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Damp Squid: English Laid Bare

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how language is changing – and why

Truth be told, this is quite an advanced book on language use written from deep within the research vaults of the English linguistic history, but it’s written in a language that most people will be able to understand. Behind the apparently frivolous and amusing selection of examples in Damp Squid, Jeremy Butterfield is offering a serious update on how lexicography is conducted in the digital age.

language useDictionaries are no longer constructed from contributions handed in on slips of paper by enthusiastic amateurs: they are compiled by software programs crunching vast stockpiles of words stored in databases – known as the ‘corpus’. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs.

The complete database (of the Oxford Corpus) contains over two billion words, and is being expanded at the rate of 350 million new words every year. The Corpus reveals those words we use most frequently (the, is, to and) – but it has to be observed that these are based on written evidence – not the language we speak.

He looks at the origins of English language, which comes from a bewildering variety of sources – Old English, French, Norse, Greek and Latin, plus words borrowed from more than 350 other languages.

The current social activities generating most new words include information technology, lifestyle, media, sport, ecology, fashion, and cuisine. These new words are coined by making compounds from old terms (bedmate, streetwise) clipping and back-formation (advert, emote) portmanteau (chortle, podcast) eponyms (Biro)and foreign suffixes such as —ati (It: glitterati) —ista (Sp: Guardianista) and —fest (Gr: bookfest).

He has a good chapter on irregularities of spelling and pronunciation, culminating in a review of ‘eggcorns’ – understandable mistakes such as just desserts, free-reign, and baited breath – many of which are so widespread there is a danger of their becoming accepted.

He is a fully committed descriptivist. That is, his job as he sees it is to record the manner in which the English language is used, no matter how much it might change its meanings. Hence the title of the book. He argues that damp squid makes just as much sense as the original damp squib – because we hardly ever use the term squib any more. This might infuriate traditionalists and prescriptive grammarians, and it does neglect to note that a squid can hardly be anything other than damp, since it lives in the sea, so the metaphor loses all its force: it fails to make an imaginative connection between two disparate things.

In fact he takes things even further in his conclusion, where he delivers a vigorous critique of what he calls the ‘language Nazis’ – those people who write to newspapers complaining about the decline of the English language (and are aided and abetted by the BBC).

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Jeremy Butterfield, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.179, ISBN: 019957409X

Design for the Real World

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human-centred and ecological design principles

Design for the Real World is often tipped in design circles as one of the best overall guides to ethical design theory and practice, along with Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. Victor Papanek takes a radically user-centred approach to design, with a very strong emphasis on social and ecological consciousness. It’s obvious to see why a book like this becomes a standard text – because all his questions are very fundamental. Essentially, he bases his design judgements on political criteria. What does this object do? Who is it for? What is it made of? And do the answers to these questions have any social consequences for the rest of society?

Design for the Real WorldHe is quite uncompromising in his approach. No objects are too humble to be considered in terms of good or bad design – a hammer, a teacup, even a simple cardboard box. He is amusingly critical of famous design objects such as de Stijl and Macintosh chairs:

These square abstractions painted in shrill primaries were almost impossible to sit in; they were extremely uncomfortable. Sharp corners ripped clothing, and the entire zany construction bore no relation to the human body … The thronelike Glasgow chairs designed by Charles Rennie MacIntosh in 1902 – with six-and-one-half-foot ladderbacks [had] all the soft comforts of an orange crate.

You won’t get lots of ideas for fancy new designs, but you will get a radical method and a critical approach to design which means you will never look at a spoon or a sports car in the same way again.

En route he offers scathing analyses of multinational corporations such as fast food chains and motor car manufacturers for their often selfish and profligate policies. There’s a detailed critique of MacDonald’s packaging waste, and a clear link argued between gas-guzzling car design and US foreign policy in the middle-East. These ideas will appeal to anybody who wishes to combine design with an ecological conscience.

