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This paper examines the typographic form of Plowden's Commentaries within its legal, printing, and technological histories, demonstrating that its typographic appearance embeds complex tensions over the study and dissemination of the common law into its material form. There are legally relevant meanings in the shape of letters, beyond mere legibility, that are connected with the heritage of type design and print technologies. Within the context of debates over the propriety of early common law printing, this paper provides an examination of Plowden's typographic style as roman and humanist. Tracing the genealogy of roman and humanist letters that led to the ones used in Plowden's opening judgment, the typography of the Commentaries is connected to debates over the resistance of the common law (as an unwritten law) to humanism and Roman-style codification. Plowden's typographic register is thereby seen to encode the Latinate traditions to which the structure and custom of the English common law is opposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The substantial two-volume work Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639) by the Franciscan friar Francesco Quaresmio (b. Lodi, Italy, 1583–1656) is known as a veritable encyclopaedia on the Holy Land. It is also an itinerary of pilgrimage through the sacred sites, taking their monumentality and graphic landscape into account. Quaresmio was especially attentive to the Latin inscriptions made by the Crusaders, here copied by him as autoptic testimonies. This is part of a more general phenomenon. From the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth, in Europe this period is sometimes called the "Age of Inscriptions", during which epigraphy was recognized as a source of ancient history on a par with philology and archaeology. The overall aim of the present article is to show how Quaresmio, while continuing a medieval tradition of Franciscan scholarship, improved upon epigraphical study by deploying a specific technology, namely the visual rendering of uncial inscriptions in printed form. His rigorous observations, however, would have come to naught without the technical mastery of the Flemish printer-typographer Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641). Following previous developments in pilgrimage literature, where inscriptions – especially the Crusader epitaphs at the foot of Calvary – were commonplace, Quaresmio studied inscriptions not only as texts, but also considered their formal and material aspects. Ultimately, the present study argues that these Latin epigraphic texts played a role in the man's theological argumentation and in the defence of the loca sancta as Latin possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to fill a research gap in current scholarship by exploring the role of typography in place-making practices in transitional China. Based on fieldwork conducted in an aspiring new town in an underdeveloped city, I observe that a diversity of typographies from both the tradition of calligraphic writing and novel digital design are applied in making the new town. Drawing on the emergent field of typographic landscape and notions of indexicality and enregisterment in sociolinguistics, I investigate the potential historical, social, cultural and political meanings of various typographies of emplaced signage across the town. Through a culturally sensitive analysis of signage found in historical parks, government-authored promotion boards and commercial streets, I further demonstrate how patterned and value-laden typographic choices are made across the three domains and shed light on the ideologies which shape these choices in situated place-making practices. Lastly, it will be argued that the new town can be read as a heterotopia comprised of different spaces that are incompatible due to their differing world views and place-making positions. The implications of this constructed heterotopia for its relocated residents framed by wider themes of socialist civil education, market-driven economy and tourism development will also be briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presentation of text in picturebooks is an under-investigated field that requires consideration in order to support readers and those selecting books for readers. A unique form of picturebook is the bilingual picturebook which presents a story in two languages. The complexities of language readability and legibility are increased in these books, with implications for reader perception of the typographic design. In this paper we outline considerations for the design and presentation of two languages in bilingual picturebooks. We provide a discussion and analysis of text layout in Māori-English bilingual picturebooks and present guidelines for authors, designers, and publishers as well providing recommendations for the required further investigation into typographic layout for bilingual picturebooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins to locate female sadness in the complex popular literary environment of the seventeenth century. It focuses on bibliographical evidence to trace the physical presentation of despair in a set of commemorative pamphlets and canonical early modern theatre by William Shakespeare and John Webster. Doing so, this article aims to give insight into cultural cross-fertilization between popular literary milieus and enrich our understanding of how print conventions shaped and controlled female authorial voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of the British poet Christopher Logue is characterized by variation, collaboration, and intermedia projects. His output includes poetry set to jazz, printed poster-poems, public poetry performances, film scripts, collaborations with artists, and translations from Portuguese, German and, most significantly, ancient Greek. War Music, an 'account of Homer's Iliad' according to its subtitle, became Logue's life's work, eclipsing many of his earlier projects. But collisions of word, image, and sound—the intermedia formats that characterize his early work—endure in Logue's Homeric translations in the form of radical typographic experiments and textual images, such as inch-high capital letters marking the