I attended OCAD’s VizDay a couple of months ago and found it exhilarating. Hearing Sara Diamond, Greg van Alstyne and invited presenters talk about information visualization got me thinking about how books work. Today when most content is digital at inception, the class of work called “writing” is coming to be described as “content generation” with the book, as a physical object, being only one manifestation of that content, the others being things like pdfs (or e-Books), formats for book readers like the Kindle, print-on-demand books, websites, even handheld devices.
DocuBurst (image above) visualizes book content through word searches, prioritizing categories by the incidence of key words. Docuburst is the brainchild of University of Toronto student Christopher Collins. Read more about it in the Toronto Star.
Docuburst is about new ways of accessing book text, not a different kind of writing but one imagines that tools like it will eventually change the way books are written as well.
Neither is Docuburst about reading book content online, which will be the subject of a future post, but a taste here:
O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online
Blogdoctor has created a template so you can use Blogger to present book content in a book-like way: Castle of Otranto
And it’s not about writing books online either, tho’ you can do that too at NaNoWriMo if so inclined, especially in November (?)
And perhaps we should mention Bookcrossing too, for circulating real books in real reality by using real online tools, really.
Finally, I still love the book, the paper portable open it anywhere and know where you are kind, a giant of media that can withstand assaults of every order, including mockery:
