Inspired by the complex material qualities of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and the difficulties surrounding its digitization, I designed a digital workspace that preserves and amplifies the “book-ish,” material experience of reading a book. The design enables readers and researchers to flip, bookmark, and annotate the book, thus preserving important experiences of reading to inspire critical engagement and creative response.
In the fall of 2023, I took a class on the “Material Text,” a field of study that focuses on the material nature of textual objects, whose physical form, publication, provenance, technology, and reading experience brings illuminating insight.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uQVlC1tTjzEUMOgh_TWGjx2vEgHhpK7bBcMhCJT09N0/edit?usp=sharing
In my final project, I conducted a bibliographical study Dictee and its reprints. A text known for its difficulty, Dictee is a book of writing and collected images authored by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in 1982.
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I found that Dictee defies conventional modes of publication, digitization, and readership. The centrality of the text’s material aspects—the quality of its images, layout, its rhythm across pages—poses difficulties for efforts to recreate and digitize it.
However, the only digital version of the book, published by De Gruyters, obscures many aspects important to the physical book.
The bibliographical history of Dictee raises the important question of how digital tools both make accessible and inaccessible a physical object. Books like Dictee demands an expansion and extension of existing digital tools.
In an article titled “Artists’ Books and the Problem of Digital Preservation,” Tyne Lowe writes that:
“Creation of digital surrogates for artists’ books often sacrifices the authenticity and access to the intellectual content of the work. The challenge of digital preservation for artist’ books demonstrates the shortcomings of digital reformatting for works that may be intellectual and artistic […]”
Through these insights, I see a potential future for the digital transformation of idiosyncratic textual objects:
<aside> <img src="/icons/thought-dialogue_green.svg" alt="/icons/thought-dialogue_green.svg" width="40px" /> How might we design a digital platform that facilitates different modes of engagement with material texts, in a way that benefits readers, researchers, and creators? What would such an interface look like?
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I begin to flesh out my concept of a digital tool that expands conventional, even convenient, engagement with digitized material texts.
<aside> <img src="/icons/star_green.svg" alt="/icons/star_green.svg" width="40px" /> The following questions guided my process: