viz. - textual studies

Handwriting: What's it good for?

Calliope — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:20:19 +0000

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: www.bellafigura.com

One compelling argument for keeping handwriting around is that it can be very pretty, and therefore affective. A friend's wedding invitation came in the mail recently and it got me thinking about the decorative and emotional value of handwriting. The envelope was addressed in beautiful cursive, a standard touch for formal invitations 20 years ago but certainly not the norm today. Now couples often have their envelopes labelled with digital fonts or will deliver invitations entirely online. It's only the occasional couple who busts out the fountain pen and ruler and puts their cursive skills to work. In my book this doubles the couple's charm factor as well as increases the likelihood that I will attend their wedding. There's something about the slightly imperfect symmetry of handwritten script that marks a card as personal, and this consideration for the guest I think presages a good wedding party. (On the other hand, an open bar probably has more to do with a successful wedding reception than the writing on the invitation).

Another case where I think the handwriting remains rhetorically impactful is in letter writing. Someone recently told me about how their sister's fiance asked her father for permission to marry her in a handwritten letter. This made me wonder whether handwriting, especially in the Digital Age, lends writers a particular gravitas that printed text does not. Students of literary manuscripts will tell you that handwriting can reveal a good deal about a writer's process; small variations or mistakes can show where the writer hesitated, where s/he struggled to find the right expression, where s/he wrote with confidence. Perhaps, then, it is a more honest medium than type because it betrays these writerly hiccups rather than masking them with uniform letters. The appearance of honesty, openness, and having thought about what one has said are all things I imagine one wants to cultivate when asking a man for his daughter's hand.

Image Credit: www.etsy.com

Did the handwritten form of prisoner Kim Millbrook's petition to sue the federal government work in his favor? After the felon's case was rejected by lower courts (he is suing the government as the employer of a group of prison guards who he claims sexually assaulted him at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa.) the Supreme Court picked up his "pauper's petition" which was written rather pathetically in longhand. In a case like this where the federal courts' so-called immunity from prisoners' allegations is at issue, the rudimentary style in which Millbrook addressed the Justices underscores his cause. His crude petition highlights the basic imbalance of resources, power, and human rights that always exists between a prisoner and the federal government.

The last thing I want to say about handwriting is that as much as technology has seemed to erase the need to write legibly with paper and pen, the impetus to take handwritten notes to record and organize one's thoughts is still remarkably strong. It's strong enough to power a whole market of note-taking applications, such as Penultimate or Notability, which allow iPad users to write on all kinds of digital surfaces (pdfs, presentation slides, websites, etc.).

So, in summary, it seems like handwriting is not going away anytime soon. But its utility and cultural significance have certainly changed. We rely on it less and less as a medium for communicating content audiences as we have become increasingly bad at deciphering other people's handwriting. As rhetors, we occasionally exploit the presentation value of handwriting to add gravity, romance, or pathos to our appeals. And finally, functionally speaking, I wonder if the only advantages handwriting has over typing are its mnemonic characteristics--its flexibility, variability, and particularity--which would seem to narrow its field of usefulness to notes that are meant only for oneself.

The Fate of Arcimboldo; The Fate of the Book

Laura Thain — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:21:10 +0000

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: Wikipedia

“Fate” is a tricky word because it, in its very definition, denies agency. In its most general sense, it is neutral; in its most particular, it signifies destruction and certain doom. Fate implies an unarticulated threat, inalterable and unavoidable, existing always in negation of the object at hand. In its most classical sense, the hubris to resist it can propel fate, giving it wings, enabling it in its most monstrous form.

And so here we are, two years after TILTS’ “The Digital and the Human(ities)” Symposium (2010-2011), approaching the issue of the digitizing of text from a different perspective. While in broad strokes, TILTS explored the possibilities of the digital in 2010, in 2012, it seems to be exploring, at least in part, the anxieties surrounding this structural shift—anxieties which, as the title so aptly captures, center around “the book’s inevitable ‘death’.” How can we read Arcimboldo’s imagine in tandem with this approach to the discourse of the digital humanities?

