would say this is a mistake in her pronunciation.��

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[singing continues]��

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CH: Throughout the song, you can hear Simone trying to prevent these tiny mistakes, trying to sound like a native French speaker, to pass.��

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[singing continues]��

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MAS: So you might have noticed a hesitation there where she says, “l’amour sera loi” and she pauses before the “loi” … probably because the lw sound in English is really hard to do, so it seems like she is thinking really hard before she pronounces it.��

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[singing continues]��

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CH: These are small details. But they reflect Nina Simone’s culture and history, which are being refracted through a song written in a different language by a songwriter from a different culture.��

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[singing continues]��

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Oh, lord��

Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
Ne me quitte pas
��

MAS: This is one of my favorite lines in this whole thing. Her voice breaks before the “oh,” and there is this drawn out “oh” before she says “lord.” This is real evidence of code switching. It’s jarring. It reminds us she is an English speaker, a non-native speaker of French. It also evokes a different musical tradition, to me Black spirituals, the mix of sorrow and hope that genre gives you. By code switching, she’s bringing in a whole other world into this song. ��

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[singing continues]��

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CH: These differences aren’t just markers of Simone’s culture and history, but an expression of her individual identity, which she clearly imprints on Jacques Brel’s song.��

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[piano plays and singing continues]��

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MAS: I love her piano playing. … She’s so breathy there. It’s on the verge of speaking. … There I love the intonation of, “Tu comprendras” — you’ll understand. There’s this lilt there of the question.��

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CH: This is an iconic live performance, in part because Nina Simone doesn’t finish the song. Before the final verse, she apologizes to the Parisian crowd for her language mistakes and stops the song abruptly.��

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[Nina Simone sings then speaks]��

��

Ne me quitte pas��

��

Sorry about the words, ya’ll��

��

Ne me quitte pas��

Ne me quitte pas��

��

[song ends]��

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CH: These subtle observations—the imperfections in Nina Simone’s French, the way she performs the song, her decision to stop abruptly—they reflect larger racial, cultural and political forces.��

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MAS: By doing this close reading, you get to these larger issues, which is something we do in the humanities. It’s supposed to sort of better understand the human condition by looking at various kinds of cultural production.��

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CH: This kind of translational analysis can be applied to much more than different versions of a song. It is an entire framework for considering culture and society.��

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MAS: Everything is a translation. This notion that people have original ideas? That’s not really true, right? You’re borrowing from someone else. You’re translating something you experienced into a different medium.��

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CH: The examples are endless. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” alone has some 1,600 covers and adaptations — 1,600 other versions that could be analyzed to gain insight into the people who made them, the audiences that received them and the cultures they came from.��

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[music plays]��

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CH: Maya’s work on “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is an analysis of translation in the broadest possible sense…comparing not just languages, but everything from the form and content, to the author, reception, context, history, and legacy. This wide-ranging consideration of similarities and differences is the essence of translation studies, an academic field focused on the theory, description, and application of translation. It is a helpful framework for considering the relationship between multiple versions of the same thing, as Maya has done with “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” But it can be applied more broadly to gain insight on the way different things and ideas spread. As Maya said, one can argue that everything is a translation of something.��

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Further Reading��

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Here are five texts that will help you learn more about Translation Studies as a way of knowing.��

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��“” by Susan Bassnett��

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Bassnett traces the history of translation and its role in the modern world. This is a great primer on translation studies, especially discussions about what gets lost and gained in translation. ��

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��“” edited by Laurence Venuti��

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This collection is a survey of the most important developments in translation theory. Each essay is an example of this theory in action on a wide variety of source material.��

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“” by Daphne A. Brooks��

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Brooks explores more than a century of music, and examines the critics, collectors, and listeners who determined public perceptions of Black female musicians.��

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��“” by LJ Müller��

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Müller does a feminist reading of pop music by analyzing the sound of different singer’s voices, from Kurt Cobain to Björk and Kate Bush. ��

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“” by Nina Simone and Stephen Cleary��

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“” by David Brun-Lambert��

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Two biographies about Simone: in one she tells her story, in another, we get insights on how a French audience received her.��

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Finally, there’s Maya Smith’s book about “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” which is being published by Duke University Press.��

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CH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91̽��faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, and our friends, Matmos.��

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Sam Harnett: The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.��

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[end]��

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Ways of Knowing��

The World According to Sound��

Episode Seven��

Material Culture��

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[music plays]��

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Sam Harnett: On the outskirts of the city of Newark, Ohio, there’s a series of long, completely uniform mounds of earth. They’re about six-feet high, covered in grass, and they form perfect geometric shapes. They’re very, very large—the size of dozens of football fields.��

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Chad Allen: You see the octagon, which is actually an octagon connected to a circle. And the octagon encases 50 acres and then it is connected to the circle by a walled corridor.��

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SH: Chad Allen, professor of English and American Indian studies at the 91̽��.��

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CA: What I think is interesting about the octagon is the points of entry. How is it permeable, and why it has these segments where you can come in at all these places.��

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SH: Chad has spent over twenty years studying these mounds, which we now know are more than just an impressive complex of geometric shapes.��

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CA: If you know how to read it, it encodes astronomical knowledge. ��

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SH: Only in recent decades have scholars begun to understand how these mounds work.��

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CA: The big discovery in the 1980s, and it took until the 1980s to rediscover what the Octagon Earthworks really is, is that it’s a huge clock. It’s a huge system of measuring and marking the northernmost and southernmost rise and set points of the moon.��

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[music plays]��

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SH: Lunar set points are a fairly obscure detail about the movement of the moon. The moon rises and sets at a slightly different place on the horizon each day—sometimes a bit further north, sometimes a bit further south. The changes follow a cycle that is exactly 18.6 years long. The geometric shapes of the Ohio Earthworks are arranged to precisely mark the range of lunar set points over the entire cycle. This requires detailed astronomical observations made over long periods of time. Then of course you have to build these huge mounds. Altogether it is a feat of astronomy, engineering and coordinated labor.��

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CA: They’re astronomically aligned, they’re mathematically perfect, they’re well engineered, they’ve endured for 2,000 years.��

SH: Over 2,000 years ago Indigenous people in the Americas built these Octagon Earthworks. And these weren’t the only ones of their kind. Indigenous people built thousands of mounds across the eastern half of North America.��

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CA: When you look at maps that show where sites were or where sites are, it’s really all the major waterways.��

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[music ends]��

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SH: The oldest known sites are from 3,500 BCE. And they’re thought to have had a variety of purposes: for public gatherings, religious ceremonies and to mark burials. Some, like the Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, were constructed in the shape of culturally significant animals. Others were built into American Indian cities, like Cahokia, which was built on the Mississippi River near modern day St. Louis. At its peak in the 12th Century, Cahokia had between 6,000 and 40,000 residents. More than London at the same time. Cahokia alone had around 120 different earthworks throughout the city.��

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CA: The whole eastern half of North America is really a built environment. Up into Ontario, all the way down to Louisiana, Florida, New York, all the way out to Wisconsin, Iowa.��

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SH: These earthworks confused European settlers. The general belief was that these impressive mound structures could not have been built by Indigenous people.��

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CA: So now we’ve had a couple centuries of these bizarre theories of white giants or Chinese people came over or Phoenicians came over or people from Atlantis or the lost tribes of Israel — all of these theories.����

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SH: As European settlers colonized the Americas, they destroyed the mounds, flattening the structures, building on top of them, using them for their own purposes. Across the river from Cahokia, in what’s now St. Louis, settlers disassembled the mounds and used the dirt to build an embankment for a railroad which you can still see today. Of the 120 mounds that existed there, only one remains.����

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CA: In the 19th century particularly in the early 20th century, all these amateur archeologists and looters really were hoping, either they were doing it for adventure, or they were doing it because they were going to get rich, they thought there was treasure. There still is a black market for artifacts that come out of earthworks.��

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[music plays]��

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SH: In the mid-20th century American Indians were finally able to establish some protections against the destruction of earthworks. By then most had already been destroyed. Today only several hundred of the several thousand survive. Some are on state and national park land, but a great majority are on the property of private landowners.��

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CA: They’re captive to a culture that didn’t build them and doesn’t fully understand them, and is using them often for very different reasons. ��

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SH: The Octagon Earthworks is a prime example of this captivity. ��

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CA: Settlers used the area for various activities, including mustering militia. And then in 1910 it gets leased by what’s called the Mountain Builders Country Club. In 1911, they start playing golf on the site. They make of what they think of as improvements: rough, sand traps, eventually irrigation, paths for golf carts. They build a clubhouse.����

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SH: For almost 100 years, people have been playing golf on one of the most significant American Indian sites in the country. Finally, in 2022, after a long legal battle, the Ohio State Supreme Court ordered the golf course to relinquish the land. The plan is to make the Octagon Earthworks accessible to the public and to tell the story of the people who built and maintained them. ��

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CA: The earthworks on such a massive scale give the lie to the stereotype of Indian savagery. The idea of savage, unsophisticated, uncivilized people who had no technology. The stereotypes that somehow Europeans brought civilization to the Americas is enduring. These sites really fly in the face of that. ��

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[music plays]��

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SH: Material cultural studies is the analysis of the relationships between people and their things, including everything from the making and history of a society’s objects, to their preservation and interpretation. Chad’s research into the Octagon and other North American Earthworks is focused on the creative ways a culture responds to cultural erasure—the attempt to obscure, displace, or outright destroy a culture’s objects and their history. Part of the work is identifying how a culture and its history has been attacked. It’s also about rebuilding knowledge of that culture’s objects and their relationships to the society that produced them. Material Culture is deeply entwined with archeology and anthropology but became its own discipline in the early 1990s.��

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Here are five texts that will help you learn more about Material Culture as a way of knowing.��

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��“” by Beth Preston��

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Preston’s work is an examination of the theory behind material culture studies, and goes into current debates and questions about how to do this kind of analysis.��

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��“” by Pieter Hovens��

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In the 1880s, the Dutch anthropologist Hermann ten Kate assembled a sizable collection of American Indian artifacts. They are the subject of this 2010 analysis by Pieter Hovens. It is a great example of material cultural analysis in action.��

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��“” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz��

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This is the book to go to for a more broad overview of American Indian history, the massive cultural erasure done by European settler and the attempt to recover that history. ��

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��““ by David Graeber and David Wengrow��

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Graeber and Wengrow offer a new understanding of human history. In this book they challenge our most fundamental assumptions of social evolution––from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality.��

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” by Chad Allen��

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Chad’s written a book about his research on the Octagon and other earthworks sites, specifically how people today interact with them and the importance of these sites to American Indians.��

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Chris Hoff: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the 91̽�� and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with 91̽��faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, and our friends, Matmos.��

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SH: The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.��

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[end]��

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