INFO 498A Construction and Presentation of Information in the Visual Arts
Before the Web
Written Properties of Visual Information |
Larry Rivers Parts of the Face: French Vocabulary Lesson |
Class discussion: What is the relationship between the print and visual elements in this painting? |
Some Initial Questions:
- The Form of Information What is the appropriate (best? natural?) form of information?
- The Meaning of Information Or does information have meanings?
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Information has a form? What's the relationship between an oral myth and its written form? Is there a canonical version of King Lear? Is there a canonical version of this html page? Why does eXtensible Markup Language separate content from presentation? |
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Information has a meaning? What is the meaning of "Moby Dick"? What is the meaning of "42nite"? or "42 nite"? or "4 2 nite"? or "4 2nite"? What is the meaning of this blue box? |
Information Technology, some history . . .
The Last IT Revolution: Print| Johannes Gutenberg - "Man of the Millennium" | more |
Class discussion: Printing press; moveable type; book creation beyond control of elites; Ben Franklin can publish political tracts; appearance of dictionaries; codification of language and grammar; sudden appearance of problem of illiteracy; competition to Church hagiography; threatened information elites, disruptive information technology, new ways of reading and writing, etc.
| Rapid Advances in the Technology of Information | more |
- 1800 - Stanhope tests iron printing press
- 1803 - Cylindrical paper-making machine produces cheap paper
- 1804 - First book printed by stereotype process
- 1811 - Steam-powered cylindrical printing press
- 1822 - Composing machine for setting type
- 1832 - Penny Weeklies build large circulations
- 1836 - Dickens' Pickwick Papers invents serial publication
By the end of the nineteenth century, the features of marked typography included: the use of a wide range of type faces, styles, and sizes with mixtures and juxtapositions of these proliferating within a single sheet; the breakup of the page into various zones of activity which received very distinct graphic treatments; the use of vertical elements; and finally, the use of paragonnage -- the incorporation of several different typefaces and/or sizes within a single line or word. Even without the incorporation of distinctly pictorial elements, the marked text became decidedly more visual, acting on the seductive methods and shock effects that could be generated by graphic variety. In addition, the site of these works was public -- the posted handbills, theater announcements, government notices, publicity circulars and a myriad of other printed sheets came to be a feature of the urban landscape in the late nineteenth century. Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 97
Advertising typography from La Publicite, 1913 |
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| Soiree du Coeur a Barbe, I. Zdanevich, Paris 1923
The outstanding feature of this poster for the Soiree du Coeur a Barbe is what is technically termed paragonnage: the assortment of various sizes of type within a single word... All this amounts to a single conclusion: Zdanevich manipulated the word as a series of letters in a graphic field, insisting on the visual properties of written language. |
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Development of Databases
- 1960 - National Library of Medicine (NLM) - MEDLARS system.
- 1960 - First public demonstration of online searching, SDC's Protosynthex.
- 1965 - Chemical Abstracts issued Chemical & Biological Abstracts, printed and magnetic tape formats.
- 1965 - Beginning of the CAS Chemical Registry System database funded by NSF, NIH and DoD.
- 1967 - Engineering Index.
- 1969 - BioSciences Information Service (BIOSIS)
- 1969 - LC MARC tapes for books available to subscribers.
- 1967 - First production search service, Lockheed's DIALOG serving NASA.
- 1967 - Data Corporation: Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR) full-text retrieval system.
- 1970 - Data Corporation became Mead Data Central (MDC).
- 1973 - MDC's LEXIS became operational.
- 1971 - 1972: Lockheed offers DIALOG services to database producers.
- 1974 - 18 databases offered.
- 1971 - NLM's MEDLINE (MEDLARS on-line) became operational.
- early 1970's - SDC's ORBIT developed with DoD contract.
- 1970-1975: Transition to on-line searching led by govt.; scientific numeric database.
- 1970-1975: For profit companies entering the A&I market. Predicasts, Congressional Information Service. Databases sold/leased/offered online through DIALOG or SDC's ORBIT.
A Little Database Theory
Database suppliers gather information, index it and create bibliographic records. Philosophically, one might say that they "create" the information. Database suppliers may be profit or non-profit organizations. An example would be ERIC. ERIC is an education database that uses Descriptors and Identifiers.Some Arts Information Databases Exercise: What is the typical structure of information in arts databases? What are the typical fields? How are they indexed typically? |
Assignment 1
For class discussion
Reading One: How important is orthography?
Strategies of the Construction of Information
Consider busy, messy reality:
Pets are registered in King County and are categorized as "domestic" (e.g., a dog) or "exotic" (e.g. a cobra snake). Registered pets have a registration number, and most pets have a given name. Each pet has an owner of record with an address. Pets are also given a general descriptive term such as "poodle."
Some questions about busy, messy reality:
- Would you want to record the zip code of a Seattle area in every pet description? Or, would you rather design things so that Seattle zip codes are recorded once in their own document?
- What is the relationship between an element like "dog" and an attribute like "registration", or an element like "pet" and an attribute like "type"? Could things be turned around so that "registration was an element and "dog" was its qualifier?
- Who is going to control the descriptive term "poodle?" Suppose that tomorrow someone registers a another poodle, but describes it as "Standard poodle." What's the relationship between "poodle," "standard poodle," "miniature poodle," etc.?
Strategy #1 Putting stuff in its place First XML Example
Strategy #2 Managing qualifiers Second XML Example
Strategy #3 Managing descriptors Third XML Example
| Digital Effects on Written Language |
Don't Go Gently Into that SMS
Guardian Entries for the SMS Poetry Competion |
In the first major competition of its kind, the Guardian awarded cash prizes to people who wrote the best poetry on their mobile phones, using the popular short text message service (SMS). People on their way to work, people on their way home, and people just out and about, banged out poems and shot them to the newspaper at an incredible rate. Because the size of a phone's screen is limited and an SMS message can hold only 160 characters, contestants had rather interesting ways of expressing their thoughts. Check out Hetty Hughes' championship entry:txtin iz messin, mi headn'me englis, try2rite essays, they all come out txtis. gran not plsed w letters shes getn, swears i wrote better b4 comin2uni. &she's african The newspaper winnowed the entries down to 100 and then handed them to professional poets who selected seven of the poems for cash prizes. The judges chose a poem written by Julia Bird as the "most creative use of SMS 'shorthand' in a poem:14: a txt msg pom. his is r bunsn brnr bl%, his hair lyk fe filings W/ac/dc going thru. I sit by him in kemistry, it splits my @oms wen he :-)s @ me. |
| Assignment 2 | Not only in English... |
The Rebus
The Enhancement of Language, or Digital Destruction of Language?
A10tion - attention Gr8 - great H4ck1ng for g1rl13z 4t9ers Au: Hamilton, Kendall TI: Double Trouble for 2pac SO: Newsweek, v. 124 (Dec. 12 '94) p. 62-3 SU: Shakur, Tupac, rap musician and actor Unintended rebus Agricola Confusion between the letter O and the number 0 0bservations, 0ctober, 0ld WorldCat Database Using zero for the letter 'oh' 1 0obert 1 0omer 1 0paris 1 0peration 2 0perations 1 0pportunities 1 0pposition 1 0pthalmology 1 0ptical 24 0r 1 0rakow 2 0sullivan 2 0swald 1 0swaldo 1 0takar 1 0tis 1 0trokovice 1 0tt 8 0tto 1 0united 1 0v 1 0wen 2505 osullivan Using the number one 3 1edition 1 1ee 1 1eengineering 1 1effect 1 1effective 1 1eg 2 1eh 1 1eines 1 1einziger 3 1eko 2 1el Using the number two 1 2se 21 2sect 13 2sectie 1 2section 1 2see 2 2seelenart 1 2sei 2 2seiki 77 2ser 2 2ser-fm 1 2seri Using the number three 1 3tausend 5 3tc 1 3tcs 28 3te 1 3tech 7 3teil 2 3tel 65 3ten 14 3ter 36 3tes 1 3te10m Using the number four 3 4foljden 1 4forschungsbereich 1 4four-fibel 1 4fp 2 4fsc 2 4fstatement 7 4ft 1 4f1-4f2 2 4f2 1 4f31 2 4f6f Using the number five 1 5ino5p 1 5inventare 1 5ist 1 5iu 11 5ive 1 5ivefold 1 5iv1976 6 5j 1 5jaarlijkse 2 5jahrhunderts 4 5jahrigen |
Assignment 3
| More Information Technology Changes: The World Wide Web | more |
- 1969 - ARPANET connects first 4 universities in the United States. Researchers at four US campuses create the first hosts of the ARPANET, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
- 1970 - 1973 The ARPANET is a success from the very beginning. Although originally designed to allow scientists to share data and access remote computers, email quickly becomes the most popular application. The ARPANET becomes a high-speed digital post office as people use it to collaborate on research projects and discuss topics of various interests.
- 1982 - The term 'Internet' is used for the first time.
- 1983 - TCP/IP becomes the universal language of the Internet
- 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, posts the first
computer code of the World Wide Web in a newsgroup, "alt.hypertext." The ability to
combine words, pictures, and sounds on Web pages excites many computer programmers who see the potential
for publishing information on the Internet in a way that can be as easy as using a word processor.
Marc Andreesen and a group of student programmers at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) develop a graphical browser for the World Wide Web called Mosaic.