It was one year ago today that I first posted about transliteracy. A few days earlier, I had complained on twitter that transliteracy was "a bullshit made-up term for the same old stuff." Since it's always been my policy on this blog to offer solutions whenever I identify a problem, it took a few days of thought before I posted the beginnings of the language model.
Over the last year, I've done some other transliteracy-related stuff that might interest you:
Starting out, and despite my first tweet calling transliteracy bullshit, I was conciliatory and downright friendly. After putting some positive work out there and being ignored, I chose to approach the topic differently and talk about the controversy. The L&T librarians told me that I had gone too far, so before publishing Redefining Transliteracy I scaled back and was only semi-controversial (if you consider pedantically listing problems with a definition controversial).
Thing is, that post was probably the most popular of the whole lot. It was even the subject of an assignment for a Digital Media Communication class at Rider University (co-instructed by the truly inspirational John LeMasney). I hope most of the post's appeal was that it offered a compelling case for the adoption of a model for transliteracy that people find useful. I suspect that part of the appeal was the oh-no-you-didn't out-calling of the PART definition. So screw it, this stuff's been bugging me...
PART of the Problem
If the original "working definition" of transliteracy were claimed to be proprietary, it wouldn't be a big deal that my criticisms (let's call them "bug reports") and suggested improvements ('patches') have fallen on deaf ears. But the seminal First Monday paper on transliteracy refers to it as open source thinking. Professor Thomas calls transliteracy an open source concept in a well-circulated video:
We see it as an open source concept, and we offer it up for you to think about, develop, write about, go to Wikipedia and argue about the definition...
One immediate problem is that Wikipedia is a bad place to argue about the definition, since it's a place for things notable outside of itself, not original research or discussion leading to development of new ideas. While it might be acceptable to have a discussion of wording on an article's talk page to some extent, arguing about the definition using Wikipedia as the sounding board will generally lead to NOR, NPOV, and/or CoI issues. It's precisely why I haven't personally made any edits to the transliteracy page. If you don't already have your hat in the ring, I encourage you to edit on the language model's behalf.
Calling transliteracy open source is really quite hollow. Is the transliteracy blog really all the source? Where's a clear explanation of licensure for applicable source, besides a CC icon on the First Monday article? Where's the mechanism for reporting bugs and submitting patches? The fact of the matter is that there is very little open source about PART's work on transliteracy. It's a buzzword in a sea of buzzwords.
Call to Action
PART, if you do not wish to explicitly put the transliteracy concept under an open source or open creative license, release source material in the same manner, and ideally explain the mechanismby which the community can contribute to the project, you should publicly clarify that transliteracy is actually a proprietary concept.
Neither PART nor Libraries and Transliteracy have posted about the language model. Since I'm certain that prominent posters of both those blogs have read Redefining Transliteracy, it's curious to me that they haven't talked at all about the language model on their respective blogs. To me that's a lie of omission, or worse yet a faith-based lapse of intellectual honesty. After all, they've been presented with evidence to the contrary of their claims:
The things listed in the definition (signing, orality, handwriting, etc.) aren't established to be platforms, tools, or media either individually or as a group
The property of platforms, tools, and media that allows a literate person to go across or between them is not explained (and I contend, cannot be explained – a single unit is necessary for comparison)
All other criticisms aside, the order of the list is nonsensical, yet easy enough to change to chronological, alphabetical, or to delete altogether
Interaction is just a series of reading and writing acts as it applies to literacies, so including it is redundant
Talking about literacy as a function of platforms, tools, and media is akin to telling an auto mechanic over the phone that your car is yellow. Sure, color is an important attribute of a car, but the mechanic is more concerned with the make, model, and mechanical attributes of the vehicle. Literacy is about reading/writing stuff (ie. messages in languages), not where the stuff's written (ie. medium)
Unless there is some means of reconciliation to which I've not been made privy, believing transliteracy can operate under the PART definition requires faith: belief in the absence of [or in the face of contradictory] evidence. That's not a leap I'm willing to make. I've proposed a patch for a definition based instead on language (with thorough explanation of what language means in that context) that eliminates all 5 of those problems. Of course, if there were problems with the language model, I'd be interested in exploring those as well.
