board acting splay
analog computer
The Linotype is an analog computer. That big, smooth rotating cam set rolls on a continuum, the casting jaws squeeez and the keystroke brings down each letter along wavy, differently timed, channel. Likewise the codex splay of pages and its reading gymnastic of display is analog, “sensitive to minute changes in parameter values”.
There is a wonderful study of this analog/digital distinction by Greg Shapley who is Director of Don’t Look Experimental New Media Galleryand the Sound of Failure Festival in Sydney. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he also lectures in Media Arts Production. Shapley has interests in the post-digital, sound and alternative technologies.
Where did I get this leaf link? Where else but the most generative garden on the internet.
retake on double fold
For the first time I find a preservation perspective criticism of Nicholson Baker. His new Kindle item in the New Yorker advances no further his premise from Double Fold that source originals have a continuing role in the context of their surrogate delivery. He actually forgets the premise in the context of newspapers
To begin with his evaluation of Kindle 2 is without aid of comparison to Kindle 1. Aside from all the excellent 2 negative reviews of the comparison, I can tell you as an owner of both, the 2 has a grey screen and grey text. The 1 has a much better contrast; “Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?”
But nowhere in Nicholson’s excellent rambles about Kindle, the phenomena, the technology or reactions of a bibliophile, does he take up the banner again for the continuing role of source originals in the context of their surrogate delivery. He slurs the issue even with newspapers. “The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.” Only the loss of “joy” is left to regret.
He even misses one of the great bibliophile opportunities when we encounter the Amazon promo of Kindle as providing “a lifetime of reading”. Yes, he does mention that the device ” ….will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years.” But, how would we like a lifetime of reading as evoked by a little dark screen? Nicholson does discuss the ownership infringements of Kindle reading, but he does on not go on to discuss the bibliophile interests in possession of books, appreciations for ergonomics of comprehension embodied in physical books, or understandings of the reliable transmission of conceptual works.
So it appears that advocacy for the strategic future of print is now left to a few working preservation librarians. As Walter Cybulski has said, from a preservation perspective; “Digitizing is micro-filming all over again.”.
script and print
This excellent book studies site and journal has kindly linked to FotB.