May 10, 2007
May 06, 2007
Paperwork
Just a short post to document a couple of recent experiences that have given me renewed appreciation for the remarkable affordances of . . . paper.
First, as mentioned here recently, I’ve finished reviewing the copy-edited manuscript for Mechanisms (my forthcoming book from the MIT Press). This means that after the Press sends the manuscript out to a freelance copy editor it is returned to me to review and approve all of the changes as well as make whatever final revisions to the text I deem fit. This process unfolds on the surface of a single hard copy of the manuscript, and as a result, for perhaps the only time in its publication process, the text of the book assumes unique artifactual status. In other words, as I penciled in my own edits alongside those of the copy editor, the text exists in an authoritative form that is not represented by any electronic file, meaning that it is at an excruciatingly vulnerable stage (something brought home to me when I had to consign the whole thing to the mail to return to Boston).
The actual process of copy editing was instructive for a book that is all about the born-digital. The first step was to amasss the necessary tools. This involved an expedition to the campus bookstore to procure red pencils, a sharpener for same, and an eraser. And white-out (“liquid paper”). The manuscript fairly bristled with tabs and post-it notes, to which I added my own, in effect creating my own forms of indexing (which reminded me powerfully of Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier’s Technologies of Writing seminar at the Folger).
As I worked, the pages built up layers of annotations in green and red pencil, the occasional white-out or brute trauma to a page where an eraser nearly rubbed through, stickies, labels, tabs, and post-its. In several places, adding more substantive blocks of text, I had to print out new hard copy, cut out the text with a scissors, and then tape it into place.
The second paperwork experience involved a trip to the US Holocaust Museum as part of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s annual Service Day. More details on the event are available here, but what I want to focus on is what Allison Druin, the Director of the Lab, calls Low-Tech Prototyping. This is the design modality that allowed 35 people to be productive together in a small room. What’s especially striking was how powerful the specific combination of post-its and a chalkboard were. The rule of thumb was one idea per post-it, thus making them digital—discrete, individuated—objects, suitable for tokenization and manipulation. The post-its could be relocated at will, and related ideas could be clumped together. The chalk, meanwhile, allowed for labeling, annotation, and more diverse ways of expressing relationships. An important aspect of the process was the physical dimensions of the information space, the body’s relationship to it—being able to step back from the board to see overall clusters and patterns and then move forward to read individual notes—creating, in effect, an analog ZUI.
Bottom line is that paperwork still holds a unique and important position in our contemporary media environment, with its own distinctive affordances (and vulnerabilities).