Lab reports

book_lab_6.md

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+**Reflection**
+Up until I had to move my type to the galley, I was doing pretty well. All those humid, St. Louis summers I spent in an overly-air conditioned, dimly lit basement proofreading xml documents against 16th century black letter trained me to pay the perfect amount of attention to letters and characters without getting wrapped up in their meaning. Indeed, my excerpt contained no typos on my first try! My hands were small enough to reach into the California case, grasp 14 point Calson italic type, and place it in the composing stick with relative ease. Yet, when the time came to move my type to the galley it became clear I lacked the dexterity to curl my fingers around the metal and exert pressure to it at the same time. Kindly, you offered to move my type to the galley for me. Then, when you handed me the page form containing my typeset poem and those of others, my hand nearly slipped through the furniture, spilling type to the floor. Everyone’s hearts leapt from our chests. The page was heavy for me, and in trying to balance it, I held on to the furniture, nearly dislodging it. While the kind of literacy I practiced as a proofreader made me a speedy and accurate compositor and the size of my fingers lent themselves to the physicality of typesetting, my lack of strength and dexterity made me a disastrous printer.
+
+To complete this lab, I’m taking inspiration from a typo in the prompt: “who are they[texts] form?” This was probably supposed to say “who are texts _for_?”, but my misinterpretation of the typo produced intriguing question: “who _do_ texts form?” Who do these texts of metal—moveable, hot, and cold—form? What kind of body-minds to these machines and the spaces that contain them enable? Disable? How is disability, like “print culture” misunderstood as fixed? To answer these questions I jotted down some characteristics of the different types of printing technologies we’ve explored so far and the spaces that contained them: moveable type, linotype, and digital type:
+
+**Cold Moveable Type: incunable period to late 19th century and what we did in lab!**
+ - Heavy- needed to be strong to carry it and even hold the composing
+   stick. I felt my wrist getting sore while setting the metal type.
+ - Small type- workers needed excellent dexterity to reach into cases   
+   and set type in composing sticks
+ - Individual letters/characters - You didn’t need to know how to read- 
+   just pick characters that matched other characters
+ - Literacies fostered- certain kinds of neurodivergent reading would be
+   super helpful here! The kind of reading I had to do as an editor   
+   wasn’t natural for me; I’ve had to train myself to read this way over
+   years. However, my sister notices patterns of characters without   
+   attributing meaning to them as a default. This kind of literacy is   
+   often disabling because school privileges interpretive literacies.   
+   However, in this case her ability to notice minute patterns would   
+   make her an excellent compositor. I wonder if compositors over the   
+   years have read like her.
+
+**Hot Metal Type – late 19th century to 1970s**
+ - Linotype shop was loud - deafness was an advantage in the linotype
+   print shop because it was so loud. Communication via sign language
+   was necessary.
+ - Still needed to be strong to carry page forms
+ - ETAOIN SHRDLU keyboard meant that you could theoretically be a
+   linotype operator with fewer digits than are helpful to type quickly
+   using a qwerty keyboard. In the 2012 _Linotype_ film, an operator
+   explains he was the quickest typist at his paper while missing two
+   fingers. His boss thought this would make him slow and did not want
+   to hire him.
+ - Didn’t necessarily need to know how to read although it was helpful
+   in recognizing when an editor didn’t catch an error but not
+   necessary. Like cold moveable type, linotype operators weren’t
+   expected to know how to read. That being said, many operators could
+   recognize when an editor missed an error. Reading, while by no means
+   necessary, was a valued skill for linotype operators.
+ - Needed a lot of nimbleness to move in harmony with the machine and
+   recognize when it was going to spit hot metal at you. I would
+   definitely be bad at this.
+
+**Cold Digital Type: 1970s-present (how I'm writing this now)**
+ - Compositor or typesetter is no longer a job in the digital age as it
+   once was. Authors, editors, and graphic designers are all
+   “typesetters” of a sort.
+ - Less physically demanding – you don’t need to lift anything, be able 
+   to walk, etc. to “set” digital type.
+ - QWERTY keyboard - It is helpful to have two dexterous hands with   
+   fingers you can move a lot. The QWERTY keyboard is designed to almost
+   always be used with two hands as the most common letters in the   
+   English language (for which the keyboard was designed) are on   
+   separate sides of the keyboard.
+ - I don’t think deaf people represent a disproportionate number of page
+   setters – granted page setter isn’t really a job in and of itself   
+   anymore
+ - Now you do need to know how to read (interpretive literacies) to   
+   operate most computers. It’s difficult to read their error messages  
+   and navigate their controls without being able to read.
+
+**Analysis**
+Print culture isn’t just a material culture, it’s a corporeal one. By this, I mean that print culture, like all material cultures, is a product of  the body-minds of human beings who manipulate, assemble, and transform materials into cultural goods. As such, the technologies print culture creates and relies on as well as the spaces that house them enable and disable particular body-minds. In my case, the demands of moveable type printing disabled my body (strength and dexterity) while enabling my mind (editorial literacy).
+
+Understanding print culture as a world “founded in metal, wood, ink, paper, engineering, and human labor” foregrounds that print is a man-made technology and the print shop as a constructed space that is inclusive of certain mind-bodies and exclusive of others. The shifts from cold moveable type to hot metal type to cold digital type print cultures highlights corresponding changes in who is disabled and who is enabled in the print shop. Looking back to different eras of print culture, we see that unlike other workplaces and technologies, the conditions of the print shop enabled mind-bodies that would have otherwise been disabled in different built environments around different industries. As such, print culture provides a fascinating case study into how disability isn’t essential; humans construct environments that are disabling.
+
+**I should mention this observation is by no means groundbreaking. Scholars of disability studies and crip theory have been making these arguments now for decades.

book_lab_7_image.md

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+
+## Reflection
+We entered the rare books and manuscript’s library’s reading room as a class for the second time. The books you and Cait selected for our viewing enjoyment varied across genre, but they all featured rich non-textual elements. Many of these included illustrations as they are typically conceived. Others included data visualizations, DIY-navigational instruments, and pop-up visualizations of the earth’s geology. The books that peaked my interest did so for their lack image and overwhelming amount of white space. The majority of Edward Lear’s _Illustrations_ and al de Humboldt’s _Atlas Geographique_ were composed of white space, or paper left unmarked by ink. For this lab, I’m curious what page-as-image analysis affords these illustrator’s use of white space and what that may mean for how digital humanists render, analyze, or neglect it.
+
+Firstly, I describe these page-images and how whitespace functions in both volumes.
+
+Lear’s _Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots_
+ - Parrot illustrations are supposed to be life sized. The color is
+   extremely rich. It looks more like a painting than a book.
+ - The pages have to be one sided. There are pieces of tissue paper
+   between each blank page and image.
+ - only the birds are done in color. Everything else is black and white
+   which creates a visual hierarchy of the page. There’s no background
+   really. The rest of the image (aside from the birds) looks like a
+   sketch that the artist forgot to paint. The only text on the page is
+   the bird’s scientific and colloquial names.
+ - Amount of white space in the book is striking. Because the artist was
+   trying to give the reader a sense of the size of these birds, the
+   amount of whitespace left on a page image can be used to compare the
+   size of one bird to another. Whitespace isn’t blank space here at
+   all- it’s a rhetorical device communicating scale.
+
+al de Humboldt’s _Atlas Geographique._
+
+ - the first thing that caught my eye about the maps was the grayish
+   brown splatters on the pages surrounding them.
+ - Then I noticed the outline of where the lithography press pushed the
+   stone plate into the page. I could feel the impression where it bit
+   into the page.
+ - The amount of white space surrounding the maps varied as did the
+   orientation of the images. Much like Lear’s parrot illustrations,
+   Humboldt uses whitespace to communicate the scale of the seized
+   territory he is mapping. Some maps will only take up about half the
+   area of one page while others extend across the spine and occupy two
+   pages.
+
+In both books, the illustrators use white space to communicate scale and, with it, a sense of neutrality (i.e., scale remains consistent across the book to make these images seem factual to the objects they depict even though they are merely remediations of them). Whitespace, while being used to communicate neutrality, is rich with meaning. Additionally, the amount of whitespace in both books is indicative of the lithography process through which both texts were created. All printing is single-sided because a lithography press cannot print images on two sides of a page without destroying the reverse image. The history of the books’ material production is quite literally pressed into the whitespace. While left unmarked by ink, they are certainly marked by human labor. Whitespace across both volumes is anything but blank.