Maybe the silence on those blogs is because of personality conflicts with me. But that only goes so far; at some point pointing at me and saying I'm being arrogant or condescending just ends up being a distracting Argumentum ad hominem. If you think I'm an asshole and don't want to subject your readers to my douchitude, just don't mention me by name or link to my blog. I don't care – all I care about is furthering the discussion of transliteracy by putting ideas out there. If you're unwilling to tell your readers about ideas because they conflict with your pre-formed assumptions, who's the real asshole?
At the end of last year, my library school classmate Lane Wilkinson and I had this great email conversation. I had just posted Redefining Transliteracy, and he and I discussed the various implications of it. What I found most awesome were Lane's questions regarding definitions of words used in the language-based transliteracy definition: "What do you mean by language?", "What does encoding and decoding mean in this context?", etc.
Given that turnabout is fair play, and that Lane specifically requested feedback, I have a definition-based question regarding his recent post:
What definition of medium is used in this context?
Mean Medium? Mode?
To me, a medium is a go-between over time and space used to convey information:
An artist's medium might be oil on canvas
A telegraph's medium is electricity over wire
At the endpoint of a telegraph (or phone, or radio) is another medium — waves of sound over air
Medium can inform us about a lot of things. It can also confuse the issue. The reason I've pushed so hard for literacies to be defined as language skills is that many languages are relatively medium-agnostic. A letter written in ink on paper and one written in marker on posterboard are different in many ways, including both medium and aspects of visual language; but if the textual content of both is the same, the written language of both is equivalent. If that same text is on a computer screen or a television or a tattoo, the written language portion remains congruent.
In usage, people also tend to conflate medium with mode (semiotic modality). Modality is nearly a sensory means of categorization. Except it's not.
Whether medium or modality, questions arise:
Is there any difference between watching a video on television or on YouTube? Is it the video that's different? The screen? Or is it the non-video stuff that surrounds a YouTube video?
What about a watching a film on an old CRT and a new HD LCD? Different literacies?
Isn't print literacy a visual literacy? If medium or mode is important, what is the necessity of the distinction?
If someone reads text on a computer, is it print literacy or computer literacy or both? Why?
If both the medium and the mode of spoken word and of music is the same, in a medium-or-mode-literacy world can they be considered the same literacy?
Languages
Language requires a medium. Communicating (over time and space) constitutes information being encoded into signs and symbols and sent over a channel, then decoded by the receiver(s) to be interpreted. Often, though, changing the channel has little effect on the integrity of the semiotics. McLuhan's stickiest mind-virus, "the medium is the message," is widely misunderstood, and is dead wrong much more often than it is right.
Since literacies are abilities for a sender to write and a receiver to read a message, rather than abilities of either party to grok a medium, it makes more sense from a literacy taxonomy standpoint to define and categorize literacies by linguistic properties rather than media.
Also, I think the literacy ecosystem would be a lot cleaner if we could agree that, whether "information literacy" is actually a literacy or literacies or not, its name is a really crappy mistake.
Otherwise, the diagram is fantastic. It's especially astute because it shows how literacies named and in common use can be grouped, even if those named literacies are themselves problematic. Literacy sucks indeed.
Last week, David Rothman posted Commensurable Nonsense (Transliteracy), a post critical of transliteracy from an Information Literacy perspective. David’s arguments were plausible-sounding fallacies, leading to some serious confusion.
tl;dr
Information Literacy is a bad name for really good concepts. Let’s change the name (again!) to avoid confusion.