arrival of the god Apollo, and graphic shapes formed by variation in line lengths. This article demonstrates that War Music is a key text in the intersection of translation and visual poetry, which can be best understood in dialogue with other forms such as concrete poetry and the text-inspired art of Cy Twombly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Anna Trapnel's final publication: a 990-page volume of prophetic verse printed in around 1659, which now survives in a single copy held by the Bodleian Library. Advocating the value of attending to the materiality of early modern women's texts, this article examines the semantic significance of the typography in this large volume of prophecies. First, I argue that the work's distinctive letter forms and ornamental headers may affiliate it with the printing house of James Cottrell. Second, these specific visual motifs are explored as indicators of Trapnel's broader religious and textual community in mid-seventeenth century England. Finally, the article suggests ways in which we might read the volume's typographic features as both supportive, and subtly undermining, of Trapnel's highly charged religious discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, i and y shifted from an early distribution principle to a new, modern standard, which generally resulted in the establishment of vocalic i word-initially and word-medially, as well as for glides word-initially and for vowels word-finally. Previous scholars have offered interesting insights into some of the graphemes above, but the overall history of development in i and y, and the factors behind their modern standardisation, still remain partially uncovered. This paper investigates graphemic changes in the two letters in printed English between 1500 and 1700, using a quantitative model for the analysis of patterns across a range of texts from Early English Books Online. The analysis establishes the presence of a quantitative shift in the wholesale uses of i and between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and provides a precise chronology for the standardisation of word-initial, word-medial and word-final graphemic changes in i and y. The discussion reflects upon the development of the positional graphemes, and argues for pragmatic factors within the Early Modern English printing industry as primarily responsible for the modern standardisation of i and y. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the utopian alphabet project of Slovenian clergyman Jožef Poklukar, in which he tried to establish a universal alphabet for the notation of the Slavic languages in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Czech diacritical marks were accepted in Slovenian orthography in the late 1840s, he wanted to start another reform due to his view that diacritics were not satisfactory. Poklukar began working on the project in the 1820s, but published the first version of the alphabet only in 1851. After that, he intensively developed his alphabet and published numerous updated versions of lithographic tables in daily newspapers and as a publisher. Printed material sources were used as the core material of the research. Although his project was interesting from a linguistic and typographic point of view, it had no influence on the orthography and remains an example of a utopian project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tumultuous politics of the post-Independence period in Bombay/Mumbai, and the creation of the linguistic states, released multiple and contradictory energies towards a re-examination of the Marathi language and its valence in linguistic, literary, social and cultural contexts. This essay employs the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar and the Marathi-language poetry of R.K. Joshi to show the ways in which the sathottari poetry of Bombay engages with these socio-political questions of language and region by channelling the principles of concrete poetry and making the visual presence of the language (in its script, its lines, its presence on the page) a part of its meaning-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debate has seen the proposition that difficult to read, or disfluent, typefaces can improve certain learning conditions. This is counterintuitive for typography where it is the aim to support reading acts by creating texts that are as clear and as easy to read as possible. We explore recent literature on the disfluency effect in an effort to contextualize the results for typography research that is grounded in functional readability. What is evident is that the discussion about whether or not disfluent reading materials support learning is far from resolved. Further research is needed in key areas such as those related to the typographic principles of visual cuing and emphasis as well as other broader areas such as how we may be able to determine threshold for disfluency, benefit over time, and what impact environmental distractions have on the disfluency effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the nineteenth century jobbing printers in Britain played an important role in the history of printing. In the skilled hands of the provincial printer, new display types were composed into new forms of advertising, contributing to the education and societal orientation of the emergent middle classes. Jobbing printers of the Midlands contributed to the advancement of British typography, making significant innovations in the composition of printed ephemera. This article considers the craft and invention of three influential nineteenth-century jobbing printers in the region: William Joesbury (1838–1919) of Birmingham, and the two members of the Gitton family, George (1746–1825) and George Robert (1801–85) of Bridgnorth. Joesbury printed Timothy Worsey Watton's Outline Charts of General History (1848), an early example of progressive visual education for grammar schools; and the Gittons printed ephemera of Bridgnorth is a valuable record of the town's industry and of its social culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the trajectory of inline and block quotation over the period in which HTML has undergone standardisation, from the introduction of the blockquote element to the HTML 1.0 specification (1993) to the current HTML 5 standard. The focus of the study is the distinct difference between the web's current quotation practices and the legacy rule for short versus longer quotations as mandated by the body of academic style guides that began to emerge from the early 20th century. Working from a wide range of heterogeneous sources, the academic length-differentiated quotation rule is tracked from its inception, through its establishment as the academic norm in print, through its faithful remediation for digital workflows by the proximate antecedent of HTML, the leading SGML applications in text processing of the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. The consecutive hybridisation of block quotation with the text elements of the epigraph and the pullquote in the course of HTML's standardisation process is treated as a misremediation that needlessly abandons continuity and vitiates the academic legacy's virtues of clarity and coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, numerous prominent authors in various spheres of design discourse have discussed the rhetorical potency of type "icons" and how they come to embody cultural connotation. As icons, typefaces offer a universal language system—an expansive visual vocabulary that immediately references what we already know of their context. Iconic typefaces and their letterforms are subject to a process of narrative interpretation where what we "already know of them" is in a constant process of resignification. Here, critics tend to follow a Barthesian view that, as mythic structures, letterforms' narratives are continuously used and reused as signification in different contexts. This widely regarded view presumes that iconic meaning develops as a chain of signification, where one narrative builds onto the next. This, however, leaves little explanation for instances where symbolism embedded in iconic typefaces develops in unexpected ways. In this article, I therefore investigate and unpack other means by which iconic typefaces evolve rhetorical meaning. By referring to examples throughout, I explore typical perspectives on iconic type in the Barthesian sense, but also trace different processes of signification. In doing so, I aim to offer alternative insights into ideological type as a more fluid rhetorical entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the status of John Ogilby’s Virgil translations as royalist texts. The paratextual material to the 1649 and 1654 editions provides a framework which invites a royalist reading; the translation promotes this by manipulating Virgil’s text and contemporary typographic conventions. These factors combine in passages that depict the death of kings. The volume follows the Virgilian precedent of foretelling events that had already occurred by presenting the passage on the death of Priam in such a manner to imply that it anticipated Charles I’s execution. This allowed Ogilby to grant a sense of inevitability to the prophecies his translation offers regarding events that he hoped lay in the near future. The 1654 edition subtly draws on Caroline-era royalist literary tropes to suggest a permanent revival of the monarchy under Charles II. Ogilby’s contributions to Charles II’s coronation celebrations draw on the Virgil translations in vindication of such prophecies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London typefounder Edmund Fry’s Pantographia (1799) is an extraordinary catalogue of all of the known languages of the world, published on thousands of pieces of custom non-Latin type that the book’s creator spent more than a decade cutting with his own hands. Though it is now long since forgotten, Pantographia sold hundreds of copies and was reviewed approvingly in the major periodicals of its day. The book is addressed to a general audience, not to printers. I argue that the book gave its readers permission to look at printed language not as a source of knowledge or words, but as a source of visual pleasure. Throwing scores of unfamiliar scripts at the reader, one after another, Pantographia savors the visual exotics of the world’s languages and reiterates the strangeness and contingency of every writing system. The work is about the verbal/visual interface, self-consciously troubling the line between illustration and text. It invites a mode of “reading” that fixes the reader’s attention on the inked lines and shapes that readers ordinarily look through. This mode of reading, and its pleasures, are aspects of eighteenth-century print culture that we have not yet understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of her earliest critical reviews, written for The London Magazine in December 1958, Christine Brooke-Rose began to stake out territory for new literary work that confounded most critical outlines. These works, which she deemed ‘necessary to the development of the novel or play’ and ‘indispensable to our knowledge of the form’, were to be contrasted with the mode traditionally associated with the novel, social realism, placed in opposition to the works of authors ‘whose main concern is to tell a story about persons recognizable as human beings in recognizable situations’. As Brooke-Rose’s literary career matured along with the dawning of the 1960s, following publication of her poetry pamphlet Gold (1954), a quartet of satirical novels (1957-1961) and her first scholarly work The Grammar of Metaphor (1958), Brooke-Rose’s connection to the nouveau roman became the single most definitive characteristic in the eyes of her British readership. This essay will consider the influence of the main protagonists of the nouveau roman upon Brooke-Rose’s short stories and novels, with particular attention paid to her novel Out (1964) and to the emphasis placed by the nouveau romanciers upon the visual and cinematic as the privileged means of apprehending reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are book covers ‘intersemiotic translations’ of the texts they introduce, or are they better seen as marketing devices or freestanding art objects? And if the cover of a book does reflect the text, will the cover of a faithful interlingual translation do so also, or will it conflict with the translation? The first part of the article examines the covers of a few editions of two French autobiographies and their English translations. The pictorial and verbal elements on the covers of the French source texts appear to be consistent with each other and with the main text, whereas the covers of the English translations both contradict the main text and show inconsistencies between wordings on a single cover and between wordings and imagery. The second part of the article applies five criteria for deciding whether the covers should be seen as intersemiotic translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between composition, typography, publishing, and sexuality in the poetry of E.E. Cummings. Cummings composed his poems with microscopic attention to their visual form, often reworking their layout numerous times, and this article will analyse a seminal shift in the genesis of his mise-en-page. Typography is one branch of literary form which cannot be abstracted from the materials and accidents of book production. Situated within the mechanical processes of publication and characterisations of the typewriter from Heidegger and Olson, Cummings’s typographical poetics are shown to be contingent upon, but resistant to, the machinery of composition and publishing. Censorship of sexual explicitness and suppression of overly graphic typography are tightly interwoven in the textual history of Cummings’s 1923Tulips and Chimneys. Through close-readings of the mise-en-page of the volume, this article will argue that the sexual ethics of these poems must be considered through their typography, and depend on how we view and scrutinise the page layout as well as the bodies described therein. For typography to be considered a form of prosody, however, it cannot be reduced to a singular function or simply an uncomplicated analogue for the body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that many of the problems that arise in interpreting quotation marks in two poems by John Keats – namely, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ andThe Fall of Hyperion: A Dream– are primarily grounded in later editors’ responses to variances in earlier documents. The interpretive moves that can or cannot be made often depend upon punctuation that was invented by persons other than the poet when sources turned out to be at odds, or when documentary evidence proved non-uniform. The variable presence of quotation marks in some, but not other, versions of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the sudden disappearance of quotation marks from a passage in which the reader has been led to expect them inThe Fall of Hyperion: A Dreamprovide striking examples of the interpretability of quotation marks in Keats’s work, as well as in Romantic poetry more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Psychophysical research on text legibility has historically investigated factors such as size, colour and contrast, but there has been relatively little direct empirical evaluation of typographic design itself, particularly in the emerging context of glance reading. In the present study, participants performed a lexical decision task controlled by an adaptive staircase method. Two typefaces, a ‘humanist’ and ‘square grotesque’ style, were tested. Study I examined positive and negative polarities, while Study II examined two text sizes. Stimulus duration thresholds were sensitive to differences between typefaces, polarities and sizes. Typeface also interacted significantly with age, particularly for conditions with higher legibility thresholds. These results are consistent with previous research assessing the impact of the same typefaces on interface demand in a simulated driving environment. This simplified methodology of assessing legibility differences can be adapted to investigate a wide array of questions relevant to typographic and interface designs. Practitioner Summary:A method is described for rapidly investigating relative legibility of different typographical features. Results indicate that during glance-like reading induced by the psychophysical technique and under the lighting conditions considered, humanist-style type is significantly more legible than a square grotesque style, and that black-on-white text is significantly more legible than white-on-black. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For more than a century, librarians and bibliographers have supposedly identified and cataloged gothic types using the Proctor-Haebler system and many incunabula collections have been described using it. It is now widely accepted that the Proctor-Haebler system's nomenclature and techniques are uniform and consistent for cataloging rare books and that it is informative about types. This article explains that although the Proctor-Haebler system may help us to identify a printer or a printing office, it confounds different typographic concepts (typeface, font, and type), uses contradictory methods, is based on weak or arguable assumptions, and does not inform us about “types.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In television broadcasting, there are no general rules about the implementation of various short inscriptions that accompany video image and provide additional information for the viewer. Therefore, we wanted to study what combination of typeface, letter case and position should be used for an on-screen presentation when fast recognition of a text is required. The present study investigated the minimum time required for recognising three-letter words presented in bold style on the screen in different experimental conditions. The typeface Georgia showed better legibility than Verdana, Calibri, Trebuchet and Swiss 721. Upper case letters were recognised faster compared to sentence and lower case letters. The recognition times were shorter for upper on-screen positions compared to the lower ones. The resulting combinations of text properties that are processed faster thus seem more appropriate for the on-screen use (especially for television broadcasts). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The framework which governs subtitles and viewers’ comments is investigated in this study, through five film clips-parodies of the same movie, which are subtitled in the Cypriot dialect with different linguistic content every time. The study focuses on the semiotic role of subtitling and the examination of text content and meaning. Also, subtitle characteristics and typographic practices for the transcription of subtitles into a language system which lacks an official and widely accepted orthographic system are examined. As for the visual rendering of the Cypriot dialect in subtitling, the study proposes that the use of typography by fansubbers, facilitated by technology proliferation, often results in failure of legibility, cohesion and comprehension of the text, while projecting a sense of orality and improvisation. The main concluding remark is that subtitling is used as a semiotic tool in visual communication as it operates as a “semiotic switch” in the expected production of semiosis by the language of the text and the production of semiosis by the subtitles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several decades of media representation and cultural consumption have led to the creation of a collective geographical imagination of the world as a place. This paper argues that in contemporary semiotic landscapes a new, translingual, middle-brow register, called hereglobalese, has emerged and that it indexes spaces as “global.” It combines new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles in ways that create novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their “original” ethno-national languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests to systematically focus on metagraphic discourse in typographic landscape analysis. It argues that the analysis of such discourse reveals ideological ascriptions to emplaced graphic forms. Thesegraphic ideologies, sets of beliefs about the social meaning and the use of graphic variants and about the users who are (assumed to) be using them, frame the interpretation of landscapes in a dynamic way; they are socially stratified and subject to discursive negotiation. Therefore, it is argued that rather than conceive of typographic landscapes as semiotic products with a fixed social meaning, it is more apt to shift the focus fromgraphicsas a social resource tographic variationas a social, reflexive practice. The paper introduces a metapragmatic theory that can be used to access metagraphic discourse and that attempts to explain the dynamics of typographic meaning. At the core of the theory lies an interpretive concept of socially stratifiedgraphic knowledgewhich provides the basis for social actors’ ideological ascriptions. It is argued that these ascriptions are essentially a means of social positioning. Furthermore, it is argued that they interact with linguistic and spatial ideologies, an interaction from which the actual interpretation of emplaced text and texted place dynamically emerges. As a case in point, the article discusses a specific newspaper commentary that provides an interpretation of Gothic type in a historically framed public place, Berlin Tempelhof Airport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some biographical information concerning Aldus Manutius and his publishing venture, which joined the interests of Venetian scholars in classical works, especially those in Greek, with the power of the Venetian presses to print and disseminate them. The early works of the Aldine Press all reflect important innovations in typography, especially Greek, for which Aldus created four fonts. The paper considers the publishing histories of the 1499 and 1545 editions of theHypnerotomachia Poliphili, the former under the control of Aldus, while the latter under that of his son Paolo, working to resuscitate the Aldine Press with the Sons of Aldus imprint. Aldus clearly played an important role in the design of theHypnerotomachia Poliphili, which integrates text and image in the layout of the individual pages to produce visually appealing results. The 1499 edition represents what is now widely regarded as the most harmonious union of typography and illustration in the Renaissance. The two editions are then compared to determine how closely the 1545 edition reproduces the 1499, given the common assumption that they are essentially the same, apart from the lack of woodcut initial letters and a handful of woodcut illustrations. The appendix consists of a short overview of the editions of theHypnerotomachia Poliphiliin other languages through 1600. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the materiality of street signs, an unappreciated and ubiquitous type of everyday written text. Drawing on social semiotics, linguistic landscapes and writing system research, it uses a categorisation of social roles associated with street signs and of the functions of street signs applied to street signs in Newcastle upon Tyne, with some other wider examples. The materials are divided into: stone and metal signs, which use capitals and archaic letters, convey permanence and quality, and are locating in function; signs handwritten or printed on paper, which also use capitals, convey temporary status and novelty and are mostly informing; painted signs, which often use lower case, have highly individual letter forms to express identity, and are usually informing; other materials ranging from glass to snow, expressing diverse ideas of permanence. The conclusion is that the meaning of street signs depends in part on the materials they are made of, particularly to convey permanence and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Text-rich driver–vehicle interfaces are increasingly common in new vehicles, yet the effects of different typeface characteristics on task performance in this brief off-road based glance context remains sparsely examined. Subjects completed menu selection tasks while in a driving simulator. Menu text was set either in a ‘humanist’ or ‘square grotesque’ typeface. Among men, use of the humanist typeface resulted in a 10.6% reduction in total glance time as compared to the square grotesque typeface. Total response time and number of glances showed similar reductions. The impact of typeface was either more modest or not apparent for women. Error rates for both males and females were 3.1% lower for the humanist typeface. This research suggests that optimised typefaces may mitigate some interface demands. Future work will need to assess whether other typeface characteristics can be optimised to further reduce demand, improve legibility, increase usability and help meet new governmental distraction guidelines. Practitioner Summary:Text-rich in-vehicle interfaces are increasingly common, but the effects of typeface on task performance remain sparsely studied. We show that among male drivers, menu selection tasks are completed with 10.6% less visual glance time when text is displayed in a ‘humanist’ typeface, as compared to a ‘square grotesque’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classroom-based research discussed in this article explored developing elementary students’ visual meaning-making skills and competencies. The study’s instructional unit focused on a selection of visual elements of art and design in picturebooks, graphic novels, and magazines. As well as reading, responding in writing to, and discussing the focus texts, the 8- and 9 year-old children created their own multimodal texts during the research. Focusing specifically on the visual element of typography, this article presents the findings from the analysis of the students’ small group discussions aboutDon’t Read This Book!(J. Lewis and Allwright 2009). Data analysis revealed the students’ genuine appreciation for and interest in the visuality of the verbal language inDon’t Read This Book!, as well as their multifaceted understanding and interpretation of the typography in the picturebook. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study of architectonic epigraphs—engravings containing the names of those responsible for the design and construction of buildings—provides, in one respect, a better comprehension of letterforms and carving techniques, and of its relation to architectonic language. In another respect, it contributes to a better understanding of the history of the city, revealing the participation of architects, engineers, and constructors, some unknown or seldom studied. This study aims to describe the methods and procedures applied to the configuration of the São Paulo City Epigraphic Archive, a collection that comprises representations of architectonic epigraphs found in São Paulo city historical centre. The methods developed by the research team included systematic gathering and organization of many different kinds of data, from photographic records and transcription of contents to maps, rubbings, vector drawings, and three-dimensional reproductions of the engravings. As a result, 134 architectonic epigraphs were catalogued, and information on them was made available both physically and on the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the thirty years since the first appearance of Martin Lambie-Nairn's ident 'Round and Back', Channel 4 has established a reputation for screening idents that are both innovative and pleasingly familiar. While many texts have acknowledged the significance of these artefacts, there has, as yet, been no sufficient exploration into the precise behaviours that make these idents so distinct. This article explores the construction of the Channel 4 logo from independently moving parts, and the alignment of static parts prompted by tracked navigation, showing how these behaviours are made possible by the modularity of the Channel 4 logo. These behaviours are likened to anamorphosis, in which a privileged viewing zone reveals to viewers an alignment of forms, and a fleeting moment in which separate pictorial objects collaborate in the presentation of a more significant numerical configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay distinguishes itself from previous work on Alison Bechdel'sFun Home(2007) by virtue of its attention to the material and medial qualities of this text. Based on a reading of materiality inFun Home, I argue that comics scholars need to pay greater attention to how material and technological parameters shape the experience of reading comics.Fun Homeforegrounds questions of typography (specifically the difference between handwriting and typewriting) and of the physical form of books. By doing so, it self-reflexively calls the reader's attention to its own typography and its own physical appearance. As such,Fun Homeexemplifies the usefulness for comics studies of what Katherine Hayles calls ‘media-specific analysis’. My reading ofFun Homethus illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue between comics studies and media studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The typography of written language not only serves as a conduit of verbal narrative, it serves as a visual element and semiotic resource with its own meaning potentials. In conjunction with an analysis of selected contemporary picturebooks, a framework for considering how typography adds to the meaning potential in contemporary picturebooks is presented. Beginning with a brief discussion of the concept of multimodality, picturebooks as multimodal texts, and an overview of the use of typography in picturebooks, this article presents a framework for analyzing and interpreting typographical elements in contemporary picturebooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the Artemus Ward's Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869. The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as "Artemus Ward," the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture's content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward's visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist's delivery of his material. Excessive in its contrivances, the book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book's awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page. It signifies, I argue, the degree to which Ward's editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of "muchness," as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its point of departure in Roman Jakobson's model of the linguistic functions from his 1958 (1960) “Closing Statement” on “Linguistics and Poetics”, the paper raises a discussion of a neglected paradox or discrepancy in Jakobson's poetics, namely the fact that the model he used to describe and distinguish the poetic function of language was based on spoken language, where as most of his examples were all taken from literary, i.e. written texts. This paradox highlights a general problem in Jakobson's poetics – its strong orientation towards the phonetic or acoustic aspects of language as well as its relative lack of interest or sensibility to a fundamental, aesthetic feature of literature, namely that it is not a speech act but a scriptural and visual act, consisting of letters and other graphic signs written down on either paper or a screen. The examples are drawn from early 20th century avant-garde literature, Futurism and Dadaism, that is a material closely related to Jakobson's formative or – as he himself also called them – “futurist years” as a young linguist in Moscow and Prague. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Writing practices that integrate dynamic and interactive strategies into the making and reading of digital texts are proliferating as more of our reading experiences are mediated through the screen. We argue that rarely do current approaches to creating digital texts operate at the basic textual level of the letterform itself, and that this neglect is partially due to the fact that current font technology is based on print paradigms that make it difficult to work programmatically at the level of individual letters. Work produced in our lab suggests the creative possibilities in being able to easily specify behaviours at such a level, and leads us to propose that writers, typographers and programmers start thinking beyond Postscript-like formats such as OpenType or TrueType to collaboratively develop a new ComplexType format (or formats) that is designed for the twenty-first century as opposed to a simulation of the fifteenth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While composers have often employed graphic scores and other extended notation systems to explore open-form, collaborative, and aleatoric musical processes, the notational forms themselves have traditionally been presented to performers through fixed, paper-based media. In this article, several compositions by the author are described in which dynamic scores are generated in real-time during a performance and projected for the performer to read from a laptop screen or video display. The processes used to generate such scores will be described in detail and a number of the practical and musical challenges presented by the notational procedures employed will also be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of people have low vision, a disability condition caused by uncorrectable or partially correctable disorders of the eye. The primary goal of low vision rehabilitation is increasing access to printed material. This paper describes how adjustable typography, a computer graphic approach to enhancing text accessibility, can play a role in this process, by allowing visually-impaired users to customize fonts to maximize legibility according to their own visual needs. Prototype software and initial testing of the concept is described. The results show that visually-impaired users tend to produce a variety of very distinct fonts, and that the adjustment process results in greatly enhanced legibility. But this initial testing has not yet demonstrated increases in legibility over and above the legibility of highly legible standard fonts such as Times New Roman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates an experimental strategy that can improve peripheral letter recognition by modifying typographic design features based on psychophysical data. The approach is based on the assumption that peripheral letter recognition is a fundamental step to reading with eccentric viewing. The experimental design combines psychophysical testing, data analysis by confusion matrices, letter modification of the most frequently confused letter pairs by font design software, and subsequent psychophysical re-testing. Letters of the Sloan set in a common sans serif typeface were displayed tachistoscopically at an eccentricity of 8 degrees. Results from six subjects show that the most frequently confused letter pairs can vary between subjects. If only one feature in each of two out of ten letters belonging to a frequently confused pair is modified, mean recognition performance over the whole set can be improved significantly. This effect may also be augmented by secondary interactions between the modified letters and others that are less frequently confused. These findings demonstrate that the combination of psychophysics and goal-directed modification of typographic features is a viable experimental strategy. It is proposed that future research aiming to optimize the conditions for eccentric viewing should include optimizing typographic design characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design variables surrounding the presentation of signal words in warnings have been previously shown to affect performance, or variables likely to be related to performance. The present study emphasized the signal word WARNING by presenting it in red, surrounded by a red border. It was at the head of an otherwise black pesticide label that used 8-point type. A study using 24 undergraduates investigated the effect of signal-word font size (8 to 32 points), white space around the signal word (2 to 32 points), and border width (1 to 8 points) on the rated urgency of the label. A measure of the aesthetic merit of each label was also obtained from nine design students and professionals. Seven levels of each variable were used, covering the practically-useful range of each variable in the circumstances. Results showed a linear relationship between each variable and perceived urgency, with text size having the greatest effect, followed by border width. It was shown that, within the variable ranges used, the perceived urgency of the emphasized signal word resulted from the sum of the urgencies associated with the separate dimensions used in the emphasis. Tradeoffs are discussed—for example an increase of 4 points in text size produced the same increase in urgency rating as produced by an increase in border width of 2-3 points. A second study, using a further 24 students, compared the red labels with labels in black only. It was found that the signal word had to be approximately twice as big in black as in red to give the same perceived urgency. Design implications of the finding that the most urgent labels are not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]