Signata (Oct 2018)
Textes et textures numériques
Abstract
The printed text never suspends the materiality of its medium, that is, it never allows the reader to forget it. The digital text, on the other hand, as soon as it is subtracted from its reading devices, puts this materiality in suspense, so to be often called “virtual”. However, digital texts have a material dimension that leads to new exploration practices that have a major impact on our cultural and cognitive habits because they require a transfer of skills from the culture of printed texts to the culture of digital texts. Indeed, while the concept of literacy identifies the specific competencies required by reading and writing skills for manuscript and/or printed texts, the new concept of digital literacy identifies specific competencies required by the culture of digital texts. And for the most part, these skills are still to be explored. To carry on this reflection, it is therefore essential to take into account “digital materiality” (Doueihi, 2011) in order to understand its impact on new productive and interpretative practices of texts. For example, the ability to exploit texts through automatic data analysis depends strictly on the particular nature of digital materiality: so we can see the impact that materiality can have on any approach to text. Moreover, considering the interaction between the materiality of the medium and the practices of its exploitation, we can observe that digital texts make visible all the intra- and inter-textual links that compose a text, that is to say their own textuality, which allows us to talk of digital textures. Our reflections on the materiality of the media, its transformations and its challenges during the transition from the culture of printed texts to the culture of digital texts, are based on the article by Louis Hjelmslev entitled La stratification du langage (1954). By proposing a stratified model of the text stemming from this reflection, and by applying it to the analysis of traditional and digital texts, we can finally replace the practices concerning the exploitation of texts and the materials by which media are made, inside the semiotic object.
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