To begin, we might read Arcimboldo as existing in a pivotal (fated?) moment, as well. Painting after the last greats of the High Renaissance but at the cusp of the Baroque, he reaches back to High Renaissance aesthetics in the composition of his paintings in his form of composition, even as the work contrasts Michelangelo and Raphael in his content. But Arcimboldo’s composition strives to integrate man with nature and to highlight the divine in the marriage of the two—a distinct shift from the Neoplatonism of the High Renaissance, which elevated man as the near-divine and instructed that art should seek inspiration from the aestheticized universals (“Forms” or “nature”).

Arcimboldo’s clever visual articulation of the intersection of man and nature attracted the attention of Roland Barthes in his Arcimboldo essays; Barthes fixates on the way the artist employs rhetorical tropes into his painting—metonymy and paradox, for instance. For Barthes, Arcimboldo is a “rhetorician and magician” because of the structural semiotics he represents in his paintings; each part of what we recognize as a face is a discrete element meaningless in isolate, but when assembled, the elements of his paintings produce meaning in a sum greater than their parts. While Barthes argues that these “puzzles” are a metaphor for language, they also strongly exhibit Arcimboldo’s debt to Florentine Neoplatonism in their commitment to displaying meaning only as a composite body. When dissected, they cease to speak.

Scholars read “The Librarian” in two distinct ways. The contemporary reading (which much subsequent scholarship has acknowledged or substantiated) argues the portrait was a personal attack levied at one Wolfgang Lazius, HRE Ferdinand I’s court historian in the Habsburg court at Vienna, for his vain and inaccurate scholarship. Yet K. C. Elhard argues instead that Arcimboldo’s painting criticized not poor scholarship but poor bookmanship—that is, it levied a critique against “materialist book collectors more interested in acquiring books than reading them.”

Interestingly, as many scholars of present-day book history have noted, this is exactly the type of behavior that publishers in a dying book market attempt to capitalize on today. The one thing digital books cannot provide is the pleasure of owning a material object; as the symposium’s blurb asserts, “any publishers in the print trade are turning to eye-catching design strategies, cover art, and innovative packaging, enlivening the book arts and emphasizing physicality just when they seem under threat.” Tonight’s opening lecture (5:30 pm in the Blanton Auditorium) by Nicholson Baker, “staunch defender of paper objects,” is sure to expand the discussion of materiality of text to further interesting places. Perhaps someone more creative than I wants to update Arcimboldo's painting for the digital age?

Image Credit: LT

A closing word on our Painter/Rhetorician/Magician: perhaps existing between two major movements of European art, fitting neatly into neither, sealed more than anything else Arcimboldo’s fate in the canon of the Early modern. Though he has received no small amount of attention, in comparison to the great Renaissance and Baroque painters he remains ever the side show: a curiosity and a puzzle, but one that keeps me interested for more than just a game or two.

Visualizing Revision: The Case of Origin of Species

emcg — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:49:55 +0000

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.

When you launch the site, revisions of the first-edition, color-coded by edition, begin to populate the screen, representing a textual rather than organic change over time. After a few minutes, the screen goes static, and we witness a marvel of Tuftian simplicity: six editions over thirteen years, graphically captured on a single screen.

In his commentary, Bly notes that he wanted to challenge the perception of scientific theories as "fixed notions," to trace the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry. However, this visualization tool would translate well to the rhetoric classroom, by underscoring how the first edition and its revisions document Darwin’s careful and constant attention to his difficult rhetorical situation. For example, the addition of the phrase “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph of the second edition is not evidence of the evolution of Darwin’s theory but a calculated response to a potentially hostile audience of general readers as well as specialists.

And yet: I’d also like to consider this visualization tool as a specimen of how a non-specialist (Bly has a background in computer science, statistics, and graphic design) approached an exercise in documenting textual history, even if he might not have conceptualized his effort in those terms. As someone who loves Origin as a narrative, even in its less scintillating moments (e.g., a chapter on pigeon breeding!), I found that Bly’s treatment of the text(s) as Mere Data left me slightly uneasy. I realize, however, that most "literary types" do not share my investment in Origin. So, I’m curious: what if someone had applied this visualization tool to, say, the 1818 and 1831 editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as the Bodleian Library manuscript? Does Bly's unorthodox approach to visualizing revision raise possibilities (or anxieties) for bibliography and textual studies?