viz.

Image Credit: Birdsedge First School

Remember these things? It's hard to believe that kids are still learning to shape their letters according to handwriting diagrams like this one. In the first world where type is the dominant mode of textual presentation, one has to wonder how often kids will encounter a squiggly 'f' as it's drawn above or a lower case 'k' that looks like a capital R? 

The chart looks to us like an anachronism, especially next the digital text of this blog post. We're prompted to ask whether kids should be taught to write a script that is rapidly fading from the textual universe? Is handwriting a skill that is worth acquiring in an era when written communication mainly occurs through digital media, without the assistance of pen or paper?

Image credit: Wikipedia

I'll test my art history chops today (no promises) as I explore the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), late Renaissance Mannerist and an artist of interest to everyone from the critic Barthes to the stadium rock band Kansas to the surrealist Salvador Dali. 

The designer(s) of this year’s TILTS symposium flier chose an engraving after Arcimboldo’s The Librarian (1566).  In investigating some context for the painting, I couldn’t help but notice the aptness of the image—not only, of course, because of TILTS’ ever-present commitment to textual studies, but because of the particular place Arcimboldo holds in literary and popular imagination in the Post-Renaissance world. 

Image credit: Ben Fry

This month, Ben Fry at Seed launched a project called The Preservation of Favoured Traces, a visualization tool that allows us to witness how Origin of Species evolved across six revisions during Darwin’s lifetime. The results are intriguing not only for those of us who teach rhetoric of science (and who secretly harbor a crush on Charles Darwin, especially during his mutton-chop phase), but for scholars interested in how textual history might be visualized.