Johanna Drucker - Böcker

In our current screen-saturated culture, we take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. The computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information. They structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. Learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge, says Johanna Drucker, has become an essential contemporary skill.Graphesis provides a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. Among the most significant of these formats is the graphical user interface (GUI)—the dominant feature of the screens of nearly all consumer electronic devices. Because so much of our personal and professional lives is mediated through visual interfaces, it is important to start thinking critically about how they shape knowledge, our behavior, and even our identity.Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production.

A Fresh Look at the History of Graphic Design

Graphic Design History, 2nd edition is a critical approach to the history of graphic design. Organized chronologically, the book demonstrates the connection to the current practices of graphic arts, visual expression, and design with its engaging narrative and special features.

With new images, chapter revisions, and features like Tools of the Trade, the authors stay true to connecting what designers do every day to a history of innovative graphic forms and effects. Instructor PowerPoints featuring nearly all of the images from the text make class preparation easier than ever with this new edition.

A better teaching and learning experience

This program will provide a better teaching and learning experience– for you and your students. Here’s how:

Improve Critical Thinking — Chapters are framed by critical issues and historical themes so that students can fully grasp an understanding of the history of graphic design. Engage Students — Timelines and images with detailed captions easily highlight relevant information for students. Support Instructors — high resolution PowerPoint are available for this text.

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In this text, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a re-reading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara.

Johanna Drucker's "sweet dream" is for a new and more positive approach to contemporary art. Calling for a revamping of the academic critical vocabulary used to discuss art into one more befitting current creative practices, Drucker argues that contemporary art is fully engaged with material culture - yet still struggling to escape the oppositional legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation - all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avantgrade. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well.Sweet Dreams is a testament to the creative processes and self-conscious heterogeneity of art today as well as a revolutionary effort to solicit collaboration that will encourage the production of imaginative thought and contribute to contemporary life.

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. Here she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized 'Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, "SpecLab" functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker's contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age - models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies.Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet's origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been "invented" as an object of scholarship.

Theorizing Modernism is a re-reading of the modernist tradition in the visual arts that provides a unique view of the history of modern art and art criticism. Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.

The Digital Humanities Coursebook provides critical frameworks for the application of digital humanities tools and platforms, which have become an integral part of work across a wide range of disciplines. Written by an expert with twenty years of experience in this field, the book is focused on the principles and fundamental concepts for application, rather than on specific tools or platforms. Each chapter contains examples of projects, tools, or platforms that demonstrate these principles in action. The book is structured to complement courses on digital humanities and provides a series of modules, each of which is organized around a set of concerns and topics, thought experiments and questions, as well as specific discussions of the ways in which tools and platforms work. The book covers a wide range of topics and clearly details how to integrate the acquisition of expertise in data, metadata, classification, interface, visualization, network analysis, topic modeling, data mining, mapping, and web presentation with issues in intellectual property, sustainability, privacy, and the ethical use of information. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, The Digital Humanities Coursebook will be a useful guide for anyone teaching or studying a course in the areas of digital humanities, library and information science, English, or computer science. The book will provide a framework for direct engagement with digital humanities and, as such, should be of interest to others working across the humanities as well.

The Digital Humanities Coursebook provides critical frameworks for the application of digital humanities tools and platforms, which have become an integral part of work across a wide range of disciplines. Written by an expert with twenty years of experience in this field, the book is focused on the principles and fundamental concepts for application, rather than on specific tools or platforms. Each chapter contains examples of projects, tools, or platforms that demonstrate these principles in action. The book is structured to complement courses on digital humanities and provides a series of modules, each of which is organized around a set of concerns and topics, thought experiments and questions, as well as specific discussions of the ways in which tools and platforms work. The book covers a wide range of topics and clearly details how to integrate the acquisition of expertise in data, metadata, classification, interface, visualization, network analysis, topic modeling, data mining, mapping, and web presentation with issues in intellectual property, sustainability, privacy, and the ethical use of information. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, The Digital Humanities Coursebook will be a useful guide for anyone teaching or studying a course in the areas of digital humanities, library and information science, English, or computer science. The book will provide a framework for direct engagement with digital humanities and, as such, should be of interest to others working across the humanities as well.

This second edition of The Digital Humanities Coursebook provides critical frameworks for the application of digital humanities tools and platforms, which have become an integral part of work across a wide range of disciplines. This fully updated edition adds several new topics, including XR (extended reality) and AI (artificial intelligence), as well as a companion website developed in parallel with the chapters and providing extended ''how-to'' examples to enable students and teachers to follow step-by-step demonstrations of tools or platforms.Written in an accessible and engaging manner, this book is focused on the principles and fundamental concepts for application and each chapter contains case study examples of projects, tools and platforms that demonstrate these principles in action. This book clearly details how to integrate the acquisition of expertise in data, metadata, classification, interface, visualization, network analysis, topic modeling, data mining, mapping, and web presentation with issues in intellectual property, sustainability, privacy, and the ethical use of information. By combining practical information and critical issues, the book demonstrates that no application of digital humanities can be separated from ethical and critical concerns.This book is structured to complement courses on digital humanities and provides a series of modules, each of which is organized around a set of concerns and topics, thought experiments and questions, as well as discussions of the ways in which tools and platforms work. Each chapter contains an introduction to the topic, examples of current (and sometimes classic) work being done in the field, a set of exercises to explore the hands-on experience, references, and recommended readings. The Digital Humanities Coursebook will therefore be an indispensable guide for anyone teaching or studying a course in the areas of digital humanities, library and information science, English, or computer science.

