Open Source OT, part 2

In the last post we unveiled the first four parts of an IT-to-OT translation, a media-conversion of the Open Source Definition, intended to apply to software, from IT-ese to OT-ese. The goal of this process, continued in the present post with items 5 through 10, is to illustrate how emerging concepts associated with the internet are also highly applicable to (and even diagnostic of) oral tradition. As throughout this blog and the Pathways Project in general, our aim is to probe the uncanny resemblance between oral tradition and the internet, between the oWorld and the eWorld.

During our prior discussion we noted that the specialized, dedicated languages of these two media dovetail in interesting ways – that the source code of internet innovation corresponds to the register that supports the process of composition in oral tradition. The open-source concept applies, in other words, to OT’s “way of speaking” as well as to IT’s “way of programming.”

5. No discrimination against persons or groups
The OSD mandates that “the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources,” and here we glimpse a bedrock correspondence between OT and IT, one that stems from their shared core dynamic of navigating public-domain pathways. Unlike text, the two bookless media actually nurture creativity through sharing rather than ownership. Because they don’t operate by fixing and copyrighting, they encourage broad participation and draw from the collective strength of their users, rather than sequester a fossilized product behind the closed door of proprietary, legalized vendor-ship.

Of course, certain varieties of oral tradition may seem to discriminate against some potential user/performers, whether by gender, age, ethnic affiliation, or some other index. Viewed in context, however, this restriction merely proves the “no discrimination” rule. If a particular Navajo group mandates tribal membership as a prerequisite for performance of a story, they are still licensing all eligible members to deploy the tale-telling register, to use the source code. If the South Slavic village tradition of magical charms requires that bajalice (“conjurers”) be female and pre-pubertal when they learn the spells and post-menopausal when they practice them, this restriction simply prescribes the broad-based membership among whom there can be no discrimination (though of course there may be individual competition or further focusing via inheritance patterns).

This kind of prescription is not a categorical departure from the OSD definition, anymore than analogous focusing would constitute discrimination in the IT sphere. Depending on its expansivity or narrowness, a piece of software will likely select a user-group much smaller and more focused than the set of all humanity as the membership among whom there can be no discrimination.

The rule of thumb here – as in most IT and OT matters – is to respect the variety of the different situations and avoid committing blindly to a false (text-reflective) uniformity. Some open source software will involve smaller groups, some larger. Medical records software will probably attract more potential sharers than high energy physics programs. Likewise, the oral contest poetry of the Basque people involves a much wider and more diverse group of participants than the Navajo and South Slavic traditions mentioned above. Perhaps most significantly, oral stories pass freely across national and even linguistic barriers via bilingual speakers – for example, bilingual epic singers who were preliterate in both Albanian and South Slavic were able to fluently manage the oral epic registers of both languages. The key is that within the relevant group there is a free, unrestricted flow of rule-governed creativity. People and groups cooperate and share.

6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor
Any license for open source software “must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.” The OSD argues that the same programming instrument should theoretically be as usable in business as in genetic research, for example.

Correspondingly, OT thrives precisely by being transferable to any performance situation and by being deployable for many different purposes by users involved in different “fields of endeavor.”

For one thing, the performance arena – the recurrent, essentially virtual venue for the performance of any given OT activity – takes myriad different forms that vary over time and place. Different performers and audiences participate at these various times and places, all with roughly congruent assumptions about what’s transpiring in the arena. When they attend – whoever they are and wherever and whenever they participate in the particular instance – they do so by speaking and hearing fluently in the register, just as IT adapters of open source software work fluently within a shared source code. The object isn’t a static, book-like item, but movement within an ongoing process.

Beyond the myriad unique instances of any generalized performance arena lies another level of adaptability. An OT genre – complete with its register, implications, and idiomatic force – may migrate to a starkly new use, as when the source code of South Slavic oral epic was pressed into service to chronicle the exploits of Tito and the Yugoslav resistance fighters during World War II. These “partisan songs,” as they’re known, invoke the epic apparatus current in oral tradition from at least the fourteenth century in order to portray the heroism of twentieth-century guerilla warriors. Or consider the South African praise-poets mentioned above, who have adapted their résumé-building oral poetry, originally composed to “publish” the reputations of tribal chieftains in the non-textual medium, in order to celebrate or denigrate contemporary political figures. This is another way in which OT avoids discrimination against particular fields of endeavor.

7. Distribution of license
The OSD stipulates that “the rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.”

In OT-ese, the corresponding regulation would call for the implied license attached to the register (source code) to extend automatically to all who seek to employ that register in performance or any other venue. In both IT and OT this requirement really amounts to attaching a smaller codicil to a larger will. Barring discrimination against members of IT groups or fields of endeavor means extension of the original license to all subsequent users of the designated software and its source code. Barring discrimination against members of OT constituencies and against extension to new fields also means that the license to perform – and to serve as a fluent audience – cannot be required anew in each case (for each individual or performance). In a sense, the implied license for OT is a fundamental aspect of the overall speech-act: every performance assumes (and operates under) its open-ended governance.

8. License must not be specific to a product
Correspondingly, the OSD mandates that “the rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution.” In other words, each single program within a larger conglomerate should be available and approved for sharing on its own, without the necessity of transferring the entire conglomerate.

