Book Review: Plain Text - The Poetics of Computation by Dennis Tenen

I thought I wasn't clever enough to read this book. The intro and first section are very challenging if you're not already familiar with philosophy and literary criticism. However, I struggled through and found something quite wonderful. Let's start with what this is about:

I advocate for the development of computational poetics: a strategy of interpretation capable of reaching past surface content to reveal platforms and infrastructures that stage the construction of meaning. Where “distant reading” and cultural analytics perceive patterns across large-scale corpora, computational poetics breaks textuality down into its minute constituent components. It is a strategy of microanalysis rather than macroanalysis.

Part of it is trying to apply a form of literary analysis to the technology behind books. It wasn't the most intuitive thing for me to grasp, but it makes an excellent case that programmers can be unaccountable gods. So much priesthood-training is needed to understand even the basics of the forces which act on us throughout the day.

On the subject of programming in computer code:

it conjures fantastical metaphors to occlude the structure of shaping and commanding. The simulacrum created by code obscures the incongruence between visible signs and a medium’s under lying material affordances. What you see is not always what you get.

I thought I disagreed here. Surely code is explicit instructions. But it isn't. Except, perhaps, at the assembly code level - all languages trick the user into thinking with metaphor.

This bleeds into the philosophical nature of eBooks:

A flat shoebox cannot contain shoes. It can hold only images of footwear. A paragraph embodies a similarly singular arrangement of elements. It is a container or a data structure of a kind, made to hold a certain amount of sentences.

All data structures constrain. As does a scroll or paperback. The ePub format is a zip of HTML files and metadata - constructed to best represent the platonic ideal of a book. But it doesn't end there:

computational formats change rapidly and proliferate. They contain further, as yet unexplored structural possibilities: shapes similar to the paragraph on paper but native to new media.

Sometimes I enjoy reviewing the "format" of an eBook almost as much as the text itself! For example, "Plain Text" is released in the moribund PDF format - which means its footnotes aren't clickable, the page layout can't reflow, and the structure is limited by Adobe's artificial constrains. Perhaps future books will be less booklike?

The electronic book is in reality a multitude of dynamic formats. Each requires specialized strategies of reading and interpretation.

One thing I enjoyed was how much literary interpretation can also be applied to code. Is code poetry?

Line lengths are not usually important in novels, we would say; they carry no meaning. But when reading poetry, readers do value line length. In poetry it carries meaning, being an integral part of a text’s “signifying strategies.”

Python is poetry! As is any language which requires whitespace to be in a particular format. The connections continue:

No book of serious nonfiction, for example, would be typeset in a cursive font. Unless something out of the ordinary attracts their attention, readers tend to gloss the inconsequential details of formatting in favor of content.

Would you trust code written in Comic Sans?

There's also a delightful mix of history in here - Turing and Wittgenstein debating computation, Pollak-Virag alternatives to Morse Code, Telegraph spiritualists and more. It is fascinating to see how our textual world may have been different. It also shows that many of the arguments we have today are no different from the ones we had in the past:

The autographic telegraph claimed to preserve the particularity of the human hand, an individual’s signature. It was the humane telegraph in the sense that it preserved the human trace. The metaphysics accompanying telegraph communication at the time were often concerned with the possibility of human erasure in communication.

The Metaverse is erasing human connections!!!

There's no doubt that electronic texts have been a great success and are well liked. But they do come with drawbacks:

To format text without margins, for example, is also to deny marginalia. And to format text in a way that prevents further remediation is to deny the formation of shared culture.

I think that's a little off the mark. Most eReaders allow users to add their own notes. But it does make me wonder why I can't add notes to code on GitHub. Wouldn't it be lovely to add marginalia there? Not just as an issue - but a little aside or footnote to help explain things.

The book concludes with an impassioned rant against Digital Rights Management, pointing out that the restrictions imposed by DRM have an impact on the wider culture:

the inability to take notes, for example, or to share books among family and friends. Such technological constraints disproportionately affect those most reliant on informal knowledge networks, which exist outside economies of wealth and prestige. [...] Because copying and preservation are key values for university libraries, the loss of unimpeded copying and preservation should outweigh any gains in purely ornamental stability of document format.

This is an excellent and thoughtful book. It is complicated and - perhaps ironically - not very well formatted. But it is well worth it if you are a programmer who wants to expand their mind by understanding the way some academics view the nature of computational text.