This second edition of The Digital Humanities Coursebook provides critical frameworks for the application of digital humanities tools and platforms, which have become an integral part of work across a wide range of disciplines. This fully updated edition adds several new topics, including XR (extended reality) and AI (artificial intelligence), as well as a companion website developed in parallel with the chapters and providing extended ''how-to'' examples to enable students and teachers to follow step-by-step demonstrations of tools or platforms.Written in an accessible and engaging manner, this book is focused on the principles and fundamental concepts for application and each chapter contains case study examples of projects, tools and platforms that demonstrate these principles in action. This book clearly details how to integrate the acquisition of expertise in data, metadata, classification, interface, visualization, network analysis, topic modeling, data mining, mapping, and web presentation with issues in intellectual property, sustainability, privacy, and the ethical use of information. By combining practical information and critical issues, the book demonstrates that no application of digital humanities can be separated from ethical and critical concerns.This book is structured to complement courses on digital humanities and provides a series of modules, each of which is organized around a set of concerns and topics, thought experiments and questions, as well as discussions of the ways in which tools and platforms work. Each chapter contains an introduction to the topic, examples of current (and sometimes classic) work being done in the field, a set of exercises to explore the hands-on experience, references, and recommended readings. The Digital Humanities Coursebook will therefore be an indispensable guide for anyone teaching or studying a course in the areas of digital humanities, library and information science, English, or computer science.

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of Iliazd has been prized by bibliophiles and collectors for its exquisite book design and innovative typography. Iliazd collaborated with many major figures of modern art—Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Joán Miro, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others. His 1949 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words, was the first international anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry ever published. The list of contributors is a veritable "Who's Who" of avant-garde writing and visual art. And Iliazd's unique hands-on engagement with book production and design makes him the ideal case study for considering the book as a modern art form. Iliazd is the first full-length biography of the poet-publisher, as well as the first comprehensive English-language study of his life and work. Johanna Drucker weaves two stories together: the history of Iliazd's work as a modern artist and poet, and the narrative of the author's encounter with his widow and other figures in the process of researching his biography. Drucker's reflection on what a biographical project entails addresses questions about the relationship between documentary evidence and narrative, between contemporary witnesses and retrospective accounts. Ultimately, Drucker asks how we should understand the connection between the life of an artist and their work. Enriched with photographs from the Iliazd archive and a wealth of primary documents, the book is a vivid account of a unique contributor to modernism—and to the way we continue to reevaluate the history of twentieth-century culture. Accounts of Drucker's research during the mid-1980s in the personal archive of Madame Hélène Zdanevich, the poet's widow, lend the narrative an incredible intimacy. Drucker recounts how, sitting in the studio that Iliazd occupied from the late 1930s until his death in 1975, she was drawn into the circle of scholars who had made him their focus and were doing foundational work on his significance. She also coped with the difference between the widow's view of the artist as a man she loved and Drucker's own perception of Iliazd's significance within a critical approach to history. Iliazd is at once a rich study of a significant figure and a thoughtful reflection on the way a biography creates an encounter with its always absent subject.

"From codex to document, from performance to self-image, the world of artists' books is made available to student and teacher, collector and connoisseur.” –Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Library JournalNow Back in Print! Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.Prior praise for Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books:“[Drucker] locates the artists' book, in all of its multitudinous aspects, within every significant modern movement and draws on an extensive bibliography of scholarly references to reveal the philosophical and artistic connections among the several emerging avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.... The book vastly expands our understanding of the interdependence of structure and meaning in artists' books.”--Buzz Spector, Art Journal“A folded fan, a set of blocks, words embedded in lucite: artists' books are a singular form of imaginative expression. With the insight of the artist and the discernment of the art historian, Drucker details over 200 of these works, relating them to the variety of art movements of the last century and tracing their development in form and concept. This work, one of the first full-length studies available of artists' books, provides both a critical analysis of the structures themselves and a basis for further reflection on the philosophical and conceptual roles they play. From codex to document, from performance to self-image, the world of artists' books is made available to student and teacher, collector and connoisseur. A useful work for all art collections, both public and academic.” Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Library Journal

Narrated by an Archaeon, a 3.8 billion year old species, the oldest on earth, Downdrift is a work of speculative eco-fiction that describes the impact of ecological pressures on animals that are adopting human behaviors, with droll and sometimes alarming, results. The book follows a year of changes and the travels of a housecat and a lion who are inexplicably driven towards a rendezvous. At first, a few isolated harbingers of change appear, but they quickly escalate. Squirrels take up manic knitting, wild hares steal earth-moving equipment, rats go in for disco music and form-fitting metallic leisure-ware. Data-sorting abilities appear among urban populations of birds, and frenzied domestic pets seek celebrity careers. Droll, melancholic, and poetic, the tale is crammed with witty vignettes and poignant reflections on the ways the pressures on the once-natural world are accelerating mutations in behaviors among the animals. Genetic material alters. The differences between animals blur. Odd mutant forms appear–goat-chicks and dog-flies, fish-birds and flying lizards–as if some mad rush is propelling genetic code to propagate across every form of flesh and living matter. As large-scale infrastructure projects make their appearance, each of the animals takes the role appropriate to its disposition—or not. Melancholic rather than apocalyptic, the book is a celebration of species as well as a mourning of the damage done in our time. Throughout, the emergent voice and character of the Archaeon extremophile records events as well as a slow coming to consciousness about its own identity as a hyper-organism.