A Symbol Factory

• Introduction to the Literary Machine
• By Gunnar Sommestad

Everything in the Literary Machine is about words. Words are actually numbers in the dictionary file. Changing the spelling or the ending of a word does not effect its linking to other words or other behavior in the system.

Words in the Literary Machine are discrete phenomena. They exist or they do not exist. They have this or that connection, or they have not. If you think about language as something intrinsically non-digital, always this or that, in continuously varying degrees; then stop reading here.

Words may be changed as to their alphabetical/language representation. In the Literary Machine 2000, I introduced the Inflection object. Inflections are a list of "true" synonyms; that is a list of words that you consider as interchangeable with the word that currently holds a position in the dictionary list.

The inflection list facilitates convenient changes of the word entry. It also gives a base for more or less automatic text processing, where you can allocate to a word in your the Literary Machine system with some word in a text.

In real life, you may experience that you cannot find the word for an entity that you want to use (e.g .a person name or a word for a phenomenon). In the Literary Machine, this would mean that you could see the word number instead of a word with characters. (This will not happen…)

We are now approaching the "symbol factory" devices of the Literary Machine. The Literary Machine word entries may be combined in objects called "Concepts", building new symbol and cognition value.

The system in it self does not preclude what kind of functionality that this is. It is just offered to you.

From experience, I would say that concepts will be used to harbor near-synonyms in a group, clarifying the usage of words. However, more often it is used to expose the logical "and"; that is the common area of two or more words. (And those who consider the Literary Machine to be a regular database will have still other versions.)

Concept is a step in a symbol reference chain, where economy in symbol usage and our preference for a certain "slack" or indecisiveness shows up.

(The inflection extension could be said to be something similar, extending in the other direction from words in the dictionary list.)

The Clipboard

The Literary Machine handles both its own "symbol factory" and ordinary complete texts alongside. It never imposes a strict and tight interdependence between the two.

Texts are always possible to move and process via the standard Windows clipboard. Thus, text items in work are often accumulated by the Literary Machine to longer concatenated texts on the clipboard for the convenience of the user.

Ideally, the Literary Machine should treat several media of expression, like sounds, moving pictures, etc to mimic the situation of human perception. As a modest start, you are offered to store pictures instead of texts on the cards.

Images

2nd abstracting step - Keywords

Ordinary texts are stored on the Item cards (for technical reasons item texts must not be longer than 32 000 characters each.) The item texts are not automatically connected to the objects in the Literary Machine database system; they are instead indirectly classified by an unbounded use of mark-up with keywords.

Keywords are in fact the "concepts", which in turn are built by combinations of words in the dictionary word list. Since the concept may consist of several words (without a designated header word), the item mark-up consists of an arbitrary word from the concept.

(At a first glance, this might appear as a senseless strategy. Testing it in the program, you will be able to judge whether it is useful or not.)

The heart of the Machine operations is the various "drop onto desk" and "drop onto other object" activities. Dropping cards is an efficient mouse-driven technique, that uses the computer screen area as efficient as possible. It allows you to use your spatial or graphical cognition for grouping and connecting. However, there is no similarity to the traditional mind-map-paradigm. This is intentional - I am skeptical to graphics as an environment for human thought programming.

All what has been said so far is beneficial to the analytical side of human mind: "What if..?" or "Could not this or that be changed...?" questions.

We also have other needs. We need to describe developments in the time perspective and we then typically avoid too much analytical "what ifs".

To put it another way - the same word can be used in both these environments.

Take the word "Politics". Politics may be explored as an understanding of the arena of possible change. Or we could have an interest in studying it as a factor in human life, competing with other interests. In different ways, the focus could be on "in fact, anything could go."

The dialectical opposite ot that is the study of Politics as an easily recognizable entity, having an organic development in time. The historical descriptive understanding, or the ability to deeply understand and forecast that entity, which you have labeled.

In the Literary Machine, the narrative text, the conventional story is the equivalent of this second perspective. The project box could contain headers of such continuos texts.

This is a dialectical setup possibility. You may name projects as words (drop a dictionary word in the project box and you have created a project heading.)

You may use the item texts fragments to form the project contents. Moreover, you may change the typographical setting to bookmode and get a similar-to-book reading perception.

What this is about

The Literary Machine is not only, what I have written about here. Most users so far have implemented it as a more or less traditional database and their comments have that as the starting point. This spin-off effect is rewarding and more than I had in mind at start.

Thus, this text is strictly an interpretation of my own. I will try to summarize my favorite ideas in a few headings here.

(All discussions and criticisms, which build on tools, rather than academic prestige, are most important.)

Use the Literary Machine Symbol Factory to develop your own private implementation or agenda, using the words around you. The more you work with it, the more you increase efficiency and your refinement in communication.

Give "digitalization" of language a thought. Do you think that language is an "analogous" non-computer machine? Well, in that case you will never have come this far in reading...

One of my own main hypotheses is that the brain could have a high priority for abstraction in order to achieve economy in processing. It must deliver results on time. This idea and also the idea that there exists a beneficial effect in impreciseness or slack, have guided me.

People in general assume that language is perfectly common and standardized. I cannot see the foundation of that idea and it often makes me wonder if I was born on the same planet. How could the precision of words and concepts be a non-discussion item?

Building your own dictionary is a good beginning in thinking about this.

Some more screenshots:

Screen layout commands