Module 4. The Technical Foundations of Digital Text
Module 4. The Technical Foundations of Digital Text
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At the end of this module, you should be able to do the following:
Explain why text is a basic, flexible medium that will not become obsolete
Describe in general terms how bits are used to represent text
Explain the difference between content and style in text
Text is the most common form of recording and transmitting knowledge in the contemporary world. Most of the information on the Web is still represented as text; this course is an example of that! This section introduces to you to some key features of digital text.
Activity 4.1. Read about digital text
Activity 4.1. Read about digital text
Before continuing with this module, read the chapter on text by Savage & Vogel 2008 book, An Introduction to Digital Multimedia. Pay attention in particular to the following terms and make sure you know what each term refers to:
anti-aliasing
outline fonts
bitmapped fonts
tracking
kerning
typeface
style
The importance of text
The importance of text
Savage & Vogel discuss the importance of text in general in the beginning of Chapter 5 of their book. Text, they point out, will never go away. That seems obvious, doesn't it? But it is nonetheless an important point. Consider this: fifteen years ago, email was a profound development. We could transmit huge chunks of text instantaneously from a computer terminal. Now, more and more people are increasingly able to transmit large amounts of data (including sound, static images, and moving images) across vast distances. Audio and video is often referred to as rich media and requires many more bits to encode. Yet we still send emails, which are encoded in old-fashioned text. Why is this?
One answer is that not everyone has access to the kind of bandwidth required to transmit rich media. It's an easy answer, but also an incomplete one. Picture in your mind's eye---just suppose---that everyone did have access to large amounts of bandwidth. Just suppose that everyone had a computer or a mobile phone that could record and send rich media. Do you think that writing and reading text will become obsolete? It seems unlikely because neither video nor audio is a "better" kind of media than text. Each kind of media has its particular advantages and disadvantages. Each of them opens up different communicative pathways. In his book Design for New Media, Barfield (2004) argues that in spite of the fact that information is increasingly being created and delivered through digital graphics, digital audio, and digital video, text will always be used to deliver important information for the following reasons:
Editability: It is easy to reorder, add content, or remove content from text-based material, and less so with other kinds of media modalities.
Sufficiency: Sometimes, text is sufficient to convey all the information that you want to bring across. Why draw a dog when you can simply type, "dog"?
Accessibility: Composing digital text requires fewer resources than creating digital graphics, video, or audio.
Encoding, decoding, and displaying text
Encoding, decoding, and displaying text
Like all digital information, digital text is actually nothing more than a series of numbers that is interpreted by computer's hardware and software. You should know that those numbers are not stored in the computer in the way you might expect them to be. You might remember that the number 58 (which is in base 10, or decimal, form) can be represented in other ways. In base 16 form (also known as hexadecimal), the number 58 is written as 3A. In base 2 form (also known as binary) it is written as 111010. But remember that 58 stands for the colon (“:”). Therefore, 111010 can be interpreted by your computer as either the number 58 or the colon symbol. The interpretation that is used will depend on what software application you're using.
Activity 4.2. Test your ability to decode characters
Activity 4.2. Test your ability to decode characters
Take the following bitstream:
100010111011101100011110111111001001100101
Referring to this table of ASCII printable characters listed in Wikipedia, can you figure out what word it spells?
Style and content
Style and content
There are a number of considerations to producing digital text, which you will be diving into in MMS 171. In this module, we will simply consider the difference between style and content. Consider the two passages below:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
They look very different because they are styled differently. However, they contain exactly the same content (that is to say, the same information).
This separation between content (or information) and style (or formatting) can be pushed to all sorts of limits. For instance, these two Web pages contain exactly the same text, but notice how different they look:
That style can be separated from content can be useful if you find that you have to restyle large amounts of content. For example, you may need to create two versions of the same document: a Web version and a print version. By applying stylesheets or style templates to your content, you can automatically change the look-and-feel without going through the document and changing everything manually.
Activity 4.3: Other advantages of text
Activity 4.3: Other advantages of text
Can you think of other advantages that text has over other media modalities? (For instance, think about you do when you need to search for something online using a search engine.)
References
References
Barfield, L. (2004). Design for New Media: Interaction Design for Multimedia and the Web (1st ed.). Addison Wesley.
Savage, T. M., & Vogel, K. E. (2008). An Introduction to Digital Multimedia (1st ed.). Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
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