The analogous situation in OT might involve a cycle of stories about a particular character that are learned from a single individual – a small collection of Native American Coyote tales, for example, that a person might hear from an older family member. The implied license to perform any one of these stories doesn’t depend on a license for that cycle or any other; each story is individually licensed for performance and reception, even though one tale may implicitly refer to another within the tradition. They aren’t explicitly defined items, but rather implicitly linked patterns.

This is a bit of a slippery distinction, especially for those of us accustomed to thinking and interacting by creating and exchanging texts in a sort of “text-klatch” ritual. True enough: oral stories are in one sense complete in themselves, quite intelligible as isolated events. On the other hand – as with language itself, of which OT is but a special case – the fluent audience will bring a great deal of idiomatic meaning to the isolated tale; they will “fill it out” with their background knowledge of the tradition, the character(s), the location(s), and the storytelling patterns that underlie what may otherwise seem a novel, even unprecedented plot. Tell one, two, or more Coyote tales as you please; each one is both its own story, licensed for distribution on its own terms, and by extension a part of something much larger and more comprehensive. Nothing need stand in the way of telling and receiving the isolated tale, but it’s conventionally told (and meant for reception) within an implied, immanent context. The individual story works like a hot link in hypertext, providing built-in connections to other pathways. Click on the individual tale and its context comes up on your desktop.

9. License must not restrict other software
According to the OSD, “the license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.” In a sense this is the obverse of the preceding regulation: just as the whole cannot limit its parts, so the parts cannot limit one another.

We find an analogue in the real-world ecology of OTs, the cultural system of various OTs that operate by different rules. Even though each of them is open-source, with its register or code available to all whom the genre selects as eligible practitioners, their diverse dynamics involve different performers and variant audiences. Rules for one species do not necessarily coincide with rules for others.

Within the South Slavic ecosystem, for example, oral traditions are organized by gender, age, and social function. As we observed during fieldwork in Orashats, Serbia, women perform magical charms, lyric songs, and funeral laments (all in eight-syllable poetic lines), while men perform epics and genealogies (both in ten-syllable poetic lines). Magical charms and genealogies were primarily the province of senior women and men, with the other genres theoretically independent of age. The actual function of the oral poetry – whether to cure ill humans and animals, to celebrate or criticize love and marriage, to mourn the dead, to affirm ethnic and historical identity, or to preserve the family tree – is a third parameter for differentiation within the ecology of forms.

The implied license to perform any one of these genres applies to all practitioners of that particular oral tradition but does not extend to other forms. Within the set of bajalice there is freedom to share, learn, and perform according to pertinent societal practices (charms are passed only from grandmother to grand-daughter, for example). But that freedom does not extend to men, nor can the charms be voiced in the men’s ten-syllable meter or enlisted to serve another social function. Although open-source, each of the ecosystem’s species plays by its own rules.

10. License must be technology-neutral
The OSD requires that “no provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.” Much of the language describing this regulation is specific and technical, but the general thrust is to avoid limiting transmission of software to and within GUI (graphical user interface) environments and to allow for sharing “over non-web channels that do not support click-wrapping of the download” (those check-boxes you find at the end of contractual agreements formulated by proprietary software manufacturers).

In regard to the implied license underlying the use of OT’s source code or register, this means that the tradition and its code must be able to be shared outside the foundational technology in which they arose. In other words, an OT register must be transferable to – and functional within – other communicative media, without the user’s having to seek a separate implied license.

How would this work in an actual OT? Consider the case of Petar II Njegosh, a nineteenth-century Montenegrin bishop who grew up in a village, mastered the epic way of composing oral poetry, and eventually became a learned, highly literate and text-centric official. His “textual” poetry – written for readers – used the source code of oral epic to express his ideas on current political topics as well as traditional heroic mythology. Or how about Elias Loennrot, the Finnish physician who scoured the Karelian region for what he posited were remnants of a once-expansive oral epic, the Kalevala? Although highly literate, he learned the register of that oral poetry well enough that he was able to compose “missing” passages to cement these collected shards and re-create his envisioned national epic – which he then published as a book. For both Njegosh and Loennrot, the implied license to perform oral tradition transferred to a new medium, in this case that of the authored, published text.

Coda
The OSD prescribes the rules by which the IT community can share software and its source code in an open, contributory manner. Each of the ten tenets distinguishes open source philosophy and practice from proprietary, vendor-driven philosophy and practice, under the assumption that continuous, shared development is the most productive way to foster innovation and create an inclusive constituency.

Our translation of the OSD from IT-ese to OT-ese suggests a kindred dynamic. Instead of depending on individual authors of individual texts, which are then packaged and sold as the concrete items they are, OT thrives on sharing among a collective. Discrimination among people, groups, or media is discouraged; stories and other forms remain open and malleable; even the source code that underlies them is freely distributed. Historically, the result has been that OT “software” travels widely and easily across continents and eras – the Gesar epic is known across the face of central Asia, and ancient Homeric laments have descendant forms alive today in the Greek islands. Books and manuscripts, far too brittle and user-unfriendly a medium (even as digitized fossils) to support long passages either geographically or chronologically, just can’t match this record.

In this way as in so many others, the eWorld mirrors the oWorld, and both are worlds apart from the tWorld.

