Dana Solomon Spring 2012

“Bookwork After New Media”

Research Report: Page1: Great Expectations

Summary and Description: Page1: Great Expectations is a paperback print book produced by graphic design publishing house GraphicDesign&. The book was published in a small run in early 2012. The text is an experiment in graphic design, collaborative book production, and visual communication. The project consists of the first page of Charles Dickens’ 1860 novel Great Expectations, reorganized and redesigned in a variety of ways by 70 contemporary graphic designers. Each designer lays out the same “Page 1” of Great Expectations in a different format, ranging from newspaper-style double columns to network visualizations to concordance lists (Figs. 2-4). Each designer also provides a rationale for his or her decision-making on the page opposite his or her layout. The book also contains commentary by the publishing house’s founders as well as Dickens scholar Charles Patten, Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities at Rice University. Specifications and Images: Page1: Great Expectations is: “Standard format paperback 110mm × 178mm 320pp Perfect bound Cover in two specials and foil 300gsm Olin Rough Cream Text pages in black 70gsm Ensonovel Concertina tip-in in black Printed letterpress on newsprint” The cover (Fig.1) is a visualization that represents the various locations of the page number on each layout as chosen by the designer. From the GraphicDesign& website: “The shapes printed in fluorescent ink represent the footprint and position of the page number (1) as placed by all of the individual contributors…The cover design reveals that the most common position was close to the bottom edge of the page, but it was fortuitous that [one] design gave us a very satisfying block of solid colour that sits just above the title.”

Figure 1: Cover image of Page1: Great Expectations

Figure 2: Sample page

Figure 3: Sample page

Figure 4: Sample page

Research Context: The research context for Page1: Great Expectations straddles literary studies, visual communication, and material textuality. From a literary perspective, this text is relevant in that it forces scholars to rethink and update their understanding of the relationship between the form of a literary work and its content. Literary scholars and historians of the book, particularly those interested in the text as a material object, will find Page1: Great Expectations to be an opportunity for engaging with historically and culturally produced assumptions about typography, layout, book design, as well as these assumptions’ effects on literary interpretation. This book will also be relevant to the emerging field of comparative media studies in that the text reasserts the medial aspects of the print book by foregrounding the constructed nature of the page and the persuasive capabilities of design, highlighting the way in which the (print) page is a medium for information that can be configured and presented in different ways. Technical Analysis:

The variety of layouts, fonts, etc., used in the production of Page1: Great Expectations calls to attention our understanding of literary reading practice. The multifarious layouts highlight the affordances of the print page, while simultaneously gesturing toward the foreclosed possibilities of most (traditional) literary texts (and their respective interpretations). A book like this forces readers to think about how information is organized on a page and further how this organization affects and reflects the literal act of reading. Johanna Drucker, in “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space,” uses the terms “programmatic” and “instructions” to refer to the ways in which the “the material substrate, and its formal particulars,” i.e. the print book and its covers, pages, textual organization, etc., inform and influence the act of reading.1 In terms of its overall design, the text is somewhat minimalist in its printing. Apart from the orange accents on the cover, the text is black and white, privileging the shape of each page’s layout over any kind of decorative or colorful adornments. Each new page requires the reader to shift their interpretive register to take account of the unique specificities of the given design. Figure 2, for example, visualizes the relationships between all of the words on the first page as a network diagram, literally connecting words to other words (nodes) with thin black lines (edges). The concentration of lines around certain words produces a kind of palimpsest of relationality, where certain words are more “connected” than others. Without arguing that the layout of a text predetermines the meaning of the text, it is clear that there is a significant relationship between the page’s design and the type of reading or interpretive perspective it elicits. In a more extreme example, Figure 4 requires that a reader perform a machine-assisted reading, using a camera equipped with a Quick Response (QR) Code reader. The QR code is a type of matrix barcode that contains digital information, similar to UPC codes on retail items. The page cannot be “read” without the use of digital technology. All of the examples in Page1: Great Expectations situate the reader in a position similar to Dickens’ young character Pip at the start of the source text. Just as Pip attempts to glean information about his deceased parents from the shape and design of the letters on their respective tombstones, readers of Page1: Great Expectations attempt to produce knowledge from interacting with the shape and design of the words on each page. Every one of the 70 interpretations of Dickens’ text presents a new challenge to the reader, each with its own set of “instructions” for reading. It is an exaggerated version of every act of literary reading, but it is

exciting because of its self-reflexivity and its success at calling into question culturally-produced and institutionalized (and somewhat arbitrary) conventions of print. Evaluation of Opportunities in the Context of “Bookwork After New Media”:

Like some of the other texts we have discussed throughout the seminar, Page1: Great Expectations is a book that could not have been produced without the use of digital media. Not only were its pages produced with digital editing software like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign, but many of its layouts make subtle or overt reference to digital technology. It is literally a bookwork produced with new media. However, beyond its production, it self-reflexively calls into question our assumptions about the static qualities of the print page or the essentiality of print text. Engaging with this text presents an opportunity to examine how N. Katherine Hayles’ notion of media-specific-analysis can and should be applied to print texts. In other words, Page1 requires that we attend to the material (and visual) specificity of each page, acknowledging the ways in which subjective decision-making (design) can impact our interpretation of a text. Links to Further Study:

1.) Website for GraphicDesign&: http://www.graphicdesignand.com/ 2.) A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.

Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/ 3.) Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters: Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2011. 4.) Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks

Publishing, 2004. 1 Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/