A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
notes from around the web
On April 26 in Los Angeles, haudenschildGarage presents a performance entitled The Last Book, an “attempt to resurrect the medieval illuminated manuscript through the invocation of our current alchemy, the new technologies, to conjure a future as the past in reverse”. The artists and writers involved include Steve Fagin, Mary Gaitskill, Mian Mian, Leslie Thornton, Davina Semo, and Greg Landau; their site has more information.
Max Bruinsma has an interesting essay at Limited Language entitled “Typographic Design for New Reading Spaces”, addressing the issue of designing for screen reading and why text on screens is still generally so ugly.
Mediabistro points outMoulinarn Mobile Books (website under construction), devoted to publishing content specifically for the iPhone platform. Their content doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it does look like it’s not a generic e-book reader.
Those with a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education might be interested in this article about Matthew Kirschenbaum work on writers’ digital archives.
DiRT is the Digital Research Tools wiki, a collection of useful resources for scholars doing research digitally. Most of the tools they point out are open-source; it’s nice to have all these things in one place. More advanced users might look at XTF, an interesting new public domain extensible text framework designed to make archives digitally accessible.
The Digital Poetics blog suggests a new method of film criticism: grabbing a screen shot at 10 minutes, 40 minutes, and 70 minutes into the movie & talking about what’s on the screen at that instant and how it relates to the rest of the movie.
Dene Grigar’s “Electronic Literature: Where Is It?” has been up at the Electronic Book Review for a while, but it’s still worth a look. I’m not entirely sure it will convince skeptics, but it is a good overview of the present of electronic literature and its place in the academy.
Brazilian novelist Claudio Soares has put his 2006 novel Santos Dumont Número 8: O Livro das Superstições into the Institute’s CommentPress. He’s given all of the characters Twitter accounts; an impressive online presentation introduces the online version of the novel, which looks to be a fairly serious undertaking although put together with free tools. Once again, I wish I spoke Portuguese. (Edit: Claudio Soares suggests three auto-translated links – http://ow.ly/2g0r, http://ow.ly/2g0x, http://ow.ly/2g17 – for English speakers who wish to get a better idea of the project.)
