A visionary report on the revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.
Digital_Humanities is a ...compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry—including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation—to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.
A distinction between autographic and allographic signs was formulated by the art historian Nelson Goodman in his important work, The Languages of Art (1972). This distinction links the signifying ...qualities of form with the function of signs as systems of notation. In analyzing this difference, this article interrogates the question of whether an epistemological and political dimension plays a role in the subject of enunciation. Self-portraits by André Breton and Lazar el Lissitzky provide principle examples that demonstrate two very different concepts of artistic subjectivity.
The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of ...deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of Iliazd has been prized by bibliophiles and collectors for its exquisite book design and innovative typography. Iliazd collaborated with many major figures of modern art—Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Joán Miro, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others. His 1949 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words, was the first international anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry ever published. The list of contributors is a veritable Who's Who of avant-garde writing and visual art. And Iliazd's unique hands-on engagement with book production and design makes him the ideal case study for considering the book as a modern art form.
Iliazd is the first full-length biography of the poet-publisher, as well as the first comprehensive English-language study of his life and work. Johanna Drucker weaves two stories together: the history of Iliazd's work as a modern artist and poet, and the narrative of the author's encounter with his widow and other figures in the process of researching his biography. Drucker's reflection on what a biographical project entails addresses questions about the relationship between documentary evidence and narrative, between contemporary witnesses and retrospective accounts. Ultimately, Drucker asks how we should understand the connection between the life of an artist and their work.
Enriched with photographs from the Iliazd archive and a wealth of primary documents, the book is a vivid account of a unique contributor to modernism—and to the way we continue to reevaluate the history of twentieth-century culture. Accounts of Drucker's research during the mid-1980s in the personal archive of Madame Hélène Zdanevich, the poet's widow, lend the narrative an incredible intimacy. Drucker recounts how, sitting in the studio that Iliazd occupied from the late 1930s until his death in 1975, she was drawn into the circle of scholars who had made him their focus and were doing foundational work on his significance. She also coped with the difference between the widow's view of the artist as a man she loved and Drucker's own perception of Iliazd's significance within a critical approach to history. Iliazd is at once a rich study of a significant figure and a thoughtful reflection on the way a biography creates an encounter with its always absent subject.
An 1842 compendium of literary curiosities assembled by bibliophile Gabriel Peignot presents a collection of works and rules for their composition that has interesting correlations with electronic, ...computational, and digital productions of poetic works. Because these works were written under constraint, their rule-bound approach has an algorithmic character that can be compared with the compositional tactics used in computational work. This paper analyzes Peignot’s collection in terms slightly different from those on which he organized his compendium. Rather than sort the works in a typology of formal properties, this paper presents a typology of production methods and compositional techniques. Though not all electronic approaches are anticipated by the works collected in Peignot’s remarkable work, the range and variety of these methods, many of which reach into antiquity, establishes a long lineage for conventions of rule-based poetic composition.
This article addresses the challenges for design pedagogy in supplying the intellectual and critical skills for knowledge design in networked projects. In addition to the need for technical ...understanding (of data formats, infrastructure, and information systems), this piece suggests that a critical understanding of the concepts of agency should also be part of the designer's agency-- as an autonomous, free-willed individual, a part of a social system, an agent for transformative change, an interventionary force, an instrument of resistance, etc. In turn, the designed environment encodes illusions of agency for a user. The ability to articulate these critical dimensions and understand one's role in the supply chain of illusion is an essential aspect of design practice. Preparing designers for this role should be crucial component of design education.
Theories of materiality include attention to the literal, forensic, formal, and distributed-to which categories the "performative" adds another dimension, one that is premised on the instantiated and ...situated experience of an aesthetic work rather assuming its existence as a self-evident, autonomous object defined by inherent properties. The idea of performativity is also crucial to diagrams-drawings that work, that are generative in their activity because of structural features that spatialize semantic relations and make spatial relations semantic. Because diagrams are exemplary-even paradigmatic-they offer a way to reconceptualize approaches to design and reading/viewing aesthetic artifacts across a broad range of artistic works and practices. This paper proposes that the "diagrammatic" and "performative" concepts offer a way to think about aesthetic practice from a theoretical perspective that draws on non-representational and new materialist perspectives that embody crucial principles of humanistic epistemology relevant to the creation of knowledge in the digital environment. Examples from the history of information visualization, poetics, book arts, and digital arts will be used to illustrate these principles.
Database Narrative in Book and Online Drucker, Johanna
Journal of Electronic Publishing,
01/2015, Letnik:
18, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Web Resource
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