| Title: |
Psychology, Writing and Computers: A Review of Research |
Vol: 25.4 |
| Author(s): |
Hartley, James |
| Abstract: |
My aim in this paper is to provide a brief review of some of the main issues covered in research on writing and to indicate where this research may be found. For convenience of presentation the paper is divided into four overlapping sections: 1) the nature of writing; 2) learning to write; 3) computers and writing; and 4) evaluating written products.A fifth topic, the users of writing, is covered in more detail by Freedman et al (1987), and readers who are particularly interested in social aspects of writing, and how cultures and activities are shaped by, and have been shaped by writing, are especially referred to this paper. Other review papers on more specific topics have been provided by Applebee, 1984; Chandler, 1991; Cochran-Smith, 1991; Durst and Newell, 1989; Fitzgerald, 1987; Freedman et al, 1987; Hayes and Flower, 1986; Humes, 1983; and Huot, 1990. There are, in addition, many books and book chapters on writing, and several of these will be referred to in this review.
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| Title: |
The Effects of Drawing Method on the Discriminability of Characters |
Vol: 25.4 |
| Author(s): |
DeKay, Michael L.; Freyd, Jennifer J. |
| Abstract: |
Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of drawing method on the subsequent discriminability of hand-drawn characters. A novel set of eight characters and two drawing rules were developed for use in these experiments. In Experiment 1, angle measurements performed on hand-drawn characters indicated that members of character pairs drawn using dissimilar stroke directions became more differentiated while members of character pairs drawn using similar stroke directions remained relatively undifferentiated. In Experiment 2, subjects were better able to distinguish between members of differentiated character pairs than between members of undifferentiated character pairs. In Experiment 3, subjects also appeared to be better at distinguishing between members of character pairs which had been drawn using their own drawing rule, though such a finding may depend on the exact nature of the task.
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| Title: |
Introduction to the Artists' Books |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Hubert, RenŽe Riese |
| Abstract: |
In this issue where critics, book artists, archivists and poets participate in defining the problematics of the modern artist's book, production and reading emerge as the key issues. Contemporary artists have modified traditional practices to such an extent that their readers are hard pressed to give a suitable definition of an illustrated book. By undergoing spatial displacements, text and image exchange or relinquish their respective identities. Many barriers have been crossed and many oppositions have disappeared, notably between handcrafted and industrial artifacts, between theoretical and creative productions, between unity and multiplicity of media. Text and image alternate, combine or wage war on one another. Their various alliances and rivalries give rise to a variety of questions discussed in this issue. Do text and image upstage or enhance each other? Does the shape of the book translate or subvert its message or meaning? Is the binding more than mere decoration and can its absence be revealing? In view of many radical changes, the artist's book assumes multiple functions: aesthetic, political, cultural and social. Frequently it provides a form of protest against either institutionalism or elitism even though it can cater only to an elite. The act of reading becomes complex, the reader, curator or librarian can no longer perform routine tasks, but must participate on another level in the creation or production of the book.
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| Title: |
From Book to Anti-Book |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Polkinhorn, Harry |
| Abstract: |
Because they are mixed modes (words and images), "artists' books" have lacked an adequate theory relating them to other forms of cultural production. In order to understand these unique objects, one must divide them into two subgroupings: de luxe editions (usually limited, numbered, signed and sold to dealers and collectors), and "anti-books," those which question the physical and conceptual foundations of the book, seriality, identity and the art marketing system. Mexican examples are presented because they highlight the explicitly political and social substratum from which the avant-garde emerges.
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| Title: |
The Book as the Trojan Horse of Art: Walter Hamady, the Perishable Press Limited and Gabberjabbs 1-6 |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Lydon, Mary |
| Abstract: |
Walter Hamady's combination of iconoclasm/craft, art/daily life, and sophistication grounded in physiology and earthiness set his work apart. "The Book as the Trojan Horse of Art" explores these themes while the article itself mirrors, in its form, Hamady's attitude toward the book as a reflective vehicle in its ability to break and intersect narrative lines, play with syntax, integrate found materials, and convey enigma, paradox and information all at once.
