Rita Raley

Machine Translation and Global English

This essay critiques Warren Weavers articulation of machine translation as a problem of cryptography and his analogizing of the treatment of language within the context of machine translation to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richardss Basic English project. Basic language, with its privileging of communicability and immediate legibility, is the precondition for the global network of programming languages. Focusing on the underlying principles of machine translation, functionality, and performativity, this essay argues for a homology between machine translation and global English: both exist in the technocratic mode and abide by the principle of instrumental rationality.

Securing with algorithms: Knowledge, decision, sovereignty

Amid the deployment of algorithmic techniques for security – from the gathering of intelligence data to the proliferation of smart borders and predictive policing – what are the political and ethical stakes involved in securing with algorithms? Taking seriously the generative and world-making capacities of contemporary algorithms, this special issue draws attention to the embodied actions of algorithms as they extend cognition, agency and responsibility beyond the conventional sites of the human, the state and sovereignty. Though focusing on different modes of algorithmic security, each of the contributions to the special issue shares a concern with what it means to claim security on the terrain of incalculable and uncertain futures. To secure with algorithms is to reorient the embodied relation to uncertainty, so that human and non-human cognitive beings experimentally generate and learn what to bring to the surface of attention for a security action.

Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes

rita raley Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes Alternatives are clearly needed, not merely objections. —Drucker I am convinced that the answers don’t lie in what we have been, but in what we could be. —Rockwell T here are numerous origin stories for the digital humanities as an institutional entity.1 What they do not yet include is the advertisement for a faculty position in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, written by Alan Liu and committee in 2000 and quite clearly specifying the desire for candidates whose work is recognizably literary, to some degree practice-based, and informed by cultural criticism. It read: Assistant Professor, tenure track, digital humanities. We antici- pate making one appointment effective July 1, 2001. We seek can- didates who, while working in any literary field, have a major commitment to studying the historical and theoretical aspects of information technology and new media. Applicants should also be committed to some dimension of digital practice such as web authoring or multimedia. We anticipate that the person appointed would teach courses on such subjects as the culture and aesthet- ics of information, hypertext literature, past and present writing technologies, and the relationship between information society and gender, ethnicity, or global cultures (as well as courses on Volume 25, Number 1 doi 10.1215/10407391-2419991

Another Kind of Global English

This essay first considers global English in relation to the contemporary sociotechnological milieu. It examines machine translation applications, particularly Google Translate, and suggests that they globalize English in their de facto articulation of it as a normative default. Even, or perhaps especially, in the age of Google, English retains its protocological status. The essay then considers the place of global English within the twenty-first-century university, perhaps no longer the University of Excellence but the University of Efficiency. The overarching suggestion is that the discourse of global English needs to expand well beyond disciplinary and curricular concerns to consider English as the literal and metaphoric operating system for a social matrix that is at once networked and informational. If the discourse of global English is to have any critical purchase, in other words, it cannot afford to think only in terms of print culture, for to do so would be to sidestep its primary operational field and the means by which it maintains its continuing paradigmatic function.

Statistical Material: Globalization and the Digital Art of John Klima

Since all presence is presence only at a distance, the tele-presence of the era of the globalization of exchanges could only be established across the widest possible gap. This is a gap which now stretches to the other side of the world, from one edge to the other of present reality. But this is a meta-geophysical reality which strictly regulates the tele-continents of a virtual reality that monopolizes the greater part of the economic activity of the nations and, conversely, destroys cultures which are precisely situated in the space of the physics of the globe. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb 1