Open Source OT, part 1

Your grandmother’s desk?
It wasn’t so long ago that oral tradition was construed as a static inheritance, something like your grandmother’s desk that traversed the generations relatively inert until it reached you. Your task was then to preserve it: to maintain the inheritance in the best shape possible for handing on to the next generation. “Tradition” in this sense was a monolith, an item whose value derived from its (perceived) immutability, its capacity for resisting change, its essential thing-ness.

Although this notion comfortably fits our cultural fantasy of absolute objectivity and permanence, applying it to oral tradition amounts to “bookifying” a bookless phenomenon. After all, OT depends for its very existence and continued viability not on fossilization but on the restless dynamic of rule-governed change. That is, OT continuity and sustainability stem not from fixation but from innovation, as discussed in relation to IT in the last post ("In the public domain"). “Tradition” in this sense means, first and foremost, the generative mix of pliability and pattern. It means a process rather than a product, a living and evolving entity rather than your grandmother’s desk – however precious and irreplaceable that family-honored antique might be.

To illustrate this reality of continuity-via-innovation, and to provide another perspective on the OT-IT congruence that is the subject of this blog and the Pathways Project in general, I propose an IT-to-OT “translation.” In this and the next posting I’ll attempt an idiomatic conversion of an IT charter document – the Open Source Definition of software (OSD) – into the cognate language of OT-ese. In what follows we’ll be considering how the ten guidelines of the OSD also speak directly and importantly to the Open Source phenomenon of oral tradition.

Register = Source code
At the basis of this IT-to-OT translation lies a fundamental parallel between IT source code and OT register. Just as the specialized language of OT is a particular “way of speaking” that supports particular expressive tasks, so specialized software amounts to a particular “way of programming” that supports specific cybernetic tasks. In both cases the register/source code serves as the instrument or vehicle for building one of myriad possible products, the plastic and yet patterned medium used by the performer/programmer to create and to innovate. In both cases we are dealing with processes that profit from being open, collective, and amenable to rule-governed change. Registers and source code are alike in being productively protean.

Translating the OSD for OT
The Introduction to the OSD cautions that “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” In OT terms, we could translate as follows: it isn’t enough simply to expose audiences and other performers to the particular way of speaking, or register, that a performer and an audience use to negotiate the performance. Such access is the crucial starting-point, of course, but only that – other provisions must follow if OT is truly to be regarded as open source.

1. Free redistribution
The OSD mandates that a software license must not restrict any party from transferring software to any other party, without royalty or other fee. The rationale explains that this requirement “eliminate[s] the temptation to throw away many long-term gains in order to make a few short-term dollars,” and that failure to redistribute freely will generate “lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.” The logic is plain – conventional IT vending segregates rather than aggregates contributors to the collective software project. It sets innovators competitively against one another and constrains joint creativity by diminishing the energy of the larger group and foreclosing on its time for development. And all for the sake of a short-term result that can never achieve the long-term gain and stability that open source innovation fosters.

Correspondingly, and here our translation begins, OT depends for its viability on free distribution among its creative constituency (subject to individual cultural patterns, of course). If there are commercial or other barriers erected to impede the flow and continuity of the innovative process, then the T effectively disappears from OT: it may be oral, but the continuity of tradition will fade.

Examples of the crucial importance of free distribution abound. Xhosa and Zulu praise-poets from South Africa must be able to draw on a living resource as they construct their individually tailored “résumés” for tribal chiefs. Kaqchikel-speaking storytellers from Guatemala must be able to pass their tales along a human chain that stretches from the distant past through the present and into the future. Mongolian epic singers must be able to choose the particular cycle-chapter they happen to be performing on this occasion and to imply other characters, stories, and events from the hugely larger Janggar epic repository.

Without this free distribution – between performers, between performers and audiences, and over centuries and myriad different locales – OT becomes (at best) an oral item, an artifact. Singular and self-contained, perhaps, but an evolutionary dead-end. Pathways become cul-de-sacs.

2. Source code
The OSD calls for all programs to be distributed “in source code as well as compiled form” in order to facilitate modification, to empower users to innovate as they wish and need to do so (and to foster subsequent acts of innovation by others).

Compare the distribution of OT via the face-to-face, emergent situation of actual performance (that is, in source code) versus its transmission as a diluted, fossilized record in a published anthology or other paper edition (the compiled form). As the static, spatialized texts with which we’re so familiar and comfortable, paper editions present a digestible, fully compiled version of OT. Ready to go, ready to use: the compiled form unquestionably “works,” at least according to our default cultural expectations. But can the compiled form of OT – the book – foster exchange, modification, and innovation among its users? Is it truly open?

Along with its apparent convenience, the (unrealistically) tidy paper edition reveals little or none of its source code: nothing of the living, morphing phenomenon, including the many levels of sound and intonation, rhythm, gesture, vocal and instrumental music, visual signals, audience interaction, and other codes that make up the register. From the point of view of OT participants seeking to use and build on the living reality of performance, and here I include both other potential performers and all potential audience members, the way is blocked by their lack of access to the source code. Fluency in the compositional idiom – the ability to make and remake – is an impossible achievement if all we can experience is the superficial, radically reduced reflection we find in the paper edition.

eEditions, whose goal is the resynchronizing of the oral performance by electronically linking audio or video, transcription, translation, and contextual materials in an interactive whole, can’t ever substitute for actually “being there” as a member of the original audience. But at least they can lay bare some of the source code, representing the performance not as a finite series of static pages (the compiled form) but as the multidimensional, emergent phenomenon it once was and, to a degree, still can be.

