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Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress

Check out Decentering Whiteness in Design History, an annotated bibliography in progress.

One of the great FemOS ladies shared the above resource recently. She came across it via the Simply Secure Slack chat. It seems like a strong doc, I hope that the researchers and others continue to add to it.

If you’re looking for resources on a particular topic like typography or graphic design, it’s best to refer to their hashtag list currently on page 8 (search the doc for “Hashtag Authority List” if it moves). Then find a tag you’re interested in and search the doc for that tag.

Below is a list of a few resources that caught my eye and I’d like to follow up on. These are all freely available online in one form or another or could likely be loaned from a library.

  • “The Font that Never Was: Linotype and the “Phonetic Chinese Alphabet” of 1921”, an article by Thomas S. Mullaney. The article is behind a paywall, but he also presented it at ATypI 2016 (see video).
  • Saki Mafundikwa’s TED talk Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets
  • Chromophobia by David Batchelor published in 2001. The editorial description: “The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through colour—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’—the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological—or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.” Purchase from the publisher, buy it secondhand, or look for it at local library.
  • “New Blackface: Neuland and Lithos as Stereotypography”, an essay by Rob Giampietro that was originally published in the journal of the Type Directors Club (an org that has been been in hot water over the past few months, incidentally…). It’s available to read on his website.
  • Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985, the catalogue for the exhibition “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985” at LACMA in 2018. Purchase from the LACMA online store, buy it secondhand. Feel like this is unlikely to be in a local library unfortunately.
  • “Violence and Economic Growth: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870–1940” by Lisa Cook, published in the Journal of Economic Growth in June 2014. Cook analyzed over two million patents, cross-referencing with Census records to track Black patent activity over time. From the bibliography: “Her data suggested something huge happened after 1921 that caused the rate of Black patenting to tank after that date; it turned out to be the destruction of “Black Wall Street” during the Tulsa massacre.” Available in full as a PDF via Cook’s website.

Time to reintroduce a whole lot of color on this site, I think!

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Open source tools for multi-source and cross-format academic publishing

I’m working with Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer on the Open Weather platform, an archive and learning resource related to NOAA satellite 🛰 imagery. Sasha just shared a few open source publication tools that were brought to her attention by a friend and fellow artist at her Akademie Schloss Solitude residency, wanted to add them here for further research and future reference.

Manifold: A platform for publishing academic texts online

Manifold is a free “intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing”. See their repo on GitHub.

Manifold powers the Fembot Collective including Ada, Fembot’s journal on gender, new media, and technology. Looks like Fembot has been working with Manifold since about a year ago when the platform launched their pilot. Read Ada 16: Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa.

It looks pretty cool (and so does Fembot + Ada!). Manifold can bring together a whole lot of different methods of writing such as Epub, Markdown, HTML, and Google Docs. Hence the name Manifold, I guess. This is incredibly useful when bringing the work of different researchers together. Also makes it clear to me that good markup in writing is so worth it.

Manifold wants to make a digital book much more than just a screen version of a physical book, something that can easily fold in explorations, supplements, and other resources that augment the main text. It also incorporates annotation and discussion settings to keep the conversation going.

I’d love to see a book that really heavily uses the platform’s unusual features. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames is a featured project that’s worth a look. The chapters are punctuated with metagames they’ve created that you can download and install.

As a reader, I feel that the typography lets it down a bit. I found it hard to read, particularly on larger screens. A slightly narrower maximum width to the main text column would help a lot. Losing the justification and greater paragraph indentations would help too. Manifold does have some theme options, but it doesn’t involve control over the typography.

If your priorities are bringing together content from a wide arrange of sources, incorporating the work of disparate researchers with varying levels of technical abilities, and relative ease of setup (the documentation seems comprehensive), then Manifold seems like an incredible tool. If you need to retain any control over the design though or if you also want print publishing tools, it might not be the right fit for the job.

And probably worth mentioning: I think you’d need at least a bit of technical know-how to get this set up safely and securely. Probably worth getting in touch with Manifold directly if you’re an org since they’re still in beta.