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| Title: |
"Inner Tension/In Attention": Steve McCaffery's Book Art |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Perloff, Marjorie |
| Abstract: |
Steve McCaffery's poetic career had its inception in the northern England of the late sixties; his biggest influence was the concrete poetry/concrete art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Emigrating to Canada in the early seventies, McCaffery worked both on sound-text poetry and on artists' books, producing a series of remarkable illustrated books--Ow' Waif, Dr. Sadhu's Muffins, Intimate Distortions, Knowledge Never Knew--which combine word and image and, more important, treat the book as a composite whole, spacing, typography, arrangement, white space, letter size, etc. all working together to create a field of play. He is therefore all but impossible to anthologize and his work belongs more properly with artist's books than with conventional poetry.
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| Title: |
Deguy/DornyDorny/Deguy |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Deguy, Michel |
| Abstract: |
Deguy/Dorny Dorny/Deguy is a reflection on poetic stimulation of collaboration in the realm of space and materiality of words.
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| Title: |
Working Together: Collaboration in the Book Arts |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Hoyem, Andrew |
| Abstract: |
Different styles of book art collaboration are explored through fifteen vignettes of the author's work with various contemporary artists including Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, John Baldessari and Jim Dine as well as the architect Robert Graves and photographers Michael Kenna and Lou Stoumen. These vignettes are anchored by an introductory description of collaboration at the Arion Press and the fact that the author was a given in each creative, interpersonal encounter.
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| Title: |
The Computer Made Me Do It: Computers and Books |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Zelevansky, Paul |
| Abstract: | This essay compares the form, function and experiences of reading and writing books with the utilization and creation of narratives on the computer. Topics include: hand-eye coordination, gestures and rituals which characterize computer use; the speed, accessibility and flexibility of computer tools; rules and assumptions which inform the relationship between human and machine; the structural, technical and psychological functions of the interface; the experience of navigation within an electronic narrative structure; the computer user as audience, reader and creator; signs and symbol, the intersections of visual and verbal language; the manipulation of icons, formats, metaphors and scenarios which support computer environments and simulations.
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| Title: |
Typographic Manipulation of the Poetic Text in the Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Drucker, Johanna |
| Abstract: |
Experiments with typography proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century in the works of poets and artists involved with the various movements of the early avant-garde. For artists of the Dada, Italian and Russian Futurist, and Vorticist movements, these manipulations were an integral part of their aesthetic and political concerns. The source which inspired these works and the central issues which motivated these visual pyrotechnics varied considerably from poet to poet. This article traces the relations among aesthetic principles, linguistic meaning, political strategies and visual representation in the typographic work of F.T. Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis and Ilia Zdanevich in the Period of 1909 to 1923.
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| Title: |
Covering the Text: the Object of Bookbinding |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Anzalone, John; Copans, Ruth |
| Abstract: |
Binders have long contributed an important material dimension to any consideration of the polysemy of the book-as-object, and the heritage of the livre de peintre, or artist's book, has left its mark on the bookbinder's awareness of interpretive strategies for approaching the text. This article examines the practices of five contemporary French bookbinders whose diversity of creative styles only masks fundamental common preoccupations: the creation of decors that are harmonious and not competitive with the text, and the need to ally aesthetic pleasure in the finished decor with a structural integrity that preserves the book as an object of reading, not an object for viewing.
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| Title: |
Reading the Multimedia Book: the Case of Les Fleurs du Mal |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Haskell, Eric T. |
| Abstract: |
Contemporary book illustrators have often experimented with mixed media. Roger Bezombes' collage illustrations for Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (Strasbourg: Less Bibliophiles de l'Est, 1985) exemplifies this experimentation at its best. The artist's appropriation and juxtaposition of often disparate images from ancient to present day iconography shows the diversity of the text's potential and points to the universality of Baudelaire's poetic gesture. In his articulation of a new architecture for the book, Bezombes provides a robust visual plane whose intersections with the verbal register foster novel conjugations for reader/viewer reception and frame them within unprecedented paradigms of image-text inquiry.
