Paper Thin: The Misleading Metaphors of Digital-Textual History

Eve, Martin Paul (2023) Paper Thin: The Misleading Metaphors of Digital-Textual History. Stanford Text Technologies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (In Press)

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Abstract

Contemporary computing is saturated with physical metaphor and analogy. It is a virtual space of web sites, of windows, of menus, of icons, and of pointers. There is a clear reason for such a prevalence of metaphor in this world. The metaphorical trope of relation provides a way for new users to imagine how a digital interface might work with respect to its physical correlate. This has been thought as true in the digital reading world as elsewhere. Paper Thin, however, exposes the weakness of our digital-textual, material metaphors. This book tackles and rewrites the most common assumption in UI design: that user interface designs for digital reading and writing are mentally constrained by and designed to mimic physical correlates. Conducting a new media archaeology of several digital forms – from pagination, whitespace, virtual typography, keyboards, directionality, and dimensionality, to technical protection measures – this book revises our understanding of material path dependencies, which are often erroneous or misplaced.

Metadata

Item Type:	Book
School:	School of Arts > English, Theatre and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Martin Eve
Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2020 17:09
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2020 17:09
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31744

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