Research into language, linguistics, lexicography and the importance of capital letters is kick starting a new wave of work for this year.
My aims are twofold, one to create a hybrid typeface, which will link linguistic transcription convention (similar to printers marks) within a new typeface, this body
of work continues research developed on the MA Motion Graphics (Rpt) at Nottingham Trent. The audience for such work could include students learning English as a second language. It is intended to test the work with University of Derby ESOL department and the Royal School for the Deaf, Derby.
Other work will be to explore the word ‘vermilion’ as part of the visual communication research group.
Research following includes biographies from Ted Talks and an accompanying sketchbook includes research from Jefferson, G, ‘Conversation Analysis’ (2004)
John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Marvin Minsky
He is one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence -- and using computing metaphors to understand the human mind. His contributions to mathematics, robotics and computational linguistics are legendary and far-reaching.
Why you should listen to him:
Marvin Minsky is the superstar-elder of artificial intelligence, one of the most productive and important cognitive scientists of the century, and the leading proponent of the Society of Mind theory. Articulated in his 1985 book of the same name, Minsky's theory says intelligence is not born of any single mechanism, but from the interaction of many independent agents. The book's sequel, The Emotion Machine (2006), says similar activity also accounts for feelings, goals, emotions and conscious thoughts.
Minsky also pioneered advances in mathematics, computational linguistics, optics, robotics and telepresence. He built SNARC, the first neural network simulator, some of the first visual scanners, and the first LOGO "turtle." From his headquarters at MIT's Media Lab and the AI Lab (which he helped found), he continues to work on, as he says, "imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning."
http://www.ted.com/speakers/marvin_minsky.html
Steven Pinker
Linguist Steven Pinker questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others. In his best-selling books, he has brought sophisticated language analysis to bear on topics of wide general interest.
Why you should listen to him:
Steven Pinker's books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds -- the patterns in which our brain cells fire -- predispose us each to think and behave differently.
His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren't born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
In 2003, Harvard recruited Pinker for its psychology department from MIT. Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. His latest book is The Stuff of Thought, previewed at TEDGlobal 2005. He is working on a new book that studies violence. http://www.ted.com/speakers/steven_pinker.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html
Erin McKean
As the CEO and co-founder of new online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean is reshaping not just dictionaries, but how we interact with language itself.
Why you should listen to her:
View Erin McKean's Profile
Erin McKean's job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research. She searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. In June of this year she involved us all in the search by launching Wordnik, an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions, but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter, image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional, and highly useful, features.
Before Wordnik, McKean was one of the youngest editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary . She continues to serve as the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim ("language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974") and is the author of multiple books, including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: McKean is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist. Is there anything she can't do? Surprisingly, she is notoriously bad at Scrabble.
"Ms. McKean is part of the next wave of top lexicographers who have already or may soon take over guardianship of the nation's language, and who disprove Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge.'"
http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of_language.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania.html
David Carson
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_carson_on_design.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/976960.stm
Friday, 20 October, 2000, 10:25 GMT 11:25 UK
A capital offence case
Company names, signs, TV shows - all have begun to ignore the rules of grammar. What is happening to our capital letters, asks BBC News Online's Ryan Dilley.
lastminute. dinnerladies. go. smile. Spot anything missing? Is this the decline before the fall of the Roman capital empire?
George W Bush
"The capital of Russia? Er ... R, isn't it?"
London's Barbican Arts Centre has spent £50,000 redesigning its logo. Its new look has a lower case b.
Officials say the capital B will be retained in press releases. However, in reporting the centre's revamp, newspapers have already referred to it as the "barbican".
Using "Carolingian minuscules" - lower case letters - and ignoring Roman capitals is all the rage.
Small change
A company aiming to rebrand the northern city of Hull - and propel it into the premier league of urban centres - settled on the slogan "pioneering hull".
CityImage - which seems happy to include a smattering of capitals in its own name - has angered some in the city.