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| Title: |
The "Non-Book": New Dimensions in the Contemporary Artist's Book |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Prinz, Jessica |
| Abstract: |
Some contemporary books blur the distinction between book and sculpture, presenting three-dimensional objects that toy both with the shape of the book and its definition. Three exemplary "non-books" are examined in this study in order to show how the dimensions of the book have been expanded. As it blurs disciplinary boundaries, the contemporary "non-book" questions its own status as a "book," thereby enriching and enlarging our definition of what a book might be.
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| Title: |
Ida Applebroog and the Book as a Performance |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Sayre, Henry M. |
| Abstract: |
This piece has been conceived by its author as a reading--or, more precisely, as a performance--of a small book by the contemporary painter Ida Applebroog, self-published in the late seventies and entitled Life Is Good: A Performance. As an artist, Applebroog has continuously sought to reveal what might be called the "underside" of everyday life. She "reads" the commonplace as an arena of deceit. She reveals in her reading what convention allows us to forget. In that spirit, this piece is a reading of the conventions of reading, with Applebroog serving as a guide.
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| Title: |
A Book Exhibit at the MusŽe Pompidou |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Saillard, Martine |
| Abstract: |
In her poetic introduction to the exhibit of her books, which she also curated for the MusŽe Pompidou, the author goes beneath the surface of the genre of artist's book--beyond the materials and the aesthetics into their meanings replete with uncertainty and enigma. Four projects from this exhibit are presented; each demonstrates a divergent approach and intention.
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| Title: |
The Librarian and the Artist's Book: Notes on the Subversive Art of Cataloging |
Vol: 25.2/3 |
| Author(s): |
Shipe, Timothy |
| Abstract: |
As an avant-garde medium, the artist's book challenges the expectations of the reader/viewer and violates the conventional distinctions between literature and the visual arts. Those expectations and conventions are institutionalized in the popular notion of the library as a repository for books and of the librarian's role as custodian of that repository. This article rejects this conventionalized approach and posits in its stead the library as a sort of performance space in which the confrontation between artist and audience may occur. In this model, the librarian becomes an avant-garde performer who uses the library's conventional cataloging system to establish a set of expectations that are challenged by the work at hand. As a kind of "straight man," the librarian becomes as essential actor in the realization of the work.
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| Title: |
Leading-edge Research or Lost Cause: The Search for Interscriptual Stroop Effects |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Benson, Philippa Jane |
| Abstract: |
This paper reviews studies done during the last decade in one small area of cross-language research, that of cross-orthographic Stroop interference tests. Although these studies may at first seem distant to discussions of basic literacy skills, the insights they provide may be critical to furthering our understanding of human acquisition and use of written language. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, by critiquing one of the first cross-orthographic Stroop studies in the context of related studies, this paper describes how cross-orthographic Stroop studies have been used to explore cognitive mechanisms involved in reading and the possibility that those mechanisms might be constrained by the orthography of a language. Second, this paper reviews some conceptual and methodical flaws in the research, flaws that underscore the difficulty in empirically verifying hypotheses about how humans might make meaning from and with written language. As debates intensify about the role of empirical studies in research on written language, it becomes increasingly important that researchers relying on empirical methods increase their efforts to weed their experimental designs of potential rival hypotheses. This weeding is particularly difficult in cross-language studies because investigators are often hampered by a lack of sufficient knowledge about the languages they are using as experimental materials. Despite their faults, however, the studies reviewed here, along with others, provide evidence that readers of different orthographies may invoke different cognitive processes at the base of their reading strategies.
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| Title: |
Literary Assessments in Polyscriptal Societies: Chinese Character Literacy in Korea and Japan |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Brown, R. A. |
| Abstract: |
Literacy studies within both "autonomous" and "ideological" traditions, to use Street's (1984) terminology, have tended to focus on Western alphabet using societies and assume that literacy, however defined, is an all or nothing matter. Societies in which varieties and degrees of literacy are possible (indeed ordinary) have hitherto largely been ignored. Japan and South Korea are such cases, with separate but functionally interrelated writing systems, used for communicatively disparate purposes, differential mastery of which, consequently, has social and economic repercussions. In these and perhaps similar cases, literacy is, rather than discrete and unitary, always multiplicitous and variable. Different "literacies" entail different social and, some would argue (Unger, 1984 and 1987) cognitive consequences.
