Code / Law I

BoingBoing.com today has great fuel to fire the liberating relationship between language and computer code.

The first example from Penguin Publishing charges six authors with the task of writing "digital fiction" to tell stories in ways never before attempted. The authors take up the challenge through diverse means, such as using an interactive Google Map to confabulate physical location and narrative chaptering. It's a remarkable effect well beyond mere "set pieces". As we all commonly now see even our own cities and localities through the lens of the Google Map (I use it at at least three or four times a week to navigate Toronto) the effect brings the reader into a familiar (if not merely familiarly abstract) proximity with an otherwise unknown and distant space and time, and which need not necessarily be depicted in the story itself.



Then, in a particularly Perec-ian turn that is the literary equivalent of peeking in the neighbor's window, the reader can also click on the "green tabs" for descriptions, info, sidebars, images, and sounds peripheral to the main narrative yet -- by virtual of the underlying map -- are not devoid of context.

The second example on BoingBoing is an in-house production ("Gadget 13") that blends the classic gameplay of Breakout with a block of quoted text. By bouncing puck off paddle, the quote can be physically shaved of words in a visceral sort of textual deconstruction in which neither the author or the reader have complete control of a constantly shifting meaning.

All of this is interesting to me because it shows how computer code can be used to liberate accepted hegemony of textual production. Of which, as a lawyer and human rights advocate, I clearly have a vested interest in overcoming. The experience of a statute, for example, is entirely one-dimensional: utterly abstracted from its subjects, swaddled in a grammar of artifice and the arcane, disambiguated only where referenced and referring to a disembodied network of regulations and policy directives, requiring complex rules of procedure to interpret and determine, and therefore nearly inaccessible to most people. Consider instead the possibility of a "digital statute" -- a true "law code" -- which can embed all the reports relied upon by Parliamentary committee in promulgating the statute, or which features a "time slider" that allows you to scroll back and forth between revisions, or which allows the reader to click on a single word to bloom it into a "mind map" infographic that shows every instance of its use in Hansard or by NGO advocates.

Recognizing interpretive "Law 2.0" functions as the "official statute" relied upon by courts would go a long way to making it a truly public document. The potential as I see it is that experiments in language and code of this kind can liberate and make accessible the "meta text" of a statute beyond the highly trained lawyer-as-canton or the judicial interpreter as omnipotent gatekeeper. It does, in other words, facilitate a more immediate and indeed coherent connection -- just as in the Penguin Google Map story -- between the general and the specific, or between the rule, its expression and re-presentation in language, and its application to specific cases. Along with the infinite number of other "green tab" potentialities effaced by one-dimensional re-presentation.

April 17th, 2008 / 2 Comments / Tags: codelaw, text, deconstruction, meta, law 2.0