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Electronic Mediations
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Volume 44)
Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.
Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book.
Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.
Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book.
Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 8, 2018
this is definitely a really great book to understand what's going on and what has already happened in digital literature. I got the feeling that we don't really get how many experiments and attempts to take literature a step ahead are taking place, but this book initiated me on it and more importantly, it gave me the will to keep investigating and learning more about all this authors that are still completely unknown to me but I'm sure the will stop being so.
February 6, 2017
If there's one thing I should have learned by now, it's that you should always write the review for an academic work right after you finish reading, when it's still fresh in your mind. Or at least take better notes than I did in this case. But I still recommend Emerson's book, even if my recollection is a little vague. Essentially, Emerson is interested in the ways that interfaces as technology reveal or obscure certain practices and productions. Generally speaking, this discussion takes two forms: an examination of the tactics used by individual artists to reveal the materiality or presence of a given interface, and the strategies by large digital corporations like Google and Apple (mostly Apple) to hide those interfaces.
The latter endeavour in particular stood out. The typical description of Apple nowadays is that it started as an innovative company that has slid into being more and more conservative; frequently, that narrative is tied to Steve Jobs and his involvement with the company. Emerson argues, fairly persuasively, that Apple has always been in the business of selling closed systems in the name of user-friendly service. The individualist aspect is a little harder to gauge. I wasn't totally in the dark, but Emerson does move through some of the examples fairly quickly, and without background knowledge of her terms and works in question, I got a bit lost. That perhaps explains why I found the third chapter, "Typewriter Concrete Poetry as Activist Media Poetics" particularly interesting--thanks to some typographic history I've received from Johanna Drucker, Emerson's timeline was a bit easier to follow. I also had trouble in the chapter on Dickinson and pinning, being not that familiar with Dickinson, but that was my fault rather than Emerson's, as I initially glossed over the pinning definition.
What I found most valuable about the book was its broader theoretical movements. It offers by example what a study of e-poetry has to offer in terms of larger media studies, and Emerson, through practice and argument, provides a useful case for how media archaeology can be applied to objects from different time periods without resorting to a technological determinism or anachronism. Most of all, the chapters on typewriter art and pinning drew my attention to how many issues regarding interface I let slip by through familiarity and habit. Some of the finer examples went over my head, but I'm very glad to have read the book.
The latter endeavour in particular stood out. The typical description of Apple nowadays is that it started as an innovative company that has slid into being more and more conservative; frequently, that narrative is tied to Steve Jobs and his involvement with the company. Emerson argues, fairly persuasively, that Apple has always been in the business of selling closed systems in the name of user-friendly service. The individualist aspect is a little harder to gauge. I wasn't totally in the dark, but Emerson does move through some of the examples fairly quickly, and without background knowledge of her terms and works in question, I got a bit lost. That perhaps explains why I found the third chapter, "Typewriter Concrete Poetry as Activist Media Poetics" particularly interesting--thanks to some typographic history I've received from Johanna Drucker, Emerson's timeline was a bit easier to follow. I also had trouble in the chapter on Dickinson and pinning, being not that familiar with Dickinson, but that was my fault rather than Emerson's, as I initially glossed over the pinning definition.
What I found most valuable about the book was its broader theoretical movements. It offers by example what a study of e-poetry has to offer in terms of larger media studies, and Emerson, through practice and argument, provides a useful case for how media archaeology can be applied to objects from different time periods without resorting to a technological determinism or anachronism. Most of all, the chapters on typewriter art and pinning drew my attention to how many issues regarding interface I let slip by through familiarity and habit. Some of the finer examples went over my head, but I'm very glad to have read the book.
Read
August 5, 2026Very funny how much of this book is focussed on Canada and Canadians. At long last, I have found a domain in which Canada is actually well-represented, and not in a fake way; and not only that, but it's adjacent to my domain.