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| Title: |
Copying Fluency and Orthographic Development |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Bear, Donald R. |
| Abstract: |
This exploratory study examined the relationship between stages of orthographic development (Henderson, 1990) and writing fluency. It was hypothesized that subjects in the beginning stages of orthographic development would copy less fluently than subjects at more advanced levels of orthographic development and reading achievement. Forty-one first- through third-graders copied separately four nonsense illegal letter strings. A standardized reading achievement test and a 20-word developmental spelling inventory were administered. Based on the results of the spelling inventory, subjects were placed in one of two stages of developmental word knowledge. The beginning readers and spellers approached the orthography in a linear fashion, and tended to copy in smaller unit, often copying letter-by-letter. Children with a more sophisticated knowledge of words copied in larger units, and often at the whole word level. The results support the hypothesis that the graphemic output lexicon of beginning readers and writers is not sufficiently detailed to allow a fluent output.
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| Title: |
Intonation and the Comma |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Cruttenden, Alan |
| Abstract: |
A special issue of Visible Language (Winter 1978, 12:1) was devoted to the interface between reading and listening. It is significant that, among the six articles in that issue, there is no mention of punctuation or of intonation. These two topics are among the least-studied aspect of visual and auditory language. This article represents an effort to explore one aspect of the relationship between intonation and punctuation. The historical developments of marks of punctuation is outlined, and uses and prescriptions for the comma from the sixteenth century onwards are described. Prescriptive recommendations for the comma in the twentieth century are examined in detail and compared with what is known about the division of connected speech into intonation-groups. It is suggested that, where syntactic prescription and intonational usage conflict, a return to more elocutionary punctuation would in many cases aid intelligibility.
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| Title: |
Spacing Printed Text to Isolate Major Phrases Improves Readability |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Bever, Thomas G.; Jandreau, Steven; Burwell, Rebecca; Kaplan, Ron; Zaenen, Annie |
| Abstract: |
Three-liguistically-motivated algorithms for assigning between-word space sizes were compared for their impact on text readability: a computer-implemented heuristic analysis assigned extra spaces between word groups corresponding to major phrases; a phrase-structure analysis assigned each space a size proportional to the depth of the phrase structure at that point; a prosodic analysis assigned space sizes proportional to the between-word pauses indicated if the sentences were spoken; finally, an even-spacing algorithm, assigned a constant amount of space between each word on a line. The readability of the formats were contrasted using the Cook-Chapman find-the-odd-word test in a paragraph version. The readability results showed the following significant ordering of increasing difficulty: heuristic-->phrase-structure=prosodic=even-spaced. The reason that spacing based on the heuristic parser results in better comprehension than based on the complete phrase structure may be that good readers guide their eye movements by a similarly crude initial parse of texts. These results suggest that the readability of text can be improved with the aid of a rudimentary automatic parser.
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| Title: |
Bastard in the Family: The Impact of Cubo-Futurist Book Art on Structural Linguistics |
Vol: 25.1 |
| Author(s): |
Polkinhorn, Harry |
| Abstract: |
The impact of Russian avant-garde, especially the cubo-futurist artists' books of Kruchenykh, Klebnikov and David Burlink (with illustrations by Goncharova, Kulbin, Malevich and others) played a significant role in determining the shape of early structural linguistics. This happened primarily through Roman Jakobson's association with these artists at a time in his life when he was formulating a series of revisions to the linguistic concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure and the neogrammarians before him. Jakobson's artist colleagues began working in interdisciplinary art forms (the artist's book), as he was attempting to articulate a theory that would encompass the irrational in discourse focused on the relationship between sounds, and between sound and meaning, thus trying to retain a role for reason.
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