This paper puts forward the concept of 'geographies of (con)text' to critique the metaphors and materialities of 'the digital', concentrating on the physical constructs and constraints of language on the web. A landscape of words as opposed to a landscape of code , language-as-data becomes material in ways very different from both print and spoken word; its physicality represented in bits, bytes and circuitry, and its limits and variations mediated and governed by the processes which order, sort, move and index it. By virtue of their reproducibility and enhanced means of dissemination, digitised words can have paratextual -and often political -agencies and excesses beyond their linguistic function. Using examples of online search, dictionaries and translation, the paper will imagine how context as a kind of space might be produced, constructed and limited, how competing actors contribute tactically (de Certeau, 1984) to the (in)visibility and (im)mobility of the linguistic data in the searchable database, and how these actors negotiate the conflicting interests of money, efficiency and truth (Lyotard, 1984) in the geo-linguistic spaces of the web. With a geography of (con)text thus imagined, the mathematical and binary logics that construct and mediate the language within it are also clearly exposed. The paper goes on to discuss how creativity and originality might be restricted by ongoing processes of quantification and monetisation of language, before concluding that digitised language falls somewhere in the middle of a structuralist/post-structuralist critique; being at the same time both free from and constrained by the geographies of context. IntroductionWhat happens when words become data? Now that almost all language is in some way digitised, 'data-ised' and submitted to computation, the ownership, control and organisation of linguistic and other data can have a profound, yet not always intentional or indeed predictable, impact on social, cultural and political discourse, and on personal freedoms and securities. As well as significant power and profits for those who harvest and process it, the 'data-isation' of language brings the risk of serious collateral damage. By virtue of their reproducibility and enhanced means of movement and dissemination, words-as-data can have paratextual agencies and excesses beyond their linguistic function; the granular configurations and distortions of data can be instantly and exponentially magnified to a global geopolitical and discursively significant scale. But in contrast to this apparent post-modern untethering of language from its locational and referential functions, language that appears non-normative, or somehow unexpected, such as poetry or other creative variations of text, resists computation, and as a result has its movements through digital space restricted. It becomes suspect; penalised for its originality, or its unmarketability, as it fights its way through search engines, firewalls and new libraries of spam. This paper explores this apparent cont...
On the battlefield, light and dark mean much more than the (dis)ability to see. While the darkness of night-time can be used as a tactic, providing cover for personal and territorial defence and attack, it also affects and secures bodies and the spaces they inhabit in other more immediate and intimate ways, recalibrating senses and redefining distance. Light too can spell both safety and danger on the battlefield, disciplining and controlling its occupants with often asymmetrical power-plays of affect and aggression. Using autoethnographic examples of experiences in Iraq in 2003 (based on the poem below), this article sets out to challenge traditional binaries of light/ dark, good/bad and to question the elemental, cultural and technological sovereignty of light and vision in modern battlespaces.
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