Marshall McLuhan of course is the determining theorist of the study, whose basic thesis is that the interfaces through which we create media determine, to some extent, the media that we can make. "The medium is the message." The big example is computer interfaces, whose overriding logic post-Macintosh and post-Google is transparency, or invisibility---which means inaccessibility. To be literate, you need to be able to read and also write in a medium. Corporatized interfaces, slick and glossy operating systems on our computers and phones and websites, are all about removing friction so as to facilitate interpellation of the user as consumer.
It wasn't always like that. In fact, prior to the Macintosh (released in the mid-'80s), there was the Apple ][, which had an extensible architecture: you could add RAM and storage and peripherals. It cost like $10,000. Its successor, the Macintosh, warned that if you opened the case to try to tamper with its innards, you might receive a potentially lethal electric shock. Interfaces in the '70s spoke of invisibility as accessibility. The approach was to train users how to program, even if in very simple programming languages. The borders of the software would not restrict usage; they would not be visible, or they would be transparent: you could see through them.
I learned a good deal about the history of how computers developed from this book. I've read about it before, we all know about the Mother of all Demos, we all know about the Xerox Alto, etc; but there was a much stronger progressive tendency prior to the Macintosh that I didn't know about. Of course it's all more techno-utopianism, from a certain perspective always doomed to failure ... but it filled out my understanding.
The stuff about concrete poetry and dirty concrete poetry was also super interesting. Not an area that I knew about at all, because I hate Canada, ha. The connection between interface as enabling a deep form of literacy, what the book frames as "activist" media, is that there were poets who used the typewriter in highly unconventional ways to make work that functions more as visual art than literature. bpNichols is probably the most famous of them---I think I found this book because I had been investigating him, and the author has done scholarship on him. But he was a real hackerman: he wrote a computer poem that had easter eggs hidden in the code. You could only access elements of the poem by doing some small element of computer programming.
The typewriter is another kind of interface, arguably less ideologically suspect than computer interfaces, but one which codifies certain ways of writing. The computer poets do all kinds of crazy tricks to produce work that, again, looks more like visual art than a traditional "poem." They used masking to draw the outlines of curved shapes; they drew pictures in the manner of ASCII art ... It's hacker shit, at the end of the day.
The final section, on Emily Dickinson, was interesting, but strangely abbreviated. Dickinson is relevant because her manuscripts indicate that she was highly concerned with her writing (beautiful handwriting), drawing certain letters in specific ways so as to create visual parallels; she was also evidently using the page as a canvas, her writing carefully positioned on the page. She used linebreaks and dashes in highly specific ways, but probably most importantly, she had a practise of creating something called fascicles. This is not a word I had encountered before, but it seems to mean something like a zine or chapbook, published or created on its own, but composed as part of a larger book. She would organize her poems and pin them together into little zines. But she would also overlay pieces of paper onto lines of poems, creating alternate or additional ends. There is some parallel here with digital literature.
What I found most intriguing, or heartening, about that is that it means that Dickinson's poems are never done, never completely readable. There is no final version of her texts: they admit of endless combinations and variations. The question of how to publish them is also not clear. I find this heartening as I try to explore the possibilities of hypertext and what new media can bring to literature ... but at the same time, I have anxiety about the settled nature of a work that eludes a final form. bpNichol's computer poems, and a lot of dirty concrete poetry, can only really be "translated" onto a page. This book is filled with screenshots of works that are no longer accessible online, in their supposed native environment; but which at the same time cannot be archived due to their media-form. Fuck!
Marshall McLuhan of course is the determining theorist of the study, whose basic thesis is that the interfaces through which we create media determine, to some extent, the media that we can make. "The medium is the message." The big example is computer interfaces, whose overriding logic post-Macintosh and post-Google is transparency, or invisibility---which means inaccessibility. To be literate, you need to be able to read and also write in a medium. Corporatized interfaces, slick and glossy operating systems on our computers and phones and websites, are all about removing friction so as to facilitate interpellation of the user as consumer.