Gladiator
"Anyone else prefer Carolingian minuscules?"
Gerard Hailwood, secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, was scornful of a CityImage advert written entirely in lower case.
"While the teachers in the city work their hearts out trying to raise the standards of literacy, the image-makers put out copy that sends a clear message that standards don't count," he said.
The exclusive use of small letters was defended by the company, which said its intention was to mimic "a modern, forward-looking e-mail".
Downsizing
E-mailers, it seems, are the fifth column in the assault against capital letters.
In a recent survey, internet consultancy The Fourth Room found writing e-mails entirely in lower case is an increasingly fashionable habit of the "digitally literate".
HM The Queen visits a computer train
Are e-mailers helping change the Queen's English?
So-called "creative professionals" are particularly adept at dropping their Hs - along with every other big letter in the alphabet.
This trend owes much to the rise of the dot.com.
High-profile internet firms, such as travel specialists lastminute and the - soon to be revived - sportswear e-tailer boo, flew in the face of the rule that proper nouns must begin with a capital.
The seeds of this rebellion were sown back in the mists of internet time - well, 1987 - when it was decided domain names should not be case sensitive.
URL power
Type NEWS.BBC.CO.UK and see where it gets you. news.bbc.co.uk, that's where.
Lower case names have made the jump from the URL address box to the UK's billboards and newspapers for several reasons.
Novelty value for one. The omission of a capital can win a company name the reader's attention and build brand recognition in a market crowded by new start-ups.
British Airways' budget airline go
Flying in the face of convention?
But Dr Margaret Smith, from the University of Reading's typography department, says the fashion may burn itself out.
"As soon as you're joined by other people writing only in lower case, the novelty wears off."
Already the lower case ranks have been swelled by firms such as the British Airways budget spin-off "go".
Standing out from the crowd now requires an even more liberal application of grammar. Exhibit 1: easyEverything.
Cap and gown
Designer label Chanel has gone to the other extreme, deciding to have its name written in capitals at all times.
Internet users may be horrified to see CHANEL - capitals are widely frowned upon as the e-mail equivalent of shouting.
Child at an anti-noise protest
Capitals are the e-mail version of shouting
Indeed, The Guardian's "Reader's Editor" says the paper's growing use of small letters is in the interests of humility and egalitarianism.
"The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary are now the home secretary and the foreign secretary, the sort of people you might find standing next to you in the queue for the bus."
Though purists have spotted a decline in the use of capitals in recent years, the struggle has raged between upper and lower cases for centuries.
Change a cummings
In the 20th Century, minuscules won the backing of such cultural visionaries as poet e.e. cummings and singer kd lang.
In the 1920s, Germany's influential Bauhaus design school advocated the abolition of capitals from typography.
"Why have two alphabets when one will do?" said Bauhaus master
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman from lastminute
Dot.coms: Ventures without capitals
"we write all small, then we spare time." read the school's letterhead.
Dr Smith says the scholars who first combined minuscule and capitals might not understand any move to undo their system.
"It was considered a great advance. It changed the status of words. It was not decorative, but meaningful - changing the actual meaning of text."
Indeed what would Dr Smith's home city of Reading be without a capital letter? A verb.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/openbook_20070211.shtml
Justin Cartwright talks about his latest book, The Song Before It Is Sung.
Justin Cartwright
Justin Cartwright's life long fascination with philosopher Isaiah Berlin has led him to write a novel about Berlin's friendship with Adam von Trott, one of the German aristocrats involved in the plot to kill Hitler.
He talks to Mariella about how he used the known facts to create his fictional version.
The Song Before It Is Sung - Justin Cartwright
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Promise of Happiness - Justin Cartwright
Publisher: Bloomsbury
White Lightning - Justin Cartwright
Publisher: Sceptre
Get It Loud In Libraries
The Get It Loud in Libraries project invites up and coming bands to shatter the usual peace of libraries by performing in them. Mariella is joined by Stewart Parsons from Lancaster Library - who's behind the scheme, and Ben Hudson, lead singer of Mr Hudson and the Library who have recently completely a library tour.
