The McLuhan Symposium: Big Stories, Small Scales
Abstracts for papers
Laurence Ferland
Scratches, chips, polishes and holes: a tale of
material culture
There have been aristocrats fascinated by the past, collectors, antiquarians, treasures hunters gatering and
preserving old objects from the past years. The archaeological discipline has lost a bit of its romanticism over
the years in becoming a systematised field of study, but has kept all its capacities of wonder with the
increased
possibilities
to
reach
the
past
human
activities.
One of the methods developed to interpret the past is use-wear analysis. It consists in archaeological finds
microscopic analysis to recover the actions performed with the object hundreds to thousands years ago.
Specific patterns of scratches or spalls on ceramic will indicate stirring or beer making when shiny polish on
stone will tell a tale about harvest. Gathering the different scales of analysis together has always been a
challenge in archaeology, but when micro-analysis results meet contextual analysis, the picture gets clearer
and past times may be reconstructed and interpreted.
Jim Baker
Smaller details of language – bigger
consequences for linguistics
In this talk I will consider some ways in which studying even the smallest details of specific languages can
tell us a good deal about those languages and about language more generally. To this end I will present
overviews of three areas from my own work in linguistics and philology. Firstly, I will look at Codex Bezae,
a New Testament manuscript in Latin and Greek. This text contains a large number of what can be broadly
termed “spelling mistakes”. However, even such small details, when considered together, reveal a lot about a
number of bigger questions, such as the sound systems of Latin/Greek at the time, changes from earlier
periods, and the origins of the manuscript. Secondly, I will consider changes in the forms used to express
passives and past tenses in the evolution of Latin into French. In order to gain a fuller understanding of these
changes it is invaluable to investigate individual instances of these forms in specific manuscripts. Again,
then, we see that considering such small details as the forms of individual verbs can reveal a good deal about
the changing system more widely. This also has an impact on our more general understanding of what
patterns occur in language change. Thirdly, I will look at the case systems of a type of language known as
“split-S” languages. (An example of a case distinction is the distinction between “I” and “me” in English.) In
split-S languages, different verbs are associated with different case forms. Investigation of these languages
on a small-scale level, considering verbs individually, is the only way to properly understand how these case
systems work, both in terms of understanding individual languages’ systems and understanding the
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constraints on possible systems across languages. It also has consequences for our understanding of case
more generally.
Malcolm Scott
Scaling the Internet, Bit by Bit
What does the Internet actually look like? The online services we all rely upon are backed by huge
datacentres -- warehouses filled with millions of specialised computers and routers in constant
communication with each other, working to provide personalised data to millions or even billions of users
around the world within a few milliseconds. In order to build efficient datacentres, we need to look in
increasingly fine detail at how computers transmit individual messages and how they locate the data they
require. In this talk I will give a quick overview of how the Internet has worked for the past few decades,
and then I will discuss some of the ways in which small-scale hardware and software changes can have a
major impact on the ability of the Internet to handle increasingly large-scale demand -- seeminglyinconsequential tweaks which can make or break your ability to watch funny cat videos.
Philip Brown
Superconductivity: how electrons can co-operate
to overcome resistance
Electrons don’t want to flow through wires. This problem limits our electricity-based society: electrical
resistance wastes around 8 % of the power transmitted from power stations to our homes, it makes the
generation of large magnetic fields (essential for modern medical diagnostics) difficult and costly, and it
prevents computers from being made faster without burning themselves up. Physics could provide a solution:
superconductivity, an unusual low-temperature state of matter in which electrons group up and act cooperatively. In the superconducting state, electric current can flow without any resistance at all, because any
scattering process would have to scatter all the electrons at once. In this talk, I present a brief introduction to
the theory of superconductivity suitable for a general audience. I explain why we think superconductors
work, and how they’re used technologically today, from superconducting MRI magnets to Maglev trains to
the first tests of power transmission using superconducting cables. I also discuss some of the more exciting
recent developments in the field – in particular, whether magnetism (long thought to be the mortal enemy of
superconductivity) can sometimes play a role in creating it. Superconductivity is a manifestation of action at
the smallest scales, with the quantum-mechanical interactions that affect the nanometre-size lives of
electrons becoming clearly visible to our macroscopic world. It also has the potential to be a huge story for
our technological society: the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor would utterly revolutionise
the efficiency of the electrical devices we depend on.
Jessica Soltys
Strategic speech acts: Big aims and small
utterances
An ideal speaker communicates her aims succinctly and unambiguously. She is direct – her intentions are
laid out explicitly and little interpretive effort is required from her addressee. She may, for example, request
help with an assignment by stating “Please help me with this assignment.” By speaking unambiguously, she
ensures that the addressee understands both the content of the request and the fact that a request has been
made of him. If direct speech is as optimal as it appears, why then, would a speaker choose to speak
indirectly? Consider the following example: The same speaker, again aiming for assistance with an
assignment, turns to her addressee and says “I’m rubbish at stats!” Like the example above, the utterance is a
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request. Unlike the former, however, it is off-record indirect (ORI). The utterance is ambiguous and may be
interpreted for either its literal meaning (a statement of opinion about the speaker’s mathematic ability) or its
requestive meaning. The speaker’s aim is never explicitly stated and thus, the interpretative burden lies with
the addressee. The speaker’s decision to use ORI is, likely, a strategic one. By speaking off-record, she
accomplishes much more than just her original (requestive) goal. In my talk, I will examine two competing
theories on the use of ORI: Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory and Pinker et al’s (2007; 2008;
2010) Strategic Speaker approach. I will return to the question raised above (“Why would a speaker choose
ORI?”) whilst outlining the strategic advantages afforded to a speaker using ORI. I will share my own data
from a recent experiment on ORI, with specific focus on three speech acts: a favour, a bribe, and a sexual
proposition. Along with a review of statistical trends, the presentation will include a variety of sample ORI
utterances, all drawn from participant data. My talk will follow the theme of the symposium, beginning with
an overview of indirect speech, narrowing in to a discussion of two prominent theories, and concluding with
a focused and detailed presentation of data.
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