Listening to Braille
In her recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv quotes a writing excerpt from a sixteen-year-old blind student whose literacy has developed through aural/oral means, without the benefit of braille. This single excerpt is meant to stand as damning evidence of the failure of oral-based literacy:
He looked in the [...]
Google Maps old school
A charming and delightfully perverse take on the google maps tutorial (reminiscent of Michael Gondry’s The Science of Sleep). The object of satire here is not so much google maps as the now ubiquitous screencast tutorial:
I think of Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Power of Powerpoint, in which he argues that each medium has its own [...]
Figure/Ground
Moma always turns out beautiful websites tied to their exhibitions. What I like about the pop-up site for their Design and the Elastic Mind show is how they manage to balance extreme function and extreme fancy — to the point where the functional information (all that block text) becomes more like a background pattern, while [...]
Block Text
A rudimentary digital poem I adapted from The Next in Line (the book, not the blog). I think it maybe works better in digital form than on the page. But it’s in the book, too.
Devorah Sperber
Trolling for pictures to illustrate the last chapter of my dissertation, I came across artist Devorah Sperber’s brilliant take on the Picasso portrait of Gertrude Stein, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Picasso, not the Sperber).
I hope that Sperber won’t mind that I’ve posted her artwork here. The digital realm seems [...]