Plausible Fallacies
Rothman’s post starts with the two most common definitions of literacy:
an ability to read and write
knowledge of a specific subject
Nothing wrong there. However, it’s implied that for the purposes of transliteracy the second definition is the important one. I don’t see how one would reach that conclusion, given that the definition of transliteracy quoted later in the post starts “Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact...,” pointing to the first definition rather than the second. Transliteracy is about reading and writing (or their equivalents in other senses/contexts); working from some different assumption is a straw man.
The second problem is that Information Literacy is not a literacy per his own criteria. If a literacy is an ability to read and write or knowledge of a particular subject, where does “Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information” fit? The common definitions of IL as critical skills are incompatible with the extended-but-conventional literacies of transliteracy. As such, comparing IL to transliteracy in such a manner has no bearing.
The second problem I mentioned — that Information Literacy isn’t a literacy — underlies the growing misconception. IL requires conventional literacies, but is not encompassing of them by definition. IL advocates apparently consider IL to be all-encompassing, but that’s a difficult-to-defend position. As such, the topics important to transliteracy, at least before last week, are distinct from IL.
The ensuing discussion has led to confusion over the practical boundaries of these terms. For instance, it isn’t clear how big transliteracy’s domain is per this newly-thin-air-pulled definition. In Why Transliteracy?, Lane insinuates transliteracy encompasses the Venn diagram of IL:
For me, transliteracy is the bridge between isolated spheres of information literacy,...
I'm only using transliteracy as a catch-all for one particular slice of information literacy that I haven't seen before.
This leads me to wonder: is transliteracy an umbrella over Information Literacy and other literacies as most everyone seemed to agree prior to last week, or just some small sliver of IL?
Call to Deprecate
It’s neither, of course! Information Literacy is the notable exception to the transliteracy umbrella. I hinted at this in my Redefining Transliteracy post and a smidge on twitter; here are the charges against IL’s compatibility with transliteracy:
Transliteracy is an ability to read and write across things (which I frame as languages, while others prefer platforms, tools, and media for some unknown reason), whereas IL is an ability to find and critique information
From a reading/writing lens, or any lens for that matter, all literacies are information literacies. IL as a term is redundant and overly-broad
However an information literate entity interacts with information, that interaction is indirect, as information does not exist in any raw form. IL as a term is non-specific to the point of triviality
I cite these charges as more than just a reason not to compare Information Literacy and transliteracy directly; I also contend that it’s reason to deprecate Information Literacy and call its skills something else.
We’ve done this before. As a field of study, Library and Information Science effectively deprecated the term “Bibliographic Instruction” in favor of “Information Literacy.” The reasons behind this switch, it appears to me, were fourfold:
Proponents of Bibliographic Instruction became entrenched in out-moded concepts and techniques, and were unwilling to adapt BI to new technologies and methods
The word ‘Bibliographic’ itself implies books. Library-ish instruction is about much more than books
Information Literacy as a term focuses on the skills of the learner, whereas Bibliographic Instruction as a term was about teaching those skills
Here’s what I’m proposing: From some point in the near future on, people talking about the useful, respectable principles currently referred to erroneously as “Information Literacy” should instead use the term [insert term here]. Previous references to Bibliographic Instruction, Information Literacy, and other less-than-ideal terms should be considered [insert term here] by implication.
Conclusion
I think transliteracy and Information Literacy are like peanut butter and jelly. You can have one without the other, but they’re usually better together. If we can remove the myth that IL is a literacy of comparison (through deprecation or social agreement), we can more effectively work to develop a helpful instructional ecosystem for our patrons. We can look at transliteracy for all the different ways people encode and decode information, and Information Literacy for the critical skills associated with that information parsing.
At the end of May I quoted Voltaire in my first transliteracy-related post: "Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another." It's been a long process, but I feel I've defined a language model of transliteracy to a satisfactory extent. So before I demolish IL in the Information Literacy vs. transliteracy debate, I figured it would be fun to offer a practical example of the language model.