B-ber: A tool for single-source, cross-format, design-conscious publishing

Triple Canopy is a magazine that “resists the atomization of culture”. They’re responsible for b-ber, a tool for single-source, cross-format, design-conscious publishing. Here’s how they describe it in the b-ber GitHub repo:

b-ber is both a method and an application for producing publications in a variety of formats—EPUB 3, Mobi/KF8, static website, PDF, and XML file, which can be imported into InDesign for print layouts—from a single source that consists of plain-text files and other assets. b-ber also functions as a browser-based EPUB reader, which explains the name.

Their text introducing b-ber “Working on our thoughts”—title from the Nietzche quote “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” according to the footnotes—is a good read, explains the impetus and a bit about the ups and downs of how it evolved.

B-ber can only consume one input, an extended form of Markdown. This makes it more limited than Manifold in that regard, but the output options are substantial. It’s particularly strong for the design-conscious, the fact that you can import to InDesign and easily theme the browser-based EPUB reader is pretty fantastic. This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for back when I was working at Occasional Papers!

The reading experience of the default b-ber theme (or whichever they use on their post) is nicer than Manifold in my opinion, it’s just a lot easier to read. There are some snags, but I imagine you could resolve these in a custom theme. Related to that, see their repository of b-ber demos and b-ber theme starter.

It’s definitely worth following the development of this project if you’re in to digital publishing. Their announcement post was published back in December, not very long ago! Excited to see how it develops.

As with Manifold, I think you’d need a reasonable amount of technical knowledge to get this set up. Since it seems to be more of an internal Triple Canopy tool that they’ve kindly made open source for wider use, they probably wouldn’t be able to provide as much support as Manifold might be able to. (This is just a guess though!)

My experience

Though I’ve been tempted, I’ve never built something that was meant to have a digital bookish-ness, everything I’ve developed has had online-first layouts and components in mind. Some sites have had fairly extensive print styles, but that’s usually as far as it goes.

The most common related problem I’ve run in to on sites with long-format academic writing is footnotes. I’ve never come across a CMS that handles footnotes well. Heck, even HTML doesn’t handle them all that well, there aren’t any appropriate semantic elements as far as I’m aware (though there were in HTML3?).

The only easily accessible markup system that works with footnotes AFAIK is extended Markdown syntax. To use extended Markdown on a client site though, A) I have to be sure that the client is on board with learning quite a bit of Markdown (they often are once they understand the benefit, but some are stubborn!), and B) it needs to be compatible with whatever layout system the designer has devised.

I used this approach a while ago on the Jock Kinneir Library site, as of right now they’re using footnotes on the Biography page.

This implementation wasn’t super straightforward since the site couldn’t use a single Markdown field for content, we needed more of a page builder to accomplish the layout. Because of that, I had to do some trickery to recompile the footnotes at the base of the page content as opposed to after each text section. Honestly I can’t 100% remember how I accomplished it… It’s on Craft so uses Twig templates, and I don’t think we had the time to make a custom module that would take advantage of server-side logic. I do remember that it was a bit hackier than I wanted, but it safely accomplished what needed to be done.

If I need to include footnotes or something similar in the future, I’ll probably refer to this comprehensive article on footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes (via @s3ththompson).

Would be curious if others have come across similar free, open source tools, or if anyone knows of work being done on the HTML spec to get some progress with footnotes.

At any rate, all of the above just reinforces my opinion that anyone who writes, regardless of how tech-savvy, should learn how to write in Markdown at minimum, ideally the extended syntax. If your archive of writing is in a machine-readable format, you’re miles ahead should you ever wish to publish it somewhere remotely digital or want to convert it to an IDML file or something similar.

Edit 24 September 2020: Added link to article about sidenotes.

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Command to delete all `node_modules` directories

How to delete all node_modules directories from your computer

Sam just pointed out this article, so useful! I ran the command to check how much space my node_modules folders are taking up, it’s 6.2G in total. Probably more on my external drives. Not necessary for sites I haven’t touched in quite a while (particularly since I’m still trying to keep my old laptop kicking…).

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“I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously”

America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Many passages in Between the World and Me are worth quoting, but this one really hit home. Coates also brands this “patriotism à la carte” in his Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” (see below).

This blind national pride has been particularly painful to many people recently with the wildly inadequate pandemic response, the killing of George Floyd, unmarked federal officers’ violence in Portland, and so many more recent events.

I’d forgotten about how very pervasive it is until I got back to the US in early June. It’s insidious, sad and borderline delusional. And it’s not just a right / conservative thing.

It’s all well and good to be proud of your accomplishments, but if you can’t identify and work to rectify your failings then what the hell is the point?

I’ve been speaking with some friends about this book, they mentioned a few resources I’d like to follow up on.

And I’m still working through my previous list.

I just finished “The Case for Reparations” and learned so much.

Coates weaves together individual and collective experiences, history, and data to connect the dots between the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, redlining by the Federal Housing Association following the New Deal, the efforts of the Contract Buyers League, Belinda Royall’s early and successful petition for reparations in 1783, John Conyers’s HR 40 bill, the early history of slavery in the US, the failure of Reconstruction, the levelling of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and its subsequent suppression in law and the media, the myth of fatherhood as the antidote to Black poverty, the fuzziness of affirmative action, the “gulag of the Mississippi” Parchman Farm, the impact of Germany’s post-WWII reparations on Israel and the evolution of contemporary Germany, the prevalence of subprime lenders preying on Black home buyers in the run up to the 2008 crisis, and so much more.

He argues for the cooperation of every aspect of society in a real discussion and debate about reparations to “reject the intoxication of hubris” and bring about “a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history”.

HR 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans “to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies”, has progressed since Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” in 2014. Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee is now first sponsor of HR 40 having taken over from John Conyers in 2018. There has been some progress with the bill, but a vote has not been set.

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Sorting out WordPress error “Updating failed. Error message: The response is not a valid JSON response”

I moved a brand new WordPress site on to new hosting recently and was confronted by an “Updating failed. Error message: The response is not a valid JSON response” error. Seemed kind of inexplicable, not a lot of info in the console either. I’ve done the same thing a bajillion times with this and other hosting providers and have never run in to this error, so it seems kind of weird.

This issue on GitHub outlines a lot of the potential causes, but this comment specifically sorted out my problem. Turns out you just need to flush the permalinks? Another off-then-on-again type of fix.

I think the WordPress devs might eventually create a more helpful error message for this, but in the meantime this is worth keeping in mind.

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WordPress “Upgrade database” process hangs on Laravel Valet

I’m working on a WordPress site for a client that involves importing a whole bunch of their legacy content. I decided to work with a copy of their old database for this. I set it up locally in Sequel Pro, accessed /wp-admin, and was met (as expected) with a “You must upgrade this database”-style screen. I clicked the button and… nothing. Eventually I had a 504 error.

I use Laravel Valet to develop PHP sites locally on my MacBook Pro, so I checked the NGINX error log ~/.config/valet/Log/nginx-error.log for hints about what was going on. I repeatedly saw an error along these lines (highlighted bits are altered by me to be more generic):

YYYY/MM/DD HH:SS:MM [error] 52486#0: *14 upstream timed out (60: Operation timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: , request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/Users/username/.config/valet/valet.sock", host: "hostname"

I searched online and found a bunch of suggestions, about checking the valet.sock file, about increasing the fastcgi settings in the NGINX config, etc. Nothing seemed to work.

I then came across this issue which sounds super similar, and they seemed to resolve it with a reboot.

Worked for me too. Turn it off and on to the rescue again. Wanted to mention it here in case anyone else is banging their head against the wall at some point.

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“A person is only a coder as much as you are an InDesign-er or Microsoft Word-er”

Jake Dow-Smith just announced Publish Something Online ↗, a resource geared towards students. It’s super worthwhile and a very fun browse. From the intro:

Building websites is often seen as an uncreative, mathematics-based task undertaken by coders. This library encourages you to learn how to design and build interactive experiences and to consider this a tool in your design toolkit. A person is only a coder as much as you are an InDesign-er or Microsoft Word-er.

This library will introduce you not just to code resources, but also to examples of alternative forms of screen-based interaction and the technologies they are based on.