He also comes up with rather witty observations on ‘fashion’ and false aesthetics from time to time:

Because in any reasonably conducted home, alarm-clocks seldom travel through the air at speeds approaching five hundred miles per hour, streamlining clocks is out of place.

As an educationalist, he advances several useful problem solving techniques which could be applied in other disciplines, as well as design. But this book doesn’t let you off the hook. Whatever is being designed, he wants to know ‘Is it useful?’, ‘Does it do the job for which it is intended?’, and ‘Is it cost effective?’

If there’s a weakness, it’s that he spends a lot of time spelling out the problems of people with physical and social disabilities and calling for design solutions to them. We would all agree that these issues need attention, but personally I would rather he explained the principles of good design.

He gives plenty of examples of ‘alternative’ cheap and cheerful design solutions pioneered by his design studio and students

He’s fairly unrelenting in his argument for ecologically sound, labour-saving devices to help the underprivileged of the third world, but few of them seem entirely convincing, even when they pass prototyping.

The latter part of the book takes on the issue of design and education. Here he makes an argument for what he calls integrated design – working in teams, tackling real problems (not fashion-related) and keeping an ethical vision in mind.

The main trouble with design schools seems to be that they teach too much design and not enough about the ecological, social, economic, and political environment in which design takes place.

If you are serious about product design, put this book on your reading list. It’s full of attitude, full of ideas, and uncompromising in its approach. And it’s got a very good series of bibliographies on all topics related to the issues he discusses.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, London: Thames & Hudson, 1985, pp.394, ISBN: 0500273588

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Design Without Boundaries

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visual communication in transition

Design Without Boundarie is a collection of articles on visual communication produced between the 1980s and the mid-1990s. That was a period that saw an unprecedented development in graphic design in the USA and Europe, but Rick Poyner observes that there was no corresponding critical analysis of what was going on. This is his contribution to rectifying the matter. The pieces are exhibition and book reviews, profiles of designers, essays, and interviews. He is energetic and passionate about his subject, which is the relationship between design, illustration, and art – all of which he treats at both a theoretical and commercial level. And he’s truly international in his reach of vision. He interviews April Greiman in America, reports from Dutch and Swiss design studios, and searches out UK designers in their workshops and even their homes.

Design Without BoundariesHis approach is combative and challenging. He doesn’t give up looking for theoretical rigour and method, and he certainly doesn’t pull any punches with quite well-established figures. Jan Tschichold and Paul Rand both come under fire in the early pages of the book. It’s a pity there aren’t more illustrations (and some colour) because he spends a lot of time describing designers’ work which would come alive better with graphics. However, there is an up side to this. Because of his pursuit of rigour and clear analysis, he’s forced to describe works in a way which (where there are illustrations) turn out to be accurate and objective – certainly not the sloppy, self-oriented impressionism which passes for much of art criticism.

He really comes into his own on the ground of UK-based design. There are not one but two articles on Neville Brody in which he characteristically praises him for his design and challenges his theoretical assumptions. [In my experience, graphic artists are rarely gifted in articulating ideas about their own production. Go to any art school finals show to see the pretentious nonsense they write about their work.]

Peter Saville has interesting revelations to make about surviving early celebrity. It’s amazing how insecure these famous designers can still feel beneath their apparent success. This might be caused by the rapidly changing styles of the businesses that employ them – music, fashion, popular magazines, and the arty end of commercial advertising.

Other designers he discusses include Vaughan Oliver, Why Not Associates, Cartlidge Levene, Tomato, and Jonathan Barnbrook. Then he does the same thing for a group he classifies as illustrators – Russell Mills, Dan Fern, Andrzej Klimowski, and the American Milton Glaser.

There’s a section on magazines covering Nova, Oz, Modern Painters, David Carson’s Ray Gun, and Emigre. These analyses are very impressive indeed. For Poynor not only captures the graphic spirit of these publications; he offers as well their background commercial histories, their successions of editors, changes of policy, and in most cases the reasons for their demise.