One thing came to mind when thinking of examples: Brian Hulsey's Everyday Transliteracy video. It's known as the "blueberry smoothie" video to many; it shows how someone might communicate the same message (a blueberry smoothie recipe) using different websites and other forms of communication, and all in a concise, friendly manner.
Let's look at the examples through a linguistic lens.
Written Language
Most examples involve some form of written language. In many cases, though, communication via a particular website or other form requires subtle changes of dialect or language variant.
Email
In many ways, the language used in email is most like that of a written letter from perhaps a century ago. If a writer wished to ignore clear, concise business style, he or she could write an email of flowery prose or any other style you might otherwise encounter in written language. To me, the written language of an email is something of a baseline for comparison to other language usage.
Twitter
Linguistically, twitter is an interesting variant. Where you might devote a whole paragraph in an email for a stand-alone idea, the standard on twitter is for one tweet (at 140 characters or fewer) to do the same. As such, someone familiar with the letter/email baseline might develop a workflow for converting their verbose ideas to tweet-appropriate length:
Write a sentence or two. See that it's a number of characters over the limit
Shorten any URLs (more on that later) to preserve space
Use common abbreviations
Go over entire text looking for places to re-word, perhaps with chat/SMS lingo
Start removing things like pronouns and the vowels from certain words
Remove punctuation that isn't absolutely necessary
Begin to question whether the idea(s) might require multiple tweets
There's more to it, such as @replies, but the above workflow is the gist. It's interesting, anecdotally at least, that tweets and text messages diverge somewhat in linguistic usage, despite their similarity in imposed length restrictions. Whereas it's common to use instant message-type lingo (lol, brb, stfu, etc.) in an SMS message, it's at least somewhat less common on twitter. It's also more accepted to go over the character limit in text messaging, while quite impractical on twitter.
Facebook
Facebook doesn't formally impose stringent length limits like twitter. A savvy facebook user, however, knows that a long status update will get cut off at a certain length; and the cut off text is only viewable after clicking a "read more" link. This leads to a subtly different usage than twitter. Facebook users are more likely to use full words in full sentences.
The combination of "read more" links and quoting the first three or so words of comments on profile pages means that effective facebook users avoid "burying the lead." Such users communicate in pithy, concise posts, with their thesis statement within the first few words.
Facebook users may sometimes forgo leading personal pronouns since their name is displayed before their status. This is a less-likely occurrence on twitter, where users are represented by short usernames rather than their actual names.
Blog
Blogs are similar to emails from a written language perspective. There are nuances, of course, but it's long-form writing with the optional addition of hypertext elements, just like rich email.
Telephone (or face-to-face)
Talking on the phone obviously isn't written language. However, I think it's a great basic example of transliteracy. Brian, in the video, reads the necessary amount of orange juice aloud off the screen. This is him reading (decoding) written language and speaking (writing, encoding) the same message into oral language. This is a basic transliteracy that many of us possess that we often take for granted.
A Post-It Note
Similar to long-form written language. For a message longer than originally intended, someone writing a post-it message might employ chat lingo and abbreviations, or might start writing smaller near the end of the message.
Other Languages
URLs
URLs are a written language construct all their own. I learned what URLs looked like, how they worked, and the intricacies of their syntax and semantics from using them, rather than by any formal instruction. However, an internet user can gain a lot from being instructed in URLs.
For instance, Brian was 100% correct to shorten the URL for the recipe before posting it to twitter, as that's common practice. On the other hand, he didn't show how he used the full URL for the resource in facebook. It's knowing usage rules like these that make URLs an important language literacy.
Hypertext
Written language is a special subset of visual language. Hypertext is where, on the web, written language and what we usually consider visual language intersect. Hypertext elements have default styles per user agent stylesheets in the browser, making them visual elements. They are also semantically-defined markup elements per their SGML syntax. So bold text or italic text or a link or a heading appear different from text not wrapped with any markup; the elements' semantics precede their appearance.
