Transcoding Is The New Shannon-Weaver Model

The readings this week were partly review for me, not that review is bad in any way. Some of the material covered for this week touch on Technical Writing 2, a bit from Hypertext, and a bit from Multimodal Composition. It is nice to directly know the intersected points from those classes and this one.

I really enjoyed the Design Papers pdf. I found the Q&A section to be a very insightful framing of complicated subjects, especially the part covering semiotics. I really liked the last section containing the exemplary descriptions of the concepts in the first part of the reading. Talk about putting theory into practice!  This is something I will refer back to from time to time as a concept review. Heck, my wife asked me to give a copy to her so she could read it and use it.

The pdf that go my mind working was What is Document Design. It was the last four pages that really perked my mind. The explanation of the Shannon-Weaver model brought Lev Manovich and his theories of New Media up as a filter in document design for me.

I could not help correlating the ideas of transition, reception, and “noise” with the process of transcoding. Though Manovich discusses his concept of transcoding in relationship to digital media, I do think it applies to documentation or communication in general. The only thing we need to do is look at “information architecture” as a machine or system, which is not that hard to do considering textual and visual communication are systems of knowing to begin with.

The basic idea of transcoding is that a new media object can somewhat be converted to another format. A more detailed description begins with putting forward that an expression is encoded through mediation to become a new media object that then can be remediated to another form. In this, there is an encoding process a decoding process and a recoding process.

The encoding is taking the expression and manifesting it in one or another medium. It is putting thought out into an object-form that can be digital or not.  Then, the expression can be said to have been mediated, or encoded with meanings intended by the creator and meanings not intended (this is the friction of that decade long argument revolving around authorship vs. authority). It is a semiotic manifestation of an internal codex of personally generated meaning.

Then, from that mediated form, another person can decode the manifested idea to understand the intended meaning; in other words, it is decoded (keep in mind the unintended meaning). Additionally, depending on the original mediated form, the expression can then be converted to a different remediated variation. It is here where I would argue that the reception of the expression directly into the mind of the reviver could constitute remediation itself. Instead, I merely mention this view. The other remediated variations can be of any type, including a rehash of the original manifestation in its native form.

Thus far, I have put forward that transition and the act of encoding are analogous. I have also mentioned that decoding is analogous to receiving. So what is the “noise”? The noise is in the unintended authorial meanings encoded with the intended authorial meanings. This is where I assert that inaccessible documents are the result of unintended authorial meaning… “noise”.

I believe it is possible that confusing or difficult to decode documents represent an infusion of designers’ inadvertent transmission (encoding) of a struggle with the substance and organization of the document itself. The result is “noise” or “static” that is that difficulty. I know this is pretty elementary, but it does help me to fix the ideas of what document design is and why there is no convention in identifying or determining the identity of the persons creating various documents.

Transcoding does not only take place in the process of creating a document, it is also a feature of the entire field of document design. In attempting to encode the task, job, even the event of creating a document of any type so that others can understand what it is document designers’ do, “noise” (static) is produced as a result of having to attempt to navigate codes from all of the fields in which  document design is an aspect, which really is all of them.