Lined & Unlined

At Yucca Mountain, where nuclear waste will remain stored for over 1,000,000 years, the issue is how to create a warning durable enough to last for that long. The answer is in diversification:

We have looked very closely at what WIPP is doing—the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. They did a study with futurists and other people-sociologists and language specialists. They decided to come up with markers in seven languages, basically like a Rosetta Stone, with the idea that there will always be someone in the world who studies ancient languages, even 10,000 years from now, someone who will be able to resurrect what the meanings of these stelae are. They will basically say, “This is not a place of honor, don’t dig here, this is not good material,” etc.

New problems, classic solutions (via Kottke). One of my students at Parsons arrived at the same solution earlier this year when I put the challenge to my Experimental Typography class. Project description here.

The endlessly brilliant Umberto Eco on infiniteness, order, and lists:

We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone… One could go into great detail.

Oh and there’s a whole book? Wishlisted! (via Bobulate)

Above, from top: Engraving of Kilroy on the WWII Memorial in Washington DC; “Abracadabra” definition from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, available as full text on Google Books; paperboard templates by Karl Nawrot; illustration of tally sticks; mnemonic device for remembering Morse Code; results of research on chess players and memory chunking (click image to enlarge); numbers 1-40 constructed from the equivalent number of matchsticks by Julia Born; afterimage of black dots on a grid; the Hering Illusion applied to a circle.

The second Wikipedia Reader was created by ASDF (aka Mylinh and David) who kindly asked me to participate. I was honored, having been a huge fan of the first Wikipedia Reader after picking it up at the New Museum bookshop. Other contributors included curator Laurel Ptak, artist Amy Yao, designers and friends Ryan Waller and Dexter Sinister, and many more.

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BY ROB GIAMPIETRO & DAVID REINFURT

0 — May I speak now?

1 — Of course. I didn’t mean to get carried away, but…

0 — You mentioned typesetters. While preparing the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming in the early 1980s, Donald Knuth received the galley proofs and was quite upset by what he saw. His publisher had just switched to a digital typesetting system and the typographic quality of this edition was far below the first. Knuth realized that typesetting only meant arranging 0’s and 1’s (ink and no ink) in the proper pattern, and figured, as a computer programmer, he could do something about it. He spent the next ten years developing TeX as a language for writers to directly produce high-quality typesetting. As opposed to industry-standard page layout programs that implement a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm, TeX produces “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM) by using plain text files and a semantic mark-up language compiled on-the-fly to produce final pages.

1 — Run that by me again.

0 — During most of the time, the typesetting of a book’s pages has followed the same model—What You See Is What You Get. Typographic technologies have changed at a constantly accelerating pace from steel punch-cuts to Monotype’s lead-slugs to phototypesetting’s chemical emulsions and finally to the exclusively digital production of typeset pages. Each one of these relies on a human operator, or typesetter, to translate the texts into typographic form and compose the page. As the typesetter works, he sees the full page compositely formed before his eyes. Whether assembling metal letters in between rows of leading (while reading backwards) or preparing long typographic galleys on Linotronic paper, the typesetter sees what he is making as he is making it. Even in a digital software program such as Adobe InDesign, the operator is given a full-page interface where typesetting choices are reflected back in real time. What You See Is What You Get.

But, with the appearance of the computer, Knuth realized, another possibility had arrived. (This may be what you were getting at a while back when you suggested that “Information wants to be freed”…) Computer software can be delegated the technical work of assembling lines of letters comfortably on a book page. And this kind of brute-force automation and progressive problem solving is likely the work for which the digital computer is best-suited. So, if software can automatically perform the rote tasks of typesetting, that leaves the writer (who has also been electronically enfranchised as producer) free to make page layouts by simply instructing the computer as to what she means. The writer prepares a text that says what it says but also includes the structural relationships between the parts of the text. “This is a headline.” Or “The next paragraph is a quotation.” When this kind of text-as-structure is passed to an automated typesetting system, the result is What You See Is What You Mean.

This is where the moral objection comes in. Once the typographic decisions have been passed over to software, then the information no longer is tied to any one specific form. The possibilities multiply. It can find any of many forms from electronic text message to glossy magazine to portable document format. The transitions are increasingly fluid, increasingly automatic. But instead of prying itself from its carrier, the information becomes, paradoxically, more specifically bound to its medium. The communication is always a combination of what is being said and how what is being said is being delivered. The medium remains the message, and ever-increasingly so.

1 — Ultimately, you’re right, not just about books, but about the medium of language itself. Let me try to respond by splicing several different speakers from several different sources. The first is MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, who wrote a column for Wired in 1996 about his newly released book Being Digital:

> What weighs less than one millionth of an ounce, consumes less than a millionth of a cubic inch, holds 4 million bits, and costs less than US$ 2? What weighs more than 1 pound, is larger than 50 cubic inches, contains less than 4 million bits, and costs more than 20? The same thing: Being Digital stored on an integrated circuit and Being Digital published as a hardcover book. […] We seldom carve words in rocks these days, we will probably not print many of them on paper for binding tomorrow. In fact, the cost of paper (which has risen 50 percent in the past year), the amount of human energy required to move it, and the volume of space needed to store it make books as we know them less than the optimum method for delivering bits. In fact, the art of bookmaking is not only less than perfect but will probably be as relevant in 2020 as blacksmithing is today.

Paul Conway, the head of Yale University Library’s Preservation Department until 2001, might draw a different conclusion from Negroponte’s. In an essay also from 1996 titled “Preservation in the Digital World,” Conway writes:

> Our capacity to record information has increased exponentially over time while the longevity of the media used to store the information has decreased equivalently. […] In order to achieve the kind of information density that is common today, we must depend on machines that rapidly reach obsolescence to create information and then make it readable and intelligible.

Conway compares modern information technology to the book-publishing boom of the 1850s when more books than ever were being printed smaller, cheaper, and faster. While “illuminated manuscripts and other documents from Medieval times are quite able to withstand centuries more study and admiration,” Conway notes, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or The Whale, first published in 1851 on typically acidic paper, symbolizes the worldwide preservation challenges of all 19th- and 20th-Century publishing.” In cases like Moby Dick, the medium, literally, was disintegrating, and taking the message with it.

Acid-free paper wasn’t developed until the 1950s and is often symbolized today with a ringed infinity symbol appearing on the book’s copyright page. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, a different kind of deconstruction was challenging the book’s material (if not physical) form. Derrida opens his 1972 book Dissemination with an “Outwork,” a text that, as he explains, exists externally to the book itself.

> This (therefore) will not have been a book. […] I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them. The question here, precisely, is that of presentation. […] [The] book form alone can no longer settle—here for example—the case of those writing processes which, in practically questioning the form, must also dismantle it.

While the book form, right down to its now acid-free paper, seeks to preserve and extend, Derrida seeks to dislocate and upend all the knowledge structures represented by the book and even the tool of writing itself in search of new ones. Later in the book, he retells the story from Plato’s Phaedrus of the “old god” Theuth, who presented the King of Egypt with the gift of writing:

> When it came to writing, Theuth said, “This discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories: my invention is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom.” But the King said, “Theuth, my master of arts, to one man it is given to create the elements of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and usefulness it will have for those who are going to employ it. And now, since you are father of written letters, your paternal goodwill has led you to pronounce the very opposite of what is their real power. The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it’s not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered.”

Earlier we described information and knowledge as a kind of disembodied “light”…

0 — That’s true! That’s correct! “The electric light is pure information!”

1 — But, Derrida points out that accessing that light requires Theuth’s “recipe” of writing and that this recipe is some kind of a drug—both remedy and poison. Perhaps it is true that we make books in order to forget.

Negroponte says that by making more things, smaller, cheaper, faster, and more widely accessible, we’ll get smarter. Conway warns that it was precisely making objects in this way that led to widespread rot and decay. Derrida shows that even without rot and decay a book’s material form might need to be dismantled. Plato reminds us that the very tool used to create books—writing—may have placed us in this double bind for good, between remembering and forgetting, information on or off, from zero to one and back.

This piece was comissioned by Laurenz Brunner (who also did the excellent image selection) for The Present Issue: The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2008. Many thanks to Tan Wälchli for his careful edit of the text. Part one of this essay, “From Zero to One,” is here. See also: Gould Meets Gould. —RG

Ben Goldacre of The Guardian interviewed on NPR’s On The Media:

There’s something very interesting about vaccine scares. These are cultural products. They’re not about evidence. If vaccine scares were about genuine scientific evidence showing that a vaccine caused a disease, then the vaccine scares would happen all around the world at exactly the same time, because information can disseminate itself around the world very rapidly these days. But what you find is that vaccine scares actually respect cultural and national boundaries.

Viral marketing, indeed.

BY ROB GIAMPIETRO & DAVID REINFURT

0 — To begin let me ask straight out: are there any off-limit areas?

1 — I certainly can’t think of any, apart from the music, of course.

0 — I’ve recently been thinking about libraries, and I know this is a conversation we’ve shared off and on for a while. Perhaps I’ll pick it back up, now.

