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April 17, 2005
Graphical Structuring
Perhaps the most dramatically overlooked graphical forms in the humanities are the most familiar: books, pages of print, letterforms, and all the structures of textual and paratextual apparatus. The graphical features of texts are generally regarded as trivial, except by students of bibliography, book history, or design. But basic codes for reading are graphically structured. (10)
One among the many clear, cogent points offered by Johanna Drucker in "Graphesis" is that as readers of conventionally formatted, paper-bound texts we're already accustomed to recognizing and apprehending meaning by way of graphical features. To a degree, the comprehensibility of the text is immediately gauged by its adherence to given graphical organization schemes. Readers generally anticipate and perhaps even rely on some stylistic consistency in graphical patterns. Grievances against conventions—whether violations of margin spaces, fonts, paragraphing as indicated by tabbed indentation, punctuation, and horizontal, left-to-right lines of characters—stand to perturb readers, and in this sense, a few simple graphical conventions are the mainstay of fixed texts (well, yeah, and fluid texts in various interfaces). Because I've experienced a subtle shift in the way I approach such graphical conventions with students over the past few years, I appreciate that Drucker acknowledges the way such "basic codes" are commonly perceived as "trivial." The distinctions between fixed texts and fluid texts, between intertial forces and accelerative forces all seem to coalesce in this rather simple-seeming matter—the graphical design of texts (broadly construed) and the design's relationship to meaning, the experience of the texts, etc.
Posted by dmueller at April 17, 2005 09:24 PM
Comments
I found this point rather interesting as well, particularly in light of the emphasis Drucker puts on the ability to decode graphics not being self-evident. Convential texts (books) are self-evident only in so far as we have made the codes transparent, and thus they appear to be trivial. I had a friend doing some work with graphic novels and he was initially amazed at how much he had to explain about the composition of frames, the interplay of text and graphic to denote plot development or action or good guy/bad guy or whatever. Part of what strikes me in this statement from Drucker is that unsettling of our notions of fixed and transparent codes for reading texts. It's part of what McLuhan was faced with in designing MITM, no?
Posted by: TR at April 18, 2005 08:50 PM