Error and Material Publication Form

To return to a topic like counting characters in Gettysburg address and Joshua Bell at the metro, consider whether the type face in which an article is set can be an error. This post is a web-enhanced version of a comment submitted to the SHARP listserv.

In the web version of an article on the Helvetica type face in the Toronto Star, the author refers to the “fancy little dangly bits.” The serifs, which are drawn to the reader’s attention to distinguish the newspaper’s printed typeface (TorStarTextRoman) from Helvetica, won’t be found. Click thumbnail below to view a screen shot of the paragraph:

Screen Shot of Paragraph in “Official Typeface…”

Toronto Star Article, “The official typeface of the 20th century”

In the HTML code, the call for type face is passed off to a style sheet in a separate file. This style sheet (invisible to end users, I think) presumably calls for the default sans-serif font. On my Windows machine with Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, the default sans-serif font is Microsoft’s Verdana typeface. According to Wikipedia article, Verdana is available on over 90 percent of Windows and Macintosh computers.

So, for this reader and for most readers of the web version, Verdana is not TorStarTextRoman is not Helvetica.

If no character is changed, is it an error if it is displayed in an alternate type face? It illuminates Jerome McGann’s contention that texts are “self-generating feedback systems.” When the publication form is incapable of generating the feedback that the author at least seemed to intend, something is lost. Whether the concept of “error” usefully describes it is another matter.

What is Lincoln and Whitman during the Civil War?

Lincoln and Whitman during the Civil War (now known as “Civil War Washington: Studies in Transformation”) will be (as of mid-2007, “is”) a web site that emphasizes geo-spatial data, that is, historical data linked to spatial coordinates that are also represented by historical maps. But Lincoln-Whitman at the time of this post was a database that represented information entities. The information entities include broad information categories that are mappable by location: hospitals, forts, theaters, fugitive slave camps, etc. But the information entities also include people, events, associations of people, associations of events, and geographical data.

I drafted the SQL database entities (things) and relationships (ways in which data is linked) using a nifty application called GraphViz, a tool that can be used for drawing diagrams, including entity relationship (ER) diagrams. So one thing that Lincoln-Whitman was (at time of original post) is the attached chart, drawn in GraphViz. The chart is very large.

Lincoln_Whitman_SQL_DB_Design.jpg

Note: To access “Civil War Washington: Studies in Transformation,” see http://cdrh.unl.edu/civilwardc/ for the current public face of the project.

Joshua Bell in the D.C. Metro Station

Today’s Washington Post article on Joshua Bell in L’Enfant Plaza is melancholy, puts me in mind of Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro. But also, from Much Ado about Nothing, I think of Hero on Beatrice’s attitude toward men: “If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds / If Silent, why, a block moved with none” (3.1.66-67). What is perceived depends on the perceiver’s frame of reference.

Joshua Bell, minus the concert hall stage and the rakishly informal tiring–as befits the eminent soloist–becomes an odd variant on the usual huckster and fiddler. Albeit loud and with touch, he probably wants a buck. Except, of course, he’s not sawing for dollars. It’s a social science experiment, and you, philistine on your way to work, are the rat in the labyrinth.

The article is an experiment in multimedia web as a frame. My first impression was that the piece was written quite well, though coy at the beginning, especially the Slatkin interruption. I can’t separate the article from the video, the haunting sadness of the violin unheard, the dancer from the dance. And yet, the video cuts are excruciating. I want to hear it uncut, ticket turnstiles clacking through it all. So I printed it, to set aside for seven years and read again, minus the soundtrack, so that I can be an impartial critic of the prose.

One need not wait like Horace. The article now has another public frame. It jumped to “Most Read” and “Most E-mailed” within hours of its posting. In librarian mode, I thought of the article six months from now, in a news service database (Lexis-Nexis, etc.), minus the video and the sound. These public frames (in addition to the gratuitous but clear Romantic child as audience) and my own public response are all the more important for understanding how the article is read, or heard.

So I’ll document a bit more about my one personal reception experience, which framed my response as well. I read it while my son, who has his second violin lesson tomorrow, was watching Pirates of the Caribbean. On hearing the computer speakers, he turned up the TV volume. Johnny Depp and the exploding ship drowned the violin. Digression again with poetry, this time Felicia Hemans:

There came a burst of thunder sound–
The boy–oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!–

No human fragments in Pirates, as PG-13 rating requires one to avoid swords piercing entrails. Much Ado is personal too, as my little violinist was the Sexton in a children’s theater production. I attended last night and the night before. The attraction of poetry is strong today, and I suspect that designing an SQL database will do that to a person. Maybe it’s just spring.

UPDATE: Today, 7 April 2008, Weingarten’s article won a Pulitzer Prize. And it is on Lexis-Nexis, but the URL that links to Bell’s performance is awful. Here is the link on Lexis-Nexis: http://washingpost.com/magazine.. That takes you nowhere, to the “Washing Post,” which as of today is a dead link but within a week I expect will be owned by a pornographer.