Tag Archives: Amaranth Borsuk

Week 10: Is All Media Three-Dimensional?

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Electronic literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes in 2007 that contemporary e-lit authors “explor[ed] . . .the Z-axis as an additional dimension for text display, behavior, and manipulation” (“Electronic Literature: What Is It?”). Hayles describes the work of Ted Warnell, whose TLT vs. LL (2006, strobe/flashing warning) “shifts to a dynamic surface in which rising and sinking motions give the effect of three dimensions as the layered letter forms shift, move, and reposition themselves relative to other letters” (Hayles). I am considering this spatial depth alongside our discussions of screen interfaces and my own work with Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), a book which combines leaf layers to produce an animated effect.

In a comment on Micaela’s post last week, Sierra mentioned otome games – a subgenre of visual novels, which themselves emerge from interactive fiction games. It’s made me think about the conventional display interface of visual novels, which generally overlay narrative text and selectable options over illustrations. While considering how Gallop! produces animation and sequence through interactions between bound layers, I’m realizing that I haven’t attended to the “Z-axis” in screen media like 2D visual novels, animation, or even the computer screen interface itself. The backlit LCD display of my computer also produces animation via interactions between layers of light and crystal. This is a 3D process. Because the computer interface produces media through X, Y, and Z axes, even what appears to be 2D screen media is materially 3D.

We therefore don’t look at a screen, but through its layers. Interactions between layers produce optical effects, much like the Scanimation barrier-grid effect produced in Seder’s Gallop!. N. Katherine Hayles has already explored computer backlighting’s “media-specific” influence on e-lit through texts like “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” (2000), but I’m only now realizing the implications of the Z-axis to electronic literature. How does an e-lit work engage with the 3D spatiality of its medium?

Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2005) mediates the 3D spatiality of print books by inviting co-reading between human and computer readers. As the human user physically moves the book’s QR-coded pages in view of a computer reader’s camera, the computer retrieves and displays 3D visuals that are mapped onto the visual feedback. As Dr. Pressman argues in “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” (2018), Borsuk’s augmented reality book shows that “technology is not only part of the work but also part of the text to be read and compared” (323). Borsuk’s “3D concrete poem[s]” (323) reflect the 3D spatiality of “page and screen” interfaces. Following Dr. Pressman’s example of “the piggy poem” in Borsuk’s project as an allusion to the animal skins used in medieval manuscripts (326), we might consider how animal skins themselves form outer layers over complex interior systems, and how the reduction of these systems to a single, ‘2D’ exterior layer reduces the complexity of their multidimensional, mediated bodies.

From now on, I’ll view media objects as assemblages of layers. This is kind of blowing me out of the water in terms of reframing my approach to e-lit and animation studies. Engaging with the materiality of Gallop! in concordance with Hayles, Borsuk, and Dr. Pressman’s e-lit studies reveals the multidimensionality of media and media activation. The medium cannot be flattened. How might e-lit engage with this spatiality, and with the illusion of flatness, as narrative and material conflicts?

Week 5: Books Becoming Content Based

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After reading Chapter 2 of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, the curation of the book itself went from an intricate handmade artform to a mass production to fit the newfound purpose of the book, which is to use it for its content. Last Tuesday’s class in the Special Collections, we took the time to observe a variety of texts and the craftsmanship of the book itself. The covers, bindings, and format of the text revealed a history of the book without the reader even having to open it. For example, the intricate handmade cover of the Dominican Catholic Hymns book portrayed its importance with its ornate embellishments and high-quality leather. Being able to see the different handcrafted books in person highlighted the dramatic shift from books as art objects to books as content-based mediums.

I took a glance at my own personal book collection, and couldn’t help but notice that the majority of the books on my shelves are paperbacks with creased spines and flimsy covers that lacked any artistry. I flipped through the pages and noticed that most of the paper itself was so thin that I could see the words faintly through the other side. These observations display how “the printing press changed the book by facilitating its proliferation and separating the idea of the book from the object” (Borsuk, 76). Prior to the printing press, the book reflected more than the content inside. It was a portrayal of status and wealth not just a container of knowledge. The printing press made books more accessible and created the shift from sacred, one-of-a-kind artifacts to everyday commodities, valued primarily for the content they carried rather than the material form they took.

In my SOC730 course: Advanced Social Theory Class, we are discussing Marx theories that explain that with the increase in automation and capitalism we will see a decrease in work hours and more time for individuals to pursue arts and , to my understanding, more time to appreciate art. Will automation continue to decrease the artistry of books leaving them as disposable vessels of information? Or, perhaps, will it create space for a resurgence of book crafting as people search for meaning and beauty in tangible, handmade forms?

Week 5: Morph as Content

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Amaranth Borsuk defines the book as “a portable information storage and distribution method” (The Book 1).The History of Reading Working Group (William Warner et al.), part of UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project, reads these methods across time through In the Beginning Was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface (2008). The Flash animation, now archived as three video simulations, “represent[s] the morphs of the page over the past 1,400 years” through “the first fourteen lines of the Gospel of John.”  I examine the connotations of the term “morph” in the context of Borsuk’s materiality studies.

I was curious about The History of Reading Working Group’s use of “morph” as a noun, which I had only been familiar with in evolutionary biology contexts. The OED lists the meanings of “morph” as “The action, process, or technique of changing one image into another by morphing; an instance of this” (first attested in 1991) or as “An image or character created by morphing”, particularly through computer manipulation (first attested in 1992). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers the additional meaning of “An allomorph” (2022), suggesting the morph as a multiple variation of a linguistic element. The OED’s examples show the morph’s prominence in discourses of computer art and digital literature from the 90s. The term frames digital media’s linguistic and visual transformations as physical metamorphoses, asserting the materiality of digital media and language.

In the Beginning Was the Word presents a sequence of morph, with its own .SWF (“john-morph.swf”) and video files representing more. The biologic connotation that is remediated in digital uses of “morph” – “each of the different forms exhibited by an animal or plant in the course of its life cycle” – presents the digital morph as one “form” in a broader media ecology (“Morph, N. (4).”). Approaching In the Beginning Was the Word as “morphs” characterizes the page, and book technology, as a multiply evolving type of body. Framing books as biological morphs frames books as biologically or ‘naturally’ mutative.

The “natural”, though, is defined through contemporary natural science’s own morphs of Enlightenment codifications. If we approach the page through a natural science framework, we need to grapple with the politics of that framework, or we risk “naturaliz[ing]” the book’s political imbrications (Borsuk 109, 1). As Borsuk writes, typography mediates “the legacy of othering embedded in language’s form” (93). Following Borsuk’s definitions, we must read the page’s morphs not simply as “content,” but as “objects.” When approaching objects in Special Collections, I’ll pay closer attention to design, including typography, as signifiers of sociopolitical contexts.

Post is no good this week as I feel like I’m under two feet of municipal hard water & I think the other 600 words made no sense. Vaxx up & mask up !

Accessibility Shapes the Book

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After reading Chapter 1 of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, the deeply intertwined relationship between technology and “the book” has become clear to me. As Borsuk writes, “the book, after all, is a portable data storage and distribution method” (12). Books are not only a way to preserve human intelligence but also a means to spread knowledge quickly and efficiently across wide populations.

The ability to distribute knowledge has always been central to human progress. Like we discussed in class, information was reserved for the elite who had access to clay tablets or scrolls. These objects were fragile, time-consuming to produce, and limited in circulation. As a result, the spread of ideas was often slow and laborious. However, as Borsuk depicts in Chapter 1, the evolution of the book reflects a consistent pattern: each new form of book that came to be was to make storing and sharing knowledge more efficient. From tablets to scrolls to codex, these technological transitions were never random but rather direct responses to humanity’s ever growing need to communicate and learn.

Lying in the evolution of the book is, how Sigmund Freud states, human nature to know everything. People have always craved learning and sought faster, more accessible ways to acquire knowledge. With greater access to texts, more individuals were able to read, reflect, and expand upon existing ideas. What was once confined to a small region could suddenly travel across nations, inspiring revolutions in science, politics, and philosophy. The cumulative effect of shared knowledge created a foundation for the technological revolutions that followed. Without the distribution power of books and archives, many of the breakthroughs that define human history would not have been possible or traceable at that.

Yet, this relentless drive to make books more accessible has also come with a cost. Earlier books were not only containers of knowledge but also works of art. They were meticulously crafted by scribes and artisans. As printing technologies advanced, the emphasis shifted from artistry to efficiency, prioritizing mass production over craftsmanship. While this allowed knowledge to reach millions, it also diminished the individuality, beauty, and human labor once woven in every page. In our current digital era, the physical artistry of bookmaking is even further removed, reminding us that in our pursuit of accessibility, something of the book’s original artistry has been lost. This tension between accessibility and artistry also complicates how we evaluate media today. With mass production and the endless stream of information online, it is often difficult to decide whether media is “good” or “bad.”

The Endless Scroll

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Reading chapter one of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, I paused at her description of the papyrus scroll and found myself drifting into thought. She describes papyrus as light and flexible, yet not easy to carry around. A scroll required both hands to handle, or a table to place it on, and reading moved in one long, continuous line. There was no flipping back or comparing passages. The form itself made reading linear and tied to time.

What stood out to me here is how much the material itself shaped reading. On the one hand, a scroll was very simple to use. You unrolled it and followed the line forward. That simplicity made reading easy. But at the same time, it was clumsy to transport and hard to navigate. You could not easily go back to a section or hold two places at once. In that sense. While reading was straightforward, it was also limited.

This suddenly reminded me of how we read today on phones. In many ways, social media feeds are modern scrolls. They run in one continuous stream, moving from top to bottom, easy to follow but difficult to step outside of. The big difference is that technology has solved the old problem of portability. What was once heavy and awkward to use is now light, instant, and always in our pocket. So in a way, we carry the scroll everywhere.

But this comes with new effects. The papyrus scroll at least had an end. After some time, you would eventually reach the bottom. The digital scroll, however, never ends. Feeds refresh again and again, keeping us moving and holding just enough of our attention. This shapes how we read. We skim, swipe, and move on quickly, very rarely stopping and taking some time to reflect. Where the codex brought depth and comparison, the feed pulls us out and throws us into an endless scroll.

Borsuk’s description of papyrus made me realize that reading has always been about more than words. It is also about the form that carries them. The scroll once kept reading on a linear path. The codex later opened new ways of moving through text. And today, our screens have brought the scroll back, this time in a portable, digital form. The question is whether this return to scrolling opens up new freedom or if it traps us in a flow we can’t really step out of.

Week 4: “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal”

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In The Book (2018), Amaranth Borsuk foregrounds the networked production histories of book media. In an example from 1153, hair follicles on a parchment page evidence the remediation of a living being into book materials (52). I have been reflecting on Borsuk’s reproduction of this parchment page in comparison to Jonathan Senchyne’s warm instances of human “traces” through book media in The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2020), which I encountered in Dr. Pressman’s Literature’s Media course in Fall 2024. Senchyne’s traces manifest moments of human interconnection, creating an empathetic bond between readers throughout time and place that situates how a book object traversed its setting. In one example, the handprint of a reader marks time from 1657 (Senchyne 15). The organism which traces its memory in Borsuk’s parchment leaves the trace of a time marked more violently: unlike the human craftsperson, the animal/s lost its life in the parchment production process. How do we read media for traces not only of life, but of death?

If its materials influence the ways that we interact with and perceive a book, the book also influences the ways that we interact with and perceive its materials: that is, our understanding of trees is influenced by our interactions with paper, and our understanding of animals is influenced by our interactions with parchment and vellum. Borsuk notes that, in first millennium CE Egypt, the cyperus papyrus plant was exploited to near-extinction in papyrus production (14). Did a similar fate befall the animals whose hides were culled for use in parchment production? How did the economy of parchment shape human-animal relationships, contextualizing the role of animals in human trade and information production?

The parchment product mediates a power organization and economy of human-animal relationships in which animal bodies are exploited, alive or dead, and in which their passage from living to dead is directed by human actors. This leads me to question how life and death are configured in “media ecologies,” and how significant death is to media production. The reeds, the animals, and the trees which compose common book media interact with eventual readers as de-autonomized bodies – traces of once-life and the conditions which created their death. The plant or animal’s body is remediated from living to dead. This exploitation interrelates with the ecological violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and their social permutations.

Considering this, Borsuk’s chapter has raised new research questions for me. How were the bodies of animals used for parchment and vellum production symbolically and culturally encoded as products of information production, economy, and “the very nature of thought itself”? (44) How were human interactions with these animals shaped by the association of living organisms with product? Further, how were the lives and animal cultures of these creatures shaped by their exploitation in the vellum and parchment trades? Did botanical and zoological adaptations occur through these contexts? This would make good material for a study of nonhuman reader networks and media ecologies, which N. Katherine Hayles gestured towards in her presentation at SDSU last semester.

These questions relate to my capstone project-in-progress, which in part historicizes scientific galvanism through a disability studies framework. The galvanic slab is a site of networked interconnection between human, nonhuman animal, and technological bodies – much, I’m now realizing, like the parchment or vellum page. We know that the information in a book can be violent – and so, I need to emphasize, can be the production of the book. The medium might be fatal. I’m now thinking about anthrodermic bibliopegy (the custom of binding books in human skin) as it relates to spectacles of capital punishment, which also featured heavily in galvanism. Borsuk’s materiality study has made me more aware of the ecocritical, ethical, and thanatological implications of the human-animal-technology circuit in disseminating information and encoding meanings through trans-species interactions with book media. The dead reed, animal, or tree is a key model in contextualizing the material production of book objects. Who died to make this object? Who killed? How does the fact of death-production influence how we interact with and present the object? Now that I’m finding some footing, I want to get serious with media studies and explore these wider effects as I handle objects in Special Collections with more attuned sensitivities.