POST: Experimental Typesetting with Neatline and Shakespeare

“Does a jagged, unjustified border make the text feel more tumultuous and Dionysian? Would the same text, printed with a justified margin, become more emotionally controlled and orderly?” David McClure (University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab) asks these questions as part of a digital typesetting experiment using Neatline and a single Shakespearean couplet, where each each successive word is embedded within a letter in the previous word.

Neatline, the Omeka plugin developed to explore collections spatially and temporally, can also be used to annotate non-spatial images such as paintings and drawings, and new uses are being explored. McClure’s experiment follows the “structuralist notion of language as kind of progressive enveloping of words…Each exists in the context of the last and casts meaning onto the next; each word is contained, in a sense, inside the sum of its predecessors.”