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 !