Just a quick update: the printers have done their work, and my books arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Here are a few photos of what the bricks look like.
The book of tweets
The book of tweets, side view
A spread from the book of visualizations
Another spread from the book of visualizations
The theory book
Thanks for following along as I complete my thesis project!
Vuokko
Here we are, turning onto the final stretch. For those interested, I'm posting links to the PDF versions of my hardcover book of tweets and paperback book of visualizations. And for the extremely interested, a PDF version of the theory book I wrote and designed.
These are, of course, just shadows of the boxed set of books, the real physical object. Anyway, hopefully they'll give you an idea of what my project contains. Enjoy!
Here's a small selection of my work in progress.
First below are two spreads from the hardcover book of tweets. Not sure if I'll stick with this style per se, but I do like the symmetric/asymmetric balance of it. The layout is Jan Tschichold's golden canon.
The below is my first step in making a cover for the fold-out booklet of maps. Next step: looking for interesting foldable layouts.
And finally, some early pages from my booklet of visualizations. So far there are lots of lists, small multiples, and minimal graphics throughout the pages. Not sure about the color scheme for print yet. I'll post updates when I finish the next round of iterations. Thanks for reading!
I put my head down for a month and when I looked up, I had written 60 pages about web-to-print art and about book objects, publishing and authorship now and in the future—but more on that later when I get to writing conclusions and all of that. Eventually I think I'll post an abstract of the finished thesis here along with a link to the whole thing.
For now I'm busy working on the actual design part of the thesis, which is taking the form of a boxed set of books, booklets and fold-outs. I'm designing a 200-page hardcover book of all the nearby tweets I collected during the spring in New York City, a 52-page booklet in which I visualize interesting things found in the tweets, and a fold-out booklet of maps around the project. The design of all of these is well under way. Exciting times!
An outline of the boxed set I'm designing and making.
I finally did it. I quit my fancy design job in Manhattan to concentrate on my master’s thesis and finally get my Master of Arts degree. And here I am. One and a half research questions later, I’m concentrating on a visualizing and and making a book from my database of nearby tweets collected during 100 days of my New York life. Nearby tweets? Let me explain.
For 100 consecutive days in early 2014, I collected the five or so first nearby tweets whenever I posted a tweet of my own. By this I mean the first tweets by time stamp within a radius of a few hundred meters. That’s it. No sorting. I wanted to capture the voice of my multidimensional city, whatever it was, wherever I was. I’ve popped the filter bubble and looked at nearby tweets before, but doing that always made me uncomfortable. Who are these people and how can they exist so close to me? However, in the process of formulating my research question, I realized that looking at what makes me uncomfortable is exactly what I should be looking at.
Looking at the database of nearby tweets now feels a little poetic. There they are: New Yorkers in all their cleverness and stupidity. Some tourists, too, and a spambot in SoHo tweeting in French for some reason. I’m currently in the process of cleaning my data and making rough visualizations of what people talk about. Then what? For one, I’m going to lay the tweets out nicely and print them on nice weighty paper. It’ll be interesting to see how the tweets change in nature when plucked from our infinite and collective stream of consciousness and placed into a format made to last. In my writing, I’ll explore personal and shared media experiences on the web and in print and then diving into questions of authorship. The end product will be a printed book of New Yorkers’ tweets, visualizations of this collective voice, and documentation of the book design and publication process.
This printed tweet business stems from my excitement about the Print-to-Web movement gaining speed in New York at the moment. Artists like Paul Soulellis with his Library of the Printed Web are exploring the web through the medium of print and painting a picture of how we live our lives now. I hope to add to this conversation.
“Twitter actually feels like the street”, William Gibson once said. Let’s take a ride.
I have news. More soon!
A grandiose project, step zero.
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