I liked the fact that the essays were fairly short – three or four pages at most. Because he gets straight down to business with no padding. And yet it’s a huge book. If you’re looking for a survey of contemporary design issues written by an extremely well-informed insider – this is it.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Rick Poynor, Design Without Boundaries, London: Booth-Clibborn, 1998, pp.296, ISBN: 186154006X

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Design Writing Research

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illustrated essays on design, graphics, and typography

Design Writing Research is the name given to the combined work of Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, who are curator at Cooper-Hewitt design museum and director of a New York design agency. This elegant compilation brings together their writings on a wide variety of design-related topics – from the graphic presentation of numbers; contemporary hieroglyphs; the choice of body text in printed books; advertising; racial presentations in journalism; the seductiveness of commercial advertising; and newspaper layout and design – to a brief history of graphic design in America. This splendid variety in content is also matched by the design of the book itself.

Design Writing ResearchThey start with an essay on Deconstruction in design history – tracing the influence of French critical theory in the US and eventually settling on notions of typographical presentation. There’s also an essay on the history of punctuation and spacing which is wittily illustrated with a visual paraphrase of punctuation styles – from Latin monumental inscriptions to email emoticons in one short essay. This is a perfect use of the print medium, and an excellent fusion of form and content.

Some of the essays are no more than a sketch over a double page spread, but all of them are interesting – even one on the representation of numbers in print which inexplicably comes to an abrupt stop after the abacus.

They ambitiously tackle structuralist typography – an attempt to apply cultural theory to the realm of type design. Whilst this is not altogether convincing, it’s consistently thought-provoking and like all the other essays in the compilation, skillfully illustrated in a manner which is reminiscent of the work of Edward Tufte.

There are some indications of old-fashioned political correctness. They use the term ‘progressive’ as a blanket marker of approval reminiscent of the Old Left. When this is combined with an essay extolling the technical skills of Andy Warhol, the effect seems naive and rather whimsical. And yet the essay itself, a study of the relationship between advertising and graphic design, is essentially quite interesting. It looks at the work of illustrators such as Ben Shan, Paul Glaser, and David Stone Martin – pointing out that many of their works ‘were sold in galleries soon after they were published’.

The essays in the centre of the book are longer, detailed, and well researched, looking at the practice of graphic design in the context of twentieth century art. A study of McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message argues the case for the groundbreaking contribution of his co-author, Quentin Fiore. This is followed by an in-depth study of the relationship between race and advertising; then the use of stock photographic archive materials in journalism; and subliminal messages in advertising.

The book ends with a synoptic account of graphic design in the USA between 1829 and 1993 – which just stops short of the Internet explosion. If they ever get round to analysing Web pages in the way they treat their material here, it will be truly something to look out for.

This is a beautifully designed and exquisitely illustrated book which is a Must for anyone interested in graphics, information design, typography, or media studies – and it’s amazingly cheap. I bought my copy at full price, just in case the bookshop had made a mistake.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, London: Phaidon, 1996, pp.211, ISBN: 0714838519

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Design: A Short Introduction

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themes, principles, and categories of design

John Heskett kicks off this brief study by defining the term ‘design’ and shows fairly convincingly that it can cover a wide range of activities which affect “the forms and structures of the immediate world we inhabit”. There follows a quick gallop through historical attitudes to design problems, before getting under way with a look at the relationships between ‘form’, ‘function’, and ‘utility’. His focus is on design theory considered by categories (objects, communications, environments) rather than looking at the work of individual designers – though plenty of these are considered en passant.

Design: A Short IntroductionBy ‘communication’ he means the vast array of two-dimensional materials that play such an extensive role in modern life. For this read advertising, print, television, street signs, and web sites, plus hybrids such as the online promotional video. Once again he looks at general principles, but gives mention to individual designers such as David Carson, Milton Glaser, and Paul Rand.

On environment (interior and exterior design) he makes some interesting comparisons between America and Japan. Homes are much bigger in the USA, and the domestic appliances tend to be bigger and more old-fashioned. In Japan space is at such a premium that everything tends to be miniaturised, computerised, and designed to be stacked vertically, not horizontally

I was surprised he didn’t follow the logic of his own arguments here to consider the design of external environments such parks, airports, and other public spaces.

The design of ‘identities’ considers the sort of total corporate makeovers of the kind which Peter Behrens invented for the German electrical giant Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Geselschaft (AEG). He also considers disastrous examples, such as BA’s badly-judged, sixty million pounds re-launch of its visual identity with the much-mocked multicolour tailfins

Image is a projection of how a company would like to be understood by customers; identity is the reality of what a company delivers as experienced by customers. When the two are consonant, it is possible to speak of corporate integrity. If a gulf opens up between the two however, no amount of money flung at visual redesigns will rebuild customers’ confidence.

There’s a chapter on the relationship between design and business management and the politics of design in a national context which will be of particular interest to anyone with serious career ambitions.

He concludes with a glimpse into future possibilities, which gives him the chance to raise the issue of social responsibility in design – at which point I was delighted to note that he gave mention to Trevor Bayliss’ clockwork-powered radio.

This book was first issued as Toothpicks and Logos three years ago, and I have to say that placing it in the context of these ‘very short introductions’ has probably enhanced its value.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.148, ISBN: 0192854461

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Hamlet on the Holodeck

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reflections on hypertext and story-telling

Janet Murray has an intellectual background which will be common to many who have passed through higher education since the 1960s. She is rooted in her training in the humanities (English Literature) – but she has been touched by developments in computer science, and wishes to combine the two disciplines. She holds simultaneously a deep reverence for post-Renaissance book-based traditional learning and an appreciation that digitised texts, non-sequential narratives, and multimedia effects might produce new artistic forms. Hamlet on the Holodeck is an exploration of what has been done to develop these new forms – and what might be done in the future. It is a study which has become a central text in the required reading on hypertext. As a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the home of research and development in multimedia – she knows the field well.

Hamlet on the HolodeckHer examination starts with a survey of science fiction and various modern narratives which explore the possibilities of parallel universes or alternative realities – including 3-D movies and virtual reality simulators. She describes the existing technology with enthusiasm – although in each case she ends up in the realm of ‘Imagine if this could be put to use in …’ rather than what has been done. But this is understandable. After all, we are considering an extremely new technology. When printing was first invented, books were produced which imitated written manuscripts, just as in our own age cinema and radio first imitated the live theatre. Maybe the new digital narrative forms have not yet emerged.

She discusses videogames, virtual dungeons (MUDs and MOOs) and literary hypertexts, including the best known – Michael Joyce’s Afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. She also considers the advantages and weaknesses of Web-based narrative experiments. These include the complex worlds which are generated around TV soap operas for instance – which have archives of back footage linked to fan-generated materials.

The main problem is that she doesn’t really confront the most fundamental philosophical principle of fictional narratives. This is that consumers usually want and appreciate a series of events which has been artfully conceived and structured by somebody else. Such narratives represent, in no matter how diffuse a form, a distinctive point of view or perspective on the world.

There is much discussion of journeys through mazes, fantasy quests, dragon-slaying, and all the usual clichés of games with names such as Pong, Zork, and Doom. However, when it comes to predicting what the new forms might be, these tend to be simply different ways of telling the same story – multiple viewpoints – a strategy which has been adopted in most art forms, and which is not intrinsically connected to computers or hypertext. Her arguments and exposition seem more fruitful when she is discussing the rapidly merging world of the Web and television.

Her examination of current multimedia productions is wide-ranging and thorough, although there are one or two assumptions about what is likely to develop which seem open to question. The first is that computers will somehow participate in the generation of basic narratives. The second is that readers will be invited to participate in the story. The third is that a video games or MUDs are likely to be the most likely form to be developed. These are certainly interesting possibilities, but whether they are necessary elements of the new forms or not, only convincing evidence will tell.

