From ASCII Art to Comic Sans

From ASCII Art to Comic Sans
Author: Karin Wagner
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262546140

A fresh and provocative take on typography, computing, and popular culture, viewed through four idiosyncratic typographical phenomena from the digital age. From ASCII Art to Comic Sans offers an original vision of the history of typography and computing in the digital age, viewed through the lens of offbeat typography. We often regard text as pure information and typography as a transparent art form without meaning of its own. In this richly illustrated book, however, Karin Wagner offers a fresh perspective that shows how text is always an image that conveys meaning, and how typography, far from being meaningless, has in fact shaped modern visual and material culture in significant ways. By juxtaposing four odd typographical phenomena—the pedantic practice of ASCII art, the curious-looking machine-readable typefaces, the blurry letters of dot matrix printers, and the much-maligned font Comic Sans—Wagner paints a vivid picture of how functional technologies influence popular culture when used in ways their original creators never intended. Design practitioners, as well as fans of media, graphic design, type history, and computer technology, will enjoy this breezily sophisticated perspective on visual and digital culture. Spanning the material and visual aspects of typography from the 1960s to the present, From ASCII Art to Comic Sans is a unique contribution to the study of popular and material culture that fills a gap in the history of typography and computing.

Print Punch. Artefacts from the Punch Card Computing Era

Print Punch. Artefacts from the Punch Card Computing Era
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN: 9781916412132

Data used to be physical. In an era when 1s and 0s seem to hover above our heads, 'Print Punch' returns to the heyday of the punch card?to a time when you could touch (and punch) data. The aesthetics of this early move towards automation represent a unique moment in our history, when we designed for machines instead of human beings. Rigorous constraints, inherent in punch card technology, unwittingly birthed a coherent design language: rhythm in grids, punched absences and presences, and the patterns in them dancing to their own machine logic. Now obsolete, punch cards were the primary method of data storage and processing from the 1890s until the late 1970s; spanning almost a century of ubiquitous utility, the artefacts of that era sit between these pages to be examined anew.0Featuring over 200 punch cards, 150 archival images and essays by Steven E Jones, Sandra Rendgen and John L Walters.

The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Author: Martin Gurri
Publisher: Stripe Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1953953344

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Also Innovators

Also Innovators
Author: Christopher B. Yardley
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1760462993

‘Thank you for your order, Mr Mainframe Customer. The cost is £5 million and the lead-time for manufacture will be two years. In the meantime you will have to build a special computer centre to our specification. For our part, our project team will help you recruit and train potential programmers and we shall advise on how you might use the system.’ How different from today when the customer will want to see a specific application running before he puts a hand in his/her pocket. Chris Yardley lived the changes as a computer salesman and tells his story of a career living and working in five countries. Warts and all. The ecstasies, the heartbreaks and idiocies of major corporations. His career was not a planned one. In a growing industry, opportunities presented themselves and Chris believes he grasped every one presented. Having written his story, he has had every chapter verified by at least one person who features in that narrative. His respondents have universally endorsed the facts with comments such as ‘Wow, I’d forgotten most of that’. ‘You have a fantastic memory.’ ‘I never knew before the full facts of what happened.’ ‘How have you remembered all the circumstances?’ ‘It really is a people business.’ This is the only book that has followed a computer sales career over almost 50 years.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307887456

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

Multimedia

Multimedia
Author: Richard Wise
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2005-07-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134808119

Multimedia: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive guide to the new media form which has resulted from the application of computer technology to existing techniques of broadcasting and telecommunications transmission. The rapid growth of multimedia technologies such as the internet, e-mail and digital television holds the promise of a new 'information age' in which individual tastes are catered for, citizens become better informed, and new wealth is created. But are new media technologies really designed to achieve these utopian aims? Multimedia: a critical introduction provides a historical, cultural and political context to the development of multimedia, as both a technology and a concept. Individual chapters address: * the origins of multimedia in the unlikely interaction between the military and 1960s counter-culture: how the phenomenal US budgets allocated to US military research resulted in the microchip, and why the efforts of counter-culture computer hobbyists evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. *the wider democratic and cultural implications of multimedia in the wake of the deregulation of the media industries by 'new right' governments in the 1980s, which has led to the domination of the media by transnational conglomerates. * issues of privacy and censorship in relation to new media, including discussion of cryptography, electronic surveillance, and attempts to regulate material such as pornography on the internet. * the use of digital technology to create special effects in feature films.

Post-Digital Print

Post-Digital Print
Author: Alessandro Ludovico
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: Book industries and trade
ISBN: 9789491677946

Digital technology is now a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than a century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over? In this book, Alessandro Ludovico rereads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than 20 years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

No Logo

No Logo
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2000-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780312203436

"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.

Interactive Digital Narrative

Interactive Digital Narrative
Author: Hartmut Koenitz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1317668677

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

Research Methods in Human Development

Research Methods in Human Development
Author: Paul C. Cozby
Publisher: WCB/McGraw-Hill
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1989
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

For undergradute social science majors. A textbook on the interpretation and use of research. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.