Thesis abstract (as of 05.08.12)
The Design of Writing, or Graphic Design
In Strunk and White’s The Element of Style, the first principle of writing is: “Choose from a suitable design”. Design, before laying down a single word. It can be the structure of a novel (lines of text forming rectangular blocks, spreads separated by chapters, the plot triangle). It can be an academic report (the parameter of the page count; footnotes/endnotes, double-spacing for pen marks, introduction, argument, counter-argument, conclusion). It can be as granular as the paragraph unit. The indented extract. Marginalia. As marks, they are visual, and their formal qualities dictate certain principles of organization, spatial relations, narratives, and interactive inclinations. While another brand of graphic design may give form to existing content, this kind offers writers a formal framework within which to write, so that their writing might be transformative.
I believe a suitable design must correspond to the patterns of communication technology engages us in at any given era. Today’s patterns lend themselves to attentions that are analytical, to relationships between reader and writer that are participatory, and to new contexts for textual experiences. My work entails the design of new writing frameworks that are informed by these patterns. As digital interfaces, they introduce 1) meta data tracking which support visual and multi-layered analyses, 2) social interactions as frameworks for collaboration, and 3) designed experiences that reestablish how text is valued in specific contexts. All offer new designs from which writers can choose. Designs that seek not only to evolve writing practice, but appropriately transfer the values of the old into the new. It is alongside this evolving system of communication which our culture embraces that suitable designs must be reinvented, now, as well as era after era, in order for the tradition of transformative writing to be sustained.
rare music typewriter. certainly of note.
Thesis wall today
i eat out for design ideas
wireframe for word processor with color coded filtering and so so much more. visual design in the works!
Part 3: every greiffiti blog post (except this one) printed.
First draft of my thesis book: done.
When writers write, they crumble, throw, snap, pace, groan, slam, and cry. No tool is too precious—no paper, pen, or tablet. It’s what writers do. Writerswrecktheirtools.com.
Writing and Technology: It’s Not All Black and White
In a recent interview at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken, Germany, British film critic V. F. Perkins discusses film and technology. Perkins refers to his 1972 book, Film as Film, a key text in film studies, in which he maintains that film should take advantage of what new capabilities technology offers. This stance went against what many aestheticians of the day believed. “In the 60s…” he explains, “the masterpieces of silent cinema is what was definitive.”
Is the thinking among novelists today so different? Would anyone call the writing found on someone’s Twitter feed “definitive”. Often, new technology is criticized as disruptive to literature. As renown author Jonathan Franzen recently told the LA Times, “The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral…Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.” Perhaps not coincidentally, these sentiments parallel the success of the Academy Awards winning film The Artist. Yet, Perkins defends art’s embrace of technology. In his interview, he explains:
link: want play with. why is it not showing up in the app store?
Children’s literature is not some ideal category that a certain age may reach and that another may miss. It is instead a kind of system, one whose social and aesthetic value is determined out of the relationships among those who make, market, and read books. No single work of literature is canonical; rather, works attain canonical status through their participation in a system of literary values. At stake is not, say, why Alice in Wonderland is somehow better than the books of Mrs. Molesworth; or why the many imitations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe never quite measure up to their famous model. What is at stake, instead, is how successive periods define the literary for both children and adults, and how certain works and authors were established in the households, schools, personal collections, and libraries of the time.
— Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Read alongside Craig Mod’s Post-Artifact Books and Publishing, about today’s evolution toward a new book age:
For those of us looking to shape the future of books and publishing, where do we begin? Simply, these are our truths:
The way books are written has changed.
The canvas for books has changed.
The post-published life of a book has changed.To think about the future of the book is to understand the links between these changes […] These connections shaping books and publishing live in emergent systems behind the words. Between the writing and the publishing, publishing and consuming, consuming and sharing.
We have an opportunity now to shape these systems. And in doing so, to refine the relationships between authors, publishers, readers and texts.
I love a good tape-in-book
My notes that immediately led to this project, Cmail (Creative Mail):
‘Writing to Context’. Writing with consideration of the new contexts in which reading is done, and creating new contexts for readers.
- I don’t think writers should write without a context to write for. The difficulty in today’s new media landscape is it has no concrete shape - no landscape. It looks more more like whitewater rapids. Some folks want to call it a deathly waterfall. Writing to context means staking new ground. When contexts are in flux, it means writers needing to control and create the contexts in which a reading experience is done.
- new writing tools need to allow writers to generate it only text but the contexts in which that text is experienced.
What defines context? place, time, reader/writer community. Also, calabilities: interaction capabilities, attention capabilities, conceptual capabilities. These are not mutually exclusive, they affect each other, and working them requires craft just as any art form might.
- in an email, attention capabilities are low. Creative writing must use this. How can our capabilities that are activated in email-reading (speed, receive, prompt to act/reply) be used creatively? (idea. Subscribe to fictional emails. Writers have fictional email writing platform.)
- Writing needs a context to write for.
- what are the capabilities I believe should be protected?
- what kind of writing systems do i believe must be preserved and fostered?
- don’t be too vague to be directly actionable.
A photographic image is more like a complex utterance than it is like a word.
