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should recognize a close correspondence with their modes of blind selec-
tion, combination into units, and ending with a limited residue). A still
closed but partially organized reservoir could be constructed by organ-
izing characters into categories, such as consonant and vowel, with blind
selection from different categories possible: Countdown letter games
could be understood as selection from categorized but effectively unlim-
ited reservoirs (Countdown 2007). The collection of moveable type in a
printer's shop could be regarded as an organized reservoir of letters open
to deliberate selection of individual letters, with the number of letters in
each box of the overall store anticipating their relative numerical distri-
bution in message sequences (ligatures are excluded for the sake of ana-
lytical clarity but could be understood as frequently recurring sequences
of individual letters). A surface with some pattern-based organization
imposed would be the sending mechanism for the Cooke and Wheatstone
telegraph, from which messages were selected by pointing needles at par-
ticular characters within an array. From a restricted alphabet of twenty
letters, each character could be selected by pointing two of the five nee-
dles; characters arranged primarily by reference to the order of the alpha-
bet (Ohlman 1996, 713-714; Science Museum 2007). A keyboard could
also be regarded as a surface for selection—the historical transition from
alphabetic arrangement to qwerty configuration was intended to ensure
that type bars, linked to keys in a manual typewriter, did not conflict in
their movements and jam (Ohlman 1996, 632). Proposals for reform
from qwerty toward a more efficient keyboard could be understood as
reorganization deliberately governed by frequency of occurrence of indi-
vidual messages for selection in anticipated messages. In these instances,
the messages for selection were conceived as syntactically or pattern-
differentiated units, without immediate semantic significance. Individual
messages only function semantically as words in special cases ( I , a ) and
only when considered as part of the message.
The parallel between the increasing organization of messages for selec-
tion and of the components of the paradigm (Paradigm, chapter 6) is only
partial. The organization imposed on the messages for selection is
r conceived primarily at the level of the character,
r restricted to pattern-based or syntactic characteristics, and
r stops short of semantic associations.
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