3. Derived works
According to the OSD, a software license “must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.” That is, the IT license that accompanies the program must explicitly permit retooling by users to foster values central to the open source movement: “independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection.”

Although the OT license in question is implicit rather than explicit (though no less binding because it hasn’t been textualized), oral tradition certainly follows this same model for “derived works.” The key feature is the absence of any and all barriers to recomposition and reperformance, to insure that transmission through evolution doesn’t reach an impasse and that multiple generations of OT will be born, thrive, and engender subsequent generations.

By analogy to the OSD, every OT performance amounts to one individual’s independent peer review of other performances, just as every performance is peer-reviewed by each of the audience members. Anything less than completely unfettered evaluation and remaking, followed by free distribution of the “derivative” performance on the same terms as its predecessors, will hinder the “rapid evolution” of the tradition. In the cases of both OT and IT, we should add, evolution will not be limited to a single direction or outcome but will organically proceed in many different directions with correspondingly diverse outcomes. Multiple pathways, multiple realizations. While natural selection may accord special prominence to a particular performer or story, for example, the overall, long-term ecology of OT will be at its healthiest when it’s most diverse and most open to rule-governed morphing.

4. Integrity of the author’s source code
Some features of this guideline pertain only to IT, with software authors and users being required to identify themselves and acknowledge responsibility and rights. But one regulation applies importantly to OT: “the license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.”

Understanding as above that the OT “license” is implicit in the act of performance and transmission, this regulation would allow for modified versions of the register – both dialectal (regional) and idiolectal (individual) – to serve as the basis of future performances.

In other words, consider the case of an oral epic singer from a particular geographical area who learns most of his or her “source code” from the other singers in that region, and perhaps especially from a close relative. Every performance that such a singer gives will reflect the dialectal form of the OT prevalent in that area, as well as the idiolectal language of his or her relative. Just as surely as a child raised in south Boston in the U.S. state of Massachusetts will speak a certain dialect of English, performers will use an OT source code typical of their home region. And just as surely as that same child will also reflect the pronunciation and vocabulary used by family and peers, performers will echo the individualized compositional register of the performers who taught them.

Extrapolate out a few generations of OT performers, and you can see that everyone will soon be working with a “modified source code” of one type or another. Until the central, federalized regulation made possible by print and static recordings arises, OT will evolve in many different directions, creating an ecology that once again fosters innovation by evolution. The truth is that Proteus never really stops morphing until you take drastic measures to try to hold him still. And even then what appears to be stasis can turn out to be an illusion.

In the next posting we’ll continue our IT-to-OT translation with OSD guidelines 5 through 10.

In the public domain

Continuity and sustainability through innovation. To the book-bound mentality, such a strategy may appear at best unlikely and counter-intuitive, at worst simply wrong-headed. But as we’ll see in this and the next blog entry, it accurately describes how oral tradition and the internet operate in the public domain, the arena in which each thought-technology thrives most naturally. Despite what our default cultural reflexes encourage us to believe, OT and IT prosper not via the textual program of fixation-through-capture, but via morphing and regeneration. For pathways-based media, it’s rule-governed, ongoing evolution – rather than the dead-end of fossilization – that promises continued usefulness and accessibility.

Two aspects of OT and IT, both of them foreign to the textual world, stand out as especially important reasons underlying this counter-intuitive behavior. The first is a radical openness to change, and I mean “radical” in two senses – fundamental and innovative. The second aspect is an unprivatized community of makers and users, a cyber-democracy if you like. These two qualities make for a creative scenario that favors access, exchange, and diverse contributions over ownership, licensing, and proprietary products. Instead of micro-societal restriction by legal instruments and entrenched resistance to shared innovation, so typical of the régime of the book and page, OT and IT offer an invitation to cooperate and jointly innovate across the broad swath of the macro-society.

OT accomplishes its goals by opening the performance arena to all performers and (let’s not forget) all audiences, subject to individual cultural rules. Likewise, IT’s ever-emerging openness and ever-expanding community are sponsoring more and more “open source” and “open standards” sorts of activities. In short, if OT and IT operate like matched “bookends,” it’s precisely because they flourish by not closing the book on sharing, by conducting their business very much in the public domain.

Let’s consider a few examples of IT behavior along these lines. (In the next entry I will examine ways in which the Open Source Definition of digital creativity and rights can be applied to the dynamics of OT.)

In recent years the so-called “open source” movement has begun what some are already calling a major revolution in software design and development. The trend away from proprietary, vendor-regulated products and toward open source software has meant that innovation of any sort can take place without the usual restrictions of licensing, commercial purchase, and penalties for modification. The source code is open, experimentation is open, and redistribution is open – all across the eAgora.

In the simplest scenario, this initiative fosters adaptation of freely available applications to any subsequent purpose without abridgment of copyright, so that anyone can tailor preexisting “open” software to a particular purpose without monetary impediment or fear of legal repercussions. Would your business function more smoothly if you could tweak a particular application by adding or substituting modules, or even by rewriting basic code? Under open source rules, feel free to go ahead and tweak – no questions asked, no fees incurred, no laws broken. Likewise for the next innovator, and the evolution goes on unhindered.

