Digital Linguistics and the Body

Digital Linguistics and the Body

This is more a response/interest in Diego’s posting about digitizing the human body (in this case, the foot). I think it’s an interesting examination of this possibility in classification and reimaging the human body through Google or other Internet sites interested in this storing of the body in pieces. This is a bit off track from Diego’s argument/observation; however, I think it is definitely relevant to our class’s discussion sounding digital spaces, heteroglossias and transforming the “space” of digital archives and the role of the University in charting these spaces (including this interdisciplinary approach to the medicine and the digital body). Recently, I came across this research and article within USC’s Engineering department http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2009/engineers-first-in.htm. The article highlights the digitizing of the human vocal tract and mouth through MRI technology. I won’t pretend that I know much about this sort of research and technical developments that have gone into it; however, I think framing this article around the lines that Diego presented in digitizing and scanning the human foot, as well as this categorization and reframing of body technologies is useful in processing how we understand the collective and consumptive notion of body as an indexical object. I think in the case of this new vocal assessment and investigative technology, the terms for understanding speech patterns posts an interesting challenge in “seeing” speech. The act of “seeing” in this case is challenged by the conditions and textures of the mouth (being dark, wet, salty and fast-paced). In documenting this low-visible act, I am curious (as this article points out) about the implications and effectiveness in recording these movements and the future implications in creating a more visual vocal tract. What are the parameters in categorizing this visualization of speech? And what will it reveal about speech and its movement, both in a linguistic and medical context? And how does this inner/outer dynamic in the researcher’s “peek into the human vocal tract” reveal a more visualized body?