viz.

                                                                                                                         Image Credits: Amazon.com

In researching and writing my last blog posting, which sought to explore the possible dangers associated with the expurgation of the literary classics we use in the school setting, I found myself digging a little deeper into a story from a couple of years ago that I was only vaguely familiar with.  In that last posting, I focused upon the ways in which e-books were, by the nature of the medium, particularly susceptible to modification and/or censorship.  But these concerns are not ones we should only ascribe to the digital; I wanted to demonstrate that modification of canonical works for the purpose of “protecting” people from any content that might be unpleasant to the modern reader’s sensibilities can and does happen with our “old-fashioned” paper textbooks, too.

Credit for Eedited Image of Leo Tolstoy: Sean Ludwig

Educators and everyday people alike have spent (at least) the last half of a decade in a state of ever-increasing turgidity as they speculate as to all of the amazing feats the e-reader (usually, “e-reader” means “iPad” in the popular discourse, so I might use both terms below) will achieve in the context of public education.  It is almost assumed that replacing every student’s bulky, quickly-dated paper textbooks with sleek, capability-rich e-readers is an unequivocally good, nay, downright imperative educational initiative. 

However...

Image Credit: Per Erik Strandberg

“Lorem ipsum” has been recognized by publishers and graphic designers throughout the 20^th century as the industry standard text by which to mock up text layout, thanks to a small UK company called Letraset, which mass-manufactured dry transferrable lettering from the 1960s to the 1990s.  With the advent of digital media and desktop publishing, the first two words of the ubiquitous sequence have become recognizable to the population at large.  It appears in markup templates almost universally across publishing platforms.  Templates in word processing, presentation software, and web design all bear the mark of their print forbearers. Thus, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, a scrambled copy of an excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (“of the ends of good and evil”) has entered into popular discourse as a recognizable placeholder, as Wikipedia says, “used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation…by removing the distraction of meaningful content.”

This post would like to explore lorem ipsum as an ideological concept in both print and digital media.  In part, this exploration will question what it means to view text itself as visual rhetoric.  How can text draw attention to or defer attention from itself as a visual object?  How can conventions of representation make text, like lorem ipsum, disappear?  Might we view such disappearance as a sort of censorship?  If so, how can we describe the internal logic of such censorship as an ideological trend in the digital age?

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag.  Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best.  The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Forever Amber was the best-selling book in 1940s America, selling over three million copies during the decade (Guttridge). In many ways, the scope of the work recalls Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Written by Kathleen Winsor and set in seventeenth-century England, Forever Amber is the tale of Amber St. Clare, who climbs the ranks of British society by marrying (or sometimes just sleeping with) wealthier and wealthier men. The book was subject to vehement censorship, even though (or perhaps in spite of) a market demand that surely tested the durability of the Macmillan Company’s printing operation. Interestingly enough, as part of their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit, the Harry Ransom Center is showing an Armed Services Edition of Forever Amber.

                                                                                                              Image: Partial Screen shot from Google Maps

How do you make a topic like censorship visible?  After all, the goal of censorship is to make things, in a literal sense, invisible, un-seeable.  But in a world where (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes insidiously) the visual has come to be paramount, how can you visualize censorship, see what can’t be seen?  A few weeks ago, I posted about a few of the visual images highlighted by the Harry Ransom Center’s new Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit related to this topic.  Inspired by Banned Books Week—it’s this week, in case you didn’t know—I want to examine some modern representations of censorship. 

                                                                                                                                      Photo by Jake Ptacek

We here at viz are deeply excited about our new partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, one of the premier research libraries for the humanities in the United States.  As part of that partnership, we’ve been given a tour of their current exhibitions and the chance to blog about some of the Center’s amazing holdings.  You may have already had a chance to read Matthew Reilly’s meditation on their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit and Jay Voss’s post on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition.  Continuing that thread, this week I want to look more closely at two artifacts on display in the BBSC exhibit: the official seals for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.