Complementary to the open source movement is a commitment to open standards, such as the OpenDocument standard recently adopted by the state of Massachusetts as a replacement for proprietary, non-conforming productivity applications. By January 1, 2007 all state offices will be required to install software that supports this new standard, which in effect will disqualify any proprietary software that doesn’t do the same. As of that date Microsoft Office is out, as are WordPerfect and Lotus Notes, none of which support the OpenDocument standard. Technophiles and ordinary citizens of the cyber-democracy, on the other hand, will profit from decreased costs and increased access, as will state workers – once they master the new applications that will be required when “open season in Massachusetts” begins. Capitulate to broader, community-based rule or suffer the consequences, the Massachusetts folks are saying to software vendors, even as they warmly welcome makers, users, and workers into an open, seamless eCommunity.

Add to these symptoms of a deeply rooted and growing commitment to sharing – as opposed to owning – another remarkable phenomenon: MIT OpenCourseWare, which makes public and available many hundreds of courses over 34 departments and programs. MIT President Susan Hockfield describes the broadening and leveling of the educational eAgora in this way: “educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.” IT opens doors (through pathways), just like OT.

On the eCommerce front, the phenomenon of “market mavericks,” third-party bloggers and screeners who are taking advantage of web democracy to help correct information asymmetry and rebalance the process of informed purchasing. These responsible cyber-citizens provide the consumer community with easily available, independent evaluations of products and buying advice. (Visit the bzzagent website for an example, or consult the Commuri-Radford research
partially sponsored by the Center for eResearch at the University of Missouri-Columbia.)

So. . . the state of Massachusetts, the MIT faculty, market mavericks – what do these three groups have in common? Briefly stated, they’ve decided that the way forward is not to hoard ideas but to distribute them as widely as possible, not to try to corner the market but to trade with everyone else, and on as equal a footing as possible. They see their best opportunity for sustained contribution as members of a radically open community of makers and users – indeed, a community wherein the (essentially proprietary) distinction between “makers” and “users” really doesn’t apply in the default sense. Instead, and again as in OT, all involved become in one way or another participants, actors or doers participating in a process of mutual exchange whose strength derives from morphing and innovation.

That’s what’s meant by a truly public domain – an IT-based community in which ownership has given way to sharing, which is in turn a recognition that ideas just don’t hold still. In such circumstances, is it really any surprise that open source software, open courseware, and third-party cyber-advisers have begun to take center stage? As with OT, people are once again starting to prefer pathways to paper.

Post-“script”
This just in, as the anchor newspeople say! Only a few hours before the present blog entry was posted, Microsoft submitted its Open XML document format technology to the international standards body known as (Ecma). While this action doesn’t meet Massachusetts’ call for an OpenDocument standard, it does represent a new direction (dare we say a concession?) on the part of the giant software vendor. It also constitutes one more piece of evidence that the eAgora is moving away from ownership by proprietary fiefdoms and toward sharing across an open community.

Online with OT, offline with books

We start with Corey Doctorow’s neat, succinct contrast between media, taken from a talk on digital rights management he gave to Microsoft’s Research Group on June 17, 2004: “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media are good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.” In other words, media success derives from mutual exclusivity in dynamics.

As Doctorow goes on to explain how conventional paper books and eBooks contrast in their goals and delivery systems, it’s hard or impossible to disagree with the “different agendas” dichotomy he describes. Different tools for different jobs.

In fact, we can extend his argument a step further by noting that the once-new medium of page and book originally succeeded for precisely the same reason: disjunction between media. Separate vehicles, separate agendas – at least in the most straightforward cases.

And how does that separate-but-equal arrangement work? Well, the page was (and remains) unarguably “worse” than oral tradition for doing what OT did and continues to do, but far “better” at accomplishing its own program. As emphasized throughout this developmental blog for the larger Pathways Project, we won’t ever be able to compress the living reality of OT into even the most elaborately configured book. They’re simply different animals – or rather one is a living animal and the other a taxidermist’s museum-ready reduction of the real beast.

So what’s the page’s own program? What can it do for us that OT can’t manage? History teaches that the cognitive prosthesis of texts can freeze (or appear to freeze) performances into conveniently spatialized items that can then be copied, stored, transported, and consulted at leisure. Simply put, the book converts online OT participants into offline text-consumers. So not only does Doctorow’s theorem apply to the book versus IT disjunction, then; it also accurately characterizes the role-segregation of OT versus the book.

But that’s where the contrastive theorem runs aground. For whether it’s as simple as two negatives yielding a positive match or something more fundamental (like navigating pathways), OT and IT don’t follow that same rule of mutual exclusivity. As discussed in “Owning versus sharing”, the oAgora and eAgora actually have a lot in common – all superficial appearances to the contrary. Both technologies thrive on morphing, on variation within limits, on open sharing among a broad-based community; and they both lack the concept of the free-standing, complete-in-itself item that’s at the very heart of the book-and-page medium. OT and IT lack the ideology of the thing; they use pathways.

Or, to reframe the relationship in a version of Doctorow’s helpful theorem, OT and IT are worse at the stuff books are good at, and better at the stuff books are bad at. They succeed because they’re good at the same stuff – promoting performance along a network of options. In a real sense, books are offline; both OT and IT are online.