+
+## Towards a Digitization Protocol that Accounts for Whitespace
+
+One of the most successful projects I’ve seen that accounts for whitespace is Melanie Micir and Anna Preuss’s digitization of Hope Mirrlees’ _Paris_ ([https://ada.artsci.wustl.edu/paris/content/paris_current.xml](https://ada.artsci.wustl.edu/paris/content/paris_current.xml))_. Paris_ is a 400 line, modernist poem that Virginia Woolf typeset and printed at her Hogarth Press. In the poem, Mirrlees makes use of strange spacing, and Woolf’s amateurish typesetting also creates odd spaces between lines and words. Rather than normalize these, Micir and Preuss opt to measure the space between each word, line, stanza, and page-margin. They encode this spatial information into their xml edition of the poem. Micir and Preuss’s digital edition is, therefore, specific to the copy of the poem they digitized. It preserves the material realities of typesetting at Hogarth that produced the variant spacing in _Paris._ But Micir and Preuss’s methodologies cannot be replicated at scale. To create an automated protocol for digitization that preserve whitespace, we must look elsewhere towards OCR and DIA.
+
+Whitespace is rarely if ever preserved in text-centric digitization approaches. OCR, for example, famously transforms an image of a page into a “bag of words.” Take Google’s Tesseract for an example. Tesseract transforms an image of page into a black and white version where all marks considered “meaningful” are rendered in black and those considered part of the background (not meaningful) are blotted out in uniform white. This process is called binarization. The goal of this step in Tesseract is to separate intentionally made marks from those made unintentionally. In doing so, it enacts a hierarchy of meaning where marks made with ink are meaningful and those made through some other medium are meaningless. Or, that marks made intentionally are meaningful while unintentional marks are meaningless.
+
+After tesseract transforms an image of a page into this black and white intermediary, it scans for machine readable characters. It transcribes the characters it finds into plain text. In terms of spacing, it preserves spaces between words, line breaks, and paragraph spaces. Tesseract does not encode whitespace on the rest of the page into the plain text remediation. If I were to run Tesseract on images of Lear’s and Humboldt’s volumes, I would likely end up with gibberish. It would almost certainly miss the cursive text on Humboldt’s maps, and it may try to transform the images into textual characters. The amount of whitespace on the pages would not be preserved.
+
+The DIA protocols Piper, Wellmon, and Cheriet describe in their article would be more amenable to a digitization that accounts for white space; however, like OCR, it relies on binarizing images. According to the authors:
+
+> one of the most essential steps in the [DIA] process is that of
+> binarization, which is used to differentiate what DIA researchers call
+> the foreground and background of a page image (Fig. 1). Qualities that
+> are relevant to the process of binarization can include the
+> discontinuous color of the page through weathering or
+> the bleeding of ink either through the page or across to an adjacent
+> page (Piper, Wellmon, and Chertier 271). 
+
+DIA, like OCR, renders the marks its algorithm deemed intentional in black and everything else in uniform white. This would remove the traces of the lithography process left on the Humboldt page images thereby occluding human labor. Likewise, Lear’s color illustrations may be rendered in black and white which would not preserve them well at all. DIA could, however, calculate the amount of a page that is so called background or whitespace. This could be quite useful for studying the use of whitespace at scale. I can imagine this might be helpful in studying how the use of whitespace to communicate scale was politicized in imperial maps, like that of Humboldt. Or, in studying anatomically-to-scale illustrations similar to Lear’s.
+
+Digitization always already enacts a hierarchy of meaning upon the object being digitized. Organizing digitization around page-images destabilizes the text-centric approach that has long dominated digital humanities. It also provides a way to study non-textual elements of page-images at scale. However, it, too, reaches its limits in studying whitespace. These elements, though unmarked with ink, are marked with the human labor that constructs, the technologies that produce, and the storage conditions that preserve/degrade page images. Un-inked space on a page is never blank. DH methods need to be reimagined to account for.