The first libraries were based on an Archive model, a safe place for important records. They housed mostly commercial transactions and inventories recorded on clay tablets. As the library developed, it retained this archival function, but on July 1, 1731, Benjamin Franklin and the Leather Apron Club of Philadelphia established the first public Circulating Library. Books were quite expensive at the time and by pooling resources, many volumes could be shared among contributing members. One was free to borrow any book for a length of time, return it, and borrow another. This new Library was built to expand and evolve, a shifting arrangement of ideas and objects constantly circulating in a concentrated community of committed readers.

In recent years yet another library model has materialized, specifically online, which might be called the Distributing Library. The Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg are perhaps examples, where a large collection of documents are collected together electronically and made available free for download. Instead of 50,000 books, one copy each, sealed in an Archive; or 15,000 books, a few copies each, all constantly circulating; the Distributing Library offers any number of “books,” with unlimited copies, all available free to be downloaded, digested, dispersed. Now, if the Archive Model essentially treats books as Capital, investing them back into the institution in order to reinforce and expand the reach of the library and the Circulating Library constitutes a gift economy by freely sharing the books in its collection through a network of benign strangers, then, what economic model corresponds to the Distributing Library?

1 — Libraries started out as a single building whose assets were the property of the sovereign or state. Through the work of Franklin and others, libraries evolved into a set of branches whose assets were the property of a membership, township, or community. The Archive is one place. The branch system is many places. When you examine this progression, the makeup (or perhaps the markup) of the Distributing Library becomes clearer. It has a slippery relationship to place because it is housed on an infinite number of servers and accessed through an infinite number of web browsers. It also has a slippery relationship to its own assets. The library’s assets are not there to be merely stored or loaned. The Distributing Library’s assets are there, really, to be copied.

In the days of the Archive, there were few copies and few originals. Taxes may have helped to fund the library, but fundamentally it was controlled by the state and therefore all information was controlled by the state as well. The structure was so centralized that it was a gift economy’s virtual opposite. Writing in The Gift, Lewis Hyde gives the case of Enrico Malatesta, head of an anarchist gang who hid out in the woods near Naples trying to unravel the state one archive at a time. Here’s Hyde quoting historian James Joll: “At the village of Lentino the column arrived on a Sunday morning, declared King Victor Emanuel deposed and carried out the anarchist ritual of burning the archives which contained the record of property holdings, debts, and taxes.” The uprising happened in 1877, nearly 150 years after Franklin’s revolutionary new Circulating Library model was functioning in America. It is as if Malatesta had realized that the state was relying on an outmoded library technology, the Archive, to exert control. At the same time, the increasing circulation of books from Gutenberg onward had created a more literate citizenry and therefore a more informed (and demanding) public. Information wanted to be free, open, and available to everyone, as Franklin’s library was.

The Leather Apron Club was also known as the Junto, a word Franklin adapted from the Spanish verb “to join.” Sharing books empowered these mostly middle-class, highly-literate merchants. Sharing also eroded some of the hierarchy the Archive created between civilians and the state. Finally, sharing books established what Hyde calls a “feeling bond” among members of Franklin’s circle, a sense of union. E pluribus unum. The Junto’s roots were not in book collecting but in discussion. It was a social club before it was a library. This is telling. In the days of the Archive, items existed to be looked up one-by-one on your own. With the advent of the Circulating Library, items existed to be discussed by a group. Now with the Distributing Library, a further change is taking place. Let’s tune our radios back to December 2008 and listen to Lawrence Lessig speaking to Terry Gross on NPR:

Copyright law was architected for a world where copies were the exception. […] In the digital age, every single thing we do with creative work on a digital network produces a copy, so that the act of reading on a digital network produces a copy. The act of sharing my book with my mother produces a copy. Any of these activities which in real space don’t produce a copy, in cyberspace produce a copy.

The Circulating Library model was not a digital model, it was a real-world model. In the real world, you have to surrender ownership to increase access. In the digital world, you don’t. In the real world, information content (a text) is wedded to a physical form (a book). In the digital world, information content (a text) exists as one layer separable from digital form (a PDF, email, blog post, text-to-speech reading, etc.). Thus while Franklin’s club had shifted the emphasis on how books were used from owned objects of study to shared objects for conversation, the Distributing Library continues and deepens that idea of culture as conversation. Even if you wanted to burn the library down now, you couldn’t: its users have made a thousand copies of it, ready to take the place of the original. Few of those users feel that what they’ve done is wrong: they want to do whatever they want with the content they’ve accessed. Therefore, it’s time for the state to play catch up, and that’s why there’s so much upheaval in copyright law, in newspaper publishing, in the distribution of music, and so much more. We are experiencing a massive shift from the Library of Alexandria to Google Books. They may be comparable, but they’re not the same.

Does that answer your question?

0 — Yes, in part. But, frankly I’m surprised at your naïve distinction between the “real” and the “digital” worlds. Does the computer and its contents no longer belong to the same world that we live in? Digital information may appear disembodied, but it is always nothing more than a collection of simple electric charges, on or off, 1 or 0. And, if you don’t believe me, try grabbing your plugged-in Macbook by the motherboard, and you’re in for a jolt of reality.

1 — Maybe the distinction isn’t between “real” or “virtual,” maybe it’s simply between “analog” and “digital.” Circulating and Distributing Libraries provide two different platforms with some different possibilities. But when you’re trying to optimize how the information is used, it’s possible to be platform independent. Information wants to be free, accessible to whomever, wherever, however.

0 — “Information wants to be free?” Does it really? The second half of Stewart Brand’s aphorism is often conveniently omitted, so I’ll include it here for you:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, “intellectual property,” the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

1 — But Brand’s aphorism makes a cost distinction. I’m making a use distinction. They’re quite different. Maybe we should rewrite him: “Information wants to be freed.”

0 — Nice one. But still, the tired rhetoric of “free information” has its roots in the mid-20th century discourse of Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and Claude Shannon’s Information Theory which model a communications system that isolates information from its carrier. Technically, this may be correct—and yet, please find me some information that arrives without a vehicle…

Perhaps this is why our conversation here, now makes some sense in a book about books. Books are a particularly robust vehicle for delivering information, and I think you’ll agree that the form of the book is as important as the information it carries for the total message delivered.

And I’d go further. I’m really not happy at all with the idea that information wants to be free—I think it probably wants a house, a body, a vehicle. And, it wants that carrier to be as carefully considered as what it’s carrying. (The form plus the message equals the contents of the communication.) I suppose I agree that the information can be separated from its carrier and can be recombined in new objects for circulation and conversation as you describe. I only think, practically speaking, that information never exists free-floating, it is always made physical by way of its medium. There is no such thing as pure information.

1 — I can see your point. Maybe here’s where we begin to see a boundary between What Libraries Want and What Books Want.

Libraries want the information first and foremost and are more agnostic about the carrier of that information. They spread lux et veritas, light and truth. That is their public trust. Franklin’s library grew out of his Enlightenment ideals and the idea of the Enlightenment itself is embedded with this idea that “knowledge” is analogous to “light.” It is disembodied, diffuse, and not naturally controlled. Harvard University Library Director Robert Darnton draws a useful parallel between the two in an essay called “Google & the Future of Books” for the 12 February 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books. He writes:

[Most] of us would subscribe to the principles inscribed in prominent places in our public libraries. “Free To All,” it says above the main entrance to the Boston Public Library; and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, carved in gold letters on the wall of the Trustees’ Room of the New York Public Library: “look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” We are back with the Enlightenment.

But what I think you’re saying is that books want to remain as book-like as possible, all the while other information carriers—webpages, for example—try to take their place. We dislike calling Amazon’s Kindle a “book.” It’s really something that’s emulative of a book. You “turn” a digital “page” by pressing a button, which wipes the screen of pixels and replaces those pixels with new ones. Design is the set of decisions that add one metaphor on top of another to make the Kindle feel book-like. It’s an exercise in analogy. But books don’t want the Kindle. Books, as a medium, want more books. Information, however, just wants to be transmitted, through whatever host allows it to spread as widely as possible. It’s a bit Darwinist, I suppose. (Richard Dawkins would be so pleased.)

The whole debate reminds me a bit of a similar one that was raging in the 1960s over records versus live music. There’s a famous radio documentary and article by Glenn Gould about it—have you ever read it?—it’s called “The Prospects of Recording.” There’s a great moment where Gould relates the protests of live concert musicians to the protests of the typesetters’ union:

Automation: a crusade which musicians’ union leaders currently share with typesetters and which they affirm with the fine disdain of featherbedding firemen for the diesel locomotive. In the midst of a proliferation of recorded sound which virtually erases earlier listening patterns, the American Federation of Musicians promotes that challenging motto “LIVE MUSIC IS BEST.”

Gould dismisses these concerns as an anachronism, referring to the presidential election of more than 20 years ago. “A judgment with the validity of a ‘Win with Wilkie’ sticker on the windshield of a well-preserved ’39 LaSalle.”

This piece was comissioned by Laurenz Brunner (who also did the excellent image selection) for The Present Issue: The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2008. Many thanks to Tan Wälchli for his careful edit of the text. Part two of this essay, “From One to Zero,” is here. See also: Gould Meets Gould. —RG