Ian’s got a nice post on Academic Mumblespeak, that highlights a particularly useless facet of scholarly publishing. Hell, as PhD students, I think we’ve all come up with or inherited selective writing cliches that somehow delay any statement of intent whilst maintaining a factious degree of integrity.
But later on, Ian carves out an important reason why, ‘mumblespeaking’ could potentially cause untold damage to scholarly publishing.
“Mumblespeak makes potentially interesting works unreadable, contributing to their esotericism. Good editing does not involve cutting material, but cutting chaff. I’d wager that the average scholarly book’s length could be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 without removing any actual content. Such effort would do two things: first, it would reduce the size of books, making them more approachable, affordable, and legible to a broader readership. Second, it would incrementally reduce the costs of printing, since fewer pages costs less on a digital or an offset press.”
Couldn’t agree more here. But it leads me onto an interesting thought recently regarding writing, publishing and helpful metaphors. I’ve come to the conclusion (“in many ways…” 
) that publishing should be more like a ZIP compressor, and readership should be more like ZIP expanders. Let me explain how this metaphor could work.
Many of us have, at one time or another, used a ZIP Drive to install a program or downloaded a ZIP file and expanded it to the original file size. But something defying the laws of physics is happening here; how can you compress the overall number of bits and bytes into a smaller file size, and then somehow magically expand that compressed file, into an identical version of the original? And as a metaphor, what can this reveal about scholarly writing and publishing?
Ok, this is how I was taught the basics. Take a bunch of words, like Lacan’s ‘revision’ of the cogito;
“I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought. I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”
If we translate the sentence into bytes, say, one byte for every character, punctuation and space, we have a total of 103 bytes. What would be the best way to compress this sentence in order to transport it easily? Clearly some word repetition is evident here; We have 5 instances of ‘I‘, 3 instances of ‘am‘, 2 instances of ‘not‘, 2 instances of ‘of‘, 2 instances of ‘.‘ and 3 instances of ‘think‘. As with most of Lacan, many of the words are replicated or punned to such an extent that they can be classed as redundant.
ZIP compression programs work by implementing their own dictionary based systems, cataloging replicated patterns into concise designators. Some algorithms use numbers to designate regular patterns. For example, we could use this system for the Lacanian cogito;
1 = ‘I‘ / 2 = ‘am‘ / 3 = ‘not‘ / 4 = ‘of‘ / 5 =’.‘ / 6 = ‘think‘
Thus we would have;
“1 2 3 wherever 1 2 the plaything 4 my thought5 1 6 4 what 1 2 where 1 do 3 6 to 65”
Accounting for the fact that the dictionary system needs to be added to the compressed file at the end, as long as you had the obscure compressed file and the dictionary algorithm to go with it, you could perfectly expand and reconstitute the phrase as it had originally been intended. In this example we have compressed 103 bytes to a mere 82 bytes. But consider the entire Lacanian canon compressed and you soon start to see why ZIP files are successful. And it doesn’t stop at words; you could rewrite the algorithm to account for repetitive combinations of letters like ‘er‘. What successful ZIP compressor algorithms do is look for patterns and condense them efficiently.
This type of compressing is typically known as ‘Lossless‘, as it quite literally loses less information. It systematically reconstitutes a compressed file into the original file. Another type of compression is called ‘Lossy‘, which is similar to the type of process Ian alluded to. Basically reducing unnecessary bulk and size, without any noticeable change to the quality or structure. It aids ease of transport, costs less, and removes clutter.
Both types of compression have interesting implications for scholarship writing and reading. At first, one might assume that Lossy would account for the concise nature of communication that is required here. But lets not discount the importance of readership expansion in Lossless compression. Whilst the metaphor would halt at the suggestion that the reader receives the exact original thought, idea or suggestion that the author conceived, ultimately the rhetorical challenge remains; “The sole task of the author is to successfully communicate his/her argument as it was orginally intended.”
Compression is the ultimate tool here; the point being that, publishing should take on the structure of compressing large chunks of research, so that the unpacking and expanding of the work is as efficient as possible.
And yes, its too late, the business name “ZIP publishing” is already taken. I thought of it too.
