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January 30, 1981. We want to travel (let’s say), from Bakhtiyarpur to Patna, and we have in our hand the December 1980 edition of Newman’s Indian Bradshaw. These stations are on the main line from Howrah to Mughal Saria. Many of the express trains have started their journey at Howrah station in Calcutta, including our train, Number 167 Up, T-W Bombay Janata Express. “Up” means in the direction of Delhi, nodal center of Indian Railways. “Janata” is Hindi for “people’s,” and the train is 2nd Class only, though of course, this being India, there are many classes within 2nd Class (two-tier sleeper, three-tier sleeper, hard, soft). The train departs Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving Bakhtiyarpur Junction at 21.35, arriving Patna Junction at 23.10.

Newman’s Indian Bradshaw lays out in the tabular form of a railway timetable an infinite number of possibilities for travel and several millions of assertable actualities^§MS2.3 for the travelers on this day in 1981. And a requirement: be there then, or you will miss the train. It’s all text (numbers, letters, and a fine array of different kinds of asterisk), but the complex requirements, actualities, possibilities of meaning are visual, in two-dimensional, tabular array. The table represents the essential torsion of event:^§MS2.1 entities (bodies and places) and action (moving trains moving bodies). And positions:^§AS1.3 place named and ordered by location along a line; times by number according to the speed of the train. And pointed absences:^§MS1.1.2 the “ … ” ellipses to indicate that the train will not stop at stations so marked in the grid.

In the configuration of a table, columns and rows might represent relations between concepts (field names), and the content in the cells are instances (data). Or they may represent relations between instances or concepts in the rows or columns and their calculable quantities or namable qualities in the cells. And for that matter, the data in the cells may be repeating, and so a concept. When we arrive in Patna at 23.10 on that day in January 1981, this is a singular instance of arrival, the kind that someone planning to meet us would want to know. We might have sent ahead an itinerary, or recorded this after the event in a travel diary.

But timetables are about many such arrivals, in both possibility and actuality. In the always-transposability of instances with concepts, what might be an instance in our traveling becomes a concept in the timetable. The number in the cell of the table is about many arrivals on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the train runs three times per week, although Patna is clearly instantiated.

And, if these transpositions are not complicated enough, tables are linked to tables – you need to go to another table to see a journey to Bombay, or to change trains at a junction. The whole Bradshaw, hundreds of pages of it, is an integrated mesh of tables connected to each other, concepts awaiting our instantiation. The visual frame of the timetable represents dynamic meaning as movement across place in time, always repeatable and never the same.

When Alan Turing started to consider the computability of numbers,^§MS1.3.2b he conceived a machine whose memory and thinking was recorded on a paper tape. Like writing when materialized in medium, by affordance the tape was inevitably linear, one instruction laboriously executed after another. Though like both writing and Chomsky’s grammar, in the struggle to overcome linearity, later instructions could refer back to earlier ones.

In 1970, E.F. Codd, an English computer scientist working in the US at IBM, brought computing back to the visual design of a table. He developed what came to be called the “relational model” of data. Data was arrayed in tables with columns and rows. Each contained an atomic value (datum). Tables were accessible by table name and could connect with each other. Codd had extended the written lines of programming with the two-dimensional relationality of tables.⁴⁰⁶

The only difference between this and our Bradshaw was this: if this was a computerized timetable and our train was running ten minutes late, the arrival time at subsequent stations could be updated. With relations expressed in algorithms, relevant atomic values could be recalculated by the machine. To Codd’s dismay, his employer did not understand the significance of his invention. But a company called Oracle did, and today most of the world’s data is stored in relational databases.

The thinking and culture of computable visual-textual array first reached the consciousness of the masses with VisiCalc. This was the first spreadsheet, created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and released in 1979. Like Noam Chomsky, Bricklin was a son of Jewish Philadelphia. Frankston was Brooklyn-born. After completing an engineering degree at MIT, Bricklin enrolled in an MBA at Harvard Business School. There, legend has it, he saw a professor calculating business variables on the blackboard, erasing and revising columns or rows. This inspired him to invent the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet.

In the Whole Earth Software Catalog, computing luminary Ted Nelson waxed lyrical. VisiCalc, he said, “represented a new idea of a way to use a computer and a new way of thinking about the world. Where conventional programming was thought of as a sequence of steps, this new thing was no longer sequential in effect: When you made a change in one place, all other things changed instantly and automatically.”⁴⁰⁷ In truth, this was to repeat in more accessible visual form the underlying logic of the relational database, or, to track back further, to automate the Bradshaw with dynamically re-renderable text.

Notwithstanding his Harvard Business degree, Bricklin was unable to become rich from his invention, not in the way that Microsoft would subsequently make Bill Gates rich with Multiplan of 1982, renamed Excel in 1985.⁴⁰⁸

In 2014, Reddit and then other social media sprang aflame with an Excel spreadsheet created by a husband and emailed to a wife documenting rejections of his sexual advances over the previous seven weeks. This was a transposition into the now-ubiquitous tabular format that the thousands of commenters said was clumsy, awful, and much more.⁴⁰⁹

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⁴⁰⁵ Percy Fitzgerald, 1890, The Story of “Bradshaw’s Guide,” London: The Leadenhall Press.

⁴⁰⁶ E.F. Codd, 1970, “Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” Communications of the ACM 13(6):377–87; Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee, 2011, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research, Cambridge: Elsevier, p. 217.

⁴⁰⁷ Stewart Brand, ed. 1986, The Whole Earth Software Catalog, Garden City, NY: Quantum Press, p. 66.

⁴⁰⁸ Burton Grad, 2007, “The Creation and the Demise of Visicalc,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29(3):20–31.

⁴⁰⁹ https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/pouty-husband-sends-wife-spreadsheet-detailing-sex-life-1607350830/+tcberman

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 152–155. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Newman’s “Indian Bradshaw” §AS1.4.6a