7 - Materiality in Numbers

Summary

In this chapter, we will look at how and why using material devices to represent and manipulate numbers acts as the mechanism of numerical elaboration. Essentially, material forms make quantity tangible, and tangibility lets us manipulate quantity into increasingly explicit forms and complex arrangements.¹ Different types of material forms then have different properties for representing or manipulating numbers: Some are fixed and thus suitable for recording, while others are mobile and thus suitable for calculating. Properties may also act as limitations that can motivate the recruitment of a new material form, which is selected because it can do things that the earlier form does while addressing its limitations in some manner. An example is the tally, which accumulates in the way the fingers do, though its higher capacity also means that it can reach quantities whose visual indistinguishability can motivate the use of a form that can be rearranged into groups. Numerical elaboration thus becomes a matter of whether devices are used for numbers, which ones are used, and how they are used.