On the face of it, then, we’re confronted with a phenomenon of media recursiveness, as OT contrasts diametrically with the book, which in turn contrasts with IT – making OT and IT similar to each other and distinct from texts. Could it be that with the internet we're returning to something more fundamental that the default medium of the book and page? Could it be that we're casting off what some philosophers have called “logocentrism” (a fixation on the myth of objective reality) and returning to the kind of medium that more truthfully mirrors reality and mimes the way we think? After centuries of offline activity, are we now getting back online?

Owning versus sharing

What does it mean to own something? How do we come into possession of an item or idea, and what are the rules for sharing it with others? There’s probably no hotter issue in today’s digital, internet-enabled world, and yet it’s also an issue that has deep roots in the long history and prehistory of media.

Consider a hypothetical parallel. Imagine a time and place where and when there is no such thing as copyright – either “big C,” Creative Commons licenses, or any other such arrangement. And the reason such instruments wouldn’t exist is that the very concept of ownership of ideas, performances, and works of verbal and musical art wouldn’t exist. Embroiled in a litigious society where patents and copyrights and intellectual property seem more and more the topics of everyday conversation, we would find such an imagined time and place almost unfathomable.

But in fact this is far from a fantasy: it was and is precisely the situation in which oral traditions have long flourished. According to the basic dynamics of exchange, stories circulate widely and freely, with the only universally observed constraints being the capacity to perform and the ability to enlist an audience. (Of course, particular cultures may impose other constraints, such as the gender or age of the teller, the season during which a story may be told, and so forth, but these are localized rules and have little or nothing to do with the conception of the story as an item or thing in our terms.) People can’t “own” oral traditional stories any more than they can individually and exclusively own the everyday languages they speak. Notwithstanding the protestations of the famed Académie Française, no single person or group can prescribe or determine language use, which will always remain a rule-governed free-for-all that operates via natural selection.

Oral traditions that function without support from text-based media show that this kind of open sharing – as opposed to our default concept of owning – isn’t just grudgingly or tacitly permitted: it’s absolutely the lifeblood of the continuing tradition. Unless stories are free to flow across a culture without hindrance from a centralized authority, the tradition will simply die. The tradition belongs to the people who make and re-make it.

So where does that meddling authority come from? First, it’s resident in the ideology of the idea or work of verbal or musical art as a thing, a commodity, an objectified item that is subject to ownership and therefore to centralized control. Second, that authority can emerge only with the conversion of an idea or work to textualized form (and here we include texts of an audio and video recordings as well as the book and page). This transformation operates under the radar, as it were, via an unexamined, unacknowledged alchemy. Once made tangible by transfer to the book or page, so goes the unstated assumption, the idea or work effectively becomes that book or page – just the same kind of (faulty but similarly ideology-driven) assumption we make when we decide that what appears, spatialized and dead, on the page is language itself, rather than a script for language.

And there’s another step, and accompanying trapdoor. Contrary to what some claim, it’s not simply the introduction of a writing system that makes the difference. Writing systems need the attendant technologies of cheap reproduction (printing and easily available copies) as well as broad literacy and mass readership before centralized authority can emerge and the commodification of ideas and works of verbal or musical art can take place. Thus the medieval European arena, in which authorship was often inchoate and emergent, and in which works were regularly created, copied, and translated without attribution, depended to a significant degree on manuscripts and reading aloud in public forums. No cheap reproductions or mass readerships there. These societies were set up for exo-legalistic sharing rather than owning, and so the advent of ownership and all that it brought with it was to prove gradual, even halting.

In retrospect the shift appears cleaner and neater than it was. But once the idea-to-page conversion was accomplished and became the reflex action of a culture, the way was clear for modern concepts of authorship, publication rights, protection of intellectual property, and other text-dependent forms of ownership to take hold. We’ve chronically ignored the history and continuing importance of this evolution in pursuit of our own agenda, but the truth is that the open sharing that fuels oral tradition did give way to the agreed-upon illusion of legally defined owning. It’s been our conventional practice to foster that illusion.

So perhaps it’s not just serendipity that the hot-button issue of ownership of ideas and works of verbal and musical art is rising to the top of our cultural agenda right now, just as another “thing-less,” non-item-based medium begins to take firm hold. Once again we find ourselves traveling along pathways, this time in the eAgora rather than the oAgora, and once again the medium we’re using exposes the notion of ownership as a convenient but finally baseless ideology. Traveling along pathways means movement in and out of digitized, morphing environments: it’s forever kinetic, emerging, making sense by changing rather than remaining (putatively) static.

The internet and digitization have bluntly put the lie to our comfortable assumption that ideas and works of verbal or musical art can ever truly become immutable items, things, or commodities. If this exposure seems enervating to individuals, groups, and corporations, their discomfort is traceable not to the new media, but rather to modern Western culture’s ideological commitment to what’s always been a falsehood. Small wonder that post-Gutenberg societies are essentially alone in locating the idea and the work within the palpable reality of the document. Faced with this dilemma of our own making, we should resist the urge to shoot the media-messenger.

And how do we know for certain that this claim of ownership has always been a falsehood? Because for many millennia – long before writing systems of any kind arose – owning ideas and works of verbal and musical art just wasn’t possible. Ownership was simply not a category. Sharing was the rule.

With this perspective in mind, let’s pose the following topic for a possible future discussion. Could the open-source initiatives now threatening to displace commodified, proprietary software be another symptom of internet-sponsored, digital sharing? Is the open-source movement a manifestation of sharing inspired by the natural ecology of the eAgora?

