wednesday miscellany

  • Arc90 has released Readability, a bookmark that strips away most of the cruft that generally surrounds text on the Web to focus on the main text column. It doesn’t work on every website, of course, but it does point out how messy our reading environments generally are. (An analogy might be drawn to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, in which the poet transcribed every word in a single day’s New York Times; set like a novel, the result was a 836-page book. A good deal of the act of reading is knowing what to ignore.) It seems a reader-oriented version of the full-screen writing environments in tools like WriteRoom or Scrivener. Probably also of interest as a model for making websites more accessible to the blind: this would make sites much easier for a screen reader to read.
  • John Willinsky has a paper in the Journal of Electronic Publishing entitled “Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press”: he presents a very detailed model for how academic publishing could work online which should be read by everyone interested in the subject.
  • There’s an interesting blog entry by Johannes Görannson about the Stephanie Strickland piece on electronic poetry noted here recently. Görannson notes that network-based writing practices (like those of inveterate prankster Tao Lin) seem more radical than the multimedia works than Strickland presents, which generally don’t acknowledge community ad the network.
  • Dan Green has a pair of well-reasoned posts on ideas about how text should be written differently for the perceived problem of the lack of attention. Green doesn’t believe that breaking books into smaller chunks (smaller chapters, smaller paragraphs) is likely to help anything; to argue this is to miss the point of what books can do.
  • Have we mentioned TextSound here? It’s a fairly new journal presenting sound poetry; what’s interesting to me is the sheer volume of material that can be presented in it. Their second issue would take up 6 CDs, if presented that way; on the web, projects can swell to their own sizes. Artist Paul Chan’s My Own Private Alexandria might be mentioned in the same breath: Chan has created his own library of audio books, nicely tagged.
  • If you happen to be in Oakville, Ontario, you could do worse than to pay a visit to “Novel Ideas”, an exhibition on the changing book at the Oakville Galleries. Alex Itin is showing his Orson Whales; the other work also looks interesting.