Recently I’ve been working with the if:book team on The Museum of the Future of the History of the Book, an innovative digital literacy project for schools. So what form the book may take in the future has been much on my mind lately.
Here’s an interesting, if somewhat absurd, possibility by artist and book cover designer, Stefanie Posavec. Writing Without Words ‘is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualises the differences in writing styles of various authors.’
Literary Organism - the structure of Part One of 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac
It’s absurd – and I don’t use the term pejoratively – because it’s a visualization that obscures meaning, therefore it’s paradoxical printed matter (you can buy prints), a visual oxymoron or an oxymoronic visualization, since the usual aim of information visualization is ‘to help people understand and analyze data.’ According to Wikipedia:
Visual representations and interaction techniques take advantage of the human eye’s broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once.
Which is the exact opposite of what a novel is about. Of course, Writing Without Words is art so it shouldn’t have to make literal sense. But could this be a future way of navigating a digital book? Or, since information visualization is designed to ‘provide some means to see what lies within’, could this be a future way of judging a book, not by its cover, but by its data visualization? Intriguing questions.
Reminds me of a recent discussion stimulated by Kate Pullinger’s article, My Digital Evolution in Fiction for Internet Evolution. Kate said:
But I can imagine a time when books become more like art objects for people who like books, as opposed to people who like to read – the idea of being a big reader might not go hand in hand with being a lover of books, as it still does currently.
I agreed:
I look forward to doing most of my reading in future on a lovely e-reader… I also think the digital reading future may be liberating for the paper fabric book, turning book objects into wonderful works of art – interactive sculptural objects with stories to tell! Most objects will probably be RFID tagged anyway, so everything will be linked up to the web in one or another. All manner of things will be possible. Convergence will go many ways.
Sentence Drawings in the book version explain an approach to analysing 'On the Road'
Writing Without Words is a fascinating fetishization of the book as both object and container of information, which speaks to me about the absurdity of venerating the printed book as the only true and worthy carrier of literature and ideas.