However, these are reservations of a rather theoretical nature. At a practical level, anyone interested in the future possibilities of story-telling using computer technology should read this book. Its comprehensive survey of current practice is an inspiring starting point for what might be achieved in the digital future.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp.324, ISBN: 0262631873

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Here Comes Everybody

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how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623

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How the Web was Born

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Readable technological history of Internet and Web

Robert Cailliau’s name was on the original research proposal for the World Wide Web, along with Tim Berners-Lee. This is his account of the development, written with James Gilles. They start with a quick history of the Internet, focussing on the key feature of packet-switching which made the Web possible. Part two switches to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Here the story becomes one of scientists from all over the world who need to share, archive, and retrieve information. CERN had developed its own Intranet, and by the late 1980s had become Europe’s biggest Internet site.

world wide webAs with most accounts of Internet history, you have to keep up with a complex chronology as the separate stories of each technological strand are developed: the TCP/IP protocols; the development of the PC; and the HCI (human computer interface). Fortunately, all technical terms are explained, and the general reader will be grateful for the appendices which include a timeline, a list of key individuals, a bibliography, an explanation of acronyms, and of course an index.

They include character sketches of all the main figures – Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbert, who first thought of Windows, hypertext, and the mouse respectively.

There’s an interesting chapter on the rapid rise and fall of the UK computer industry which in the early 1980s was producing the world’s highest per-capita ownership of personal computers.

They also include potted histories of hypertext, and the pre-web search software such as Archie, WAIS, and Gopher. People who have used these command-line interfaces are likely to look back and smile fondly.

Finally, after all the preliminaries, everything is set for what was to be the killer application of the Internet – the invention of the World Wide Web.

It’s still amazing to think how recent all this has been – only ten years ago – as this second edition of their book is issued on the Web’s birthday.

If you want a history of the Web which is more general than Tim Berners-Lee’s more personal account in Weaving the Web, this is an excellent alternative.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.372, ISBN 0192862073

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Howard Hodgkin

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illustrated critical survey of contemporary masterworks

I’ve been a long time fan of the work of Howard Hodgkin. (So much so that I opened a gallery devoted to his work here.) He has a great sense of form, uses luscious colours, and produces semi-abstracted compositions which are like rich food for the visual sense. The problem in interpreting his work is that there’s a tension between the degree of abstraction of the image and its ostensible subject, usually stated in its title. Hodgkin claims that he is a ‘realist’ painter, but it’s sometimes difficult to understand how a couple of deep blue brush strokes across the centre of a green stippled canvas whose frame is dripping in blood red gloss represents ‘An Evening with Kevin’.

Howard HodgkinAndrew Graham-Dixon’s study is an attempt to solve this problem. He presents a historical survey of Hodgkin’s work which is beautifully illustrated in the full colour it deserves. It’s an approach to art criticism which is well informed (in biographical terms) which pays attention to the details of what appears on the canvas, and yet which seems to stop short of interpretation.

He does his best to make the case for representation by suggesting that Hodgkin paints memories, feelings, and moods; but when it comes to evaluating individual works he hides behind a smokescreen of supposition and conditionality. His argument goes something like this, in

this painting may have some connection with … it recalls someone else … it might have affinity with …. it can also evoke …and it might be said to represent something …

He describes almost every brush stroke in gushing prose, but he hasn’t got any hard evidence to offer. And whilst he’s getting his critical knickers in a twist, he doesn’t address glaringly obvious issues such as the fact that Hodgkin paints over the frames of his pictures. Why does he do that? What’s the significance of such a bold gesture?

It’s interesting to note that after running out of meaningful things to say about the paintings, he’s quite prepared to go on talking about their titles. And in the end, this might be the problem.

