A digitally-augmented chapbook, printed with barcode-like images readable by a computer’s camera that trigger text animations on the screen. I want one! I would love to see this in novels and textbooks, too: extra info or supporting bits of narrative available when you scan your book. I do think it’s an odd interaction to read an entire book in front of your laptop, as if you’re reading to a child, but really just reading to your (computer) self.

Although I’ve only seen the preview video, I can’t help but wince a bit at some of the text animations, which seem more driven by what the code can perform than what is right for the text. Just a hunch. Could be wrong. On their website you can also download a page of the chapbook and test it for yourself.

Rumor has it that the developers are working on a version of Company for release at the end of time.

Screenshot of iPhone version

The digital page opens on a jumble of translucent white letters on a black background, slowly jostling one another. I shook my iPad, wondering if the letters might bunch together and form words. Nada. I dragged a finger across the screen, leaving a thin white line on which letters started to gather like pigeons on a telephone wire. So one reads by creating a surface for the phrases, line by line. It’s a simple and satisfying interaction, just a finger swipe. Reminds me of the act of turning a page, which of course also makes text “magically appear” on the next sheet of paper. But there is something more playful and exciting about watching the letters come together before your eyes, I caught myself starting to predict what the words were about to speak to me. I was also reminded of a beautiful talk by Virginia Woolf where she asks us to “Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order.”

But why is it important to make the reader work for the words, tease them out of a chaos of letters? Why not just write the darn poem out flat? Is it a desire to expand reading to embrace seeing and touching? Interestingly, this work is listed under the Entertainment category rather than Books on the iTunes App Store.

What they Speak is only 99 cents at the iTunes App Store. Support your local digital media writer! As tablets become more and more visible, I’m hopeful that bit by bit (har har) we’ll see more fine writing produced specifically for this new reading surface. Fellow readers, have any of you published for this platform yet? What do you think of the experience of reading on a tablet?

I come across quite a few lovely pieces that make good use of the constraints of display technology, but with text that is far from engaging. Dentsu London’s pretty “iPad writing” comes to mind:

What would you write, if it was to be featured in this type of three-dimensional typography animation?

I installed Tumbarumba and waited a few days, reading my regular news sites and blogs. Nothing. Maybe the new Firefox wasn’t compatible, as Tumbarumba was created in 2008. And then one day I was previewing a post I had written for mommy forum I’m on–and something was out of place: “her contact info is below” turned into “her contact info is below the surface and for a moment I see a distortion.” I panicked! Why did I hit submit so soon?

Before: Tumbarumba sneaks in a story fragment

After: Tumbarumba plugin showing the full story

Then something clicked (ha!) and I realized this was a little game. With each mouse click, the story took over more and more of the page. I like that Tumbarumba scatters the story into sidebar images, captions, page headings, anything text. Over the next few days more and more stories cropped up in random websites. And then a long silence, I haven’t been surprised by any new insertions in the past few weeks. I often roll my eyes and mentally scream: BORING! when I encounter digital art whose aesthetics rely on randomness. But this is something different. Usually we pick stories, they don’t come to us, slyly winking in the middle of a product description. I admit I wasn’t as thrilled by the content of the stories, but Tumbarumba’s plugin-as-publishing-platform is clever, appropriate, and well-designed. Thumbs up, Tumbarumba. Keeping the Web serendipitous and messy, one story @ a time.

The book remains a book, but if you hold up the secret decoder ring, another layer is revealed. I’d like to see this technique extend to showing alternate or previous versions of a text, to collaborations between writers and filmmakers, to special re-releases or homages to classic texts. Buy a book along with your choice of plugin (or no plugin). Is there a work  you’d like to see reinterpreted with AR? I vote for Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.

Reminds me of Picasso’s drawings with light:

Via ffffound.com

How will what we write change when we can record words as fast as we can think them? Will we more accurately capture a flash of inspiration? Unlike putting pen to paper, when typing on a keyboard (whether typewriter or laptop) the physical motion of writing “a” is virtually the same as for any other letter. Could interfaces like Swype bring us a more intimate relationship with the letters we write? Do we even care?

My one criticism is that Swype should have gone even further–why stick with the QWERTY keyboard layout? Why not have custom keyboards for individual users (recognizable by fingerprint)? Since Swype can theoretically work on any touchscreen of any size, not just the ones on tiny mobile devices, we should expect such interfaces to become more common. The speed and motion of recording ideas in words is changing, and I hope these changes will also bring some interesting (and even unintended) effects on the literary quality of what we write.

The real fun is in combining letter sounds and behaviors from different modes, from the rising pitches and visual trails of “birds” mode to the small pulsing beats of “crickets” mode. With headphones on, you can clearly hear sounds pass from one ear to the other as a letter trots from one side of the screen to the other.

Piringer focused on the level of the letter rather than the word, which frees up the work from language barriers and earns it replay value. If he had used colors and shapes rather than letters the app would have been just as enjoyable. Using plain black letters as the interactive unit, however, shifts the work from pure entertainment to something that is also literary. It’s as if seeing and hearing letters triggers tiny word receptors in our brains, firing off all sorts of associations and semantic stirrings. Another good interaction design choice that Piringer made is the ability to start right back where you left off without having to “save”–something we take for granted with a bound paper volume but that is too often missing in digital literature. Taking usability cues from software and game design is essential to shaping a good digital reading experience.

More about the work and the author at http://joerg.piringer.net/abcdefg.

Stills: Roderick Coover

2. This evening I attended a tech networking event, full of freelancers and start-up fever. One of the presenters demonstrated speakertext, which pairs YouTube videos with its text transcription. The transcription is done by the human drones of Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service. With speakertext, you can search through the video via text, pull out a quote and use it to link to a precise moment within the stream. Flexible, mutable, and quick to travel over the Internet, text is the ultimate digital interface. The speakertext system is begging for creative use; someone has to do a writing piece with it. Get your video on and save us from copy/paste utility.