A web user who doesn't know how to identify the common appearance and function of hypertext elements would be at a great disadvantage. Often the appearance of form elements, for instance, are derived from similar UI elements from the base operating system's toolkit. However, sites will often style or re-implement elements like buttons, so the essence of button-like symbols is a useful and transferable visual language skill.
Note that in the video, Gmail, twitter, facebook, and WordPress all have similar, but at least somewhat-different, representations of buttons, text fields, text areas, rich text boxes, etc. I think it's in the subtleties of hypertext visual language that it's most practical to use the language model instead of the platforms/tools/media model.
Visual Language
Each site uses layout conventions involving columns, proportion, color, contrast, and other precepts of visual language. How they are similar and different is a teachable thing for those we might instruct. Knowing basic visual language of websites is a transferable skill.
Besides site layout, another interesting form of visual language are symbols, often used as icons. The Noun Project is a cool resource for exploring this aspect of visual language.
Conclusion
I've written a lot about a little, and have still managed to leave out a lot! The literacies at play when doing seemingly-simple things are often complex and varied.
What I wanted to demonstrate more than anything else is that the language model allows us to talk about all the same transliteracy things, but in a way that actually gets to the core literacies.
I think these language literacies allow us to work from a common set of terminology. They let us proceed quicker to developing more-universal and more useful curricula for instruction.
A point to ponder: Brian's video, many (myself included) contend, is a wonderful example of transliteracy. It does not, however, focus in any way on the critical abilities normally associated with Information Literacy.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my former classmate Lane Wilkinson for the discussion about transliteracy we shared via email. More importantly for you, dear reader, is that Lane writes a blog called Sense and Reference with some of the best and most thought-provoking posts in the library world.
If you've followed the series of posts about transliteracy on this blog, perhaps you'd agree that I've approached the topic somewhat backwards:
In this post I'd like to illustrate that the issues with the definition are causing problems: namely inconsistent communication among transliteracy researchers.
Definition Type
In his post, On defining transliteracy, Lane asserts that since transliteracy is a young term, it may not be appropriate now (or ever) to define transliteracy intensionally. I would absolutely agree with this notion if transliteracy were defined extensionally.
In the literature, the PART working definition is not only the current definition of record, but the basis for a functioning intensional unit. If we acknowledge that transliteracy is trans- plus literacy without making the necessary pre-assumptions of my previous posts, people still naturally use the word to mean "An ability to [do something] across [something]."
Do Something
The first blank, "the ability to [do something]" is much less contentious among transliteracy writers. The PART definition fills the blank with "read, write, and interact" while my suggestion instead goes for "encode and decode information." I think in both instances the intent is largely the same:
A sensory ability that goes beyond basic perception. A literate being takes sensory input, recognizes certain patterns, signs, or symbols, and can then use that input cognitively
The entity can often produce similar or identical patterns, signs, or symbols and transmit them over the same or similar channel
This sensory ability applies to more than just the written word
My review of the literature confirms the agreement on these conditions of the first blank, despite the difference in wording I suggest.
Across Something
A review of the literature (which you're free to contribute to) shows us what transliterate entities are purportedly doing something across:
The agreement isn't total, but the clear majority of those discussing transliteracy have latched onto 'medium' as the unit that transliterate people are literate across. As such, the "precise necessary and sufficient conditions for being an instance of transliteracy" are asserted overwhelmingly by writers in the field to be met by being able to read, write, and interact across media.
But medium is used inconsistently with regard to scope, and often outside of the usage of any other field. As such, the condition-facilitating uncertainty that would otherwise be attached to an extensional 'transliteracy' is instead confusing the word 'medium'.
For instance, is facebook a medium? What about twitter? Is there a single "facebook literacy" or "twitteracy"? Is medium intended as it is in the field of Communications? Of Art? In a McLuhan sense of the word?
There is no agreement in the literature.
Placeholder
The word 'medium' is being used as a placeholder for an ill-defined unit of literacy. This placeholder isn't serving anyone because of the stark variation in usage.
