I was taking notes in my notebook this weekend when I realized it had a pocket in the back. It reminded me of the centuries-old tradition of books as containers. Unlike e-books that keep things out, books are things that hold things (notes, eye-glasses, dried plants, records, even flies for …
The interest in language as a visual and material medium continues to grow. The more we lose in this area electronically, the more we are learning to value it. A new exhibit, “Postscript,” now on view at the Denver Museum for Contemporary offers a nice look at the history of …
In a recent piece on the Chronicle, writer Jennifer Howard suggests that we need to “ditch the monograph.” Her answer, along with many others, is to go short and go electronic. Here’s why her argument is wrong on all counts. 1. The first problem is the long versus short binary. …
When I returned to school last month, two things had changed noticeably on my campus. First, my department was gone. The department of German literature and culture, in which I had been a professor, was the latest victim in the so-called decline of the humanities. (To be fair, we weren’t …
A new film by Tan Lin screening at an event put on by Triple Canopy. The film is a silent, haunting look at the language and typography of Powerpoint. It’s slow and mundane and very literal, like a dream of all the conferences ever, where instead of falling asleep while …
Over the past decade or so, a number of artists have been experimenting with the art of book demolition. As Garrett Stewart suggests in his definitive handbook of the movement, Bookwork, such practices of undoing books are akin to what he calls “demediation” — taking books out of their functional …
A wonderful exhibit currently running at the Foley Gallery in New York called “Beautiful Evidence,” one that brings together a profound sense of the scientific and the whimsical. Books don’t seem to tell us the truth here, but make us wonder. These are curiosities in the Renaissance sense of the term.
A nice collection of images from Google Books, showing the visual and informational paradoxes of digitization — what is lost, found, and fused. I’m drawn in particular to the accidental nature of it all. We have many examples in the history of reproduction technologies of what is known as remediation …
I’d like to introduce a site dedicated to the new kinds of experiments I’ve been working on with my collaborator, Mark Algee-Hewitt. We’re interested in trying to visualize the lexical networks that comprise our literary past, what we call reading “topologically.” To do so, we’re developing quantitative techniques that try to …
This fall has been abuzz with debates about online learning. Like many things digital, this one first appeared a long time ago (1995 anyone?). And now it’s coming back with a vengeance. Suddenly online learning is fresh, exciting, and innovative (not to mention “massive”). A host of universities have announced …