Each OT on its own terms: oEthnopoetics II

So what do we actually do when we “do ethnopoetics”?

Our agenda lists three interactive activities: “reading,” representing, and reperforming. I put the first term in quotation marks to indicate the sense of “understanding in context” rather than of “processing a text visually.” Reading thus means taking active account of all of the aspects of the given context – not just lexical content as deciphered for encoding on the page (“the words”) but also performance-based dimensions like intonation, loudness, pauses, and other vocal signals, as well as any musical or rhythmic features, facial or manual gestures, and details of costuming, setting, or accompaniment. The ethnopoetic credo is clear: avoid reducing the multi-dimensional event to a one-dimensional, static, silent object.

Fine. But the truth is that this kind of “reading” isn’t always as easily accomplished as I’m making it sound. A brief personal anecdote may provide a cautionary tale. As a graduate student, I once made bold to ask a rather famous guest lecturer in Classics about the role of the recurrent melody associated with the guslars’ performance of South Slavic oral epic (listen to a performance by a guslar here). Having heard a few excerpts, I’d sensed that the music functioned as a mnemonic support and perhaps even as a nonverbal cueing system, possibly alerting the audience to shifts in the narrative progress of the epic plot. Alas, my well-meaning curiosity was rewarded with the rather curt observation that “the music’s just a drone, nothing more.” Never mind that this so-called drone required Béla Bartók to invent new transcriptional strategies in order to render it in notation; I was impatiently told that the vocal and instrumental melodies were merely an uninteresting backdrop to the really crucial part of the performance – the textualizable words. That response didn’t seem even remotely right, but since no research existed to refute such an abject dismissal of this aspect of the epic singer’s art, and also because I lacked the musicological expertise to further investigate what I heard happening, I was stymied.

Some decades later, Wakefield Foster, a classical musician and doctoral candidate studying ancient Greek and South Slavic epic, was to examine the musical component of a South Slavic epic performance by Halil Bajgoritch, The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Betchirbey, and to show that the melody does in fact serve as a mnemonic and signaling system. Conclusion one: we're dealing with far more than a simple drone (the tunes exhibit a theme-and-variant morphology paralleled in the formulaic language – the “large words” – of many oral traditions). Conclusion two: even more interestingly, the singer’s melodic phrasing turns out to be nothing less than a meaning-bearing aspect of the performance. For those fluent in this particular poetic tradition, the music is a full expressive partner. (We will have more to say about special, idiomatic dimensions of expression when we discuss the approach from Immanent art a few postings from now.)

So much for the first step of “reading”; how about our second ethnopoetic activity, representation? Two schools of ethnopoetics have emerged to confront this next step in the overall act of interpretation. One of them, associated with Dennis Tedlock, concentrates on the particular features of the individual performance. For example, he uses CAPITALS to indicate increased volume, while spacing, a smaller font, and ascending or descending lines denote pause, reduced volume, and up and down intonation, respectively. Tedlock’s transcription effectively becomes a script or libretto for reperformance. Another system of representation, pioneered by Dell Hymes, identifies a hierarchy of expressive units such as verses, lines, scenes, acts, and the like, and then proceeds to reinterpret prose transcriptions – originally made by others in ignorance of the ethnopoetics of the oral tradition involved – as the poetry they really are. Silent prose text gives way to performed traditional poetry.

The two schools of ethnopoetics differ, of course, the one focusing primarily on immediate performative dimensions (Tedlock) and the other on traditional, idiomatic segments (Hymes). While the two systems overlap to a degree, they diverge as much as they converge. But one essential shared concern is clear. In both cases the central idea is to restore the integrity of the individual oral tradition by (re-)scoring it as the performance it is rather than settling for the reduced and misconfigured text it isn’t. Each species of verbal art is represented on its own terms, not those of some other species.

Of course, it’s precisely in the pursuit of more faithful representation that the eEdition and eCompanion can help most directly. Instead of resorting to the standard textual option that conventionally eliminates so many of the aspects we’ve been discussing, we can enrich even the most complexly scored libretto with audio, video, and still photography, as well as hot-linked digests of idiomatic meaning, characters’ biographies, and cultural context. What more faithful way to represent the performance than to aim at resynchronizing the event?

The third and final step in the ethnopoetic program simply amounts to the natural outcome of the other two: “reading” and representing foster reperforming. When a “reader” reperforms an ethnopoetically coded representation, whether silently and alone or aloud in a group, he or she comes that much closer to the original performance and its expressive dynamism. The “reader” and whatever audience may be present can now hear some of the intonations, see some of the hand gestures, ponder some of the dramatic silences that were once endemic, meaningful features of a performance that happened in another place and time. They can more nearly approach a facsimile experience of the original.

Unlike a conventional text, then, ethnopoetic representations don’t conventionally eliminate these often crucial signals. “Readers” don’t find themselves desperately trying to make sense of a textual score that omits a large percentage of the cues, that effectively deletes much of the original reality. (Consider how difficult it would be to read a Dickens novel or a Wordsworth poem if every second or third word were silently removed from your paperback copy!)

Does our reperforming “reader” ever get all the way to the implied goal of flawless reproduction? Of course not. The most one can aspire to is a more faithful (but always non-identical) approximation of the original experience, a better (but certainly never “perfect”) understanding than a one-dimensional page-bound reflection can manage. But, although it’s destined to fall short of an absolute replica of the original, a more faithful approximation is by definition better than a reductive and partial fossilization. Increased fluency is always an improvement, even if the second-language speaker will never quite attain mother-tongue fluency.

