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Books, Typography, and the Boundaries of Visual Information
By Whitney Anne Trettien on May 13, 2010
By now, we’ve all seen the “Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.” Put together by Martin Eppler and Ralph Lengler (a presenter at next week’s “Visual Interpretations” conference), it’s a clever visualization of visualizations, showing common methods for charting data, information, concepts and strategies, as well as producing visual metaphors and compound graphics. In focusing on literacies, it misses a few. For instance, representations of geography such as maps and topographics are noticeably absent, as are tag clouds. But overall it captures how we typically think of visualizations: as illustrated frameworks for organizing content.
Working in history of the book, I’ve come to learn all about illustrated frameworks for organizing content. Title pages and frontispieces evolved from colophons and printer’s devices, small symbols “tagging” a particular firm’s work, into elaborate allegorical illustrations setting the tone of a book. Pagination allowed for alphabetically-organized indices, a kind of proto-word cloud showing the topics covered within a text, while running titles and marginal notes were developed to help orient the reader. The first generation of media studies scholars, including Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein, even argued that the printing press gave rise to charts and tables, such as the organizational dichtomies produced by Petrus Ramus, later used by John Wilkins in his attempt to taxonomize the world. Although some of these more technologically determinist arguments are debatable, it’s clear that the book as we know it today evolved as more than a vehicle for text. Like the charts and graphs in Lengler and Eppler’s table, it’s become a complex method for visually and spatially organizing textual data.
We could move a level down, from the medium of the book to the text itself. As the work of Johanna Drucker (one of the keynotes at next week’s conference) has shown, letters do not simply transmit linguistic data: they’re small bits of art steeped in cultural significance. I first came to recognize the powerful visual rhetoric of typography while studying Martin Opitz, a German Baroque poet, sometimes described as the founding father of German poetry. He began his career by writing Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae (Aristarchus, or on the neglect of the German language, 1617/8), a defense of writing poetry in German, a text itself produced just as (what would become known as) the Thirty Years’ War was beginning in central Europe. “Whenever I think about our native German ancestors, strong men and indeed invincible,” Opitz opens his essay, “I am knocked down by a certain quiet religiousness and a powerful reverent awe”; for the German tongue is “a charming tongue, a decent tongue, a serious tongue” well-suited to alexandrine and Neoclassical verse. Ironically (although historically appropriate) Opitz does all this praising in Latin, which he describes as a “corrupt” language, the language of Catholicism; but he does use German when quoting his own poetry as an example of how German can be used for expressive purposes. When he switches to German, the text also switches from clean, justified rows of Roman typeface, like this —
— into a curling Gothic font that playfully defies the neat justification of Latin. Like this:
As a marker of linguistic identity, these little Gothic outbursts threaten to destroy the imposed aesthetic harmony of the Roman columns. In other words, though suppressed by the Latin writing, the visual rhetoric of the Gothic font attempts to reclaim, even to re-colonize the page for the dispossessed native tongue. In fact, here Latin is quite literally pushed to the edge, squashed between the enclosing ranks of German. Thus not only does the typography reflect the kind of political battles being fought at the time, it actually becomes a soldier in the war, re-drawing territorial boundaries. The verses may be Neoclassical in form, but, as Opitz typographically shows, they belong to German.
Opitz is visualizing information; is this an information visualization? When does a letter lose its shape? How does typography signify? What kind of boundaries are we willing to draw around the concept of “infographics”? And how can the work being done in digital visualizations reflect upon the history of earlier media objects, such as the book, the field of the page, or even the letter?
Join HyperStudio in thinking through these questions next weekend at our conference, “Visual Interpretations: Aesthetics, Methods and Critiques of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.” You can register for free here.
Further reading:
- Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (Thames and Hudson, 1995)
- Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009)
- Inspired by Grafton and Rosenberg’s book, Bibliodyssey recently posted an amazing collection of historical “maps” visualizing history.
- Martin Opitz’s Aristarchus is available in digital facsimile from WDB.
- An interesting collection of scanned printer’s devices is available here.
