Frames and Windows
Technology of Book and Screen
DRAFT
Contents
Frames and WindowsTechnology of Book and ScreenDRAFT
Contents
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The technology of the manuscript book was highly evolved in the Middle Ages. It formed the basis for the structure of printed books we use today. The technology of the book--of information display and retrieval--evolved to meet the needs of the most intensive users of information at the time--scholars in cathedral schools and universities. Because manuscripts contain visual cues for navigating information, some of the hard-won lessons of manuscript design are applicable to displays of digital information. The different parts of the project are designed to sensitize you to the connections between types of information, visual display, and the needs of the reader/user through study of manuscript layout.
An important element of page layout allowed an early form of interactivity. Spacing left for marginal commentary, glosses, and annotations allowed readers to respond to the main text. The page layout embodied a "visual dialogue" between the main text--the "authority"--and the texts in the margins. It was designed to communicate both information and its authoritative status at a glance.
As you will soon learn, there is more digital information circuiting the globe than any of us can possibly assimilate. In order to use it to best advantage, we need to impose "frames of attention" (Richard Lanham's notion) on it to isolate portions for our focused attention--the way a picture frame bounds our gaze and focuses our attention inward toward the artwork.
In medieval manuscripts, frames of various kinds were used both to segment and to unify the page. Frames frequently occur where two media appear--text and image. They serve to bound each medium, but also to place them in careful visual relation to one another. Frames and borders are also used to regulate planes of depth on a page. They can create visual mediation between "flat" text and the illusionistic three-dimensional depth of images, so that the viewer has a gradual transition between foreground and background. Since hypermedia creations often combine text and image in the same visual space, careful thought needs to be given to display.
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What are the types of information the page presents? What are the sources of the information? How are the types of information related to each other? What visual clues does the page give for locating information?
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What is the proportion of text to image? Where is the text placed in relation to the image? Which has the greatest visual weight? What elements of design contribute to that weight? How are the text and image framed? How are the frames related? Is there anything "outside" the frames? What is it and why is it important? What's in the margins? Why is it "marginal"? What is its purpose?
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With the results of the previous projects in mind, critique the layout and framing of the "pages."
What issues from manuscript layout apply? What are new issues raised by the special nature of the digital medium?
Post your 500-750-word analysis to the Round Table discussion group.
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Study Guide for Project 3Technology of the BookFramingImages to Study
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The motive for change in the technology of the book (that is, in Biblical and theological manuscripts) was a shift in the use of texts from meditation to argumentation, from "digesting" the text (=ruminating on it) to consulting it.
This change led to the development of "ordinatio" (ordering): a structure of reasoning reflected in the physical appearance of books.
For terminology, see Malcolm Parkes.
Techniques for making the structure of reasoning visually apparent ("Apparatus for indicating the ordinatio") included:
Thus, page layout was a key item in this technology. The scribes of the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales employed many of these elements of the ordinatio.
here is a hierarchy of decoration throughout the manuscript as well as one each page: the largest textual units (tales) are set off by running titles (across the top of the page). The next largest (shifts between prologues and tales, as here), by demivinets, or three-quarter page borders and their associated capitals. The decorated capitals which appear at these divisions are most often blue and violet on gold leaf. Nearly all of these introductory capitals are four or five lines high.
The lower levels of the decorative hierarchy are provided by capitals of various sizes and by parafs (they look like an editorial paragraph mark). The major subsidiary capitals used to mark important textual divisions range from one to four lines in height, and are usually of the sort called "champes": a gold leaf initial sitting on a quartered blue and violet ground.
Parafs are set in the margins and mark subsidiary units, especially changes of speaker in dialogue and sentence beginnings in the prose. Parafs also appear at the heads of running titles and introduce all marginal materials.
Adapted from Ralph Hanna III, The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile (1989), pp. 9-14.
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There could be multiple frames on a page, defining a hierarchy of areas for different elements or purposes (text, image, gloss, border). The size and placement of the frames established visual "weight" and hierarchy.
In some late medieval manuscripts, a patterned border served as a special kind of frame. It mediated between flat, two-dimensional text and the depth of a three-dimensional picture. It softened the visual "edge" between text and image.
Color can function as a frame (expand; refer to Albers CD).
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Which of the listed elements of ordinatio are present in each image? How does each guide the reader?
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