The Cline from Image to Text

I strongly agree with Audenaert's assertion that text and image form "two ends of a continuum rather than two poles of a dichotomy." Consider this range of possibility:

• a photograph
• an image of a painting
• a photograph containing readable text
• an image of a painting with some textual elements
• artwork consisting mainly of textual representation
• an image of text with illustrated elements
• an image of text with annotations
• a PDF containing text and image regions
• a PDF consisting of a collage of texts by multiple authors
• an image of text consisting purely of text written by one author
• a PDF of text consisting purely of text written by one author

Purely in terms of logical analysis of this continuum, there doesn't appear to be any single point at which it is worthwhile demarcating text from image. Moreover, the following discussion will demonstrate that imagery and textuality are inherently related. Even the most plain-text of documents communicate through extra-linguistic semiota: font, spacing, pagination, formatting, relationship of headings with text, etc.

A purely textual manuscript

Consider the requirements for analysing the following, purely textual document. This manuscript would barely meet Audenaet's requirements to qualify as a visually complex document. Yet one would imagine the tools required to analyse the document would be similar to those employed in photographs or paintings (perhaps with an extra affordance here or there). Fortunately, there is no driver from linguistic or semiotic theory for separating the study of images and text: in the book, The Language of Displayed Art, Michael O'Toole describes how to analyse paintings, photographs and sculptures using analytical techniques borrowed from lingustics.

First Epistle of John (begins in right column). From: Codex Sinaiticus. 4th Century Majuscule. Care of CSNTM.org.

Plain text? or Collagic complexity?

Now consider the following image. The right-hand page consists purely of text. Despite the familiarity of the type-setting, and the evident bookishness, this image is arguably more complex than the manuscript above, because it is highly collagic. Consider just one parameter: the variety of authors and contributors to this one page:

• The introductory material (top of page), and the notes (bottom of page) were written by a committee of ten academics from the Reformed theological tradition during the period 1988-1995.
• The headings "The Word of Life", "Walking in the Light" and the translation notes at the bottom of the right-hand column were written by the ESV translation committee circa 2001.
• The cross-references in the middle column were developed by a team of Bible scholars from Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the 19th Century, incorporating a cross-reference system developed by the translators of the 1611 King James Version.
• The versification was designed by Robert Estienne in 1551.
• This version of the biblical text was translated by the ESV translation committee circa 2001, from the United Bible Society's 1993 Greek New Testament (4th corrected ed.), which is a critical text derived from comparison of hundreds of manuscripts, including Codex Sinaiticus pictured above.

Despite this obvious complexity, we have referenced only one parameter out of the total parameter-space for analysing complexity. We've said nothing about the graphic layout, the punctuation, the paragraphing, the visual layout of the outline. While this clearly qualifies as a "visually complex document," it consists almost entirely of plain text.

First Epistle of John. From the Reformation Study Bible, English Standard Version. Published by Ligonier Ministries, Orlando, Florida.

Mechanics of document capture

I captured this image by placing my Bible on my CanoScan LiDE 25, and causing the CanoScan software to capture the image to PDF. So this image is actually an image of a PDF document. When I open the PDF document, I can clearly see that the CanoScan software has represented the image as text despite the obvious skew. But when I position my mouse pointer over the text that reads "That which was from the beginning", and then down into the second verse, the software highlights the middle column, the right-hand column and even some of the words from the facing page. The PDF may have recognized letters; it certainly does not recognize the columnar format.

Attempting to highlight an area of text using Apple's Preview software, on Mac OS X 10.5.7. Scanned from a CanoScan LiDE 25 using CanoScan software.
The down-ranking of meaning in PDF is even a challenge in documents that are printed directly to PDF and then transmitted electronically: the headers and footers, callouts, and other extra-linguistic textual features are intermingled within the text stream. PDF was designed to drive printers, not to facilitate textual analysis by knowledge workers.

At all levels of textual analysis, from authorship to graphology, from linguistic to extra-linguistic semiotic, from imagery or textuality, from source or down-stream digital processing tools, the cline between image and text is gradual. The analytical requirements are largely shared. The tool requirements for many types of text will likely draw from techniques developed for image analysis; image analysis will likely benefit from a common framework with a digital textual analysis tool, particularly one that incorporates notions of spatial hypertext.

Next Article: Assembling the Text

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