To summarize, the method called ethnopoetics advocates letting each oral tradition speak in its own terms – first by “reading” the performance (grasping all of its expressive cues), and then by scoring it in a transcription that encodes as many of those cues as possible. If these two conditions are met, then the next “reader” can aspire to a more faithful understanding and reperformance of the original event.

In short, oEthnopoetics locates and maps the oPathways, allowing reperformers to follow the trail blazed by the original performer. The next posting will explore how the perspective from eEthnopoetics can help us identify and follow the pathways that constitute the internet.

Each OT on its own terms: oEthnopoetics I

On the heels of applying Performance theory to oral tradition and the internet, let’s turn over the next few postings to exploring two additional methods for understanding these media: Ethnopoetics and Immanent art. Both of these approaches have gained momentum in the past decade or so (details here), and each can offer helpful perspectives on what’s transpiring in the a-textual media of OT and IT.

But why look at three methods when you can concentrate on one? Wouldn’t that be more economical and straightforward? Fair questions, to be sure. I’d reply with a defense of pluralism that addresses both practical and principle-driven issues. On the practical side, we can point to all three methods’ demonstrated success with OT as well as their promise for IT. As far as principle is concerned, I advocate a broad menu of approaches for a more fundamental reason – namely, a commitment to diversity in frame of reference. I want to encourage more than a single perspective on these complicated and challenging media.

In trying to fathom both OT and IT, the very worst mistake we can make is too exclusive a focus, a false economy that will inevitably lead to parochialism and reductionism. More positively, given the inherent variety of oral traditions and the ever-expanding world of the internet, we need to assemble a tool-kit of approaches that embody distinct (even if complementary) perspectives. Committing ourselves to pluralism offers the best chance to avoid predetermined results, as well as to appreciate the richness and complexity of both oPathways and ePathways. In a nutshell, that’s why we’re assigning “equal time” to Performance theory, Ethnopoetics, and Immanent art – each has a contributing role to play in discovering oPathways.

So how does our second approach – Ethnopoetics – work? Specifically, for the purposes of these first two postings (oEthnopoetics I and II), let’s ask how it illuminates oral tradition. How does it open up oPathways? How does it address the problem of whether oral tradition truly requires a different interpretive approach, one that’s distinctive from the textual approach(es)? A question-and-answer sequence can help us get started:

Q: Does oral tradition really need to be “read” differently from texts?
A: Diverse oral traditions need to be “read” diversely.

In other words, it’s never a matter of a neat-and-tidy binary, of either oral tradition or text. Rather it’s a matter of a world brimming over with diverse oral traditions, from ancient through modern, that share two interlocking properties: the broad-based category of OT (as opposed to the broad-based category of texts) and a trademark individuality that distinguishes each oral tradition from the others. In biological terms, the genus of OT comprises the worldwide assortment of disparate, individual species (such as Xhosa praise-poetry, Basque bertsolaritza, and Ainu epic). Within the unity of oral tradition lies tremendous human diversity.

Since it’s only too easy to overlook or underestimate such heterogeneity, let’s attempt a rough calibration. Begin by reflecting for a moment on the tremendous amount and variety of “written literature” (texts) of differing types and origins: novels from six continents and many centuries, poetry in its myriad forms from the ancient world onward, the annual yield of short stories and essays across an international spectrum of magazines, literary reviews, and the like. And this is merely the short list. Even the Google library project couldn’t contain all written literature.

So much for textual heterogeneity; now for the two-part deduction. If (1) texts exhibit a broad spectrum of their own and are deserving of individual attention (no argument there), and if (2) oral traditions far outstrip texts in amount and variety worldwide (and they most certainly do), then it follows that each member of the “oral traditions” category also deserves careful individual attention. As much as all oral traditions depend on pathways for their dynamism and expressive force, each also merits its own special roadmap.

With these thoughts as background, consider the root meaning of “ethnopoetics,” from ancient Greek ethnos (group, nation, or tribe) plus “poetics,” which derives from Greek poiein (to make or create) and thus speaks to the building or construction of the tradition and performance by the particular ethnos. According to the etymology of “ethnopoetics,” then, we’re called upon to give each oral tradition its due, to understand each one on its own terms (as a species) as well as part of a larger collective (the genus).

This approach to OT puts the lie to long-outmoded notions such as a universally defined “orality” because it insists on the singularity of each tradition, genre, and even speech-act. The vantage point from Ethnopoetics thus avoids the kind of crude overgeneralization that denied Africa an oral epic because no Homeric-style epic could be found, or maintained that true poetry was unknown among many Native American peoples because no conventional Greco-Roman poetic line could be demonstrated. Happily, both misconstruals have since been corrected.

The moral of the story? Concentrate on what each ethnos understands as poiein; don’t fall victim to pre-set defaults; don’t assume that any one OT automatically = any other OT.

In the next post we’ll concentrate on the actual practice of Ethnopoetics as applied to oral traditions. Given the complex collection of species in the OT genus, just how do we go about understanding and representing them on their own terms? Most fundamentally, what are the benefits of enlisting Ethnopoetics as an approach? These will be our primary challenges for oEthnopoetics II.