It wasn't always like that. In fact, prior to the Macintosh (released in the mid-'80s), there was the Apple ][, which had an extensible architecture: you could add RAM and storage and peripherals. It cost like $10,000. Its successor, the Macintosh, warned that if you opened the case to try to tamper with its innards, you might receive a potentially lethal electric shock. Interfaces in the '70s spoke of invisibility as accessibility. The approach was to train users how to program, even if in very simple programming languages. The borders of the software would not restrict usage; they would not be visible, or they would be transparent: you could see through them.
I learned a good deal about the history of how computers developed from this book. I've read about it before, we all know about the Mother of all Demos, we all know about the Xerox Alto, etc; but there was a much stronger progressive tendency prior to the Macintosh that I didn't know about. Of course it's all more techno-utopianism, from a certain perspective always doomed to failure ... but it filled out my understanding.
The stuff about concrete poetry and dirty concrete poetry was also super interesting. Not an area that I knew about at all, because I hate Canada, ha. The connection between interface as enabling a deep form of literacy, what the book frames as "activist" media, is that there were poets who used the typewriter in highly unconventional ways to make work that functions more as visual art than literature. bpNichols is probably the most famous of them---I think I found this book because I had been investigating him, and the author has done scholarship on him. But he was a real hackerman: he wrote a computer poem that had easter eggs hidden in the code. You could only access elements of the poem by doing some small element of computer programming.
The typewriter is another kind of interface, arguably less ideologically suspect than computer interfaces, but one which codifies certain ways of writing. The computer poets do all kinds of crazy tricks to produce work that, again, looks more like visual art than a traditional "poem." They used masking to draw the outlines of curved shapes; they drew pictures in the manner of ASCII art ... It's hacker shit, at the end of the day.
The final section, on Emily Dickinson, was interesting, but strangely abbreviated. Dickinson is relevant because her manuscripts indicate that she was highly concerned with her writing (beautiful handwriting), drawing certain letters in specific ways so as to create visual parallels; she was also evidently using the page as a canvas, her writing carefully positioned on the page. She used linebreaks and dashes in highly specific ways, but probably most importantly, she had a practise of creating something called fascicles. This is not a word I had encountered before, but it seems to mean something like a zine or chapbook, published or created on its own, but composed as part of a larger book. She would organize her poems and pin them together into little zines. But she would also overlay pieces of paper onto lines of poems, creating alternate or additional ends. There is some parallel here with digital literature.
What I found most intriguing, or heartening, about that is that it means that Dickinson's poems are never done, never completely readable. There is no final version of her texts: they admit of endless combinations and variations. The question of how to publish them is also not clear. I find this heartening as I try to explore the possibilities of hypertext and what new media can bring to literature ... but at the same time, I have anxiety about the settled nature of a work that eludes a final form. bpNichol's computer poems, and a lot of dirty concrete poetry, can only really be "translated" onto a page. This book is filled with screenshots of works that are no longer accessible online, in their supposed native environment; but which at the same time cannot be archived due to their media-form. Fuck!
May 31, 2018
α - browsing through U of Minnesota's Electronic Mediations series.
Ω(⋙,Φ,î) - I must admit I'm not a fan of Apple, Google or poetry. But - yes, almost all tech companies to date wish to be mythical oracles. They have all the answers & you have no means to question their validity or intent. Who would've guessed that herding all the sheep into Facebook would make the loopy fake news reality we live in?
⇝ - 📚The Textual Condition, 📚Tree of Codes, ️web stalker, UBERMORGEN, ️
Ω(⋙,Φ,î) - I must admit I'm not a fan of Apple, Google or poetry. But - yes, almost all tech companies to date wish to be mythical oracles. They have all the answers & you have no means to question their validity or intent. Who would've guessed that herding all the sheep into Facebook would make the loopy fake news reality we live in?
⇝ - 📚The Textual Condition, 📚Tree of Codes, ️web stalker, UBERMORGEN, ️
August 15, 2015
Read for exams--really interesting examples that I will have to explore further. Also loving the concept of readingwriting, as it pertains to my interests in the reciprocity involved in that process.
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October 12, 2015802.85 E536 2014
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews