Week
7: Transliteracy
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Required
and Recommended Readings
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A background to transliteracy based on the founding article
(“Transliteracy: Crossing Divides) and examples of transliteracy in practise.
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n Sue Thomas, Chris Joseph, Jessica Laccetti et al.,“Transliteracy:
Crossing Divides,” Sue Thomas, “Nature of Transliteracy.”
n #transliteracy on twitter
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“The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”
The word “transliteracy” is derived from the verb “to transliterate,” meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.
The idea of transliteracy is really about promoting a unifying ecology. As Thomas explains,
“The concept of transliteracy calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital, and a move instead towards a unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture, both past and present.
It is an opportunity to cross some hitherto quite difficult divides.”
Transliteracy asks key questions about communication:
- How were people remembering and communicating for the thousands of years before writing?
- Where are the similarities with the way we communicate today?
- Has our addiction to print made us forget skills we had before?
- Can digital media reconnect us with those skills again?
Before writing, people remembered and communicated through oral storytelling and things like cave painting. These are literacies that have been transferred to the way we communicate today. The impacts of printing press are often compared to the impacts of e-publishing. For example, when newspapers became widely available, people were reading on the bus and in cafes, just like they are on reading on their cell phones or tablets today on buses and in cafes.
ReplyDeleteIn COMM 505 last term (which looked at some history of communications), I learned that digital technology isn’t really a “revolution”, it’s an evolution. Print gave us the ability to open up our mind space, normally reserved for memorizing, because we have something to refer back to. Perhaps our memorization skills have been affected by the transition from an oral to print culture because we don’t need to memorize information we can find online in seconds. Another area where our skills may have been affected is understanding body language and oral nuances. Being more focused on print/digital culture, people don’t hear and see someone speaking as often so people’s ability to read body language and comprehend voice inflections (e.g. sarcasm) maybe be affected. It would be interesting for psychologists to conduct a study on “millennials” to see if their oral skills are any lower than those from older generations.
As Thomas, Joseph, Laccetti et al. write, “The transliterate lifeworld is highly subjective, diverse and complicated. It is not one kind of place, but many — an ecology which changes with the invention of each new media–type. Yet a story is always still a story, whether it’s told whilst walking down the street, printed in a book, or twittered across the Internet.”
Therefore, I would conclude that we can communicate across different media and what these skills are and how they change with our environment over time is where transliteracy studies come in. People can communicate, but helping them recognize and improve these skills is the educational challenge.
Nicole - I agree with you regarding the educational challenge. I see this pretty much every day in the business world. Team members will know a whole lot about dealing with computers and tablets and phones. They will not know where or how to start collecting information for a project. It's a huge issue. The other issue is literacy skills: basic reading and writing skills are not viewed as a requirement. Listening to training on a video is not the same skill set as reading/researching a white paper or manual.
DeleteSince I first heard about transliteracy in this course, I have become increasingly aware of the many instances in which I use different modes / expressions of transliteracy in a daily basis. I justify my lack of previous awareness by observing how natural and ubiquitous it seems to rely on such skills to be able to related to others. For this reason, the theory that transliteracy existed before print, that its roots could be traced back to the survival skills of hunter-gatherers doesn’t seem that unlikely.
ReplyDeleteThere are two aspects that I find particularly interesting of this week’s readings and they both somehow refer to trasliteracy as something that happens in a place.
Thomas et al., (2007) say that “transliteracy happens in the places where different things meet, mix, and rub together.” I have read similar descriptions but applied to creativity and ideas. For example I recently found a quote from Bor’s “The Ravenous Brain” in Brain Pickings blog that said “generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view.” Creativity and ideas can happen from looking at things differently or from a different perspective. In the same way our ability to communicate in different ways could be boosted by sheer need like for example finding ourselves in an unknown place, under different circumstances or simple in front of a new challenge. Humans are very adaptable and our ability to be transliterate is proof of that.
The second reference to place that called my attention is when Thomas et al., talk about the “liminal qualities of transliteracy” by using a very fluid Alan Halsey image. Liminal according to the dictionary refers to a transitional stage or place, to being in between two positions. In this context transliteracy is always moving and changing, and most importantly: adapting. This is illustrated by the quote “transliteracy is both a concept and a practice productively situated in a liminal space between being a new cognitive tool and the recovery of an old one.”
I agree with you Andrea. As humans we seem to be able to adapt to new situations and environments quite quickly. We have this uncanny ability to use the information, knowledge, and tools that we have at our disposal to help us reach our goals and objectives, be it for communication purposes or for simply completing a task. I think having this quality makes it that much easier to be transliterate as we transition with technology into the future
DeleteNicole, Mandeep and Andrea - I couldn’t agree more. The term ‘evolution’ versus ‘revolution’ is the perfect way to describe how communication has changed over thousands of years. This is also the reason for printers like myself not to “fear” eBooks or other screen technology, but to embrace them as another cog in the wheel of our communicative society. I love the idea of including a myriad of communication tools, techniques and technologies to understand the “big picture”. Often times we (as society) have a difficult time seeing the forest for the trees and we’re solely focused on the communication technology of the day instead of working to understand how they interconnect with one another.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite passages from Transliteracy: Crossing Divides, sheds light on how similar communication is today as it was hundreds and even thousands of years ago: “Transliteracy is an inclusive concept which bridges and connects past, present and, hopefully, future modalities. The chitchat of a blog is not dissimilar to campfire stories after a day’s hunting, and the auction fever of eBay is not unlike the haggling that went on in an Iron Age marketplace.”
These are phenomenal comparisons that just skim the surface of how interwoven today’s communication methods are with those of the past. In many ways, transliteracy feels nostalgic to me because it helps us connect back with ways of communicating that are more primal, and in many ways more human, than the ways we communicate today. Speed, efficiency and breadth of reach allow computer-based communication to trump many of the communication techniques we as humans have used for thousands of years. In many ways, transliteracy snaps us back into reality to understand the role communication plays from a broader view and not just communication on-screen.
There is no doubt that our media consumption today is very different from what it was a generation ago. People have the ability to instantly share text, images, audio, and video around the world. New media has come to represent an ecology of social (ie. user generated content, peer collaboration, tagging) and technical forces (ie. infrastructure, protocols, hypertext, etc.) that interact in complex ways, creating a “convergence” where communication services are being merged through new digital media devices and networks.
ReplyDeleteLike Nicole and Mandeep, I too was drawn to the notion that “a story is always still a story, whether it’s told whilst walking down the street, printed in a book, or twittered across the Internet” (Thomas, Joseph, Laccetti et al.) I think transliteracy is really about connecting the past with the present and bridging traditional knowledge with contemporary learning so that story can continue to be told.
Every person has a story. Every person can find their voice with the communication tool that resonates with them. I like the concept that “a story is always still a story, whether it’s told whilst walking down the street, printed in a book, or twittered across the Internet” (Thomas, Joseph, Laccetti et al.) I think transliteracy validates all types and formats of communication from the latest digital media technology to historical images and traditional ways that indigenous cultural and people groups tell their stories today. There are so many tools, digital and non-digital, with which to communicate. Szwed makes a valid point that we need to rethink what is means to be literate.
ReplyDeleteI think the transliteracy concept of life worlds being a combination of our physical environment and our subjective experiences validates our individual stories. Everything is subjective and creates a diverse complicated ecology of networks which ultimately leads to innovation and creativity. I loved the picture of Al Gore sitting at this desk (1999). I still see pretty close to this image in some offices today (!). It’s truly a fascinating time in the world of communications and technology.
Lynne - you're right, everyone has a story - and everyone can find a communication tool that resonates with them. As I was going through this weeks readings and videos about transliteracy, a conversation that I had with a friend of mine kept coming to mind. My friend is a librarian with our municipal library, and recently their staff have been mandated with the task to become individually more transliterate by creating blogs at work for the public to read (and really their blogs are meant to describe their experience creating a blog), as well at contributing to a library twitter feed and Facebook feed. (Because my friend is also a children's librarian, she also puts on plays and crafting activities for the library clients, which - when you think about it - is really the way we used to communicate hundreds of years ago - through verbal storytelling and art). The librarians have to learn to use and participate in social media at work because these are also the skills that they will be required to use when helping clients research certain subjects and also to communicate more effectively with the community at large. They can't just rely on the fact that their clients want or need printed materials anymore (or even online journals) - they have to become more transliterate themselves in order to better serve their public/clients.
ReplyDelete