#nontxt

I sort of half-intentionally don’t make the text polished (hence the use of contractions like ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’), and leaving typos uncorrected. I tried not to go back to edit past posts, but have hopelessly failed. The typos still bother me.

As for publishing, every post is in effect ‘published’, but also evolving. But I have also been exploring other dimensions of publishing – fixing the text in a PDF, ‘designed’ (whatever that means), making it available for buying on lulu.com as a print-on-demand publication, and leaving the text published yet ‘open’ as a Google Doc – are some of the experiments so far. Representing the unedited, unpolished text with a ‘designed’ look was to raise the question of ‘when does a draft become a published “work”?’ Because sophisticated typesetting technology is now available to everyone, the boundary between a draft and a published work has dissolved. This might have something to do with the loss of the author’s ‘aura’, or their ultimate ‘death’. The RGB colours were intentional, playing upon material/non-material.

Let’s see what other ideas I’m going to toy around with.

I’ve often fallen victim to this way of thinking myself, even though I actually enjoy writing and think that my writing is not half bad at all. After thinking a little bit more, I came to this realisation: the act of writing is the visualisation of abstract ideas. Without externalising these snippets of thoughts from our brain to a medium where we can see everything in front of us (on a screen, a piece of paper, etc.), it is difficult to make sense of it. Mulling over ideas in your head instead of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is precious writing time wasted because we're not visualising.

Jeff Goins in his Medium post suggests that what we call 'writing' is not a single process but a three-part one: ideation, creation, and editing. I tend to agree, but I don't see them as clear cut at all. I see writing itself as an ideation process where you ponder on possibilities and try out different things as you write. Editing can also kick in during this process, where you continually refine and restructure ideas, and remove irrelevant ones. Of course, when you turn a manuscript to an editor, the editing process proper kicks in.

Another thing to think about is structure, which is also about visualisation. With current writing tech this is easy to do: organise things into paragraphs, headings, even folders, tags, colours (Scrivener is an excellent app by the way for structuring writing, and for playing with structure). In a regular word processing app like Microsoft Word, (semantic) structure and visual presentation are the same: typographic attributes are used to code different things like levels of headings, etc. But apps that use Markdown let you use simple codes to semantically structure your writing without worrying about typography, and the structure is preserved when you export the text. I tend to not write in 'focus mode' – it is important for me to see the structure when I write (although this blog intentionally does not have any headings at all – something I will discuss later).

Apparently the seed for this project was already planted 20 years ago. Posting something this old poses the risk of making a fool of myself, but I’ll do it anyway.

This was from one of my grad projects when studying at Emily Carr. I proposed that ‘text’ is always 'virtual’ (non-material?), and that it is a meta (x5) medium. Apparently I also treated the accompanying website for my project an 'electronic sketchbook/composition book’, so this is site really is nothing new.

These rather half-baked thoughts from 20 years ago are what would now be called geosemiotics, a branch of linguistics and an extension of the study of multimodality. See Discourses in place: language in the material world by Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon, where they look at interaction order, visual semiotics and place semiotics.

(to save myself from further embarassment, I won’t upload the horribly dated website)

Text as a Meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-medium

Text is a very peculiar medium. I would like to say that regardless of what medium text is appeared in – whether carved in stone, printed on paper, or transmitted in light – text is something that is always “virtual” – text does not really exist in our reality.

Text is in fact a meta-meta-meta-meta-medium. First of all, text in the most primary form exist in our brains as electrical impulses that carry intangible, invisible and abstract thoughts. The brain is the only place where text can exist in its most pure and primitive form, free from any embellishments and distractions. Unfortunately, the brain is a totally private place. Until we could transmit thoughts directly from mind to mind, we have to find ways to communicate our thoughts via external means. In order to solve this problem, humans then devised ways to code these thoughts in graphical forms – the written languages. As soon as we transcribe our thoughts onto a two-dimensional surface using a written language (making it public), a number of factors begin to come into play. First and foremost, there is the code that tells us that “this is something that can be read, in this particular way.” In order to be recognized as such, a text has to follow a pre-defined set of rules that governs the basic construction and arrangement of each letter (in the case of the Latin alphabet). Meanwhile, the idiosyncratic decisions that we make when transcribing text gives it another dimension of meaning – the typefaces or styles of writing. This is another level of coding that may or may not be decoded by the reader. Then there is the container as mentioned above – the shape, the texture, the mass, the colour etc. And finally, there is the environment (the context) that the text is in – how other elements in the environment enhance or fight with the text, and how other external factors such as lighting, temperature, the obscuring of the text affect the perception of the text.

1 Text as abstract thoughts in the mind (private)

2 Text as signs: letters (an archetypal ideal)

3 Graphical variations on the archetypal ideal: typefaces and writing styles

4 The ‘container’: shape, colour, texture, mass, etc. The medium: book, inscription, LCD display, etc. along with 3 establishes a ‘visual language’
creates authority, neutrality or banality

5 The context: the environment that the text is in can either enhance or obscure fundamental textual meaning examples: lighting, relationship to other elements in the space, temporal change, temperature.

Here is a tentative list of factors

speed

accuracy

ability or ease of correcting mistakes

congruency or fluency between thought (ideation) and action (preservation, or production)

genre (and the associated conventions), formality (this does have to do with tech if the writing tech itself is the actual medium of consumption, but a text written can always be transferred into another medium or context)

permanence

ability to see part–whole relationships as one writes

scale (visibility to the writer in terms of viewport size mainly but could also have something to do with consumption)

time constraints (?)

resources available for differentiating (emphasis for example) and structuring (separating thoughts into units in some sort of fashion) the text

stake or risk involved (this has to do with ease of correction perhaps, but I’m thinking things like exams, forms, etc. where once one commits it’s done – the stake or risk might be high. Does this have to do with writing tech?)

private or public, audience