For more information about Get It Loud, follow this link
Mr Hudson and the Library's album, A Tale of Two Cities, is released on 5 March on Mercury Records.
Unusual Typography
Books for children use text and typography in a variety of imaginative ways; so why do adult novels traditionally confine themselves to rows and rows of text?
Open Book talks to Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts, who's challenging that convention - his book includes blank pages and pictures of sharks drawn using the words themselves.
Designer Zoe Sadokierski and design critic Rick Poynor reveal that he's not the only writer experimenting with unusual typographical effects, nor is the phenomenon is as recent as we might think.
The Raw Shark Tales - Steven Hall
Publisher: Canongate
Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
Publisher: Wordsworth
Woman's World - Graham Rawle
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
Publisher: Penguin
House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
Publisher: Doubleday
Bernard Cooper
When he was 28, American writer Bernard Cooper was sent a bill by his father for the cost of his upbringing.
He's now written a memoir about his complicated relationship with his Dad, a cantankerous, difficult man prone to turning every conversation into an argument.
But, as he tells Mariella, it is written with a great deal of empathy and understanding.
The Bill From My Father - Bernard Cooper
Publisher: Picador
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/theverb/pip/yly7b/
Saturday 29 January 2005 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan with another cabaret of language. Tom Paulin concludes his series the Secret Life of the Poem and award winning audio cartoonist Peter Blegvad is in the studio.
Duration:
45 minutes
'A Darkling Plain'
View photos from Stephen Raw's exhibition, 'A Darkling Plain'
View photos of the exhibition
Programme details
The Verb Programme details - Jan 29th 2005 at 21.45
Cult novelist RUPERT THOMSON makes his Verb debut, reading an exclusive extract from his new novel 'Divided Kingdom'. The novel presents a twisted vision of a parallel Britain in which the population has been divided according to each individual's humour: Melancholy, Choleric, Phlegmatic or Sanguine. Rupert diagnoses Ian McMillan as a Sanguine Melancholic: Sanguine for his ebullient, positive and outgoing personality; melancholic for his private, poetic side. Ian is not convinced...
They discuss the medieval idea of the humours, and the ways in which contemporary Britain might be reflected in Thomson's dystopian fantasy.
'Divided Kingdom' is published by Bloomsbury on April 4th
TOM PAULIN concludes his series on the secret life of poems with a close reading of 'Sunlight' by Seamus Heaney, the introductory poem to Heaney's fourth collection 'North'.
Looking forwards and backwards into Heaney's work, studying his associations of sound and sense and his love of Old Norse, Tom uncovers a clash of vowels and consonants throughout the piece, and explains how they create the poem's tension, and its network of uneasy currents.
And there's performance from POLLY PAULUSMA, who has been described as one of the most exciting young singer-songwriters currently working in Britain. Polly came to song writing through a failed attempt to be a novelist - her decision to devote herself entirely to music was vindicated by critical acclaim for her first album, Scissors In My Pocket (One Little Indian) and finding herself supporting Bob Dylan.
STEPHEN RAW is an artist who specialises in the illustration and painting of poems - both in works in which poems' texts become parts of paintings, and covers for collections. His current exhibition at the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall in London is 'A DARKLING PLAIN' explores what happens to language when it is made visible. He talks to Ian McMillan about his art, and they explore Raw's ideas about what happens to letters and words when an artist takes them beyond typography.
'A Darkling Plain' is in the poetry library at the Royal Festival Hall until March 28th
JO SHAPCOTT is a leading British poet, a former winner of the Commonwealth Prize, the Forward Prize and, twice, the Nation Poetry Competition. She premieres two new poems on this week's Verb - both thoroughly engaged with the everyday, both funny, and provoking and moving. The Verb sincerely recommends you hear them, at 21.45 on Saturday night, or by clicking 'listen again' on our homepage.
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