If a glamorous canvas of deep greens splashed against a black border, with red and yellow dots in the background were called Composition #9 there might be less fuss than if it were given the title In the bedroom . Andrew Graham-Dixon would be less preciously strangulated, and we could just enjoy some more coloured paint on canvas.

Howard Hodgkin

In bed in Venice

But Hodgkin does give his paintings apparently descriptive titles – such as Nick 1977 which looks like two windows covered by Venetian blinds, You Again 2001 which is three interlocking pyramids, and Learning About Russian Music 1999 in which a red and ochre frame surrounds blue, green, and brown brush strokes. So the problem remains.

There is the merest smidgeon of representation still present in his work, but the acid test would be guess the subject if the paintings were not captioned. I doubt if Andrew Graham-Dixon or anyone else could do it.

Fortunately, I don’t think it matters in the end. Personally, I am quite happy to accept Hodgkin as a quasi-abstract painter whose sense of colour is simply ravishing. The reproductions of the paintings here are excellent, and this is a good-value survey of them.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London: Thames and Hudson, (revised and expanded edition) 2001, pp.232, ISBN 0500092982

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Hyper/Text/Theory

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essays on literature and literary theory in the digital age

George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and the technological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This is the third of his publications which explore connexions between them. The general argument he makes is that the digitization of text coupled with the associative links of hypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential.

Hyper/Text/Theory It makes new literary forms available, blurs distinctions between existing genres [‘boundary erasure’] and makes possible anything from multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are ‘unreproducible’ because of their size and their constant revision.

His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and Nicholas Negroponte. Unfortunately, his fellow contributors fail to match his standard. The other essays deal with non-linearity as one of the essential features of hypertext, the politics of this branch of IT, and what promotes itself as new writing – ‘hypertext fiction’, a somewhat dubious notion over which there is still much debate.

They range enthusiastically over topics as diverse as Wittgenstein’s notebooks, films and narratology, and forms of classical rhetoric. But much of their exposition is clogged with silly jargon [‘texton’, ‘scripton’, ‘screener’] which is depressingly rife amidst professionals in the field of cultural studies.

At their worst the essays deal in speculation rather than reporting
on practical experiences or successful projects. Mireille Rosello for instance at one point drops to the level of conceptual art when she spends two or three pages describing what an imaginary hypertext programme could be like. Since there are unsung technical writers out there in the field constructing hypertext programmes for real right now, this is a feeble and self-indulgent substitute. There are just too many questions raised, not enough empirical data or answers.

One further dispiriting feature is the tendency of the authors to draw on the same material, and even worse to quote each other. It is one thing for them to [quite understandably] cite Ted Nelson as a hypertext visionary, but when yet another reference to Thomas Pynchon occurs in the fourth or fifth essay, one wonders if these aren’t the papers of some post-graduate club. This suspicion is reinforced by the tendency for them all to quote from the same fashionable cultural theorists – Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. The collection ends with a piece of post-Modernist tosh by Gregory L Ulmar which weaves a tissue of non-sequiturs around a contrived verbal connection between Wittgenstein [again] and Carmen Miranda.

In Landow’s own survey of current programmes and projects [written, one supposes, circa 1993/94] it is interesting to note how often he describes the hypertext systems available by using the telling metaphor of a ‘web’ of connexions. The World Wide Web which was under development at that very time now makes available many of the linkages dreamed of from Vannevar Bush onwards. And most importantly, they are available not merely for some technological elite as in the past, but for whoever wishes to use them. This is a democratizing influence which will have a profound effect upon the construction, assembly, and cross-linking of information – and Landow knows it. One of the driving forces behind this collection of essays is to make these possibilities known. I imagine that a further post-WWW volume is on its way right now – but I hope he writes the book himself.

© Roy Johnson 2000

HyperText Theory   Buy the book at Amazon UK

HyperText Theory   Buy the book at Amazon US

George P. Landow, (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp.379, ISBN: 0801848385

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